ZECHARIAH 7
The building of the house had been going on about two years when certain persons sent “to supplicate Jehovah, and to speak unto the priests that were in the house of Jehovah of hosts, and to the prophets, saying, Should I weep in the fifth month, separating myself, as I have done now so many years?” verses 2 and 3. These persons were not helping to build the house; they were not in the current of God’s mind at all. They had felt the pressure of the captivity in a natural way, and they had been keeping up an outward appearance of recognising God, as people often do when His hand is upon them, but it was no genuine exercise before God. Men often satisfy their own consciences by [p. 116] some outward recognition of God when there is no true turning to Him at all. So the word of Jehovah was, “Did ye really fast unto me, even unto me?” In times of distress men may wish God to come in for them without any true repentance, and even His people may think that some formal acknowledgment, or doing our own will in humility, will do, without facing the moral exercises which our state calls for. But this is a vain hope; God looks for reality in those who have to do with Him.
So the word of Jehovah came to Zechariah, calling attention to the moral state which had brought His judgment upon His people, and we find that His chief concern was that there should be right relations between the brethren. Their relations with God could not be right if they were not acting rightly one toward another. So He said, “Execute true judgment, and show lovingkindness and mercies one to another, and oppress not the widow and the fatherless, the stranger and the afflicted; and let none of you imagine evil against his brother in your heart. But they refused to hearken, and turned a rebellious shoulder, and made their ears heavy, that they should not hear. And they made their heart as an adamant, that they should not hear the law, and the words that Jehovah of hosts sent by his Spirit by the hand of the former prophets: therefore was there great wrath from Jehovah of hosts”, verses 9 - 12.
The first assembly failure was in regard of brotherly relations. “There arose a murmuring of the Hellenists against the Hebrews because their widows were overlooked in the daily ministration”, Acts 6: 1. It is probable that the root of all the departure, and consequent loss of blessing, could be traced to the weakening and giving up of those links of love which normally bind the brethren together. The assemblies soon became congregations, and the warmth and liberty of the family circle were lost. When the saints ceased to love one another as Christ loved them, they had really left their first love and had fallen, and needed to repent and do the first works. The Lord would have us to be very sensitive as to the maintenance of happy relations with our brethren. “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. These words of the Lord suggest that in approaching God our hearts would be sensitive to recall anything that our brother has against us, and we should feel that we must be [p. 117] reconciled to him before we can offer to God. If this were attended to there would be no such outstanding grievances as sometimes go on for long periods, and have a paralysing effect on liberty in the service of God.
In the assembly in Philadelphia we see what is prophetic of assembly revival in a remnant at the end. Philadelphia means “the love of the brethren”. Recovery lies in coming back to this. If we love the brethren we shall not imagine evil against them in our hearts, nor shall we speak evil of them nor do them any harm. We shall in every way seek their good, and this can only be by the pursuit of holiness and truth. We shall want them all to be loved complacently by Christ, and therefore we shall be intolerant of anything in them which Christ hates.
We are brethren as in wilderness conditions, but we are also brethren as in the land. It is to be noted that Paul writes to the Colossians and to the Ephesians on the ground that he had heard of their “love towards all the saints”. It would seem that this was a necessary condition in order to the opening up of the heavenly position of the saints. I believe that, as the love of the brethren waned, they lost capacity to appreciate these two epistles. The secret of Israel’s losing “the land” was the break down of their brotherly relations. So it is stated: “The land was desolate after them ... they laid the pleasant land desolate”, verse 14. It is solemn to think that the assembly lost “the land”, in any practical sense, for the same reason that Israel lost it. “The land” can only be enjoyed in the divine nature, that nature which we have as born of God, and it manifests itself in the love of the brethren. So we may all understand the line on which God is working for recovery today. It is opened out in detail in the next chapter, which speaks, indeed, of how God will recover Jerusalem in a coming day, but which we may apply, in the spirit and principle of it, to what God is doing today. That is, He is bringing His saints of the assembly back to His own thoughts, as He will, in a future day, bring Israel back to His thoughts as to them.