Thursday, Aug. 30

Thursday

I looked again—and there before me was a flying scroll! He asked me, “What do you see?”  I answered, “I see a flying scroll, thirty feet long and fifteen feet wide.”  And he said to me, “This is the curse that is going out over the whole land; for according to what it says on one side, every thief will be banished, and according to what it says on the other, everyone who swears falsely will be banished. The Lord Almighty declares, ‘I will send it out, and it will enter the house of the thief and the house of him who swears falsely by my name. It will remain in his house and destroy it, both its timbers and its stones.’”  Then the angel who was speaking to me came forward and said to me, “Look up and see what this is that is appearing.”  I asked, “What is it?”  He replied, “It is a measuring basket.” And he added, “This is the iniquity of the people throughout the land.”   - Zechariah 5:1-6

President Calvin Coolidge was not known for his talkativeness.  A story, perhaps apocryphal, says that one Sunday he attended a worship service without his wife who was a devout Christian.  When he returned home, she asked him what the minister had talked about. “Sin,” replied silent Cal.  “Well what did the preacher say about sin?” his wife persisted.  Coolidge replied, “He was against it.”  Coolidge’s answer is a succinct summary of Zechariah 5, which tells us what God thinks about sin. In a nutshell, He is against it.

The scroll symbolizes God’s Word, especially His law as contained in the Ten Commandments. Just as God wrote the Ten Commandments on both sides of the stones (Exod. 32:15), so both sides of the flying scroll contain writing.  The one side of the scroll mentions stealing, the middle commandment of the second table of the law, which deals with our relationships with one another.  According to some commentators, the dimensions of the scroll are identical with the size of the holy place in the tabernacle and the porch of Solomon’s Temple (1 Kings 6:3), where the law was read to the people.

The other side of the scroll mentions swearing falsely by God’s name, the middle commandment of the first table of the law, which deals with our relationship with God.  As Jesus pointed out, the whole law can be summed up with, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart...” and, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:37, 39).

The book of Zechariah is full of strange imagery and visions, and they are not always easy to interpret.  But don’t get lost in the imagery and miss the application.  The flying scroll tells each of us who name the name of the Lord that we must judge our lives by His holy Word.  Our culture drifts morally with the times, but God’s Word is an absolute, unchanging moral standard.  The basket symbolizes the fact that we are all covered in iniquity.  This is a hard truth to hear for many people, and it is very unpopular concept in our culture today.  

Too many people minimize the problems of sin and guilt by portraying God as very tolerant of sinners, and by viewing ourselves as not such bad folks after all.  We see God primarily as our heavenly grandfather, or our good buddy in the sky, who may sigh about our sin, but who would never really get angry or deal severely with His children.  But it is essential for us that we form our view of God and ourselves from Scripture, not from the prevailing opinions of our culture.  When we examine Scripture, we find that God is far more holy than we ever imagined, and we are far more sinful than we ever fathomed.  This is the reason that God hates sin, because He is holy and because He loves us.  His holiness will not allow sin to be in His presence, His love will not allow us to wallow in sin without hope.  

The early 20th century evangelist, Billy Sunday, said, “I’m against sin. I’ll kick it as long as I’ve got a foot, and I’ll fight it as long as I’ve got a fist. I’ll bite it as long as I’ve got a tooth. And when I’m toothless, I’ll gum it ’til I go home to Glory, and it goes home to perdition.”  That’s God’s view of sin. He’s relentlessly against it, and so we should be against it, beginning with our own sin.

Jeff Frazier