Now the people of Bethel had sent…men to entreat the favor of the Lord, saying to the priests of the house of the Lord of hosts and the prophets, “Should I weep and abstain in the fifth month, as I have done for so many years?”

Then the word of the Lord of hosts came to me: “Say to all the people of the land and the priests, ‘When you fasted and mourned in the fifth month and in the seventh, for these seventy years, was it for me that you fasted? And when you eat and when you drink, do you not eat for yourselves and drink for yourselves?” (Zechariah 7.1-6)

If you searched the Law of Moses wondering when God commanded the Israelites to observe these fasts—in the fifth month or mid-summer, and in the seventh month or mid-autumn—you’d come up empty.  They were never commanded.  This is much like two of the feasts Jews today observe: Purim and Hanukkah.  These two also appear in the Bible, but they were instituted by man. That’s not necessarily bad; we even see Jesus himself going to Jerusalem for Hanukkah, despite threats against his life (Jn 10.22-23).  Yet the Israelites’ well-reasoned memorials and mourning failed to please God.  Why?

First, we should learn what these two annual fasts were intended to commemorate.  Zechariah doesn’t do much to inform us on this point, but the major theme of the first half of his book, the rebuilding of God’s temple in Jerusalem, serves as a major hint.  What had happened in the fifth month that was important to Israel and the temple?

In the fifth month, on the seventh day of the month…Nebuzaradan, the captain of the bodyguard, a servant of the king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem. And he burned the house of the Lord and the king's house and all the houses of Jerusalem; every great house he burned down. And all the army of the Chaldeans, who were with the captain of the guard, broke down the walls around Jerusalem. And the rest of the people who were left in the city and the deserters who had deserted to the king of Babylon, together with the rest of the multitude, Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard carried into exile. (2 Kings 25.8-11)

This was when the temple was destroyed—the reason the returned exiles needed to rebuild it, and needed a prophet like Zechariah to encourage them.  For that matter, it also marked the day the Jews had ceased to be an independent nation—the day most of the Jews were exiled from their greatest city, which was itself left in ruins.  The seventh month had something similar:

And Gedaliah swore to them and their men, saying, “Do not be afraid because of the Chaldean officials. Live in the land and serve the king of Babylon, and it shall be well with you.” But in the seventh month, Ishmael the son of Nethaniah, son of Elishama, of the royal family, came with ten men and struck down Gedaliah and put him to death along with the Jews and the Chaldeans who were with him at Mizpah. Then all the people, both small and great, and the captains of the forces arose and went to Egypt, for they were afraid of the Chaldeans. (2 Kings 25.24-26)

Nebuchadnezzar had at least left some of the Jews in Jerusalem and installed Gedaliah as governor.  With his assassination, all semblance of order was destroyed, and those few who had remained in their ancestral homeland now fled, in the opposite direction from the other exiles.  The Israelites were now truly scattered abroad.  Zechariah’s prophecies concern the returned exiles, who are tasked with rebuilding the temple.  God is good, indeed!  The cause for mourning and lamentation has melted away!  Therefore, it’s understandable that the people would question whether they needed to continue these annual rites.  As so often happens, though, God doesn’t give them a simple yes or no.  Instead he tells them they were never really observing these memorials out of devotion to him, anyway.  They acted selfishly even in lamenting the loss of God’s temple.  It was supposed to be about his glory; they’d made it about their own, instead.

This is a huge problem today, as well.  Several billion people on this earth call themselves Christians, with widely varying levels of sincerity.  There’s also a wide variety of practices and rituals associated with Christianity, only a handful of which are firmly grounded in God’s commandments in the New Testament.  For whom do we observe these rituals?  Is it for God, or for ourselves?

Keeping his commandments is, indeed, good for us, and worshipping him ought to have a noticeable and uplifting effect on us—Paul says,

“I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you. Nevertheless, in church I would rather speak five words with my mind in order to instruct others, than ten thousand words in a tongue.” (1 Corinthians 14.18-19)

Both ends establish the point: Paul is glad that he possesses a certain spiritual gift—he gets something out of it; he also recognizes that in the context of worship part of the goal is to edify each other—for others to get something out of it.  It’s not wrong for us to derive that kind of benefit.  But is that why we do it?  If so, what will happen when, one day, you become bored with worship?  That day will certainly come.  “Because I like it” is not a good reason!  On one hand, it leaves available the option to abandon the pattern, one way or another, as soon as it no longer stimulates your interest.  On the other hand, it means your focus is entirely misplaced.  We should be molding our will to match God’s more closely all the time, and for that reason we will eventually come to appreciate God’s commandments and derive enjoyment from following his pattern.  But it starts with obedience, whether we like it or not—obedience from the heart (Ro 6.17).

Jeremy Nettles

“All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything. “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food”—and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. (1 Corinthians 6.12-13)

In this portion of Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth, he addresses one of the Corinthian Christians’ many misunderstandings, mistakes, and transgressions.  While some had strayed too far in advocating for complete sexual abstinence (cf. 7.1), another contingent, by all appearances, had begun visiting prostitutes.  Their reasoning began with something true: regardless of God’s restrictions on what foods were acceptable for consumption under the Law of Moses, under Christ those restrictions are removed and foods of any kind are permissible.  To this they added the understanding that the fleshly body is not the whole of human existence, and that the immortal soul is God’s chief concern.  From all of this, they reached the conclusion that their bodies didn’t really matter all that much, and so they might as well satisfy their sexual appetites just as they satisfied their appetite for food.

Of course, this was wrong.  They were mistaken, and as a result were engaging in a behavior God despises.  And they couldn’t reasonably claim ignorance, or that it was an honest misunderstanding.

Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. (1 Corinthians 6.9-11)

Paul’s incredulous, slightly sarcastic question is the first hint that he’d been over these topics with them before.  By the end of the paragraph, when he reminds them they were washed, sanctified, and justified upon becoming Christians, it’s beyond obvious that he’d already taught them God’s righteous commandments against all of these behaviors—why else would they have repented of them previously?  But they convinced themselves, through some shoddy logic and twisting of the truth, that it was okay to return to the very same pit from which Christ had rescued them.

The Corinthians’ mistake in this context is relevant to us today for several reasons—the first is the simple fact of God’s pattern for our sexual norms, which are still today assaulted using the same old lies and confusion, leading to a culture of promiscuity whose chief difference from 1^st-century Corinth lies in its expansion to include women as well as men, despite God’s commandments and numerous earthly indicators that it contributes massively to the degradation and decay of society.  But while that’s the most pertinent application, there’s another, even more insidious version of the lie, which is gaining ground in our culture by the day: modern gender theory. 

This problem has for decades continued to grow in size and scope while being ignored by the general public; many who predicted just a few years ago that it would become a mainstream issue were mocked.  And yet, here we are.  On March 31, 2022 the Civil Rights Division of the federal Department of Justice sent a letter to the attorneys general of each state, issuing a soft threat against any interference in children being given so-called “gender-affirming care.” That term means the opposite of what it says.  To affirm a child’s gender would be to gently and lovingly reassuring a young, sadly confused boy that despite what he feels, he really is a boy and nothing can change that.  Instead, when the federal government says “gender-affirming care,” it means repeating the lie the Corinthian Christians had come to believe: that the body and the soul are completely disconnected, and people should give in to their bodies’ most destructive desires.  In practical terms, it means amputating sex-specific parts of children’s bodies, pumping them full of synthetic hormones their bodies were never designed to handle, and signing them up for lifelong drug dependency.

This is all bad enough when it involves adults mutilating themselves.  It’s a different form of sexual immorality than the Corinthian Christians’ consorting with prostitutes, but is no less sexual immorality.  What does Paul say about this sin in general?

Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. (1 Corinthians 6.18-20)

Our society has decided to challenge Paul on this one, by pushing it on others as well—sinning against children’s bodies, in ways they can never undo, no matter how many more cosmetic surgeries they undergo.  There’s not much an individual Christian can do to fix society’s mistake.  But we can do a few things.  Refuse to be deceived.  Refuse to go along with the lie.  Protect your own children from this kind of evil influence.  We may lose this battle in the eyes of the world; but we must still fight it, and remember that Christ has already won the war.  Do your best to put yourself on his side, regardless of what the forces of Satan do or say about it.

Jeremy Nettles

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. (Romans 1.24-25)

In the verses that precede this quote, Paul says that sinners are “without excuse” before God (v20), because “what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them” (v19).  To a degree, man has little need of God’s specific instruction, knowing by nature that some things are right and others are wrong.  In the immediate context Paul mentions idolatry, and as the chapter continues he adds to the list sexual perversions, hatred and its relatives, sins that spring from pride, and more, wrapping up the list by pointing out that “they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die” (v32).  Yet all of these sinful, destructive behaviors are prevalent around us, and are increasingly represented as positive virtues!

Fundamentally this makes no difference from the perspective of each individual’s eternal judgment—God’s decree applies to everyone, even those who never hear it verbally expressed.  His basic expectations from the beginning have been for man to acknowledge and honor him, obeying the conscience he built into his creation, which tells us that it’s wrong to take over God’s role and force the world to serve us.  But in the grand scheme of things, many factors influence us, and lead to a greater likelihood of success or failure in submitting ourselves to God.  A society, culture, or government that actively prohibits the sharing of God’s word will keep it away from people who would otherwise learn the truth and obey.  One that promotes sin and calls it righteous will ensnare some who otherwise would follow their conscience and shun those evils.

As long as our own circumstances are wholesome and conducive to sharing the truth of God’s will, it’s easy to turn a blind eye to the plight of those not afforded the same blessing.  But there’s a relationship between what goes in and what comes out.  It’s especially easy to see when we consider parenting.  Ultimately, each child will make his own decision whether to submit to parents, civil authorities, and spiritual authorities, but parents exert a profound influence, for good or ill.  Conscientious parents undertake the process of making decisions for and about their children with great care, because they recognize what’s at stake.

“Do not be deceived: ‘Bad company ruins good morals’” (1Co 15.33).  The picture here is a person of good morals who associates with those of unseemly character, and is influenced to go in a direction he would not have gone, if only he’d kept better company.

None of this a great surprise.  As long as we focus on the negative aspects, it’s easy to see the connection between the wrong friends and the wrong behaviors.  But the opposite is true, as well.  When we associate—either by choice or due to circumstance—with people of good morals, and especially with people who profess Christ, obey his commandments, and aren’t shy about telling us so, it’s easier to keep ourselves holy and please God—not easy, but easier.

It’s important that we recognize this now in particular, because failing to acknowledge our own society’s historical affinity for God’s word and commandments will leave us underprepared to weather the storm that began decades ago and is likely approaching its climax.  We live in a land shaped for 500 years by the actions of men who, notwithstanding their many faults, concerned themselves generally with spreading the gospel of Christ to pagan cultures.  This goes all the way back to Christopher Columbus, whose end goals included helping Europeans fund military operations to recapture Jerusalem from Muslim hands, as well as bringing Christianity to the nations of the eastern hemisphere.  From the Conquistadors to the Pilgrims, from the Quakers to the Abolitionists, from the Second Great Awakening to Trustbusting, from Prohibition to the Civil Rights Movement and more, our public history is a record of the changing tides of ostensibly Christian ideas—some well-founded in Scripture, others far less so. 

Nationwide polling shows continued decline in Americans’ belief in God, the Bible, the sinless and resurrected Christ, the gift of salvation—essentially the entire gospel.  Meanwhile, the culture continues to smear Christianity and push forward radical misapplications of ideas about equality and compassion that (somewhat ironically) they ultimately and unknowingly learned from God’s word, passed through intermediaries.  God alone knows where this tendency will lead, or whether the populace in general will follow blindly down the path to destruction (Mt 7.13), or dismiss the lie and hold up the standard of God’s truth, instead.  What will be your part in this unfolding story?  Will you go along with the many, even though Jesus said, “Woe to you, when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets” (Lk 6.26)?  Will God eventually give you up “to dishonorable passions” (Ro 1.26)?  Will you be one of those who knows better but remains silent for fear of reprisal, tacitly going along to get along?  Or will you be one of those who rejects the evil influence and risks paying a high price for the sake of Christ? 

“Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man!” (Luke 6.22)

Jeremy Nettles

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

So Abram went, as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. (Genesis 12.1-4)

When Abram (hereafter “Abraham”) first received this call, he was already an old man.  This makes all the more impressive his willingness to uproot his life and household to travel—on foot, let's remember—to a new land he’d never seen.   But it also highlights the absurdity of another one of God’s promises: “I will make of you a great nation.”  The text tells us ahead of time why this is such a problem: “Now Sarai was barren; she had no child” (Ge 11.30).  So, how’s this going to work, exactly?

Abraham and Sarai (hereafter “Sarah”) surely recognized the implausibility of having any children at this stage in their life—Sarah was 65 at this time.  We would have understood if they’d used that as the excuse not to obey God’s instruction to “go.”  How often is this the thought process for people today?  But Abraham and Sarah didn’t disobey.  Instead, they went where they were told.  No big deal is made about their faith in God or his promises at this early stage, but the proof is in the pudding, and even though the things God told him were ridiculous, still they went.

This is repeated in stronger terms some years later when Abraham, getting even older and closer to death, received another vision from God, including a more explicit promise: “your very own son shall be your heir” (Ge 15.4).  In case Abraham and Sarah had begun to think their descendants would be metaphorically descended from them and not actually related genetically, God has made it quite clear.  And although Sarah was now approaching the age of 75, nevertheless Abraham “believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness” (Ge 15.6). 

But while God made the promise clearer, you may notice that there’s still some ambiguity in it, as there will always be if we scrutinize thoroughly enough.  God said that Abraham’s very own son would be his heir, but he didn’t actually mention Sarah by name in connection with this promised child.  So, after ten years of waiting in faith, what did Abraham and Sarah end up doing?  They brought in Sarah’s servant Hagar to act as a concubine.  Oh, dear.

Was this right?  It’s important to take into account that it was a very different time and different circumstances, as well as the fact that God remained fairly quiet on the topic of polygamy between Eden and Jesus, tolerating it under the Law of Moses and giving only subtle hints to Abraham that he didn’t like it (Ge 17.18-19).  With all that said, no.  It wasn’t right.  By all appearances, Abraham and Sarah had lived a lifetime of monogamy, without children and apparently content to accept that fact, prior to being told offspring were on the way in what they must have assumed were their twilight years.  Why the sudden push for children, to the point of committing a destructively immoral act?  Let’s examine Sarah’s reasoning:

“Behold now, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Go in to my servant; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” (Genesis 16.2)

Oh, dear.  Were they so presumptuous as to try to help God?  In a way, yes; but that’s not a completely fair assessment.

Consider this: given that God had promised them offspring, what would have happened if Abraham and Sarah had remained celibate from that day forward?  God can do what he wants, of course, but he also expects his followers to cooperate with him!  The end would have been the same as if they had flatly refused to go where God directed and deliberately rejected his rules, and yet no one would accuse them of trying to help God by human means, on the basis that they engaged in marital relations, as if that undermined their trust in God’s promise.

But in this case Abraham and Sarah misunderstood the type of cooperation God expected.  We might say that they missed the mark.  That’s actually the etymology—the literal and original meaning—of the biblical words for sin.  חָטָא-ḥāṭā’ is the Hebrew catchall for “sin” in the Old Testament, and ἁμαρτάνω-hamartanō fulfills the same purpose in the Greek New Testament.  Both are most easily understood as archery terms, in which some arrows will go where the archer wants, and others miss the mark.  When described like this, sin seems almost unimportant—no one can hit the bullseye with every shot, so what’s the big deal?

Well, if you’re hunting food for your family, and you miss the mark, it’s a problem.  If you’re defending your city and you miss the mark, it’s an even bigger problem.  Still worse, regardless of context, when you miss the mark and instead hit something or someone else, it’s a problem!  Whether the sin was fully deliberate or not, there are consequences.  In the case of Abraham and Sarah’s adulterous plan, they had a good aim: a son born in accordance with God’s promise.  But they made a mistake, and missed the target, and the repercussions are with us to this day.  Hitting the mark takes knowledge, understanding, focus, deliberation, and practice.  Let’s do our best to stop missing it.

Jeremy Nettles

“‘Thus says the Lord God: I will gather you from the peoples and assemble you out of the countries where you have been scattered, and I will give you the land of Israel.’ And when they come there, they will remove from it all its detestable things and all its abominations. And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in my statutes and keep my rules and obey them. And they shall be my people, and I will be their God.” (Ezekiel 11.17-20)

With its talk of unity and a heart directed toward serving God, this passage evokes many New Testament principles, even though it’s found in the Old.  In fairness, the entire Old Testament was constructed in order to pave the way for the New, but parts of it are difficult to comprehend—perhaps especially those that in some sense straddle the line between Old and New.  Most of Ezekiel fits into that category, and as a result it doesn’t get its fair share of study; but it contains important lessons both for the Jews during their captivity to Babylon, and for us today.

Before this oracle, one of the leaders of the people remaining in Jerusalem died, and although those leaders had been rejecting God’s law and creating more and more trouble, the prophet Ezekiel still mourned his death, taking it as a sign of God’s judgment on his people.  He asked God, “Ah, Lord God! Will you make a full end of the remnant of Israel?” (Eze 11.13).  God responded with the wonderfully encouraging promise with which we began.  In short, his answer was, no.  Rather than giving Israel what they deserved, he intended to gather the far-flung exiles from the lands where they’d been scattered, and bless them.  This is even more extensive than we might at first realize. 

When the northern ten tribes, the kingdom of Israel, had been conquered by the Assyrians in the 720’s BC, much of its population was deported to various regions, in keeping with Assyria’s divide-and-rule policy.  The Bible doesn’t record the details of where these Israelites ended up, and it also does not record any major return of those exiles to their native homeland.  What it does record, in fact, is a general lack of desire among the Babylonian exiles to return to Jerusalem and Judea, even when Cyrus and the Persians proclaimed the freedom to do so.  It’s only natural—they’d lived in their new homes in Babylonia for generations by then, and while the return “home” had been everyone’s goal, it wasn’t exactly an easy task to accomplish!  Thus, the Jews remained, for the most part, scattered where they’d been taken by various conquerors.

Thus, it’s an astonishing promise God made, to gather his people “out of the countries where [they] have been scattered,” and plant them back in their ancestral homeland (Eze 11.17).  It’s especially important to note that, as with many other times when God made this promise, he didn’t limit it to the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, but referred to “the whole house of Israel” (v15).

Has this happened?  Well, that depends on how you’re looking at it.  Whether the exiles in the far reaches of the diaspora chose to return following Cyrus’ decree, they had the ability and the legal right to do so, en masse, at that time.  Was God promising to force the Israelites home against their will?  No, it’s presented as a great blessing, not a burden.  In fact, while the great majority refused the call, many thousands did return and set up a new Jewish state in the land promised to Abraham and his descendants.  But, as usual when we discover underwhelming short-term fulfillments of grandiose promises from God, he wasn’t just talking about the physical.  He had in mind the spiritual, too.  This collected nation of God’s people were to have a new heart and a new spirit.  That sounds suspiciously like the new covenant God promised through the prophet Jeremiah, saying, “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Je 31.33).  This also pertained to “the house of Israel” (v33a), and if the promise to “forgive their iniquity” and “remember their sin no more” (v34) wasn’t enough to clue us in, the New Testament tells us explicitly that this prophecy always meant the covenant that Christ would later inaugurate (He 8.6-13).  In the same way, this prophecy from Ezekiel isn’t just for the people of Israel, it’s for us!

Does that mean God no longer cares about his promises to the Jews?  Paul holds out hope.  He writes that “a partial hardening has come upon Israel” (Ro 11.25), and that God is eager to graft them back into the tree of Christ’s kingdom (vv23-24), hinting at the possibility of a greater degree of conversion to Christ, to come at some point in the future.  Up to now, we haven’t seen much of that, but it’s a worthy goal and prayer.  By and large, the Israelites have rejected their own Messiah.  The very next sentence in the prophecy we’ve been considering tells what God had in mind for the Israelites who refused to walk in his ways:

“But as for those whose heart goes after their detestable things and their abominations, I will bring their deeds upon their own heads, declares the Lord God.” (Ezekiel 11.21)

It’s easy to read that and come away with the conclusion that they simply got what they deserved.  But didn’t we find this prophecy is about the kingdom of Christ, more than the kingdom of David?  In fact, the same threat looms over our heads, if we seek to retain our old, stony heart.  Let God’s word and Spirit soften your heart and mold your goals and purposes to walk in his ways.  Adopt the unified heart and spirit of the people of God.

Jeremy Nettles