Zechariah 7
Did You Really Fast for Me?
The messages of Zechariah recorded in chapters 7 and 8 are familiar topics in the prophetic books. They address Israel’s empty religious practices and God’s disdain for ritual without repentance.
The purpose of chapters 7 and 8 is to impress on the people their need to live righteously in response to their past judgment and future glory. - Barker
In this section, God reminded His people that what He desired from them had not changed - to be found by those willing to seek Him in sincerity.
In The Fourth Year of King Darius
Vs. 1 - In the fourth year of King Darius, the word of the Lord came to Zechariah
This message, which comprises the following four messages in chapters 7 and 8, came to the prophet almost two years after he received the eight night visions and about halfway through the period of temple reconstruction. - Thomas Constable
Should We Continue to Mourn
Vs. 3 - “Should we mourn and fast in the fifth month as we have done these many years?”
In captivity the Jews had instituted four fasts to mourn the destruction of Jerusalem. One fast was in the tenth month, which was the month the Babylonians laid siege to the city. One was in the fourth month, to mark the day eighteen months later when the Babylonians broke through the walls and invaded the city. Another was in the fifth month, to mark the destruction of the temple. The other was in the seventh month, to mark the murder of Gedaliah, the last Jewish ruler in Jerusalem.
Now that the temple was beginning to take shape (for it had been under construction more than two years) a question arose in the minds of certain Jews. With the temple rebuilt, should they still keep the fasts that had been instituted in Babylon as memorials of destruction. - Don Fleming
Did You Really Fast For Me?
Vs. 4-6 - Then the word of the Lord of Armies came to me: “Ask all the people of the land and the priests: When you fasted and lamented in the fifth and in the seventh months for these seventy years, did you really fast for me? When you eat and drink, don’t you eat and drink simply for yourselves?
Zechariah did not speculate on the motive of this inquiry, but God’s response seems to indicate that the men who asked this question were virtue signaling over virtue seeking. God answered that, like their ancestors before them, they had not fasted to honor Him but rather to mourn their own loss. They had not been seeking restoration to God, only relief from suffering.
Evidently the people had turned these events into occasions for self-pity over their physical condition rather than engaging in prayer and genuine spiritual repentance. - Thomas Constable
Vs. 8 - The word of the Lord came to Zechariah:
Make Fair Decisions
Show Faithful Love and Compassion
Do Not Oppress
Do Not Plot Evil
What God had always asked of His people was that they respond to His great mercy by showing mercy to one another, that they would learn His character and seek to emulate it. Vertical relationship with God was meant to shape horizontal relationships with His people.
They Closed Their Ears
Israel’s Rebellion
Vs. 11-12 - But they refused to pay attention and turned a stubborn shoulder; they closed their ears so they could not hear. They made their hearts like a rock so as not to obey the law
Israel had been exiled because of her stubborn refusal to submit, her ritual without repentance, her law without love. Through His prophet, God reminded His people of the cause of their calamity.
God’s Spirit
Vs. 12 - the words that the Lord of Armies had sent by his Spirit through the earlier prophets.
This remarkable doctrine of the Holy Spirit as mediator of God’s word to the prophets, who were themselves its mediators, has no parallels in the prophetic books. . . . Zechariah is the first to record this aspect of the doctrine of the Spirit. - Baldwin
Summary
While Zechariah may well not have answered the original enquiry directly, he had nevertheless taken up the very essence of ritual in the heart of the worshiper, which was that the outward form of religious activity was useless and lifeless without an accompanying spirit of obedience, confession and repentance. - Ellis
