The Lord Our Shepherd


Sermon by David Strain on May 27, 2014 Zechariah 10:1-5

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You may be seated. Now if you would please take your copies of God’s holy Word in your hands. Let’s turn to the prophecy of Zechariah chapter 10. You’ll find that on 797 in the church bibles. Zechariah chapter 10. Before we read God’s Word, let’s turn to him ask and ask him for the help of his Spirit. Let us pray.

 

Our Father, we pray now for the ministry of the Good Shepherd, the Lord Jesus. We ask that he would call his sheep by name and lead us out and in, that we might find rest for our souls. Speak, we pray, by your Word for your glory. Deal with us in our sin and needs. Slay the idols that we have erected in our hearts. Show us your perfect sufficiency and the perfect suitability of Jesus to save to the uttermost all that come to God by him…That we may never again turn to worthless idols, but rest wholly on the Lord Jesus alone. For we ask this in his name, Amen.

 

Zechariah chapter 10, reading from verse 1, this is the word of Almighty God:

 

Ask rain from the Lord
    in the season of the spring rain,
from the Lord who makes the storm clouds,
    and he will give them showers of rain,
    to everyone the vegetation in the field.
For the household gods utter nonsense,
    and the diviners see lies;
they tell false dreams
    and give empty consolation.
Therefore the people wander like sheep;
    they are afflicted for lack of a shepherd.

 “My anger is hot against the shepherds,
    and I will punish the leaders;
for the Lord of hosts cares for his flock, the house of Judah,
    and will make them like his majestic steed in battle.
From him shall come the cornerstone,
    from him the tent peg,
from him the battle bow,
    from him every ruler—all of them together.
They shall be like mighty men in battle,
    trampling the foe in the mud of the streets;
they shall fight because the Lord is with them,
    and they shall put to shame the riders on horses.

 

Amen. And we praise God that he has spoken to us in his holy and inerrant Word. May he write its truth on all our hearts. Well, tonight we are continuing our expositions on the book of Zechariah. We’ve come to chapter 10, verses 1-5, a section of the book in which the Lord is depicted as the Great Shepherd of his flock, the people of Judah. It is an image, as we’ll see, full of rich scriptural associations and wonderful comfort and encouragement for all of God’s people.

 

Let’s take a look at the passage together. Notice there in verses 1-3, the care of the Lord for his people is set in a dramatic counterpoint to the idolatry to which the leaders of the people have led the returning exiles now living in Jerusalem. Zechariah helps us identify the Lord by comparing and contrasting him with what he is not. He’s contrasted first with idols and then with the false shepherds who deserted the flock to their idolatry. And, so, in 1-3, we see the Lord our True Shepherd by way of contrast. Here is the Lord our Shepherd identified by what he is not. Then, in verses 4 and 5, Zechariah focuses more fully on the way the Lord, our True Shepherd, cares for his sheep. Here is the Lord identified—not now by way of contrast—with what he’s not, but more positively we see his character delineated by what he does and how he acts. So, in 1-3, the Lord our Shepherd revealed by contrast. And, then, 4 and 5, the Lord our Shepherd revealed by way of his care. 

 

Let’s look at verses 1-3, first of all: the Lord our Shepherd identified by way of contrast. Sometimes we have a hard time telling the truth from the lie, truth and falsehood. There are times when we struggle to keep clear in our minds the difference between God and idols. And, so, Zechariah, assembles—if you like—a police lineup for us. The true and living God is present along with the false gods of the people. Israel’s true Shepherd, no earthly leader but Yahweh himself, stands—if you like—on the other side of the mirrored glass window and beside him Zechariah lines up the idols and the false shepherds that have misled the people. And he makes them turn—you know, in a police lineup they make them turn first this way and then they turn that way and then they turn back to face you so you get a good look at their characteristics, which is which—so that we see the unique character and attributes of the God who is there. He wants us to pick the Lord out of the lineup. He wants the true and real God and Shepherd of his people to stand out from the usual subjects.

 

And look how he does it. At the end of chapter 9, the prophet has spoken about a coming day of blessing in which the world will be renewed, in which grain and new wine will abound. And that sets the prophet at the beginning of this new chapter thinking about how it might be that God would bless his people even now—ahead of time, as it were. Long before the new heavens and the new earth ever came. Might it be possible to glimpse in this broken world, even here, something of the age to come? So, in verse 1 of chapter 10, Zechariah tells us the key to blessing. Even the simple blessing of rain for your crops is a trusting, dependent, prayerfulness that looks to God to provide. Even, here, amidst a world marked by sin and death. Even now God answers prayer, breaks the clouds, sends showers on the land, gives food to eat and crops to sell as he cares for his people in mercy. It is a reminder, of course. It is a reminder of the importance of prayer and of a life of dependence on God for everything.  Jesus was right to teach us to pray to Abba Father, “Give us this day our daily bread.” How easily we forget even the simplest, most routine of our ordinary resources are themselves gifts of grace and we ought never to take them for granted or presume upon them as though they were ours by right. Rain and crops and daily bread: those are the gifts of a loving Father that he gives them, Zechariah says, when we ask. Ask rain from the Lord and he will give them showers of rain to everyone the vegetation of his field. Pray, he says, pray for showers of blessing great and small. Pray for daily bread and daily mercy.

 

But, that’s not the big lesson of Zechariah 10 verse 1. The prophet’s main point is not actually to remind us of our duty to pray as much as it is to remind us that the one to whom we pray is worth praying to at all. And, so, having reminded God’s people that when they cry the Lord hears and answers, Zechariah now turns to the contrast. The path of blessing is the path of prayerfulness, he has told us. But there is another way to live. One that is tragically all too common among God’s people. Verse 2: “For the household gods utter nonsense and the diviners see lies. They tell false dreams and give empty consolation.” The teraphim, they were called, the household gods, these were little statuettes of pagan deities, perhaps the ancestors. They were used in divination and fertility rituals. And they’d been a constant temptation in Israel prior to their exile. It was one of the things God judged them for.  And they were a normal feature of life in pagan Babylon and in the Persian empire. And now that they’ve come back from exile to Jerusalem again, it seems these teraphim, these household idols actually remain a persistent testimony to the pervasive effects of Babylonian and Persian paganism penetrating the lives of God’s people, even now that they’ve come back from exile. The dominant values and practices of the world had snuck in, seeped in like a slow leak trickling into their hearts and into their lives. In all likelihood, it wasn’t that they had rejected the God of their fathers and replaced him with these idols. No, no, it was much more subtle than that. They want to fit in, you see! They don’t want to stand out from the crowd. This was the normal practice of the culture. And, so, along with the God of their fathers, the God of Israel, they’ve added the paganism that was so much a part of the surrounding pagan culture.

 

Now, if I were to come to your home on a pastoral visit, I’m fairly sure I’d be unlikely to see a little shrine with some statuettes of your ancestors and some incense burning. I’m fairly sure none of us are devotees of the teraphim, or the paganism that Zechariah is addressing here. But, let’s not be too quick to dismiss his challenge for all of that. There may be no pagan statuettes in our home, but there may yet be false gods, idols, that have found a shrine and a safe place in our hearts. That is how the apostle Paul spoke about the besetting sins of the Colossian Christians. Colossians 3:5, he says, “Your greed is idolatry.” Greed. No statues here. No pagan idols. Just greed for more, an insatiable appetite for more stuff. It’s a heart idol.

 

Or listen to the apostle John at the end of his first letter. The apostle John sums up his burden for his readers with a single, very simple, sentence. All the exhortations to holiness in this first letter are summarized in this one line. “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.” He’s anxious to see them free from idols. What kind of idols does he have in mind? Listen to 1 John chapter 2 verses 15-17. Here, I think, is John’s definition of idolatry. 1 John 2:15-17: “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life, is not from the father but from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.” Here’s the contrast again. Do you see it? It unmasks the real nature of idolatry. It is the practice of fixing our deepest love, the love that belongs by right only to the Father, on the world or the things of the world—“the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, the pride of life.” That’s idolatry.

 

There are heart idols. Anything you sacrifice for and devote yourself to and invest your heart’s deepest affections in that is not God is an idol. So before we shrug off Zechariah’s rebuke of idolatry here let’s do some inventory—shall we?—some personal inventory, a quick heart check. Might it not be the case that there are in fact teraphim lurking in your own heart, too, household gods, idols. Some remnant of the culture of Babylon. Some artifact of worldliness that has crept quietly into your life and taken up residence there. What are the real idols you keep locked away in the shadows? Do you have a pride idol? Driving you sometimes to seek approval, to build a reputation, to crave affirmation, to long for praise, to sacrifice family on the altar of work. Do you have an intimacy idol? You can’t be alone. You’ll do just about anything, make any compromise, just to stay in that relationship. What are the idols of your heart? What are the idols of your heart?

 

Zechariah puts them alongside the Lord on that lineup and he asks you to take a good, long, hard look at them. Which of them can really satisfy the deepest need of your soul? Not for intimacy and affirmation and ego. Those are not your deepest needs. But the need to be taken out of ourselves, made self-forgetful in the end, absorbed in the goodness and sufficiency of another who is supremely, unendingly satisfying. Zechariah wants to set God and idols in contrast so that we might truly sing with Cooper, “The dearest idols I have known, whate’er that idol be, help me tear it from Thy throne and worship only Thee.”

 

Just to drive home this point, this contrast between God and idols, look at how Zechariah describes idols and idolatry, verse 2. Look at the synonyms he piles up one upon another, each of them describing for us the utter bankruptcy and worthlessness of idolatry. The idols, he says, utter nonsense. The diviners who use them, they see lies. Their dreams are false. Their consolation is ultimately empty. That’s the truth about the idols we run after: they all lie to us. They offer comfort, don’t they, and they rob us of joy. They offer us our dreams and they cheat us of hope. They talk big and they never deliver. You can’t trust the glittering promises of your heart idols. And when you give yourself to them, look at what Zechariah says happens. Verse 2 again, “The people wandered like sheep. They were afflicted for lack of a shepherd.” Sex and money and reputation and appearances and drink and relationships and work and children and marriage and divorce and pornography and gluttony—whatever we make an idol of, some of them good and lawful, some of them wicked and perverse—whatever we make an idol of, it’s apparent and promised comfort Zechariah says is a deception. And the solutions to your heart dilemmas that it proposes will only make matters worse in the end, never better. They leave us every bit as forlorn and lost and in need as we were when we turned to them in the first place.

 

“The people wandered like sheep. They were afflicted for lack of a shepherd.” Your heart idols can’t save you. They won’t help you. They can’t deliver you. They can’t fix you. They will not comfort you. Idols are lifeless, powerless, worthless, empty, blind and dead. And as Psalm 115 verse 8, rather sobering-ly reminds us, “Those who make them become like them. So do all that trust in them.” Lifeless, powerless, worthless, empty, blind and dead. Idols scatter the sheep and leave them exposed to the predations of sin for want of a shepherd.

 

But, the Lord who is our Shepherd never, never deserts his flock. Verse 3: “My anger is hot against the shepherds. I will punish the leaders. For the Lord of hosts cares for his flock.” What good news! That line really is: “For the Lord of hosts cares for his flock, the house of Judah, and will make them like his majestic steed in battle.” False shepherds desert the sheep, lead them to the poison of idolatry. But, the Lord cares for his flock, the house of Judah. Who needs an idol when we have the Lord, the God of covenant love and faithfulness? That’s what Zechariah wants us all wondering to ourselves. “Whatever was I thinking? Running after my lusts as if satisfying them could ever satisfy me. All they ever did was lead me further into the darker. Further and further down the rabbit hole. Further and further into bondage. All they ever did was lead me as dumb and foolish and impotent as they are themselves. And all the while the God of grace and glory cares for his flock and says to me, ‘Ask me and I will give you rain. Ask me and I will answer you unlike your dumb idols, I am a talking God, an acting God, a living God, mighty to save, omnipotent to deliver. I can satisfy your heart when no other can. You were made for me, you see?’” “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in him.” Zechariah helps us see the worthiness of the Lord to be trusted in, the Lord our Shepherd, by way of contrast.

 

And, secondly, look with me at verses 4 and 5. This time he shows us that it is the Lord who is our Shepherd, not by contrasting him with his competitors but by showing to us just how it is he cares for his sheep. And he does it, Zechariah says, supremely by providing for his sheep better shepherds. One in particular. Look at verse 4. There are three images of this coming leader, this coming ruler who will do for the sheep what the other leaders and rulers and shepherds failed to do. First, notice this true leader will be the cornerstone. That’s language borrowed from passages like Psalm 118, verse 22, “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” Jesus will quote that verse in Matthew 21:42 referring it to himself. He is the cornerstone. Passages like Isaiah 28:16, “Behold I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone, chosen and precious, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.” In both texts—Psalm 118:22, Isaiah 28:16—they’re quoted together in 1 Peter chapter 2 verses 6 and 7 as being fulfilled in Christ. Jesus is the cornerstone! In his atoning work, he is the stone that was rejected who becomes the cornerstone upon which the whole structure of his church is built and receives its definitive shape and pattern. He is the true leader, the cornerstone.

 

The second image of this true leader is describing him as the tent peg. That’s a word that’s also used in Isaiah. Isaiah 22:23-24 to describe Eliakim, son of Hilkiah, one of Israel’s leaders. And the Lord says of Eliakim, “I will fasten him like a peg,” the same word, “in a secure place, and he will become a throne of honor to his father’s house. They will hang on him the whole honor of his father’s house, the offspring and issue, every small vessel, from the cups to all the flagons.” That is, he will be so stable and secure that all the hopes and expectations, all the trust and confidence, of his people might hang on him. He’ll hold it fast. He will be an anchor to it. That’s what this one who was to come will be, Zechariah says. An anchor for your hope. A securing hook that will hold fast the deepest needs of your soul, he will. We can rest on him all our weight, all our faith and he will bear us up and hold us secure.

 

Then the third image is one we’ve seen before. He describes Jesus as a battle bow. We’ve looked a few times as we’ve looked at Zechariah—this theme of spiritual combat and conquest. Here it is again. Jesus will triumph over sin and the devil. And, then, there’s a fourth image. Speaking not now of Jesus, but of other rulers who will come in his wake. In the wake of the appearing of Jesus, the cornerstone, the secure peg, the battle bow, will come an array of other faithful rulers and leaders, true shepherds, who will care for the flock, whom the Lord will raise up. Jesus, the cornerstone, the secure peg, the battle bow is the one in whom the Lord our Shepherd comes to us as Jesus puts it himself in John chapter 10, “He is the Good Shepherd. The sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and he leads them out and he goes before them and his sheep follow him for they know his voice.” In Jesus, the care of the Lord for his flock reaches its high water mark. “The Lord demonstrates his love for us in this that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.” The Good Shepherd lays down his life for his sheep.

 

What are the broken promises and bitter aftertaste of idolatry compared to the the Good Shepherd who lays his life down for the sheep? And in the wake of his coming and his work the Lord gives others to lead, to rule, to shepherd. Not the false shepherds who left the flock of God’s people to idolatry scattered and wandering; but rulers who will, verse 5, “be mighty men in battle trampling the foe in the mud of the streets. They shall fight for the Lord is with them.” What can put backbone into a minister to stay in the fight, and under-shepherd following in the train of the Good Shepherd himself? What can put backbone into a minister to stay in the fight when the battle heats up and opposition mounts and the sheep wander after idols and the enemy comes in like a flood? What can enable the Lord’s under-shepherds “to stand firm in the evil day and, having done all, to stand”?

 

It is, verse 5, the knowledge that Jesus is with them in the fight. The cornerstone, the secure peg, the battle bow, the Great Shepherd of the sheep who faced down the enemy and laid his life down for his flock. Jesus is with them always even to the end of age. You stay in the fight when you know that when “he who is in you is greater than he that is in the world.” You press forward. You never sign a truce with sin when you know that the God who raised up Jesus the Great Shepherd of the sheep will “equip you with everything good for doing his working in you that which is pleasing in his sight thorugh Jesus Christ to whom be glory forever and ever and ever. Amen.” You do it because you know that the Lord is with you. We, in our own strength, confide “our striving would be losing were not the right man on our side, the man of God’s own choosing. Just ask who that may be. Christ Jesus it is he. Lord Sabbaoth his name, from age to age the same, and he must win the battle.”

 

How does the Lord care for his flock? He sends them Jesus. And he sends ministers to be his under-shepherds following the model and pattern laid down by Christ strengthened in the knowledge that the Lord himself is with them as they care for the flock. God’s provision for his sheep is complete, do you see? Ask him for rain and he will split the skies. Idols are mute and impotent, but God answers the prayers of his people. False shepherds desert the flock, leave them to the cruel predations of their idolatry. But, God has sent his son to rescue us. The cornerstone, the secure peg, the battle bow. And with him every ruler that will fight and win because the Lord is with them. The Lord, our shepherd, can be identified by way of contrast. And he can be identified by his care for us. Zechariah wants you to take them out and have a look at the cheap, plastic imitation godlings you have made for yourself and to which you have given your affections. And then he wants you to turn and gaze at the incomparable, incomprehensible immensity of the grace of the living God all of which is turned toward you in his Son. Make the comparison, he says. Make the comparison. See which will deal with your heart as it needs to be dealt with. Make the comparison and tear the dearest idol from your breast whatever that idol be.  And come to Jesus Christ in repentance and faith and worship only him.

 

Let’s pray together:

 

Oh our Father, how we bless you for the Great Shepherd, the Lord Jesus, that he has given all, he’s done all, for us. And, that he continues to tend and guard and care for his flock feeding us by his Word and sending us under-shepherds to care for us. That when we cry out unlike our idols to which we so often run, that when we cry out to you, you answer us. How ever could we have turned aside to these empty, plastic, imitation gods? Save us from our idols. Help us to smash them all and set apart Christ alone as Lord in our hearts. That we may find our infinite and deepest satisfaction in his mercy, in his forgiving grace, in his beauty and glory and perfect sufficiency for we ask it in his name, Amen. 

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