Zechariah 8:1-13 Do you even know what it is to be blessed?
1 The word of the Lord Almighty came to me. 2 This is what the Lord Almighty says: “I am very jealous for Zion; I am burning with jealousy for her.” 3 This is what the Lord says: “I will return to Zion and dwell in Jerusalem. Then Jerusalem will be called the Faithful City, and the mountain of the Lord Almighty will be called the Holy Mountain.”
How about today, what is NYC, or Beijing, or London, or any other city called? We use terms like “superpower” and “vibrant” and modern, but are any of these called “the faithful city”? People want their cities to be economically vibrant, but being faithful is the best reputation for any business. Cuomo, the governor of NY required that contagious people with Covid be sent back to nursing homes where the most vulnerable were. In this way they maximized the death rate in the nursing homes and by so doing NY was able to reduce the money they had to pay for pensions and retirement. That is the definition of "unfaithful".
4 This is what the Lord Almighty says: “Once again men and women of ripe old age will sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each of them with cane in hand because of their age. 5 The city streets will be filled with boys and girls playing there.”
Here is a vision of a blessed city and we are so befuddled by the idolatry of the materialistic world that we have no idea what it is to be blessed. You have charlatans preaching that prosperity is to have gold chains, big cars and live in a mansion. They call that blessing. Hollywood and the media markets “blessing” in the same way, to be blessed is to have money and things. People live in gated communities, drive limos, and send their kids to private schools. I remember during the height of the AIDS epidemic you could go to the worst hit countries and it was as though an entire generation was missing. The entire age group it seemed had died from AIDS. When I taught in Taiwan I was stunned because about a third of my young adult students walked with canes. I asked why this was and they explained that they had been hit by cars while playing in the alleys. You can learn a lot about a city by simply walking the streets. Does this sound good today, for old people to sit in the streets and for young kids to play in the streets? No one wants to do that today because of cars, but get rid of the cars and you change everything. I grew up in the suburbs and we played in the streets all the time (streets that had very little traffic). The automobile has been a curse to cities. It isolates people and it robs the street from them. If your kids can play in the streets and your old people can sit out their watching the kids it is a safe city, a place that is very social where you get to meet your neighbors. Not only so but you obviously avoided wars for the last sixty years or so otherwise you would be missing a whole generation of men. Do you know what was a blessing to me? It was having my kids grandparents take care of them during the day. My two kids and their cousin would stay with them during the day. Their grandfather was in his eighties, he went to work every day and he played tennis everyday. He had escaped from China with the KMT when the communists took over and had to be nursed back to health in the hospital. The woman that nursed him back became his wife. At the end of the day all the kids would come to eat with them. My mother in law cooked dinner for us everyday. That was the best food I ever ate, healthy, fresh, with about twelve of us crammed around a small table. Everything was in good order, my kids grew up being respectful to their elders, and everyone was part of a family and a community. Everyone was healthy, we ate good, had good fellowship, and everyone had a function from the youngest to the oldest.
6 This is what the Lord Almighty says: “It may seem marvelous to the remnant of this people at that time, but will it seem marvelous to me?” declares the Lord Almighty. 7 This is what the Lord Almighty says: “I will save my people from the countries of the east and the west. 8 I will bring them back to live in Jerusalem; they will be my people, and I will be faithful and righteous to them as their God.”
We will be known as the faithful city because we will be expressing the faithful and righteous God.
9 This is what the Lord Almighty says: “Now hear these words, ‘Let your hands be strong so that the temple may be built.’ This is also what the prophets said who were present when the foundation was laid for the house of the Lord Almighty. 10 Before that time there were no wages for people or hire for animals. No one could go about their business safely because of their enemies, since I had turned everyone against their neighbor. 11 But now I will not deal with the remnant of this people as I did in the past,” declares the Lord Almighty.
Now let’s look at the contrast with the black background. Everyone is cheating everyone. High unemployment and it was hard to get by living like an animal much less like a man. And he had turned everyone against their neighbor. Wow! That is what we are seeing today. The BLM and ANTIFA riots with people talking about “burn it down” or “lynching white people” or “death to America”. The town I grew up in was the same place that Norman Rockwell grew up in (after he moved from NYC). So when you look at his paintings you get a very good impression of what it was like. How we have changed in just one generation. I could never have imagined back then what I am seeing today in 2022. You see people randomly shooting and killing people with guns and knives. You see videos of people being jumped in the streets as though they were a straggler being picked off by the wolves. You see these woke corporations and talking heads kow towing to thugs and hooligans. There is a mob mentality on twitter and for some bizarre reason they seem to rule corporate america. In Hollywood they follow people home who were shopping in jewelry stores, rob them and run them over. In NYC a man goes into the subway, fires a smoke bomb, puts on a gas mask and shoots up a subway car. Around the country police are being targeted, shot and often killed.
12 “The seed will grow well, the vine will yield its fruit, the ground will produce its crops, and the heavens will drop their dew. I will give all these things as an inheritance to the remnant of this people. 13 Just as you, Judah and Israel, have been a curse among the nations, so I will save you, and you will be a blessing. Do not be afraid, but let your hands be strong.”
One thing I have seen and really appreciated is that those who were most attuned to the damaging rhetoric were those who had come from socialist countries. I went to a Stop the Steal rally in Washington DC and wanted to know why people were there. I found people who had come from Cuba or Venezuela or China or Vietnam and they said they had seen the same thing happen where they came from. Experiencing the curse is like getting sick with the flu. Once you get better you now have immunity to that virus. You come from a place where everyone is turned against their neighbor you will have immunity. You will know how important the Lord’s command to love your neighbor is. Take that away and heaven becomes hell. I heard a story once illustrating this point. He said that in hell it was like being at a great banquet feast but you can only reach the food with these very long forks and it is impossible to then bring that fork to your mouth. People became savage having all that right in front of their face and they couldn’t eat any of it. Heaven was very different, they still needed the very long forks to get the food and it was still impossible to bring that fork to your mouth, but in heaven people had learned to feed each other.