Daily Blast - Minor Prophets: Day 29
Scripture
“This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘If you will walk in obedience to me and keep my requirements, then you will govern my house and have charge of my courts, and I will give you a place among these standing here.”
Reflection
The book of Zechariah takes place after the people who were in exile by Babylon return to Jerusalem. Zechariah and another prophet, Haggai, were the people who were challenged and motivated the people to rebuild the temple in the city as a place of worship to God. One of Zechariah’s key messages is about turning back to God or remaining faithful to Him.
It’s interesting that the people of God so often have to be reminded about remaining faithful to God or turning back to Him. If they are God’s chosen people why are they like this? Why are they the examples that the Bible keeps referring to throughout the Old Testament? Well actually I think it’s a rather amazing example, and to put it simply, we as humans are not perfect, but because the example they are using isn’t perfect either we get a tremendous amount of hope from this. If the Bible was full of perfect people how would we be able to relate to them? If they always did the right thing, how awful would we feel when we do something wrong?!
Well, although they were not perfect - just as we are not perfect - we are called to be faithful to God. This doesn’t mean we will be able to do everything perfectly but God does want us to be faithful to HIm in the choices we make, the things we say, and the actions we do. God wants us to remain faithful to Him as He wanted the people to follow Him in this book of Zechariah. In the part that we are going to look at today, God calls to two important men of the time, Joshua and Zerubbabel.
God wants Joshua to remain faithful to Him, and if Joshua remains faithful to God, he will be the one who leads God’s people and he will also become a symbol of the future Messianic King. Zerubbabel, the one in charge of the rebuilding of the temple is told that the temple will only be successful if the temple and its builders are faithful to God and only worship and follow God’s spirit. One key thing to remember is God’s love isn’t conditional and it is very much the opposite. Although God’s love is unconditional He does want people to remain faithful to Him (remember what we spoke about at Youth last Wednesday about God being jealous).
Challenge
My challenge for you today is to ask God to continue to help you to remain faithful to Him when you are faced with trials and temptations.
An area where maybe we are all starting to feel it now, if we haven’t been feeling it earlier on in this season, is the tough time we can have being in lockdown and remaining faithful to God. We seem to fill our days with all sorts of things because we have this extra time but we can often forget that we need to take some time out to spend it with God.