GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
ZECHARIAH 11:4-6
4 This is what the LORD my God says: “Shepherd the flock that will be slaughtered.
We must remember that this chapter is a prophecy about the judgment of Judah at the time of Christ, and we must hang all of our interpretation on that time, when the Pharisees tried to trap Jesus, when the Sanhedrin plotted to kill him, and when the chief priests and the scribes fell into jealousy over his popularity and led the people into wild accusations against him. Therefore, what we have here is the Father’s command to the Son to go and preach to the people of Judea in the days of the terrible Herods and of Pontius Pilate. He came to walk among the wicked, but he did not live by their counsel. He stood with and next to sinful men, but he did not go their way. He sat and ate with mockers and met those who despised him, but he did not sit in their seat of mockery (Psalm 1:1). He came to shepherd his flock, but many of the sheep refused to listen to his voice. Ezekiel had warned: “”Whoever will listen let him listen, and whoever will refuse let him refuse, for they are a rebellious house” (Ezekiel 3:27).
The slaughter is not the physical slaughter that was coming from the Romans, but the eternal destruction of their souls in hell. The rebelling teachers and ministers who rejected Christ would bring all of their sins down on their own heads, as they asked for: “Let his blood be on us and on our children!” just before they had him whipped until the blood ran from his back like the bloody rivers of Egypt (Matthew 27:25; Psalm 78:44). He was the source of living water, but they refused to drink from his streams (Exodus 7:24).
5 Those who buy them slaughter them and go unpunished, and those who sell them say, “Well, bless the LORD! I have become rich!” Their own shepherds have no compassion for them, 6 for I will no longer have compassion on the people who live in this land, declares the LORD. Behold, I will cause each of them to fall into the hands of his neighbor and into the hands of his king. They will crush the land, and I will not rescue anyone from their hands.”
The “ones who buy them” are the priests and scribes, who used the people to get rich, but didn’t care for their souls, or even for the physical needs of the people, such as the widows, the orphans, the blind, the crippled, and the other people who were forced to beg to stay alive (Luke 8:35; 16:20). In fact, the word “buy them,” qoneyhen, sounds similar to coheniym, “priests,” but unlike Micah, Zechariah does not like to use very many puns or wordplay.
Luther rightly complained about the popes and the bishops of his time, who did the same things, buying and connecting vast tracts of land by tricking or bullying the poor farmers to give up what they had to the church, often deceived into thinking that this could benefit the suffering soul of a dead relative in purgatory. But this still happens today among Evangelicals on YouTube, on TV, on the radio, and in person, who fleece their members to grow their churches as if they are businesses, who trade the cross to get rich with a pyramid scheme. For every one that gets caught, a hundred get away with it, and the true church suffers for it because everyone outside the church thinks that all Christians are the same with only minor external differences: the Catholics like gowns and candles, the Evangelicals are more political than religious, the Lutherans probably seem to the world like watered-down Catholics, and it seems to be the goal of certain people on the Lutheran side to do that very thing. This is because they and the world do not take the teachings of Christ seriously. They want to hold up “love one another” as if it’s the only verse in the Bible, and then take everything Jesus said about faith, forgiveness, confession, absolution, and righteousness, and throw them all out the window. This is what the priests and Pharisees did in Jesus’ day, and his judgment of those false shepherds and their followers was that they were going to be brought to an even worse end than the Babylonian captivity had been.
Long ago, the northern tribes had been exiled to Assyria and beyond, and they had never come back. This was a warning to Judah. Then Judah had been exiled to Babylon, and they had been permitted to return, but this was revealed to be a warning as well as a punishment. Worse was coming. Now, Zechariah foresees that another nation would come and burn everything, leaving Judea a useless desert; a sandbox for archaeologists to pick through, digging beneath graveyards to find the priceless trinkets of broken bottles and smashed pottery.
To reject Christ and his forgiveness is to reject every blessing from God. But to be shepherded by Christ himself and his assistants, his undershepherds, is to be cared for with the finest spiritual food and water in the best of pastures, under the shade of the cross. We have put our faith in Jesus so that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law (Galatians 2:16). So remember Jesus’ calming words: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You trust in God; trust also in me” (John 14:1). The meek and the humble trust in the name of the Lord, and he will not forget us or leave any of us behind. Your Shepherd had laid down his life for yours, so that you have a place with him forever.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
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Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota
God’s Word for You – Zechariah 11:4-6 Worse was coming