Zechariah 10-11 focuses mostly, although not entirely, on the shepherd analogy I mentioned yesterday. These two chapter also highlight what a bad shepherd is like in comparison to what the Good Shepherd is like to His people. Diving right into scripture, Zechariah 10:2 says, “Household gods give worthless advice, fortune-tellers predict only lies, and interpreters of dreams pronounce falsehoods that give no comfort. So my people are wandering like lost sheep; they are attacked because they have no shepherd.” Three things that people in those days put a lot of faith into, almost religiously, are all discredited in the first half of the verse. For thousands of years this advice has been around, but there still seems to be a market for these sorts of things. A prime example would be astrology. Every so often the astrology section catches my eye in a newspaper, and it’s always peculiar how vague and ungrounded the predictions are. Household gods could be another thing that is prevalent today; although we don’t have idols of silver we bow down to, there are certainly things in life that we let occupy us more than God and we listen to what they say, be it the media, people around us, ourselves, or something completely different.
The second part of Zechariah 10:2 goes on to say that because the people are buying into the lies, they are wandering like lost sheep and attacked like they are without a shepherd. This is not like a military attack; this is attack with the intent of consumption, like a wolf devouring its prey. This is the opposite of the bright and cheerful life with a shepherd analogy yesterday. Without a shepherd these sheep have no direction and are in serious peril and danger of being completely consumed.
As it would go, the Lord is also upset about the sheep being lost because of the lies they are fed. Zechariah 10:3 continues, “My anger burns against your shepherds, and I will punish these leaders. For the Lord of Heaven’s Armies has arrived to look after Judah, his flock. He will make them strong and glorious, like a proud warhorse in battle.” The Lord is angry against the things that lie about your future, your dreams, your well-being. He wants you to instead seek the truth out, and hear the truth from him.
If God were to whistle, what would it sound like? While this sounds completely far-fetched, Zechariah 10:8 actually does mention God whistling: “When I whistle to them, they will come running, for I have redeemed them. From the few that are left, they will grow as numerous as they were before.” The Hebrew root for the word translated here as whistle, שׁרק, or shâraq, is literally a shrill noise used to call someone, and in the KJV is actually translated as a hiss. The picture I got when I read this was one of a master whistling for his animals, and I suppose this still lines up with the shepherd analogy, although I personally couldn’t tell you if sheep respond to whistling or not. Regardless, the metaphor is that of the redeemed running to God when he calls them. I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard God “whistle” per say, but I know that He calls us all individually in unique and varied ways, if we are only to listen for it. Animals respond to the calls of their masters because the masters are good to them, and similarly, we ought to respond to the call of our Master because He is good to us.
In Zechariah 11, the prophet Zechariah is called twice by the Lord to become a shepherd of the flock intended for the slaughter to demonstrate a point of what bad shepherds are like. Zechariah himself ends up in a mutual hatred relationship with the sheep he is tending and abandons them, and is paid 30 pieces of silver, which he throws into the treasury at the temple. At the end of the chapter God reveals how this demonstrates the worthless shepherd, who did not care for the dying, the young, the injured, or the healthy, but was too busy with feeding himself. I have to wonder, especially if you parallel this with Matthew 25:31-46, if God is painting us a picture of the kind of shepherd we need to be on earth to His people, shepherd who are caring for the dying, the young, the injured, the hungry, the thirsty, the strangers, the naked, and the imprisoned. Simon Peter was told to prove his love for Jesus by tending God’s sheep (John 21:15-17). I find it no stretch to say that we are also called to act on our love and faith by being shepherds to the people, not the worthless shepherds or lying shepherds that anger the Lord and are punished for abandoning the flock, but shepherds who provide for and rescue the sheep. If we are called to be like Jesus, and Jesus was a shepherd, we are called to be shepherds to the sheep of the world, especially those who are outside the fold and in danger of attack.
The continuation of this idea in my Psalm reading for today confirms the importance of the lesson. Psalm 146:7-9 says, “He [God] gives justice to the oppressed and food to the hungry. The Lord frees the prisoners. The Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are weighed down. The Lord loves the godly. The Lord protects the foreigners among us. He cares for the orphans and widows, but he frustrates the plans of the wicked.” Almost all of those ideas have to do with what we the Church ought to be doing in the world as shepherds and stewards of God’s creation.
Let me put these shepherd qualities into a list in case you’re genuinely interested in all this.
To tend to God’s sheep, we are called to:
- Care for the dying
- Look after the young
- Heal the injured
- Feed the healthy and the hungry
- Give drink to the thirsty
- Visit the imprisoned
- Welcome the strangers
- Clothe the naked
- Visit the sick
(These all come from Zechariah 11:16, in contrast to the described “worthless shepherd”, and from Matthew 25:36-41, in accordance with the sheep that have God’s favor and go into eternal life)
Some of these are a stretch. For example, I’m not quite sure I have healing powers, medically or as a spiritual gift, and feeding the healthy sounds less churchy than feeding the people that are actually hungry. However, these are all points found in the inspired word of God in showing examples of good and bad shepherds, which is not about caring for the sheep of the world, but about caring for the sheep of the Lord.
I hope the thoughts for today get you thinking like I did about the real meaning of tending God’s sheep and feeding his lambs, which are ways of loving God and others in deed and truth rather than word and talk (1 John 3:18).
-Zachariah