Transcript
Our text this afternoon begins in Zechariah 12 verse 10, but for the sake of connection I want to read beginning at verse 8 of Zechariah chapter 12, and we’ll read the entire passage that I have in mind. The book of Zechariah, the next-to-the-last book in the English Old Testament, and reading from verse 8:
In that day the Lord will defend the inhabitants of Jerusalem; the one who is feeble among them in that day shall be like David, and the house of David shall be like God, like the Angel of the Lord before them. It shall be in that day that I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem. And I will pour on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem the Spirit of grace and supplication; then they will look on Me whom they have pierced. They will mourn for Him as one mourns for his only son, and grieve for Him as one grieves for a firstborn. In that day there shall be a great mourning in Jerusalem, like the mourning of Hadad Rimmon in the plain of Megiddo. And the land shall mourn, every family by itself: the family of the house of David by itself, and their wives by themselves; the family of the house of Nathan by itself, and their wives by themselves; the family of the house of Levi by itself, and their wives by themselves; the family of Shimei by itself, and their wives by themselves; all the families that remain, every family by itself, and their wives by themselves.
In that day a fountain shall be opened for the house of David and for the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for sin and for uncleanness. It shall be in that day,” says the Lord of hosts, “that I will cut off the names of the idols from the land, and they shall no longer be remembered. I will also cause the prophets and the unclean spirit to depart from the land. It shall come to pass that if anyone still prophesies, then his father and mother who begot him will say to him, ‘You shall not live, because you have spoken lies in the name of the Lord.’ And his father and mother who begot him shall thrust him through when he prophesies.
And it shall be in that day that every prophet shall be ashamed of his vision when he prophesies; they will not wear a robe of coarse hair to deceive, but he will say, ‘I am no prophet, I am a farmer; for a man taught me to keep cattle from my youth.’ And one will say to him, ‘What are these wounds in your hands?’ Then he will answer, ‘Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.’
Awake, O sword, against My Shepherd, against the Man who is My Companion,” says the Lord of hosts. “Strike the Shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered; then I will turn My hand against the little ones. And it shall come to pass in all the land,” says the Lord, “that two-thirds in it shall be cut off and die, but one-third shall be left in it. I will bring the one-third through the fire, will refine them as silver is refined, and test them as gold is tested. They will call on My name, and I will answer them. I will say, ‘This is My people’; and each one will say, ‘The Lord is my God.’”
When was the last time you were confessing a sin to God and you found yourself crying about it? When was the last time you shed tears in the process of confession?
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that unless you weep when you confess, you are not forgiven for your sins. The Bible is very simple and clear here, and the Christian, the New Testament says, “If we confess our sins,” not “if we confess and weep,” but “if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
Still, that’s an interesting question, isn’t it? And if you’re anything like me, you probably are thinking to yourself that it hasn’t happened as often as perhaps it should have happened. There probably have been times you should have wept as you confessed your sins to God, if you had felt as deeply as you should the significance of those sins.
And since that is something that says a lot about the human heart, I thought it might be profitable for us to look at the very remarkable scene that is presented in the passage of Scripture that we have just read a few minutes ago. For in Zechariah chapter 12, verses 10 to 14, we have a picture, a prophetic picture, of the nation of Israel repenting for their sin in the crucifixion of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Now if you will read the remainder of chapter 12 at your convenience, you will discover that the opening verses of chapter 12 are concerned with the very end of the Tribulation Period, when the armies of the nations come and besiege Jerusalem, and God is going to deliver His people at that time, and He’s going to defeat the armies of the nations that have come against that city.
And then it is obvious that the scene that is described in verses 10 to 14 follows that. It could not have occurred while the city was under siege. It follows, therefore, the Battle of Armageddon. It follows the arrival of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ once again upon the earth. And God speaks through His prophet and He says,
I will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem the Spirit of grace and supplication.
And then there follows a description of how the nation repents. We are told in verse 14 that every family that remains in the nation will be involved in this, and the repentance will take place family by family. And within families the men will be apart, and the wives will be apart.
Now it is very interesting that we are told that among those who engage in this repentance is the house of David. The descendants of King David take part in this. So the royal house, the royal family, is involved. We are also told that the house of Nathan will be involved. And even though David had a son named Nathan, this is much more likely to be a reference to David’s prophet Nathan, who you remember was the prophet who confronted David about his sin with Bathsheba and gave him God’s message of reproof.
And so we not only have the royal house of David repenting, we also have a prophetic house repenting, the descendants of Nathan. And then the house of Levi, or the family of Levi. Levi, of course, was the ancestor of the priests and Levites. So we have a priestly family, a priestly tribe, repenting.
And then, somewhat to our surprise, it says that the house of Shimei will repent. Now you may be interested to know that there are somewhere in the neighborhood of eighteen people in the Bible who are named Shimei. So we want to know who this Shimei is. Frankly, when we stop to think about it, I don’t think it’s hard to figure out who it is. After all, David and Nathan were contemporaries. And David and Nathan had a contemporary named Shimei.
You remember him. When David was driven out of Jerusalem by the rebellion of Absalom, Shimei, who was of the house of Saul, walked along beside David and his band of soldiers, and he tossed dust in the air, he threw stones at David, and he cursed David and said, “You are a bloodthirsty man. You have falsely taken over the kingdom that really belonged to my family and to the family of Saul.”
Now he was brave and bold to do that while David and his men were in retreat. But when David comes back, now here’s Shimei again, and Shimei falls down before David and says, “You know, please forgive me for my foolishness. Please don’t do anything to me.” And David spares his life.
Later, however, Shimei breaks an agreement he has with King Solomon, and he is executed by Solomon. But I think it is very appropriate that what we see here is the family of Shimei, the family of the rebel folks. There’s a sense in which what Shimei did to David is exactly what the nation of Israel has done to the Lord Jesus Christ. They have rejected Him. They have counted Him accursed. And now at the end times they will find mercy and forgiveness.
And so what we have is a royal family repenting, a prophetic family repenting, a priestly family repenting, and a rebellious family repenting. Everybody is involved. This is a national repentance.
And the point that I want to draw from this is that this remarkable, remarkable manifestation of repentance in Israel is the work of the Holy Spirit. It is the work of the Holy Spirit.
I will pour on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem the Spirit of grace and supplication.
One of the things we need to remind ourselves of, I think, in our personal lives, is that true and deeply felt repentance is always a work of God. It is always a work of God in your heart and in mine whenever it occurs.
And I think it’s appropriate for us to ask the question, in the light of Israel’s history, do you realize that this repentance that is described here comes two thousand years after the sin? The nation of Israel is repenting because of the One that they have pierced. And they should have done it a long time ago, and they should be doing it now. And they will only do it on this occasion, but it will be the result of the work of the Holy Spirit.
The human heart has a tremendous ability to withhold repentance. When we listen to the Word of God, we may hear something that, you know, counterstrikes us and tells us, you know, you shouldn’t be like that, or you shouldn’t do that, or you shouldn’t act that way. And if your heart is anything like my heart, it’s amazing how we can stuff that all away, how we can forget about it, how we can continue to do the very things that the Word of God has confronted us with.
So one of the things I want to emphasize right here at the beginning of this talk is that all of us need the work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts to produce the kind of spiritual repentance that God desires. And only the Holy Spirit can do that.
Now what is the result of Israel’s repentance? Well, in the first five verses of chapter 13 there are several results that are suggested. First of all, a fountain is opened to the nation of Israel and the inhabitants of Jerusalem for sin and for uncleanness. In other words, God forgives them.
We’re not talking here, I hope we are all wide awake, we’re not talking here about the eternal salvation of these people. They have already believed in the Lord Jesus Christ. They are mourning over the fact that they have pierced Him. But repentance and forgiveness are linked, because when we turn to God and acknowledge our sins, He forgives us for our sins and restores our harmony, restores our fellowship with Him.
Here is a nation that has been out of sorts with God for two thousand years, and the troubles that it has been through are enormous. And it is still out of sorts with God. I was watching on the television screen after one of the recent suicide bombings, and there was a young Israeli girl, a grown lady but young, and she said to the camera, “Mum,” she said, “you know, it’s awful, it’s terrible, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
And I thought to myself, yes there is, because the troubles through which Israel has gone through the centuries could be stopped if the nation of Israel would repent and turn back to the Savior that they have crucified. But that didn’t apparently factor at all into the thinking of this woman.
Yet when Israel does repent, God will forgive. But more than that, the succeeding verses say He will cut off the names of the idols from the land. They shall no longer be remembered at all. Now was this really involved in idolatry in the Tribulation Period? You better believe it. The man of sin, with the assistance of his religious aide the false prophet, sets up an idol in all probability in the temple of God in Jerusalem. And people who don’t bow to this idol will be killed by the Antichrist.
There will be a manifestation of satanic power. And we also learn from the book of Revelation that people generally will turn back to idolatry during this period. And so one of the effects of the repentance of the nation of Israel is that God will sweep idolatry once and for all out of that nation.
But not only that, He will sweep out prophecy too, because it says, “I will also cause the prophets and the unclean spirit to depart from the land.” There is no nation on the face of the earth which has had probably more false prophets per capita than the nation of Israel.
And you remember that when Ahab and Jehoshaphat were consulting the prophets of the Lord, there were about four hundred of them that said to Ahab and Jehoshaphat, “Go ahead and go up to the battle. God will give you the city. Everything’s fine.” And Jehoshaphat said, “I don’t know about that. Don’t you have any more prophets? I mean, four hundred, what more can you need?” And they got one out of prison, and they brought him before Ahab and Jehoshaphat. He said that Ahab would die. False prophecy.
Now in this period of time it says in verse 3, if anyone attempts to prophesy, don’t forget that the obedience in the kingdom is not perfect. If anyone attempts to prophesy, his father and mother will say to him, “You have prophesied lies in the name of the Lord.” And they will thrust him through.
Now that shocks us, doesn’t it? That sounds pretty rough. But that’s because we have forgotten that to claim to have a prophetic revelation from the Lord when we don’t is a very, very serious sin.
Now there are lots of false prophets in America today. And if their fathers and mothers thrust them all through, there are a lot of television programs and radio programs that would come to an end, because the chief speaker would be dead. But in the kingdom of God this kind of swift action will take place.
So it says in verse 4, “It shall be in that day that every prophet shall be ashamed of his vision when he prophesies.” He’s not going to try to do it publicly. He goes to his buddy and he says to his buddy, “Don’t tell anybody, but I’ve got a revelation from the Lord.” He will dare to say it out loud now. They will not wear the typical prophetic garment, a hairy robe, to deceive, he says.
And if someone confronts a person and says, “Are you a prophet?” he will say, according to verse 5, “No, I’m not. I’m a farmer. Don’t take me for a prophet.”
Please notice the wonderful effects of repentance upon the nation of Israel in that day. Number one, cleansing. But not just cleansing, the purging away of these terrible sins of idolatry and false prophecy. And that is the desired result of repentance always in your life and in mine.
First of all, when we come to God confessing our sins, we get forgiveness of our sin. But God also wants to remove from our hearts the wrong attitudes. He wants to remove from our lives the wrong sets of behavior. He wants to change us. That’s what repentance is all about. And that’s what it will be about for the nation of Israel at the end of the age and at the beginning of the kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Now that leads us to the last unit of the passage. You’ll notice that verse 6 starts with “but.” If you have a Bible like mine, the word “someone” is in italics, which means it is being supplied here. And the phrase here is the same as the phrase in verse 5, “but he will say,” and should be, in my opinion, translated that way too.
So it says, “But he will say to him,” all right, here is this man who has been asked, “Are you a prophet?” He says, “No, I’m a farmer.” And now this person says to him, we’re not told directly at this point who that “him” is, says to him, “What are these wounds in your hands?”
Who is this “him”? Well, as we already have learned, the nation of Israel is mourning for the One that they’ve pierced. “They shall look on Him whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for Him as for an only son, and be in grief for Him as for a firstborn.”
So here the prophet basically is asking the question, “What are these wounds in your hands?” This Thomas we’re hearing about this morning from John. John saw the wounds in Jesus’ hands and feet, I would presume, and was moved to believe.
So the person to whom he addresses this question says, “Those with which I was wounded in the house of My friends.”
When the Lord Jesus Christ came to earth, where would He be expected to find friends if not in His chosen people, among His own race, in His own nation? The Gospel of John says to us, “He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him.”
So here He comes to Israel, who ought to be His friends, and they pierce Him. They put Him on the cross. And at this point God speaks through the prophet, “Awake, O sword, against My Shepherd, against the Man who is My Companion.” And our Lord quoted this statement to Himself on the night of His arrest. The sword of God’s judgment had awakened against the Lord Jesus Christ. The result was that His sheep were scattered, His immediate followers, and eventually the nation itself was scattered.
And then there’s an interesting phrase at the end of verse 7. And it says, “Then I will turn My hand against the little ones.” One of the sad and tragic facts about a failure to repent is that the people who do not repent not only affect their own experience as a result of their unrepentance, they affect the experience of their children.
Do you remember when the crowd was standing outside Pilate’s judgment hall and Pilate says, “What do you want me to do with Jesus? Do you want me to crucify Him?” And the crowd probably uttered what is the worst and most awful cry that was ever uttered by a crowd. They cried out to Pilate, “His blood be on us and on our children!”
And the history of the nation of Israel from that day to this is a history in which so very many of the children in that nation have suffered. Now I leave aside the question about vicarious intentions on behalf of those children, but the fact is that so many of them have suffered. Maybe you noticed that the most recent terrorist act was a bombing of a school bus. There were fifteen killed. Most of them were teenagers. They were school kids.
And Israel right now is going through some of the awful agonies that kind of presage and foreshadow the terrible things that lie ahead. And it isn’t just the adults who get hurt. It’s also the children.
One of the strongest motivations that you and I have for repentance and dealing honestly and openly with God is that not only is it for our benefit to do so, it’s also for the benefit of our children, of the little ones.
And then we kind of leap over two thousand years, and in verses 8 and 9 we’re told that the time will come, this is obviously once again back to the end of the Tribulation Period, when two-thirds of the nation will be cut off and there will be one-third left in it. This is what lies ahead of Israel, that during the Tribulation Period two-thirds of the nation will perish by death, and the nation will be left with one-third of its population.
But that’s the population that is repenting in this passage. And then the prophet says, God says through the prophet, “I will bring the one-third through the fire, will refine them as silver is refined and test them as gold is tested. They will call on My name, and I will answer them. I will say, ‘This is My people’; and each one will say, ‘The Lord is my God.’”
Why all these awful things happening to Israel? Because through the stubbornness and hardness of heart of the Israelite people, it will not be until the awful agonies of the Great Tribulation Period that the nation as a whole will repent. By that time two-thirds of them will be dead. But says the Lord, the third that comes through the fire will be like pure gold. The third that comes through the fire will be like silver tried in the furnace.
And that’s exactly what we see at the beginning of this passage. Here is the one-third of the nation doing what it has taken them two thousand years to get around to do: repenting of their sin in crucifying their King and their God and returning to God with all their heart and with all their soul.
And there is certainly a lesson in this, I think, really, that we could say that the history of the nation of Israel is the history of the human heart written large. God stretches the panorama of Israel’s history over a long period, not just the two thousand years since the crucifixion of Christ, but ever since the call of Abraham.
And what we see time after time after time in Israel is an unwillingness to respond to God, an unwillingness to accept the testimony of God, an unwillingness to repent for their sins. And God must bring them through the agonies of all these events.
We think of the Holocaust in our own day and time. We think of these terror bombings. Israel is still suffering the consequences of its rebellion. And not until the end of the Tribulation will their heart be open so that they will be brought back into communion with their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
And if we learn the lesson of Israel’s history, we will learn something about ourselves. I’ve been in ministry for a long time, and it is surprising, and I’m not just speaking about other people, I’m also speaking about what I’ve learned about myself, it is surprising how long real Christian people who know they are saved, know they have eternal life, know they’re going to heaven, can hang on to sins and hang on and hang on and hang on and hang on, never really get down to business with God.
And after a while you look at that, right, and they have all sorts of troubles, problems, difficulty, maybe physical problems, maybe problems in the family, problems in the marriage, problems with finances. The troubles accumulate. And what do they do? They hang on. They resist. They refuse to repent.
One of the best things that you and I can do is to ask God for the kind of heart that is deeply responsive to the Word of God, and that when God speaks to us through His Word, that we respond, no matter how painful it is to acknowledge that God has scored a direct hit on us, to respond to the truth that God has presented us.
There’s a story about a young lady, a daughter, who left home, and she began to lead a wild and dissolute life. Her mother asked a friend to try and find her. And so the friend took some photographs of the mother’s face, and beneath the face of the mother he wrote the words, “Come back.” And then he took these photographs to all the places where this young lady might be expected to appear: the houses of sin and the rescue missions and the beer joints, I would presume, all of these things. And he posted his mother’s picture beneath her face saying, “Come back.”
One day the daughter went into one of these places, and she saw the picture of her mother’s face, and her eyes filled with tears. And briefly she couldn’t read the words; she just saw her mother’s face. And then when the tears cleared up, she saw the words that said, “Come back.” So she went back.
And when she got to the door of the house, turned the knob, the door was open. It was unlocked. And as she and her mother embraced and were reunited, the mother said to her, “That door has never been locked since the day you left.”
That’s really the way it is between ourselves and God. It is God who keeps the door open, always, always, always. And it is we who won’t go back.
So I want to urge you this afternoon, even though you’re sitting here at the Lord’s table, if there is any area of your life where you really need to get back to God and be honest with God about it, please go home. The door is open. God is waiting to receive you, to forgive you, and to deliver you from whatever the sin may happen to be.
This past week we read a psalm, Psalm 90, that has a verse in it that I think is appropriate to close the message with: “So teach us,” says the psalmist, “to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” A heart of wisdom means that I know when to go home and find forgiveness from the Lord my God.