ZECHARIAH 7 (NOTES OF A READING)
ZECHARIAH 7 (NOTES OF A READING)
CAC Some progress had been made in the building of the house at this time, so that it answers to the present time.
Ques Is there a continuous thought in connection with the building of the house?
CAC The house was there so that it could be recognised, so the men could be sent. It was actually half-finished, it took two more years to finish. We are about there now. We cannot say much about the house being finished, but a start has been made, saints walk together in the recovery of the truth of the house, so there is a place of enquiry.
Ques Could features be distinguished so as to designate the house [p. 518] of God?
CAC If saints are found in grace walking together in holiness and truth it should be possible to be discerned. Then there would be enquiry. There is very little enquiry in christendom today, very little that an exercised soul could turn to and be certain of getting a divine answer. So we should seek to walk humbly before God, so as to have the marks of priesthood easy to be discerned, something other than human expediency and all the wretchedness of man.
These men came with an excuse. They had fasted and wept about the captivity throughout the seventy years, but it was not genuine. ‘Did you do it to Me?’ Jehovah said. It was a sort of religious activity, and men are ready to acknowledge God in a certain way when in distress; it quietens the conscience of a man without there being any desire to conform himself to God’s mind. So Jehovah said, ‘You did not do it to Me’. There are many movements in the religious world that seem good and suitable, judged by man’s standard, but how much is there really of God in them? This is the test we should put so that we are not deceived by false appearances.
It was a time of great affliction, and it is a time of great affliction now, we might say. We should judge if there is any genuine desire to come into line with God’s mind; otherwise there is not much in the fasting and weeping.
Rem The men came from Bethel.
CAC Which had been an idolatrous centre. God calls attention to the moral state of the people in answering, and to what had brought down His judgment. He would always give a reply to people and point out their failure to answer to Him; therefore it must be rectified for relief to come in.
He calls attention to the fact that their relations to the brethren were not right. “Execute true judgment, and show loving-kindness and mercies one to another”.
Rem The word of the Lord comes directly, we repeatedly read, so He keeps in contact.
CAC It is God’s great controversy in christendom, the disregard of brotherly relations.
[p. 519] Ques Would the same apply to the Supper in 1 Corinthians 11? “When ye come therefore together into one place, it is not to eat the Lord’s supper”.
CAC It was disregard of all that was brotherly. You are eating your own supper, the apostle says. There is no consideration of the brotherly bond. Even the Lord’s supper was made a selfish thing. So in christendom, ‘Take this in remembrance of the Christ that died for thee’. That is a purely selfish way of doing it, it is not done in the brotherly bond. They do not even know the person kneeling next to them. The brotherly relation of saints is ignored and trespassed against.
Rem Divine conditions are transferred.
CAC All our relations with God depend on our relations with one another; that is, on right approach to God. “If therefore thou shouldest offer thy gift at the altar, and there shouldest remember that thy brother has something against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and first go, be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift” (Matthew 5: 23, 24). That is, the service of God depends on our brotherly relations being right. I may disregard the matter, but I have no access to God. The Lord has set up these brotherly relations and they are not to be trifled with. He has set us in family relations; we did not establish them; it is an obligation. None of us can choose whether we walk with our brethren. It is evil not to do so. If we do not, we are transgressing against the whole dispensation of grace. “Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another” (Colossians 3: 13). It is grace, and we are not to be on the line of demand, but to walk in the love of the brethren. Things are recognised as trying to the brethren, but if I am in the spirit of the dispensation, I can overlook a thousand things.
Rem “Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted” (John 20: 23). Remission comes first.
CAC Remission comes first because it is the natural function of the assembly to remit, abnormal to retain. The [p. 520] defaulter may show no repentance, so sins have to be retained.
Rem What is inside is shown outside. “Show loving kindness and mercies”, it says. It is the light coming out.
CAC It is the character of God coming out in His people, not just the doctrines they hold. Love is the fulfilling of the law. You will not murder, steal, do harm, for love will regulate it all. This beautiful brotherly bond is what God is concerned about. That is why the people lost the land, it says — by these things.
When the Lord says to Ephesus, “I have against thee, that thou hast left thy first love”, He is, I think, referring to activity of love toward the brethren; I do not know if I am right. “Love one another, as I have loved you” — I understand that is first love. We all feel rather small in the presence of such a standard, but who would have it otherwise? It is the secret of all church failure, declension and worldliness that have come in.
Ques Is that why brotherly love is found in Philadelphia?
CAC I thought so; it is restored in a remnant, and if we yield ourselves to God He will help us as to these brotherly relations. We shall be jealous over the details that might impair them.
Rem 1 Corinthians 13 would help us as coming between the other two chapters.
CAC Yes, I think so. It is the nature of a living organism. The body is a living organism, as every organism is. It is God’s nature, He is love. If He loves and says, ‘You are not like Me’, how dreadful that is. John speaks of His love, following on the Supper — the giving of His body and the pouring out of His blood are the great evidence of it.
Rem “If we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us”.
CAC Beautiful! There has been more failure in that than in anything in the church. It lies behind every failure in the church that ever took place.
Rem So it is the principle taken to recover things.
[p. 521] CAC If the house is to be built, this feature must be incorporated. It crowns all.
Love is more connected with children than with sons. It is more on John’s line than Paul’s, as connected with a nature. In Peter’s epistle we have “growing up” in the nature, so then he speaks of living stones, because the nature is there. God has been pleased to beget children; there is nothing more wonderful than that. They have the same nature as God. This is put in contrast to that which is formal and religious; it is not fasting and weeping, but brotherly love, so the divine nature is observed.
So you can understand God’s feelings in the next chapter — the intensity of feeling expressed there. “I am jealous for Zion with great jealousy, and I am jealous for her with great fury”. God’s heart burns when He sees the coldness and deadness of those who profess to be His people. If He sees any disregarding the brotherly bond His heart burns.
Rem Seeing the gospel in the light of God’s feelings puts quite a different colour on it.
CAC The prodigal comes to the house. God does not send a ticket for the house! Some are content with a ticket for heaven; well, it must make God’s heart burn. It is a cold kind of thing to be merely content to go to heaven. God says, I want you in my house now, I want you to enjoy being My child now. That is not always how God is treated now, and His heart burns. If God returns to His original thoughts, and He is doing so after being despised for two thousand years, He says, ‘I am going to take the matter up Myself’. The great thought of God is Zion, He returns to His great universal thought for all His people. But He has come back, that His people may come back to them. What is in the mind of God, what does He want? is the question. Am I going to be so foolish as to miss all that is in the heart of God?
Rem There is a golden thread through all the Scriptures, God having a people and being with them.
CAC Holiness and truth must mark His house. To Philadelphia He introduces Himself as “the holy, the true”.
Rem “Being renewed in the spirit of your mind; and your having put on the new man, which according to God is created in truthful righteousness and holiness”.
CAC That is the thought of the new man. It takes all the brethren to make up the new man, just as it takes all the sinners to make up the old man. The new man is a creation. It is created in holiness and truth. That is the creation to which every saint belongs. All the work of God in our souls goes on in recognition of this, that there is such a thing as the new man, and we put it on — a new moral character which links us with all saints. As they are supposed to have put on the new man the Colossians and Ephesians were marked by love to all saints. You cannot help loving them if they are brethren, so you want to walk with saints, but it is difficult because they bring in barriers not according to holiness and truth. If they discard the old man and put on the new man we should love to do so; there would be no difficulty. Unless I have put on the new man Scripture would not regard me as a Christian. Many things have not been taken up by saints; they do not know what you mean by the new man in which there is nothing of the old left, “Not Greek and Jew ... barbarian, Scythian, bondman nor freeman”. That is all gone, and you are brought into a new man where there is nothing but Christ. So then we can walk together. It is a terrible blot if anything of the old man comes in.
The city is marked by two things; experience and potentiality — the young and old. God does not speak of people in maturity here. God loves to think of saints with long experience of His ways. He delights in old saints, in their sixtieth or eightieth year. It is sixty years since I first trusted the Saviour and I wish I had more experience of God. He looks for maturity of experience. There is great potentiality in the young ones — those breaking bread in their early teens — so there is great interest for God in them. The two classes are mentioned, as if they are there we are all right. There is no trouble about what comes between, if you get both features in a meeting — age and youth. We should look at a boy or girl [p. 523] with a kind of reverence, as you do not know what God is going to do with them. So it would make us very careful how we handled young people. We do not want to come down to their low level of sport, we want to lead them up to the high thoughts of God. A young man might ultimately be the greatest evangelist there ever was.
God can do anything in remnant days. ‘It is wonderful for you, not for Me’, He says. We must get away from a mean, miserable view of things. Let us get nearer home, nothing is too wonderful for God to do in me if I yield myself to Him.