In That Day

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Ascension Presbyterian Church - Longwood, Florida  Rev. Christopher Brenyo "In That Day" July 9th, 2023

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I'm going to ask you to remain standing and please turn in your Bibles to the book of Zechariah in chapter 14,
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Zechariah 14. This is
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God's holy and infallible word. Behold, the day of the
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Lord is coming, and your spoil will be divided in your midst.
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For I will gather all the nations to battle against Jerusalem.
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The city shall be taken, the houses rifled, and the women ravished.
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Half of the city shall go into captivity, but the remnant of the people shall not be cut off from the city.
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Then the Lord will go forth and fight against those nations as he fights in the day of battle.
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And in that day his feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, which faces
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Jerusalem on the east. And the Mount of Olives shall be split in two from east to west, making a very large valley.
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Half of the mountain shall move toward the north, and half of it toward the south. Then you shall flee through my mountain valley, for the mountain valley shall reach to Azul.
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Yes, you shall flee as you fled from the earthquake in the days of Uzziah, king of Judah.
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Thus the Lord my God will come, and all the saints with you.
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It shall come to pass in that day that there will be no light. The lights will diminish.
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It shall be one day which is known to the Lord, neither day nor night. But at evening time it shall happen that it will be light.
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And in that day it shall be that the living waters shall flow from Jerusalem, half of them toward the eastern sea and half of them toward the western sea.
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And both summer and winter it shall occur. And the Lord shall be king over all the earth.
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In that day it shall be the Lord is one, and his name one. All the land shall be turned into a plain from Geba to Ramon south of Jerusalem.
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Jerusalem shall be raised up and inhabited in her place from Benjamin's gate to the place of the first gate and the corner gate, and from the tower of Hananel to the king's wine presses.
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The people shall dwell in it, and no longer shall there be utter destruction, but Jerusalem shall be safely inhabited.
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And this shall be the plague which with the Lord will strike all the people who fought against Jerusalem. Their flesh shall dissolve while they stand on their feet.
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Their eyes shall dissolve in their sockets, and their tongues shall dissolve in their mouths.
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It shall come to pass in that day that a great panic from the Lord will be among them. Everyone will seize the hand of his neighbor and raise his hand against his neighbor's hand.
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Judah also will fight at Jerusalem, and the wealth of all the surrounding nations shall be gathered together, gold, silver, and apparel in great abundance.
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Such also shall be the plague on the horse and the mule and the camel and the donkey, and all the cattle that will be in those camps.
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So shall this plague be. And it shall come to pass that everyone who is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem shall go up from year to year to worship the king, the
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Lord of hosts, and to keep the feast of tabernacles. And it shall be that whichever of the families of the earth do not come up to Jerusalem to worship the king, the
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Lord of hosts, on them there will be no rain. If the family of Egypt will not come up and enter in, they will have no rain.
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They shall receive the plague with which the Lord strikes the nations who do not come up to keep the feast of tabernacles.
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This shall be the punishment of Egypt and the punishment of all the nations that do not come up to keep the feast of tabernacles.
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In that day holiness to the Lord shall be engraved on the bells of the horses. The pots in the
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Lord's house shall be like the bowls before the altar. Yes, every pot in Jerusalem and Judah shall be holiness to the
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Lord of hosts. Everyone who sacrifices shall come and take them and cook in them.
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In that day there shall no longer be a Canaanite in the house of the Lord of hosts.
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May the Lord be pleased with our study of his most excellent word. Please pray with me.
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Oh Lord, we thank you for the hard sayings, the difficult passages. We thank you for your
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Holy Spirit who guides and illumines, who inspired these words.
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Certainly he's able to help us interpret their meaning. Oh Lord, I pray that we would rejoice that we are on the
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Lord's side and he is on our side. This will be a cause of great thanksgiving for us.
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Oh Lord, enable us today to renew covenant with you and to work labor for the advance of your kingdom.
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We ask these things in Jesus name. Amen. Please be seated. I originally was only going to read the text that we are going to consider.
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And I was reminded that, of course, this is the last chapter in the book of Zechariah.
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And this is the first of the four or five last sermons in this book, which has been a great experience for me.
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I hope it's been encouraging for you as well to study the book of Zechariah. Today we will be concerned mostly with verses one through five.
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The bulletin says one through seven, but I opted to make a break in a division at verse five today.
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In that day, for those of you who are taking notes, I have four points and these things are very easily identifiable in the text.
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So don't worry about getting the wording right. The words are a bit longer than I like to have my points, but you can find them easily in the word.
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First, the day of the Lord is coming and this is derived from verse one. The day of the
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Lord is coming. Secondly, the nations gather against Jerusalem.
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The nations gather against Jerusalem. Third, the
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Lord, mighty in battle, will fight against the nations that come against Jerusalem.
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The Lord, mighty in battle, will fight against the nations that come against Jerusalem.
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and forth the Lord will provide a means of escape for the faithful.
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The Lord will provide a means of escape for the faithful.
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Well let us begin. The people of God have faced many difficulties as they returned to the land and have begun this work of rebuilding their lives and the structures of renewing covenant with God of being brought into the land, to having a temple to worship in, and to have animals to sacrifice, to have priests to officiate at the altar.
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They have been laboring toward this end and they have been finding many difficulties.
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They had need of a vision for the future and a theological framework to interpret the events that were unfolding in front of their eyes.
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And in fact the first night visions, the first chapters of the book of Zechariah, were dedicated to giving the people an interpretation of the events that are happening in their own time.
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And now we are in that section, the last several chapters of the book, that speak of future events.
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You and I need a future vision and we need a theological framework to interpret the events of our world around us, don't we?
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We need to see through and peer through the fogginess of the times to see and discern what the
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Lord is doing on a grander scale. Since we have been studying Zechariah, there have been two central focal points.
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If you kind of distill it all down, that forming the structure of the book, you'll find these two ideas.
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And these two focal points provide a direction for our lives today in the church.
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This, if you're taking notes, this might be a good thing to write down. These things are important to us congregationally and have a rich scriptural foundation.
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First, the first is the renewal of God's people.
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The renewal of God's people. And second is the establishment, or maybe better stated, the enlargement of God's kingdom.
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This has been really what Zechariah has been all about. And I don't know if you know this, this is a lot about what
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Ascension is about. Renewing covenant with God and seeking to advance his kingdom.
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Both of these ideas pointed to in Zechariah find their realization in Christ.
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By virtue of our union with him, the salvation and sanctification that result in all that it entails, these things find their realization in Christ.
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How is the covenant renewed? How are the people of God renewed in Zechariah? They now have returned to the proper worship of him.
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And you and I, as the saints of God, need to continually return to the proper worship of our
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God. This is the chief business of our lives. That's why attendance of the
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Sunday meetings, the Lord's Day meetings, the Sabbath day, coming to church, the corporate gathering, these are not light and trivial things.
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These are weighty and heavy things. And we need to be coming with great attentiveness.
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We need to be going to bed at a certain time and eating properly and being properly hydrated.
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Whatever it takes to come into the house of the Lord with great attentiveness, to give ourselves fully to the worship of God.
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Secondly, under this heading of renewal, we need to, like the saints that went before us, to reinvigorate our obedience.
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We need a reinvigoration of our obedience to the Lord. We have been the people who have been made in covenant with God, and our obedience needs to be vivified and made alive comprehensively across every area of our lives.
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Like Zechariah's audience more than 500 years before the arrival of the incarnate
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Christ, we need to purge Babylon from our midst. The stench of worldliness that hung over God's people as they come out of Babylonian captivity, they need to be washed.
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They are washed in Christ, but they can't return to it. You and I have been washed.
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We've been made clean. We cannot return to the taint of the world. And this is something weekly we remember and we're brought back to, that we can't go back there again as God's people.
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The stench of worldliness and ungodliness needs to be permanently removed from us.
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You and I, like the saints before us, need to smash the idols without and within.
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We need to live in the joyful hope of God's love toward us.
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There should be a lot of smiling, a lot of happiness, a lot of joy when you consider what
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God has done with us in Christ. And secondly, as we seek to advance the kingdom, every man needs to be cultivating his own vine and resting under the shade of his own fig tree.
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He needs to be doing ordinary work, which leads to extraordinary work of raising and discipling families and showing hospitality to neighbors and it being an example to the community of what the
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Christian life, the best life, looks like. You and I need to be exemplars of these holy ideals of church and family life and working life.
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They need to see in us the beautiful fragrance, the glow, all from being in Christ.
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Future generations are to be taught the truth about God and his covenant faithfulness and that's why we catechize our children.
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That's why there's not a children's church or a nursery. They're here from their infancy that they might get every drop of grace in the ordinary means of grace that God has for his people, the church.
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And finally, as we advance the kingdom, we have to announce the victory of our warrior
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King Jesus. We are to invite the pagans, the
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Gentiles, to join the triumphal procession of Christ's glorious reign and submit to him, to obey him, to repent, and to believe.
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Well, let's consider our text. The day of the Lord is coming.
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There's going to be a day of reckoning and vindication and what's in view here is obviously 80 -70 for the people of God.
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There's going to be a day when God will say, no more will I tolerate the apostasy of my people.
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And I was thinking about a modern application for this in the life of the church. Can you imagine someone who maybe attended a church like ours that came to a solid church, a reformed church, a
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Bible -believing church, and they came week after week and year after year and they had an external performance of the rituals and rites of Christianity, but they never invested their heart, that they never gave themselves entirely to Christ, they never walked and lived in the faith.
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They remind me of the Christians in 1st Corinthians 6, the people who just fall away, the people who don't continue in the faith.
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Right now there's a very popular thing among people your age to have this deconstructed faith.
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Lest they repent, oh the hell for them who were in the church and heard the gospel and their parents believed the scriptures and they inculcated them with the truth and they rejected and deconstructed and say that it's not for them anymore.
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Woe to you covenant people who do not keep covenants. That's what's happened to the nation in 8070 and what a day of reckoning it will be for the people who are in the church when the
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Lord says, I never knew you. A day of reckoning, the day of the
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Lord is coming. This is a dire warning to the unbeliever to repent lest you perish.
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But what happens here? Israel, Jerusalem in particular, is going to experience a dreadful day.
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There's going to be a dreadful day at the end of history, the final day when the
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Lord and his angels and his saints come running through in judgment. But this was occurring in a real practice, a real thing that happened in 8070, that the temple was destroyed.
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The siege of Jerusalem here described points to that destruction. You may remember the
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Olivet Discourse in Matthew chapter 24. There's almost universal recognition even among dispensationalists that the apostles, the disciples would have seen the prophecy given in Zechariah 14 to be in line with the
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Olivet Discourse and in fact the the language of the Mount of Olives is in our text.
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There's a strong connection between that section and our section in Zechariah.
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We're going to see in a couple of weeks is that the very structure of Mark's gospel, particularly as it enters into the triumphal entry of Jesus and the events after that, seem to follow the outline of Zechariah 14.
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That's gonna be a very exciting thing we're gonna see in the coming weeks. But here, the literal temple, the temple that they've been rebuilding is going to be destroyed in a dramatic cataclysmic event.
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Zechariah 14 pictures the Roman forces in league with foreign kings.
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Look at verse 2. It says, "...for I will gather all the nations to battle against Jerusalem."
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The siege war is conducted here by an empire of nations consisting not only of the
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Roman forces, but places like Egypt, Gaul, Palestine, Asia Minor, and Syria.
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The consequences of this are so disastrous that D .A. Carson observed, "...never
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was so high a percentage of a great city so thoroughly and painfully exterminated and enslaved as during the fall of Jerusalem."
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It's apocalypse now for the Jewish people in AD 70.
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It's the end of the world as they knew it. But the
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Lord protects his people and he prompts their flight. We learned last week that they fly to Pella.
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They are out of there when all of this happens because the Lord protects and preserves his people.
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People like you and people like me. The nations have gathered. The Lord's day is at hand.
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The city is going to be taken. This language is very hard to read. The houses are going to be rifled.
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The women are going to be ravished. They're going to be raped. They're going to be mistreated in the most degrading and horrible ways.
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Half of the city is going to go into captivity, but the remnant of the people will not be cut off from the city.
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The Lord has a way of providing and protecting his people.
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And you and I, if we be in Christ, no matter what happens in this world, we are under the shadow of his protective wings.
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The people of God today can rest their heads on their pillows at night knowing that whatever comes passes through the providential hand of our
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God. And we have his favor because he keeps covenant with us and we are his people.
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There's a turn here in this section which is very difficult.
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Martin Luther, paraphrasing, said, basically, I don't know what this text means,
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Zechariah 14. It ties this up in knots. I think there's a simple explanation for this when you consider the whole of Zechariah and consider the analogy of faith, scripture interpreting scripture, we can get a real good sense of what is happening in Zechariah 14.
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The Lord, it says in verse 3, is going to go forth and fight against those nations.
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The Lord, mighty in battle, is going to stand and fight for his people. The nations are gathered and they're going to destroy
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Jerusalem, but God's going to rise up and protect and provide for his people.
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Now, here's the part that is most difficult for us. In that day, his feet will stand on the
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Mount of Olives, which faces Jerusalem on the east, and the
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Mount of Olives will be split in two from east to west, making a large valley.
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The language of chapter, excuse me, verse 4 provides the most angst for the interpreter.
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However, this language is found elsewhere in scripture.
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Let's turn quickly to Joshua chapter 10. This is going to be familiar to you. It's going to have you look at a couple passages today, not very many, just a couple.
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Joshua chapter 2, 10, I'm sorry, Joshua 10.
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We begin reading in verse 12. Then Joshua spoke to the
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Lord in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun stand still over Gibeon, and moon in the valley of Ajalon.
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So the Sun stood still and the moon stopped till the people had revenge upon their enemies.
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If the Lord stands up in battle, the victory is assured.
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When the Lord walks out of Jerusalem and departs to the east, all of the enemies of God could run in.
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But if the Lord is there and he's your defender, the Lord, mighty and strong in battle, he will win, and you will win, says is this not written again in verse 13 in the book of Jasher, so the
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Sun stood still in the midst of heaven and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day.
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And there was been no day like that before it or after it that the
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Lord heeded the voice of a man for, and this is the part children I'd like you to pay close attention to, the
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Lord fought for Israel. If the Lord fights for you, you win.
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The Sun stands still. I don't know the physics of that, we should have all flown off the planet or something.
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Gravity, I don't know how it works, I don't know all the particulars of that, 2 ,000 miles an hour or something, it shouldn't stop, but it did.
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The language of verse 4 helps us to see something very important.
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In Joshua, these references indicate his providential favor in Israel's victory and deliverance, and prophecy has often in Scripture mentioned
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God's feet when the enemies are thwarted and given success against the odds.
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Psalm 18 9, Isaiah 60, Habakkuk 3, Nahum 1, the language that's used here is not new to Zechariah.
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In fact, this prophetic apocalyptic language is found in many places in Scripture, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, for example.
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So what's happening here in verse 4? What's happening with the cleaving of the
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Mount of Olives? Well, this language is common imagery of God's conquering and power in the prophecy of the
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Old Testament. In Micah 1, verses 3 and 4, we learn, the Lord is coming out of his place.
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He will come down and tread on the high places of the earth. The mountains will melt under him, and the valleys will split like wax before the fire, like waters pour down a steep place.
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And this language speaks of the subjugation of Israel under the heathen nations for her sin.
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The description, the direction here of the cleft being drawn between in an irregular direction, and it creates the direction here of the flight of the people out of Jerusalem.
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And they flee, as we learned last week, taking the gospel with them.
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So again, half of the mountain, verse 4, shall move toward the north, and half of it toward the south.
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Now, I think there could be an argument made that something cataclysmic like this will be happening at the end, the very last day.
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But here, this language seems to follow the apocalyptic prophetic literature elsewhere about God's intervention.
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He's making mountains into valleys. He's taking valleys and making them plains. He's making things that can't be dissolved like wax.
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Then the picture is God is moving, and he's acting on behalf of the people.
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In verse 5, it says, Then you shall flee through my mountain valley, for the mountain valley shall reach to Azal.
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Yes, you shall flee as you fled from the earthquake in the days of Uzziah, king of Judah.
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Thus the Lord my God will come and all the saints with you.
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And thinking about this, I was thinking it is a wonderful thing to be on God's side.
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The people of God in Jerusalem had turned from God when they rejected his
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Messiah, and God sent the Roman army along with the
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Syrians and people from Palestine and elsewhere to come and to chasten a wicked and disobedient people.
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Church, we never want to be on that side. We never want to be numbered with the wicked.
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We never want the external chastening of the Lord. One of the reasons you should be reading your
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Bible and praying devotionally with great diligence and earnestness is that you might be disciplined and corrected in secret, that you might turn from your sin before it is full -grown, that you might return back to the promises and to keep covenant with God and to remember what
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Christ has done to save you and to deliver you from all of your trouble, but when we grow slack in these disciplines, like the nation did previously, when we stop honoring the
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Lord, we stop worshiping him, and we stop giving ourselves to these things entirely, we can fall into a rebellion, into a captivity.
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And it's interesting, these people have just come out of Babylon. Mighty Babylon took them hostage and chastened the people of God, but now
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Babylon is nothing because the Persians have taken them. Assyria had taken the people into captivity, but Assyria has come to naught.
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Rome and all of her allies are going to gather around Jerusalem, they're going to severely chasten the people of God in AD 70, and now
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Rome and Syria have come to nothing. The Lord has risen up and fought them in battle and they have been brought to nothing.
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Israel is subjugated because, and under the heathen nations, because of her sin.
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The church may face persecution and purification and refinement.
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Remember last week in chapter 13, we're going to be refined, and that refining may come in the form of political persecution.
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And what's going to happen is the real believers are going to be strengthened and their commitment and their devotion to Christ is going to be deepened, but the false converts, the false believers in their midst are going to fall away.
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Don't ever be on that side, be the people of resolve who are going to remain and keep covenant with Christ.
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Well, you're going to be dissatisfied with me ending here because we have more great things to consider next week and the weeks following in this section.
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I want to leave you with a few words of application. First, judgment begins with the house of God.
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What happens to Jerusalem in AD 70 is going to happen to the world on the last day.
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He comes first in our text against his people who are in disobedience, and then he turns and judges those whom he used to chasten his people.
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Right now, as the church gets encircled by her enemies, it's a snare for them because they're going to touch the head of the
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Lord's anointed, and so they're going to think right now that the church is being silenced and being relegated to insignificance in this culture, and it's a snare for them because they're going to be themselves caught in their own traps.
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Always remain on the side of faith and obedience. Secondly, I want you to consider that the
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Lord fights for you, his people. I could be a severe man and a fierce man, but never more so if you came to come against my bride, my wife.
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How much more so, our God? You are the bride of Christ.
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He's not going to tolerate you being mistreated. He's going to come and run to your aid, take refuge under his wings.
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In Zechariah 14, we're going to see nothing less than the complete, total, absolute victory of our
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God. It's our duty, if we keep that spirit of the early introduction of us keeping covenant with God and seeking to advance his kingdom, it would seem that it would be our duty to call all men everywhere to join his victory procession.
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You'll remember when Jesus' triumphal entry, the people shouted Hosanna. It's picturesque, like Caesar coming back from a great victory.
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And he brings with him the spoils of war. In many cases, those would be slaves in gold and silver and horses and cattle and all those things, and they would say, oh look how great
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Caesar is, and look at all that he's done. Well, our
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King is also conquering. His triumphal entry was a dress rehearsal for the final procession.
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And he's going to come at the last day with all of his angelic hosts and all of his saints and all the spoils of war in tow.
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We should call on all men everywhere to repent and believe the gospel, to kiss the
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Son, to pay honor to him, to whom only all the honor and all the glory are due.
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So we have work to do, as we call all men everywhere to join his victory procession.
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The Lord is coming in judgment, but you are secure because you're in Christ.
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It also leaves me with a heavy heart to know that judgment comes to the house of God, and we're gonna have friends that have professed faith that might not be there.
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We're going to have children of families who hopefully only for a season will walk away.
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I pray that the Lord would enable us to be a people who keeps covenant, who continues to cling to his promises, who continues to worship and obey
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Christ, the only King. I'm gonna ask you to pray with me now.
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Lord, we cry out to you with hope, but also with reverence and awe and sobriety.
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We know that your chastening hand can come against your people, and oh
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Lord, I pray that we would be chastened by your spirit through the study of your word, learning the lessons of redemptive history, that we would not suffer greater punishments.
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Oh Lord, help us to be a circumspect people who discern the times and can see the own error of our own ways and who repent and turn from it.
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Oh Lord, I thank you that you have numbered us, your people, as the ones who will be protected.
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You have put our spiritual ancestors to flight so they would not be there when the temple was destroyed.
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Oh Lord, how many ways have you provided for us and protected us against the dangers and uncertainties of all of these weeks.
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Oh Lord, we also rejoice that you're a God of pure and perfect justice who will judge the nations, that your honor and name would be vindicated, that the day of reckoning would come.
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Oh Lord, we long to see the wicked silenced and we pray prayers of imprecation upon the wicked, even in our own time, who kill babies, who deny that you created male and female, who have created sex for a distinct purpose, they pervert every law that you have enacted, crimes against nature and also crimes against your law.
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Oh Lord, we ask for you to silence them, to rise up and battle against them, to fight with them, that your church might thrive and prosper.
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And oh Lord, we know that that some of this is for their salvation, that they're going to be chastened and they're going to repent, and we eagerly wait the chastening that leads men to repentance.
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We also, Lord, know that you have plans to silence the nations that come up against your church and against your people, and we welcome those times.
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But Lord, in all of this we ask that we would have greater and greater obedience, greater faith and hope in Christ who loved us and gave himself for us.
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King Jesus, we bow the knee and submit to you. I pray these things in the name of Jesus.