Fasting to Feasting
September 21, 2008 Zech 8:18-23
Intro:
God specializes in taking hard, difficult, painful messes and turning them into something beautiful.
Remember Abraham and Sarah – old, childless, wandering. God turned their barrenness into a nation of people still prominent today, 4000 years later.
Remember Joseph – sold by his brothers as a slave. God turned his abandonment and slavery into a role second only to the king of Egypt, and through him saved the very brothers who had betrayed him.
Remember Job – who lost everything in a matter of days. God turned his despair into abundance once more, following Job’s faithfulness.
Remember David – an adulterer and murderer. God turned his sin around when he asked for forgiveness and gave us a model of repentance and restoration.
Remember the Hebrew children in slavery in Babylon, thrown into the fiery furnace to be burned alive. God met them there, walked with them, and allowed them to be un-touched.
Remember Peter – betrayed Jesus three times, but was then restored.
And of course, the best example of God taking something horrible and turning it into something incredible is the cross, which becomes the empty tomb.
God specializes in taking hard, difficult, painful messes and turning them into something beautiful. He has done it in the past, and He will do it again.
A personal example:
We all can probably identify times in our lives when God has done just that. In my life, I look back and see a single mom with two kids, living on welfare in a tiny basement apartment, teetering on the edge of the poverty cycle and heading down a path leading to a dark place. But then God comes in the middle, surrounds that family with a bigger, healthy family known as “the church of Jesus”, and that single mom makes good decisions, those kids have opportunities and role models and positive influences, and God takes a hard, difficult, painful mess and turns it into something beautiful.
Zechariah context:
And that is exactly what God is doing with His people during the days of Zechariah. We’ve been studying how God has brought His people back from slavery, and has been with them as they rebuild their lives and their city and the temple of the Lord. God has been present with them all along the way, with words of incredible hope and assurance and passionate love. He brings that again in the text we look at this morning.
But just before reading today’s passage, there is one more piece that I need to remind us of so that this makes sense. Zech 1-6 was a series of visions, and chapter 7 began a new section of the book with a visit from a group of Jews with a specific question: Now that the temple is functional (even though not complete), they come and ask: “Should we continue to mourn and fast each summer on the anniversary of the Temple’s destruction, as we have done for so many years?” (Zech 7:3b). You might recall that God didn’t answer the question directly, but rather asked a question in response, “was that really for me??”. But the specific question was not lost, and today’s passage begins with addressing that issue.
Zech 8:18-23 (NIV)
18 Again the word of the LORD Almighty came to me. 19 This is what the LORD Almighty says: "The fasts of the fourth, fifth, seventh and tenth months will become joyful and glad occasions and happy festivals for Judah. Therefore love truth and peace."
20 This is what the LORD Almighty says: "Many peoples and the inhabitants of many cities will yet come, 21 and the inhabitants of one city will go to another and say, ’Let us go at once to entreat the LORD and seek the LORD Almighty. I myself am going.’ 22 And many peoples and powerful nations will come to Jerusalem to seek the LORD Almighty and to entreat him."
23 This is what the LORD Almighty says: "In those days ten men from all languages and nations will take firm hold of one Jew by the hem of his robe and say, ’Let us go with you, because we have heard that God is with you.’ "
Fasting to Feasting (vs. 19):
We see the response to the original question from back in chapter 7: “those times when you got together to mourn and to fast – those painful seasons when you were just looking back on how great things used to be – those are coming to an end. They are going to change…” Let’s not miss how huge this transformation is – imagine the people gathering on the anniversary of the temple’s destruction, reliving the pain and loss, confronted again with the hopelessness of their situation as helpless slaves in a foreign land, weeping and fasting and sharing their misery.
It is happening again, just like God had been doing among His people in their history – God is taking something painful and changing it into something worth celebrating.
I want you to notice specifically what the “fasts” are turning into: “joyful and glad occasions and happy festivals”. Three different words, piled up on each other, combining to try to impress upon the people how complete this transformation will be. The first word, “joyful”, is an emotional outburst; the second, “glad occasions”, pictures family and friends gathered around a meal to laugh and celebrate; the third, “happy festivals”, imagines a larger group gathering to have a party. What an incredible contrast to the weeping and mourning and remembering the pain of the past. God turns the fasting into feasting.
What was true for the Israelites is true for us today also: God turns the messes into something beautiful. And so I want you to reflect on your life at the moment – are there some messes there? Some areas where you feel like the Israelites in slavery mourning and weeping over how things used to be? I think there are, because we are all human and part of being human means that we suffer.
But part of being children of God means that the Lord of our Kingdom specializes in taking hard, difficult, painful messes and turning them into something beautiful. In restoration and forgiveness. In transformation. In turning fasts into feasts. Even those ones you feel acutely right now. God will take your messes and make something beautiful.
How? That might be our first response – how could God take something like “this”, whatever that might be, and make it something beautiful? I’m not entirely sure of the how, I think it is different in each situation – but I am entirely sure that He can and will, because He specializes in exactly that.
Our second response might be “when”? And that might actually be a deeper question, arising out of our pain and longing to see it end, perhaps even a cry of desperation, our hearts saying, “I don’t think I can take this any longer”. The answer I have to that “when” cry is difficult but true: God’s timing is perfect. He can and will bring the change, but we might have to wait a while. We might have to walk a dark road. We might have to suffer for a while. And in that time, God is always with us suffering alongside of us, and in His perfect timing He will bring the change. The Apostle Paul reminds us of this in 2 Cor 4, where he has talked about being “pressed… but not crushed… perplexed, but not driven to despair… hunted down, but never abandoned by God… getting knocked down, but not destroyed”, and he brings that all to this point: “Though our bodies are dying, our spirits are being renewed every day. 17 For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! 18 So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.”
And all of this leaves us in this place: to have faith – that is what “fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen” means. Faith that God is who He says He is. Faith that God will do what He says He will do. Faith that the God who specializes in changing messes into works of beauty will do so again in our lives. And faith that He will do so in His perfect timing.
One more thing before moving on to the rest of the passage: we need each other for this kind of faith. We can’t get this kind of faith in isolation – we need to be surrounded by the love of each other and the reminders that God still does this today because we’ve seen it as we’ve walked through tough things before and have found the other side.
Therefore… (vs. 19b):
Verse 19 ends with a “therefore” clause. Since God is turning the fasts into feasts, “therefore love truth and peace”. Getting to the heart of it all, once again. Not just “pursue” truth and peace. Not just “fight” for truth and peace. But “love” truth and peace. The word “peace” is not simply “the absence of conflict”, as we often think of it. Rather it is the Hebrew “shalom”, a deep rich pregnant word describing everything in harmony, in its place, working properly and integrated. And since God is at work creating and re-creating that kind of world, He commands us to love it.
Our actions follow our love. If we love truth and peace, we will pursue it. We will fight for it. We will pour ourselves, heart and soul and mind and strength, into seeking it and bringing it to be in our relationships and in our society.
And it is not just for us… (vss. 20-23):
When God and His people start to “love truth and peace”, and when God acts in power to rescue and restore and transform and change fasts into feasts, the results are global. These last three verses in chapter 8 enlarge the incredible message even further. Just when I wondered if it could possibly get better than it has been in chapter 8 – beginning with the emotional burst from the God of the Angel Armies shouting “my love for my people is passionate and strong!”, shouting “I have returned!”, encouraging “be strong and finish the task!”, promising again to turn times of mourning and fasting into times of celebration and feasting – just when we are almost full to bursting, God takes it one more level.
God says, “this glorious future I have for you – of restoration and true “shalom” – it is bigger than just the Jews… It is for more than just the children of Abraham… It is, in fact, for all of humanity. “Many peoples and the inhabitants of many cities will yet come” – this is a broad description, not limited to the “peoples” and cities of the Israelites. This would have reminded the Jews of the many peoples and cities that they had seen while in slavery, and would have broadened their view of the salvation of God to include the very people who had enslaved them previously, reversing the position of servitude that they had known and replacing it with a position of honor through which God could accomplish His plan for all of the world. “many peoples and powerful nations will come to Jerusalem to seek the LORD Almighty and to entreat him."
There is a beautiful picture of what this will look like in the last verse: “ten men from all languages and nations will take firm hold of one Jew by the hem of his robe and say, ’Let us go with you, because we have heard that God is with you.’”.
“We have heard that God is with you.” The image is of a group recognizing their need and seeing the Hand of God through His people, and then grabbing hold of the hem of the robe in need and desire to meet this God of whom they have heard. The news has gone out, something amazing is happening in this group because God is there, and so very naturally people want to be a part of it. They are longing for it!
I see this image, and it honestly makes me long for that day also. When the good things God is doing among and through His people will be heard by people “from all languages and nations”, and they will grab hold of us and say “there is something different, something amazing about you! I heard it was God… is it??” Instead when I listen around in North America I hear the opposite – “the people of God are all hypocrites…”; “the church is dying…”; “the people of God are out of touch with reality…”; “Christianity is boring and irrelevant…”. Yes, some of it we can blame on those who wish to portray us in negative ways. But these things are also on the lips of those who have first-hand experience, who instead of saying “we have heard that God is with you” are instead saying, “we looked and haven’t seen God with you.”
My response to that is two-fold. First, we must ensure that God is showing His power and presence among us, and the only way we can do that is by faithful obedience. We must be different from the world around us! We must let our hearts be broken by the things of God, we must pursue the things He is pursuing in our world, we must be shaped by the Holy Spirit instead of the spirit of consumerism and materialism of our age. We must let our love be for “truth and peace” instead of comfort and self. We must step forward in faith into the new things God is doing instead of lamenting the old days before the “temple” was destroyed. As we repent and truly follow Jesus, He will be with us in power.
Once that is truly the case, the only other thing I think we need is for people to hear. In Zechariah the people say, “we have heard…” – Paul in the New Testament book of Romans (chap 10) reminds us, “But how can they call on him to save them unless they believe in him? And how can they believe in him if they have never heard about him? And how can they hear about him unless someone tells them?” And the incredible privilege is ours to go and tell them.
Conclusion:
In my mind, this brings us full-circle right back to the beginning of the passage. You see, I think the most powerful message that our world needs to hear is not “Look at me! I’ve got everything figured out”, but rather, “look at this mess that is my life, let me tell you what God has done with it…”
That is a message that will grab people, and in return have them grab us back and say, “can I come too? Please, ‘let us go with you, because we have heard that God is with you.’”
Please, let God into the mess. Have faith that He can, and will, make it beautiful. And then share that with a desperate world around you.
