Zechariah 10

We have needs. The people of God in every generation have needs. God knows this, and He has an unusual plan for the fulfillment of these needs. He wants us to ask. In one sense it really is that simple. Ask and you will receive. Yet the Lord will not allow us to usurp His place as God. We must seek His glory above everything else. Yet it is the case that if we seek the glory of His Name, and our submission to His will, we should ask Him boldly for those things that are necessary in our service of Him. He can certainly provide rain at the right time, the kind of rain that would fill the fields with vegetation.

When we examine the situation if the Lord's people in the history of Israel we immediately have some further issues to discuss concerning the prayers of God's people. Do they need food? Do they need rain? Why are they still turning to household idols? Why are they approaching fortune-tellers for empty answers? Why are their ears closed to the Word of God? They are wandering sheep. They have scorned their true Shepherd. Therefore they are afflicted.

This wandering is, in part, due to the faithlessness and abuse of false shepherds, and the Lord is angry against them. When God comes against those shepherds who have fatally mislead His beloved flock, it should be obvious that He does this because He loves His people, and seeks to protect them from those who will only do them harm. In the abstract this is obvious, but each true shepherd of the Lord feels the weight of his own weakness and depravity. Not only that, but each false shepherd imagines himself to be a true servant of the Lord until the day of the Lord's judgment comes upon him.

There is one Servant of the Lord who is beyond the ambiguity of self-evaluation. He has become the Cornerstone of the Lord's Temple, and He is the pure and holy Shepherd over the Lord's Israel. The scope of the salvation that Jesus Christ will bring is wonderful to consider. Not only will he bring back His chosen flock from Judah, the tribe of David. He will also save His elect from "Joseph," who stands for the northern tribes, those tribes that had rejected the Davidic King and had so polluted their worship and service of God, particularly after they had been decimated by the Assyrian invaders. The Lord has a good plan of salvation for His people, a plan that springs from His eternal and stable compassion for His elect. These nations had been greatly disciplined for their disobedience. Yet here the Lord says that he will bring about a day when it will be as if the Lord had not ever rejected them. He will be with His people, and He will answer them when they call to Him. They shall ask and they will receive.

The result will be very wonderful. The people of the Lord shall be strong in body, and glad in heart. These are wonderful blessings. Think of all the bodily troubles that people of all kinds face in this age on the earth. Even if all of these afflictions of body could be taken away in a moment, we would still have much misery here because of our emotional distress. The problems that we have in what we call our "heart" are as varied as those that we face in our bodies. But a day is coming when we will have the strongest bodies and happiest hearts. Our children will see it, and they will be glad as well, and their hearts will also rejoice in the Lord.

God is able to gather His people from very far away. The gift of the return of the exiles was only a small taste of the Lord's power to gather His children. More amazing than that miracle has been the gathering of Jews and Gentiles into the covenant community during this era of gospel proclamation. Yet as marvelous as this is, it is still more wonderful to take millions of bodies from the dust of death and to gather them together for immortal life in the age of resurrection. This will be what we are longing for, the beauty, order, and safety of coming home to the place that He has prepared for us for eternal life in an estate of complete blessedness.

There was a cost that had to be paid in order to bring about this wonderful promise. Someone had to pass through a sea of troubles, a judgment that could only be eternal for us, a penalty that would have continued forever. Christ, who alone is equipped to take away from us the punishment we deserve, has passed through the sea of troubles and has declared victory over the waves of the tumultuous sea of God's righteous wrath that stood against us.

The might of empires like that of the Assyrians and the Egyptians will not be able to stand against the Lord's redeemed people in the age to come. God will make His people strong in Christ, and we shall walk in His Name. For us to live that way now would be a complete spiritual victory. What God has declared will one day be ours. Just as we will have strong bodies and joyful hearts, we will also have perfectly righteous spirits. This is what the Lord has for us, and it has come to us because of Christ and the cross. In that day we will surely ask the Lord rightly, not only for what we need, but for all those things consistent with the holy, wise, and abundant desires that will then be what we most want to have, and we shall receive.