Well, as I grew up, it was the era when the sitcom Friends was the thing to watch. For those of you who haven't met it, which is probably not very many of you, the setting for this particular sitcom was six young adults in their mid-twenties, trying to navigate the joys and the distresses of life in New York — frequently those distresses caused by their own misadventures — and then seeking to find strength and equipment to navigate those challenges with the help of the friendship of one another. I could never quite decide if I liked it or not — lots of it grated with me, other bits of it were just brilliantly funny, the scripting was genius. And in many ways I think, in the whole world of sitcom, it set a new platform on which everything else has tried to build since. So, regardless of whether you like it or not, it's a part of British culture and history — so here's yet one more tip for those of you with exams to sit, this is an American thing that affected the Brits, okay, I don't know whether they're going to ask you about Friends.
Anyway, one of the things that helped its popularity was the zingy little theme tune with which it started — so, for those of you who have problems with earworms, you're welcome — here, then, are some of the lyrics from that particular little tune: “No one told you life was going to be this way. Your job's a joke, you're broke, your love life's DOA” — dead on arrival — “It's like you're always stuck in second gear, when it hasn't been your day, your week, your month, or even your year. Your mother warned you there'd be days like these, but she didn't tell you when the world has brought you down to your knees.”
Here's the question for this morning: how do you cope with the discouragements of life? All of us go through seasons when life becomes extremely demanding, draining and exhausting. What is your coping strategy at points like that? People do all kinds of different things to cope. Some people seek to get some exercise and some fresh air, and think that might help. Others maybe find comfort in a little group of friends, like our characters from all those decades ago. Some people just try to keep themselves busy. Others might seek to take a holiday. Other people try more destructive solutions, taking refuge in things like drugs or alcohol, which only makes the problem worse. Everyone has different coping strategies — what is yours?
It is also the case, though, that Christians are not exempt from these seasons in our lives. And because you have a Christian faith and a relationship with God, there are a whole load of extra questions that start to come your way, which can make it even harder to cope with. No one ever told you that the Christian life was going to be this way. Did I do something wrong? Is that why this is happening? Am I being punished? And with the network of relationships I've got with God and with his people, what levers should I pull, what should I do, what is God's instruction to me, to help me find a way forwards in this place that I feel slightly stuck in?
Well, if that's ever been you, if it is you today, if it ever might be you in the future, Zechariah is the book for you. Zechariah is a great book for the people of God when they are discouraged — discouraged by failure, discouraged by hardships, discouraged by sin.
Historical Background
I need to fill you in a little on some of the historical background, where Zechariah fits in the big-picture story of God with his people, in the storyline of the whole Bible. The background is that, by this point, things have gone badly wrong. Let's wind back a little bit, to the fifteenth century BC. God rescued his people from slavery in Egypt, and he brought them into the land of Canaan. But the people rebelled — they worshipped other gods, and they did not live according to God's good laws. So God sent the people lots and lots of warnings, repeatedly, through some people called the prophets. But after many, many warnings, enough was enough, and the people lost all of the blessings that God had once given to them. In the year 587 BC, the Babylonian army attacked the city of Jerusalem, destroyed the city, and evacuated everyone who had an education, to go and live in Babylon.
But God still promised — God promised that one day this exile would end, God promised that his promises to his people, through Abraham, through Moses, through David, they all still stood. And so, sure enough, in the year 539 BC, Cyrus, king of Persia, conquered the mighty Babylonian army, and almost immediately ordered the Jews to return home to Jerusalem, to rebuild their temple. But no sooner had they started than they encountered opposition from the people who were already living in the area, and so, in 536, the work ground to a halt. And we can read about all of this in the book of Ezra. So here is Ezra 4:24: “Thus the work on the house of God in Jerusalem came to a standstill until the second year of the reign of Darius, king of Persia.”
Well, in the year 522, Darius became king of Persia — there's another one that isn't talked about in Ezra, between Cyrus and Darius. And in 520, the second year of Darius, the work to rebuild resumed. And here's how Ezra goes on, in chapter 5 verse 1, he says: “Now Haggai the prophet and Zechariah the prophet, a descendant of Iddo, prophesied to the Jews in Judah and Jerusalem in the name of the God of Israel, who was over them. Then Zerubbabel, son of Shealtiel, and Joshua, son of Jozadak, set to work to rebuild the house of God in Jerusalem, and the prophets of God were with them, supporting them.”
This, then, was the time and the season in which the prophet Zechariah ministered. The people of God were deeply discouraged, materially very poor and tiny — just forty-two thousand had returned from Jerusalem under the decree of Cyrus, compared to hundreds of thousands who were there before the exile. They're surrounded by the ruins of their former homes, of the great landmarks that they knew and loved, that the tourists came to see, surrounded by a half-built temple that looks sorry for itself. What does God say to his people at a time like this? Read Haggai and Zechariah — there's a slight difference in emphasis between the two. Some of you have looked at Haggai fairly recently — Haggai focuses on the need to rebuild the temple, Zechariah focuses on the need to rebuild their hearts.
So Zechariah is God's word to his sad and dispirited people. And God says three things to his people in the passage we've got before us this morning, and we're going to use verses two and three as hooks to see what those are.
1. “I was very angry with your ancestors”
So, here's the first thing God says to them: I was very angry with your ancestors. Start from verse 1 again: “In the eighth month of the second year of Darius, the word of the Lord came to the prophet Zechariah, son of Berekiah, the son of Iddo: ‘The Lord was very angry with your ancestors.’” That's a very abrupt start to the book of Zechariah. But notice what God does not say — he does not say, “I am very angry with you,” he says, “I was very angry with your ancestors.” God gives them a history lesson — he says, here's the story of your ancestors, don't be like them. Verse 4: “Do not be like your ancestors.” Now, we'll see a bit later on exactly how they are not to be like them, but for now let's just see what God's anger with these ancestors of these people looked like. The story unfolds in this passage in six little stages.
(i) God spoke to them
So, stage one: God spoke to them. Verse 4: “Do not be like your ancestors, to whom the earlier prophets proclaimed, ‘This is what the Lord Almighty says.’” God spoke. I've already said God gave lots and lots of warnings.
(ii) God told them to repent
Specifically, God told them to repent. So verse 4: “This is what the Lord Almighty says: turn from your evil ways and your evil practices.” Now, I'm not quite sure what the difference is between evil ways and evil practices — I could say a few things, but it's not really the point. The point is, repenting, turning, is not just about feeling really sorry for what you did. It's what we used to teach our kids when they were tiny — sorry means don't do it again. That's what repentance is about.
(iii) They didn’t listen
But then, stage three: they didn't listen. Verse 4: “But they would not listen or pay attention to me.” This brings Zechariah's immediate hearers into the story, though, because Zechariah's hearers are, at this moment, hearing the Lord Almighty speak to them — so the question is, will they listen, or will they repeat what the ancestors did and not listen?
(iv) They’re gone
So, stage four: the ancestors, they're gone. Verse 5: “Where are your ancestors now? And the prophets, do they live forever?” God judged them just as he said he would. Even the faithful prophets are gone — none of us lives forever. But God's word lives on, whether we listen to it or not.
(v) Disaster overtook them
And so, stage five: disaster overtook them. Verse 6: “But did not my words and my decrees, which I commanded my servants the prophets, overtake your ancestors?” This is powerful language — this language of God's word overtaking the people. Let me give you a couple of modern English phrases, or ways of speaking, that try to capture that very same idiom. It's saying: they thought God's word didn't apply to them, but God's word caught up with them anyway. Or it's saying: they thought they could escape God's judgment, get away and escape fast enough that they would be safe, but God's word outran them.
And this word of the Lord that led to their destruction is extremely powerful, because God is extremely powerful. Four times in this reading you get this phrase, “the Lord Almighty.” That title for God — well, you first encounter it, actually, a very long time ago, early in the Old Testament, but it's particularly loved by the prophets of this era, you get it sixty-five times in Haggai and Zechariah. Literally it means the God of armies, the God who commands the armies of heaven. And if God commands the armies of heaven, then God must be exceedingly powerful. And so, if you ignore God's word, it is inevitable that God's word overtakes you — and you do not want to be overtaken by the word of a God who is the Lord Almighty.
(vi) They repented
Bringing us to step six: they repented. Here's the last little sentence of this reading: “Then they repented and said, ‘The Lord Almighty has done to us what our ways and practices deserve, just as he determined to do.’” Now, it's ambiguous at this point as to who repented. This could be talking about the people Zechariah's speaking to, his audience — maybe it's saying, God said, “Did not my words and my decrees, which I commanded my servants the prophets, overtake your ancestors,” this is the end of the reading, and all the people heard this and they repented. It could be that. But I'm much more persuaded that it's not that — that God is still talking, at this point, about the ancestors. So the ancestors were taken into exile, they lost everything good that God had given them to enjoy. Then they repented, once it was too late. They looked around themselves in Babylon and they said, “God has done to us exactly what he said he would, exactly what we deserved — but it's too late.”
You may remember, in 2021 there was a volcanic eruption on one of the Canary Islands, La Palma. Amazingly, only one person died. Do you know how he died? He was on his roof, conducting repairs that had been damaged during the course of the eruption, and he hadn't adequately put crawling boards on, and fell through the roof. So the actual volcano itself did not kill a single person on that island. Now, that is amazing — why were so few people killed? Over a thousand buildings were destroyed, highways had to be rebuilt, the island is several hectares larger than it was before, because the flow went into the sea and extended the land. Extraordinary. And yet nobody died, because of what the government chose to do — they worked out everywhere, every village, every settlement, where the eruption might just possibly go, and they evacuated people. And people then followed the instructions and were evacuated. It caused mass displacement, but it saved lives. They evacuated far more than was needed to prevent people dying from those thousand buildings, because they decided it was better safe than sorry.
So, here you are, you're living on La Palma, that autumn of 2021 — during lockdown, by the way, a bad time — there you are, and the warning comes: you need to leave your house. What do you do? You leave. You don't think, this warning doesn't apply to me, I'm relatively important, I'm relatively influential in these parts, the lava flow will neatly go around my house, and once it's all cooled down I'll go and get a pint of milk at the shop. You don't think that. Nor do you think, well, I'll leave eventually, when it's about to come, but it might be that I'm one of the ones that don't really need to evacuate, so I'll just wait, I'm fairly quick at running, I've got some new running shoes, when it comes to it I can run faster than lava, I gather it's quite slow. You don't do that either. What you do is you say, the warning has been given to get out, so I'm going to get out. And because people did that, many lives were spared.
But the ancestors of the people Zechariah is speaking to did not believe the warning was for them. And so God's word overtook them, and it was too late. That's the first thing God says, then, to Zechariah's audience: I was very angry with your ancestors.
2. “Return to me”
Here's the second thing that God says to them: return to me. Verse 3: “Therefore tell the people, this is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘Return to me,’ declares the Lord Almighty.” Notice what God doesn't say to them — he doesn't say, turn from particular sins. Now, the earlier prophets, we've already had them mentioned, people like Isaiah and Jeremiah, did that frequently — turn from these specific sins, mainly idolatry and injustice. Haggai did that — he told them off for the sin of treating their own comfort as more important than the honour of God's temple. But Zechariah does not say turn from this — he says turn to God. The other thing God does not say is “get building” — Haggai said that, and Zechariah's ministry got them building, but it's not what Zechariah actually says, it's not the focus of his message. God's message to these people, surrounded by rubble, is return to me. This is a positive instruction, not a negative one — it's not the negative “stop doing that,” it's the positive “start coming back to me.” This is about heart, not laws — it's not about rules, keep these rules, it's a relational thing: return to me.
Now, don't hear me saying more than I'm actually saying — Isaiah, Jeremiah and Haggai did contain lots of messages that were saying, “repent of this.” The ancestors were told to turn from their evil ways and their evil practices, and God meant it — you can't turn to a holy God without turning from the things that he hates. So don't think I'm saying, no, repenting from sin doesn't matter — I'm just saying that's not what Zechariah chooses to say. Instead, the balance of this is remarkably like the Lord Jesus. So here is Matthew 11:28: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Jesus's teaching is extremely demanding — the challenges, when you read the teaching of Jesus, like the Sermon on the Mount, are far more challenging than anything you'll find in the Old Testament, and that's right there in Matthew 11 — learn from me, take my yoke, my burden. And yet his core message, his invitation, is: come to me.
And what Zechariah says to God's weary people, sat amongst the ruins, having lost fifteen years when not one single brick was placed — Zechariah speaks to the people to put them back on their feet, to lift them up and get things moving again. And the message is: return to me. And it's what we all need to hear, every single one of us, because none of our hearts are fully devoted to God, either in particular areas of our lives more than others, or across the board — we all have bits of us that are pulling in the wrong direction, not totally devoted to God and to his priorities. And so every day we need to hear the call of God speak to us: return to me. But that is especially so when you are deeply weary and discouraged. There will be lots that God wants to say to you in a season like that — but the first thing he says is not “stop sinning,” is not “try harder.” He might get to those things, but the first thing he says to you is: return to me. Come home.
The apostle Peter had a bad weekend once. He denied the Jesus he loved. He wept. But before they could make up, the Jesus he loved was killed. Yes, he came back to life, and while he's never told off for doing so, he returned to his previous trade of fishing — but Jesus met him on the shore. You can read about it in John chapter 21 — it's one of my favourite chapters in the Bible — and Jesus took a walk with Peter. And Jesus would get to a number of things in that conversation. The point would come when he would say to Peter, “I want you to feed my sheep, I want you to teach my people” — he'd get to that. The point would come when Jesus would say to Peter, “One day you will die like I did” — he'd get to that. But how does it start? “Simon, son of John, do you love me? Simon, son of John, do you love me? Simon, son of John, do you love me?” More than anything, God wants your heart. Do you love me? The answer is always, I try, most of me does. And so he says, return to me.
3. “I will return to you”
And then the third thing that God says is: I will return to you. There is a promise attached to verse 3: “Return to me,” declares the Lord Almighty, “and I will return to you.” That promise is absolutely astonishing — but you might not notice that if you just read it through at speed. I've given you — I'll give you two reasons why this is an astonishing promise. The first is that there is one word in this passage that occurs four times, but you might not have picked up that it's the same word. Verse 3: “return to me.” Verse 3: “I will return to you.” Verse 4: don't be like your ancestors, to whom God said, “turn from your evil ways.” Verse 6: “then they repented.” One word, on all those occasions — one word for turn, return, repent, turn around, go back, come back. The same word. So God says to the people, I want you to repent, I want you to turn around — and if you do, I will match what you have just done. You return to me, I'll return to you. You repent — I'll, well, without wanting to suggest God did anything wrong — God will “repent.” Extraordinary language, isn't it, God repenting. It's not the only place you get it in the Old Testament, but it's amazing.
Second reason why this is just an astonishing promise: what would you expect, if you completely turn your back on God, make a complete hash of everything, and then come back to him — what would you expect him to do? Now, here it's quite possible that you've been coming to church long enough that you kind of know the right answer, and you say, “What I would expect him to do is have me back” — of course he would, that's his job. God is holy — God isn't just holy, God is “holy, holy, holy.” There is no “of course” with God. In fact, that was the exact mistake that the ancestors had made, wasn't it — “God's going to judge you for your sin.” “Oh, the lava flow will go around me, of course it will, God will look after me, God's a forgiving God, when it actually comes to it I'll be all right.” Once you have really grasped the holiness of God and the offensiveness of your sin, you would expect that if you turn your back on God, he will turn his back on you, and he will do it for good. Which makes this promise absolutely extraordinary.
And it's why I wanted to have the parable of the prodigal son read for us this morning. The youngest son squanders everything good that his father has given him, and then decides it's time to return home. He says to himself, “At least if I go back I might be treated as a slave, if I'm lucky — there's a chance, it's worth a try, maybe I can join the crew downstairs as a bonded slave.” What happens is his dad runs out to meet him. These are beautiful words, aren't they, Luke 15:20: “While he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him. He ran to his son, threw his arms around him, and kissed him.” The dad was more keen to have him back than he was to return.
And this is the promise of the Christian gospel. The Christian good news says: if you return to God, he will return to you. But it's so easy to forget, especially if you're having a bad day, or week, or month, or even year — which is why we need both halves of verse 3. We need to hear God say to us, “Return to me” — but we need to hear him then say, “And if you do, I will return to you.”
Those are the three things God says to his people through the prophet Zechariah in these opening verses. How it lands on us depends slightly on who we are.
Conclusion
So let me firstly address those of us here who are not yet Christians, who are still looking into the claims of Jesus, trying to work out if this is for you. Jesus consistently taught that the day would come when he would return to this world in power, in great glory, and would judge every single person who is alive at the time and who has ever lived. Now, if God threw his own people out of their land, took away all of their privileges, do you really think that those who are not God's people would escape, if that's how he treats his own? So please don't think that God's judgement doesn't apply to you. Please don't think you can just outrun God. Don't be like the ancestors of Zechariah's audience — they heard God's call, they recognised the truth of it, but only once it was too late. God calls to you, if you're not yet following Jesus for yourself — he says to you, turn from your evil ways and your evil practices, turn back to God, and he will return to you.
But for the rest of us — sure, every day we need to repent of our sin, that's true. But God wants your heart — so every day, return to him, and every day he will return to you. And there'll be some seasons, perhaps, when we most need to hear that. One of those seasons might be if you've completely drifted from God, if you've given up following him, if you've given up responding to God's voice to you, put your fingers in your ears — you need to hear God calling you back. Another season of life when you really need to hear this could be if you're living in one of those times when all you can see is everything that's wrong with the world, all you can see is the burdens that you're trying to carry, but they're too heavy for you. This is where God wants to meet you. He says to you: let me have your heart. Return to me once again, and I will return to you.