Prepare To Be Judged - Zechariah 3:1-7

Our scripture today is going to be from Zechariah chapter 3 verse 1 through 6. I'm actually not going to read mine today.

I'm going to go through part 7 as we go through the sermon. This Bible is the Hebrew Bible, so it might not sound exactly what you're used to.

And I do want to thank you all for having me up here again. I do want to tell you, and Tommy knows here and Betty Cook are old friends of mine, back in December I was, since the last time

I was here, I was diagnosed with leukemia. And right now they're continuing to monitor and test.

And if all goes well, I'll be getting tested every couple of months for the rest of my life.

As long as things stay the same, I won't have to have any treatments. But any prayers you want to offer,

I appreciate those. I know a lot of people have been praying for me. I had my hygienist at the dentist's office stop and ask me if she could pray for me.

Went to the bank and the teller prayed for me. So the power of prayer is tremendous.

And I thank you for any prayers you can offer for me. One of my favorite actors is a guy named

Sylvester Stallone. Y 'all know Sylvester Stallone, Rocky, Rambo. In his 50 -year career, he's had many, many action -adventure roles.

He's had some great movies. He's also had a few bombs here and there. And one of those bombs was a movie called

Judge Dredd. But it had a good little message to it. It takes place in the not -too -distant future.

There's this great big city that's walled in from the outside world and is heavily ridden with crime.

So they have a special police force called judges. And they go around and respond to crimes.

And when they show up at the crime scene, they tell the criminals, this is what you're charged with.

These are your charges. And then they say, prepare to be judged.

And not only are they the police, but they're the prosecutor. They're the judge. They're the jury.

Sometimes the executioner. They carry it all. Those words meant that justice was coming.

It's going to be final. There are no delays. There's no appeals. Your life of crime, and possibly your life itself, has come to the end of the line.

We all live a life of crime, don't we, so to speak. Ultimately, we have to face the judge ourselves.

He won't look like Sylvester Stallone, but he's a whole lot more powerful. And he holds eternal life and eternal death in his hands.

Matthew 25, 31 to 33 says, when the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all his angels are with him, he will sit on his glorious throne.

The people of every nation will be gathered in front of him. He will separate them as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.

He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Now, the first thing to understand about this final judgment is that it cannot be avoided.

Lots of times in church, we don't hear too much about sin and hell and judgment, but they are very, very important.

Regardless of how we choose to interpret the prophecy about the end times, we're told in Hebrews, it is appointed to men once to die, but after this, the judgment.

Ever since Adam and Eve, we human beings have been sinning against God. We're disobedient children, and we never seem to learn our lesson.

Just like the fatherless men we see today in our society who have no father in the home, very often we don't have a heavenly father in our hearts, and we go astray.

And Satan loves it. He's the master of this earth, and he gets to do all kinds of mischief, usually through you and me.

And you see Satan, he tricks us into sinning, and then he tells on us. And finally, he gets to prosecute us before God.

Imagine you're in the courtroom. A lot of folks here maybe have been in the courtroom as either a witness or on jury duty.

God is on the throne. He's down at one end behind that big bench. He's the judge, and you're standing on the floor in front of him.

Satan is also there, because remember, he's the prosecutor. He's the commonwealth's attorney at the judgment.

Satan rules this earth, so he represents this world, which is his commonwealth.

And you can't defend yourself. You can't say anything. Why? Because you know you're guilty.

The only time Satan is ever going to be on your side is when you are against God. He'll egg you on.

He'll keep pushing at you, and once he gets you in trouble, then he's going to act like it was your idea, not his.

Though everybody dies, not everybody's going to spend eternity in the same place.

Heaven is real, but so is hell. First, we have to understand that the

Word of God confirms the reality of hell. This might shock you, but the first person in the

New Testament who mentioned hell was Jesus. Nobody else talked about it before him, and it may also shock you to know that Jesus talked about hell more than he talked about heaven.

In fact, he talked about hell more than any other subject in the kingdom of God.

He also talked more about hell than anybody else did in the Bible. For every 100 words that he spoke, 13 of them dealt with the subject of hell and judgment.

And of the 40 parables that Jesus told, more than half of them dealt with the concept of hell and or judgment.

So God's Word does confirm the reality of hell. It's real.

When Satan gets to break God's law, he's also going to be the policeman, just like Judge Brett, who's going to arrest you, haul you in, and take you to jail.

He loves to push you in the mud. Satan does that all the time. He's going to throw you down in the mud and get you dirty, and then he's going to blame you.

It's your fault you got dirty. That's his full -time job.

He's an instigator, he's an agitator, and he's a dictator here on earth. But, and this is a crucial point for all of us to understand,

God's love is so merciful and so real that he actually allows people to choose hell if that's what they want.

It's the will of God that we all have free will, that we have the ability to choose.

No one else is going to choose it for us, although the devil would like to encourage us, his final decision is going to be ours.

And hell is not going to be populated with people that God rejected. Hell is going to be populated with people who rejected

God. It's just the opposite. And when the fun of games in this life ends, we're all going to stand before that judge, before God.

And the verdict he issues is going to depend on where you stand with him, because he already knows who you are.

He created you. He watched over you your entire life. Zechariah chapter three gives us a good picture of what that day is going to be.

And a lot of people don't hear much about Zechariah. When you're in church on a Sunday and you hear the sermon,

Zechariah, what book is that? Let me go find that one. But they have some good lessons in there. In fact, every book in the

Bible is in there for a reason. They all have good messages. Verse one says, Then he showed me

Joshua, the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him.

Now this Joshua, his grandfather was Saraiah, who had been the high priest at the temple in Jerusalem when they were conquered by the

Babylonians. And he was put to death by King Nebuchadnezzar. And then in 586

BC, Joshua's father was among the priests who were taken away in captivity.

And they spent 70 years in exile. And then

Joshua himself is the first high priest when the Roman came back to Jerusalem.

Seventy years later, he reestablished proper worship for God. He built an altar and he resumed the sacrificial worship that they had had before.

He plays a very important role when the prophets Haggai and Zechariah remind the exiles of their need to finish rebuilding the temple.

Remember, it wasn't very easy when they came back. They had a tough time. They'd been away for a long time and the pagans had taken over.

And they didn't have a lot of resources and they were discouraged. But Joshua helped lead them.

Now representing God himself in this vision is the angel of God. And he can either be representative of God or maybe the embodiment of God himself on earth.

And the scene includes three people. The angel of God, Satan, and the priest

Joshua. Satan's name literally means the adversary. The verbal form of the term

Satan means to act as an adversary against God. He's an enemy.

He's opposing God. Now Satan's accusation against Joshua likely centered on the high priest ritual impurity.

When priests go into the temple, they're supposed to put on their proper clothing. They're supposed to wash themselves a certain way.

Everything has to be just right and be done perfectly. And if you do one little thing wrong, then you're unclean and you did sin.

Maybe he didn't wash his hands. We don't know what he did, but he was guilty. So Satan looks at you and he looks at me and he loves to abuse us.

He'll whisper in your left ear, hey, you can get away with it. And then he's going to yell in your right ear, no, you can't get away with it.

You're guilty. You did it. And in this particular case, Satan had

Joshua right where he wanted him. Satan points to Joshua and says, he's guilty.

And he was guilty. He knew it. When the devil talks to you about God, he's always going to tell a lie.

He's going to say, God doesn't really love you. Why did that child have to die?

Why did that person you love have to have that terrible disease and die? Why did somebody have to pass away in a car crash?

Why does somebody have to be paralyzed? He doesn't hear your prayers. God should let bad things happen to people who love him.

Satan always tells lies. And too often we listen to him instead of listening to God.

Of course, when he comes to the judgment and Satan talks to God about you and your sin, he doesn't have to lie because he knows what he's telling

God about you is true. He instigated it. He got you to do it. And now you know you're guilty.

Then in verse two in Zechariah, it says, the Lord said to Satan, the

Lord rebuke you, O Satan. The Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you.

Is not this a brand plucked from the fire? A brand is a stick basically used for stirring fires.

Think about times you've been camping and you get that little fire burning out in the yard and the fire is starting to die down.

You take a stick and you stir it up a little bit. That's a brand. That's what that's used for, to keep the fire going, to build it back up again.

And that brand illustrates that God graciously rescued Joshua and the rest of the remnant who were in Babylon and brought them back to Israel.

And here's something important also to know. God is never going to defend his children's sins.

He's never going to defend your sins. He's never going to defend mine, but he will defend his children.

He will defend us. And here's the good news. Jesus is your defense attorney.

And he doesn't charge a fee. Unlike those people you see on TV that promise you're going to get you millions of dollars and they're going to win every case and whatever.

Jesus doesn't charge you anything. Those guys on TV don't bother telling you they're going to get like half of it.

But Jesus, he's a defense attorney who doesn't charge at all. And the best part of him being your defense attorney, he's never lost a case.

As long as he's defending you, he's not going to lose. You can't fight

Satan with your own power. Only Jesus knows how to shut him up and put him in his place.

Verse three in Zechariah continues the drama. Now Joshua was standing before the angel clothed with filthy garments.

Filthy garments describe the type of clothing that stained with excrement. Some of our verses may have a little bit different language there, but you get the idea.

It's really nasty, really dirty, and it represents Joshua's ritual impurity and his sinfulness.

Filthy clothing represents sin. Back when I was in high school, when

I was a senior, and I had friends who were witnessing to me about Christ that hadn't been saved yet,

I had a friend named Mike White. Mike told me that just imagine you got this bucket, five -gallon bucket, full of nasty, dirty, filthy rags, and that represents all of your sins.

And most of us keep it in a closet with the door shut because we don't want other people to know we've got it.

We hide our sins as best as we can from other folks. We can't hide them from God.

And according to Mike White, when Jesus comes into your life and you repent and you turn away from your sins, he's going to open that closet up, grab that nasty bucket, and throw those filthy rags out so they'll be away from you forever.

Now let's get back into the courtroom. Satan has all the evidence he needs against Joshua.

He has an airtight case. He's got pictures. He's got emails. He's got videos.

He's got witnesses. He's got fingerprints. He has DNA. You did do it.

You are guilty. You are dirty. He's got everything on you, and there's nothing you can do about it.

And did you know that there's always going to be three people who know when you've sinned?

Y 'all thinking about that, when you sin? We know when we sin, don't we? The first person who knows you sin is going to be

God. He knows everything. And of course, the devil, he's going to point it out as soon as you do it.

You just sin. I tricked you. And finally, you know it yourself.

You're the third person. You never do a sin and just go right on and say, well, nothing happened.

I didn't sin. Yes, you did. You know it. You know it in your heart. And in this case, in Zechariah, Joshua is guilty, and everybody knows it.

But then the judge, the Lord, he steps in and he speaks to Satan in verse four.

And the angel said to those who were standing before him, remove the filthy garments from him.

And to him, Joshua, he said, behold, I have taken your iniquity away from you, and I will clothe you with pure vestments.

The one standing before him probably refers to maybe other angels, although it could be human associates of the priest

Joshua. It doesn't really specify. We'll clothe you with rich garments.

That refers to the fact that the priest in ancient Israel wore specially designed consecrated clothing.

They had a special inner garment and an outer garment. They had a breastplate over them with jewels on it.

They had a special wardrobe that had to be worn when they went into the temple.

In verse five, it continues. And I said, let them put a clean turban on his head.

So they put a clean turban on his head and clothed him with garments. And the angels of the

Lord were standing by. Turban, you're all familiar with the idea of the turban is pieces of cloth that are wrapped around the head or whatever.

The high priest and the priests themselves had to wear special turbans, special headgear. You look at churches today, the

Pope wears a special headdress and a lot of folks in the Catholic Church do, cardinals and bishops.

Same thing, the Eastern Orthodox, even your other religions like your Muslims, the Imams, their priests, they wear funny hats.

So wearing a special hat was pretty much common among all religions, but it was especially required in the

Jewish religion for the high priest. Now Joshua didn't deserve to have those dirty clothes taken off, but the grace of God stepped in.

Remember the prodigal son? We're all familiar with the story, are we? He was impatient.

He wanted to get out on his own. He wanted his inheritance. I'm going to go out and enjoy life. And so his dad gave him his inheritance.

He left, he went out and he had a good time until he ran out of money. And once he ran out of money, he realized how destitute he was.

He actually wound up working on a pig farm, to paraphrase it. Anybody here ever raise hogs on the farm?

We had them on our farm as long as I can remember. And I remember when

I was a young man, a teenager, and I'd go to the farm with my dad and we had to clean out the hog houses, which had a concrete floor, which was covered, stuff.

And I had to get a big old shovel, like a snow shovel, and shovel that stuff out. And then we'd go back with a water hose and wash it off.

I always told my dad, it stinks, daddy. It stinks in here. He said, well, it smelled like money to me.

Because we grew tobacco and peanuts and we used the hogs ever so often to provide us cash flow.

But it did not smell very good. And you imagine the prodigal son. He's working in that environment full time.

I only had to do it a couple nights a week, helping clean out hog houses. But the prodigal son, that's where he was living.

He finally said, I need to go to my dad's house. I need to go back and beg him to forgive me and just make me the lowest of his servants and I'll be okay.

But what did his father do? His father welcomed him. He was happy.

He celebrated his son's return. He said, put on his own robe, clean him up, take off those dirty rags.

And that's what God does when he comes into our lives. He takes off all those dirty rags that have been on us and he puts his clean robe on us.

Now, when the scripture mentions the headband, the clean headband, he's talking about that big turban.

Now, verse six and seven continues, and the angel of the Lord solemnly assured

Joshua, thus says the Lord of hosts, if you will walk in my ways and keep my charge, then you shall rule my house and have charge in my courts.

And I will give you the right of access among those who are standing here. We wear those dirty filthy garments.

Only Jesus can clean us up. He's the only one who can set us on the right path. He's the only one who can defend us before God.

We can't do it ourselves and no one else is going to be able to do it for us.

It was not and never has been God's desire for anyone to go to hell.

In Matthew 25, Jesus said, then he will say to those on his left, depart from me, you who are cursed into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

If you're not right with God, that's your destination. Now, the place called hell was designed originally for the devil and for his demonic followers, not for you and me, not for us human beings.

That's why God sent Jesus to die for us on the cross so we wouldn't have to go to hell.

That's what we're celebrating this time of year, aren't we? We're observing Easter. We're in Lent.

Next Sunday is Palm Sunday. Then we have Good Friday. Then you're going to have Easter Sunday.

That's what this is all about. Jesus came to save us so we would not have to go to hell.

God doesn't want us to go there. John 14, 16 says, and it's probably one of the most quoted verses in the

Bible, Jesus said to him, I am the way and the truth and the life.

No one comes to the father except through me. So what is

Jesus going to say in our defense when we stand before God to be judged on that final day?

Will he say you went through the motions of being a Christian, that your Bible was sitting on the bookshelf or maybe on the coffee table at home, coated with dust, if you don't dust very often?

Was it look brand new? Was it just like it was the day you bought it? When you sat in church on Sunday, were you thinking about what the preacher was saying?

Or were you thinking about that basketball game this afternoon? Who's playing who in the NCAAs? Was your mind wandering?

Were you drifting off when you were singing the hymns like, hurry up, get this over with. I got to go home. I got to go to the truck stop and have lunch.

Were you focused on those things and were you ignoring your neighbors?

You have neighbors that need help. I'm not saying to run up and help people, give people money, but people who need a little hand up, people who just need somebody to go talk to them.

My wife and I go visit a couple of folks at the nursing home in Emporia on a regular basis. That's a great thing to go visit somebody at the nursing home.

But when you go visit someone at the nursing home, do you ever pray with them? I found out a couple of years ago, we were visiting a lady and we've been visiting them for quite a while, for several years.

We got ready to leave and she said, will you pray for me? So that changed from then on.

It's more important to pray with someone than to pray for someone. On the other hand, will

God, will Jesus say, hey, this person was totally sold out to me. Jesus was constantly on their mind from sunup to sundown.

Their life revolved around the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Now, once in a while, we're still going to mess up.

We're not going to be perfect, but our heart needs to be in the right place. Will Jesus say, you had a well -worn

Bible, one that was worn out because you had turned the pages so often and the covers torn.

I've got it. This is my Hebrew Bible. This is my new one. That's why it's not too worn out. I have another one.

In time, we'll verify this one. He comes to Bible study with us on Wednesdays at Forest Hill Baptist Church.

I have another one like this. It was a cloth cover or paper or cardboard, whatever.

It got so messed up, I had to put duct tape on it. Can you imagine going to Bible study with the

Bible that's taped up with duct tape? But it's that kind of Bible you have. You wear it out and then you have to go get another one.

Did you take notes in that Bible? Did you have highlighters? My wife has five different colors of highlighters in her

Bible. I only use yellow, but she used pink, green, blue, every color you can think of. Did you fill it up with a highlighter?

Did you fill it up with notes in the corners? Did your faith grow the more you read

Scripture, the more you believed it, and the more you lived it? Well, Jesus said, you didn't sound religious when you talked, but you sounded genuine.

You sounded caring. You loved other people, even people who are not lovable.

We know a lot of those folks, don't we? It's hard to love some people out there, but we have to.

Jesus loved us, didn't he? So why can't we love somebody else? We're unlovable.

If you look at yourself in the mirror, I try to avoid looking in the mirror because I know what I look like.

I know I'm a real bad sinner, and I don't want to see myself, but I have to.

And Jesus takes that away from us. Did you take it to heart when

Jesus said in Matthew chapter 5 verse 14 to 16, you are the light of the world.

A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl.

Instead, they put it on a stand and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your father who's in heaven.

Now our fate is in our own hands. The end of our soul's journey will be either an eternal heaven or an eternal hell.

The choice is ours, and we have to choose where we're going to be by accepting or rejecting the sacrifice that Jesus Christ made on our behalf.

Something that we're going to be observing in two weeks. Again, this should remind us, yes,

Jesus died for our sins. Yes, he rose again, but he did it for a reason, and the reason is so he can be there to represent us at the final judgment.

And we have to make that choice now, not next Friday, not two weeks from now, not next month, not even this afternoon at five o 'clock after the basketball game's over.

We have to make that choice right now before our physical lives on this earth come to an end.

We all, God forbid, we all have to drive home today after we leave this place. What could happen to us driving down the highway?

It happens all the time. Tens of thousands of people each year die on the highways going to and from home, and after you die, guess what?

It's too late. There are no second chances. There's no do -overs after you leave this world.

Once you're gone, you're gone, and then you're going to have to face the judgment. We have to live our lives with Jesus inside us now, right now.

If you don't know Jesus as your Lord and Savior, right now, accept him.

Right now, repent. Turn away from your sins. Ask him to come into your life.

Ask him to be your ruler in your heart, and if you do that, that's the only way that you can be prepared truly prepared to be judged.

So the decision is yours. You can keep on like you go, or you can accept