GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
ZECHARIAH 8:20-22
20 “This is what the LORD of hosts says: People will yet come, inhabitants of many cities. 21 The inhabitants of one city shall go to another, saying, ‘Let’s go to ask the favor of the LORD right away and to seek the LORD of hosts. I am going myself.’ 22 Many peoples and mighty nations will come to seek the LORD of hosts in Jerusalem and to ask the favor of the LORD.
Is this passage a prophecy of the first coming of Christ in the New Testament, or is Zechariah still talking about the more immediate blessing of people coming to Jerusalem in the sixth century BC? Since verse 22 says that they come “to seek the Lord of hosts,” we have to take this primarily as being about Zechariah’s congregation and not about Christ. But not every passage in the Bible needs to point only at Jesus; God has blessings for us in addition to the chief and greatest blessings of forgiveness won on the cross, the resurrection of the dead, eternal life, and so on. Here we have the promise of renewed and continuing worship in the temple. Many people from faraway lands would come to join in the worship of the true God. Here in Jerusalem was the only true temple, the only shrine where sacrifices to the true God could be made, whatever the opinions of pagan priests might suggest.
Solomon’s temple, which was one of the most beautiful buildings in all of the near east and was worthy of awe from other great builders, did not draw a long line of rulers from faraway lands to come and worship. Even Hiram, King of Tyre, who helped to build it, did not make a personal appearance, nor did his successors. Only the Queen of Sheba made the trip, moved by Solomon’s fame and wisdom (1 Kings 10:1). Some of the kings who worshiped in Solomon’s glorious temple even sought to improve on it (2 Kings 16:10). King Ahaz made changes to the altar, the bronze sea, and even the portable stands (2 Kings 16:17) and even removed Solomon’s royal entryway into the temple because the King of Assyria didn’t have one of those for his own temple (2 Kings 16:18), and eventually he closed the temple down and shut its doors because of his unbelief (2 Chronicles 28:24).
But what about this smaller shrine they were building in Zechariah’s time? They thought little of it. It seemed tiny, dinky. It was not impressive. Some of them may have been thinking: “I’ve seen tents bigger than this. I own a tent bigger than this.” But God was promising that people would come to worship here. And kings from Syria and Phoenicia did come, along with many other people. This continued into New Testament times, where Luke says that “there were staying in Jerusalem godly Jews from every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5). However, when the Magi came from the east, they did not go to the temple in Jerusalem to worship, but passed it by, seeking out a cradle instead. When that cradle turned out to be a feeding trough, they didn’t scorn even that, but worshiped the baby Jesus with their lavish gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh (Matthew 2:11).
To “ask the favor of the Lord” is the privilege, the special right and advantage, of the believer. Prayer is the Christian’s link of communication with God. He tells us to pray (Psalm 50:15). Jesus invited us to pray and promises to hear us (Matthew 7:7-8), and this was always what believers have understood: “You will pray to God, and he will hear you” (Job 22:27). God answers our prayers in whatever way is best for us, and whenever it will be best for us.
One of our most important prayers is the prayer for understanding God’s word. “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him” (James 1:5). We also pray for God to strengthen our faith and to give us more and more wisdom as we apply his word to ourselves and to our labor in his kingdom.
God invites us to pray for each other, as John does when he writes: “I pray that all may go well with you and you have good health, just as all is going well with your soul” (3 John 1:2). One of the reasons we gather together in worship is to join our prayers into one single prayer to the Lord, as Samuel did for all of Israel (1 Samuel 7:5). And Paul says: “Always keep praying for the saints (that is, living Christians)” (Ephesians 6:18).
Something we need to keep in mind is that prayer is part of our sanctified life, which is to say, it is a part of our response to salvation through Christ. Prayer is not the way God saves us, nor is our prayer the way God speaks to us. He speaks to us through his holy word, and we speak to him in our prayers. This is how our sainted professor Lyle Lange put it: “Prayer is not a means of grace. Prayer is a means by which we extend our hands to God. The means of grace (the gospel, Baptism, and the Lord’s Supper) are the means by which God gives to us the benefits of what Jesus did for us. We find the power for sanctified living in the means of grace. We cannot pray ourselves into a more sanctified life.”
Most often, we pray about our sanctified life. This includes ordinary needs, such as our daily bread (Matthew 6:11), but also about our faith and the way we treat the name of God, the way he will use us to extend and protect his kingdom, and the way we might carry out his will in the world (Matthew 6:9-10). To these things we add prayers about our sinfulness, our need to be forgiven, about needing God’s help in forgiving other people, and that God would steer us away from temptations and other evils (Matthew 6:12-13). And even though we avoid false teachers at the Lord’s own command (Romans 16:17), we pray for them, that somehow they might repent.
One last detail about our prayers. Sometimes people have the wrong idea that because God is so mighty and so involved with the world and has so many people praying to him, that they never have God’s full attention. One of God’s attributes, although it is not one we typically teach in catechism classes, is that God’s essence is utterly simple. This means that God is not composed of outside things. Only an incomplete being comes into compounding or composition with another, because the nature of an incomplete being is that it is suited to join with another (being, creature, tool, food, etc.) in order to be more complete, more useful, etc. But God is the complete and utterly perfect being. For example, he does not swear by anything except himself. “The Lord God swears by himself, declares the Lord, the God of Armies” (Amos 6:8). Also, a person has life because his parents produced that life in their marriage (Genesis 4:25), but “the Father has life in himself, and has granted the Son to have life in himself (John 5:26).
What does this have to do with our prayers? It means that when we pray, God is not conflicted by whom he is listening to, by world events, or even clouded by the sinfulness in our hearts and lives. The blood of Christ covers us by his grace, and God gives us his undivided attention when we pray to him. It is as if we have approached him while he is alone in his living room, sitting by a quiet fireplace, with no noise in the house. Not even a clock ticks. We approach as he smiles at us, and he sets down his newspaper and turns to us squarely, definitively. Our folded hands are, as it were, grasping his feet as he sits listening to us from his chair. He listens to everything we have to say. “Both when we listen to him and when we pray to him” (writes Deutschlander), “we should not imagine that God is absent or only fractionally paying attention to us. Oh no, that could never be!” (Grace Abounds p. 117-118). And God, the “high and lofty One, who lives forever, whose name is holy,” says: “I live in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite” (Isaiah 57:15).
So pray. God is listening with his full attention. His answer, whatever his answer is, will be for your benefit and for your eternal good. The Lord is good, a refuge in times of trouble. He cares for those who trust in him.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
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Additional archives by Wisconsin Lutheran Chapel: www.wlchapel.org/connect-grow/ministries/adults/daily-devotions/gwfy-archive/2022
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota
God’s Word for You – Zechariah 8:20-22 Ask the favor of the LORD