Zechariah Chapter 7
The people of Bethel decided to send a committee of folks to ask the priests and prophets a logistics question. “Now that things are turning around, do we still need to keep doing the annual fast we started when the temple got destroyed? Can we stop that?” It is like a committee asking leadership, “Now that we’ve recovered, do we still have to do it?”
In this instance, God does not give them a simple answer. He says, “During these 70 years of exile, when you fasted and mourned in the summer and in early autumn, was it really for me that you were fasting? And even now in your holy festivals, aren’t you eating and drinking just to please yourselves?” His point?? The sad and the happy days had become about their own experience, not the actual relationship with Him.
In this passage, the prophet Zechariah offers some generalized instructions for how we are to treat others but also gives a very specific command – “Do not oppress widows, orphans, foreigners and the poor”.
To oppress means to take advantage or victimize. Way back then it was usually the strong and powerful who oppose the weak and powerless. Based on these actions, God’s response was reciprocal in a way. “As I called and they wouldn’t listen, so they called and I wouldn’t listen. The result was a scattered nation and an empty wasteland that nobody could even walk through.
If God spelled out every kind of moral infraction in the Bible, it would be millions of pages long. Instead, he commands us to practice general fairness and honesty in all we do. And in those cases when we have power or authority over others, we must take extra care to make sure we treat them as God wants us to.
Religious performance is not a substitute for character. You can nail every tradition, every fast, every service, and still miss the entire point if it is disconnected from how you treat the vulnerable and whether your heart is still soft enough to take correction.
As we go forward, we must keep all this in mind. We all have ‘power and authority’ or someone who may be ‘weak and powerless’. Whether it is an employee, a child, a spouse, a sibling, a parent or someone completely else. We may not feel like we are POWERFUL or that someone is POWERLESS in certain relationships, but the point is like so many other times, we don’t always and truly know what is going on in someone else’s mind or lives. And because of that, God is simply trying to remind us to treat EVERYONE as He wants us to. It is hard. It may seem impossible at times. But there are truly no excuses. He sent his Son to die for all of us on the cross. Every ‘excuse’ we could ever have was thrown out the window a very long time ago. From now on, try and think thrice before we fall guilty to becoming the oppressor.