Today’s passage is Zechariah 9:1-8. God says he will keep watch over his people and never let an oppressor rule them again. He mentions eight different cities that oppose him and his people and says he will take away their possessions, destroy their power and hope, consume some by fire and allow other foreigners to overrun them.
Why is God a destroyer? How does God keep watch?
I am the eight cities mentioned in today’s passage.
Each of them opposes God in some way, just as I do with my sins of jealously, lust, procrastination, arrogance, judging, reluctance to pray, impatience, and advising without love.
In my younger days I tried to heap up “gold like the dirt of the streets” (v.3), but God took away most of that when my pension largely vanished in the financial crisis of the 90s.
Until 2007 when I married my wife and joined Wooridle Church, God pruned my life till there wasn’t much left except a small faith and a bad attitude that needed years of divine confrontation to change.
My sense of worldly inferiority doesn’t automatically turn to God.
Like David in last Sunday’s sermon, that inferiority leads me to play a numbers game to impress others instead of simply trusting in God and depending on him.
Today I finished reading a spiritual biography of CS Lewis.
It was harder to read than I anticipated, not because it was poorly written, but so much of it echoed my own spiritual trials.
I felt jealous of his lifelong friendships because I have none like them. When he talked of the happiness that came to him in his 60s, I felt the same about myself.
And for a similar reason#8212;a much younger wife to love in a Christian marriage.
When I read the part about the death of his wife, his grief, and then his own death, I cried.
What made me cry was the imagined death of my own wife and the emptiness it would leave me with.
Lewis says grief is a lot like fear. I know that feeling.
And in my imagination I lived that terrible fear again and cried hard. Hope seemed to wither.
How would I manage without her?
God is good not because he’s kind, generous and cozy like an ideal grandfather, but because he’s a loving, stern father who wants and insists on the best from me.
To get that best he applies the perfecting tool of suffering.
Because the distance between me and God is so great, he is terrifying.
I don’t understand his goodness, but I trust it is good.
In many ways I am still the same willfully blind sinner I was fifteen years ago.
But I am also not that guy at all because God destroyed my eight cities and withered my hope in them. It was necessary to grow me in him, my Lord.
Today’s passage and my reading of CS Lewis’s life forcefully reminded me of that.
Lord, keep watch over my heart and mind. Let me not put hope in anyone or anything other than you. Help me love those you have put in my life.
