Month: May 2020

Morning Musing: Zechariah 6:12

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“You are to tell him: This is what the Lord of Armies says: Here is a man whose name is Branch; he will branch out from his place and build the Lord’s temple.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Yesterday, one of my boys had to do a small project on idioms. He had to choose one, illustrate it, define it, and use it in a sentence. He chose the phrase “butterflies in my stomach,” and did a great job with it. An idiom, of course, is a word or phrase that literally means one thing, but is used figuratively to mean something else. The person who speaks of butterflies in his stomach hasn’t been eating caterpillars, he’s nervous. Small animals weren’t falling from the sky here yesterday afternoon, but it sure did rain awfully hard for a little while. Why talk about idioms this morning? Because sometimes Scripture uses what can seem like idioms and this morning offers us an example.

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Morning Musing: Zechariah 6:1

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“Then I looked up again and saw four chariots coming from between two mountains. The mountains were made of bronze.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

There’s a great scene near the end of the first Avengers movie when Iron Man is confronting Loki about his plans. The villain arrogantly crows about how superior he is to all the humans and how they are just ripe for being ruled by him and how none of them pose any threat to him. Iron Man relates how Loki has managed to anger some really powerful people. When he fires back that he has an army at his disposal, Iron Man quickly retorts, “We have a Hulk.” Loki later meets Hulk and it doesn’t go quite like he expected. It’s always nice in a moment of crisis to have a Hulk on your side.

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Digging in Deeper: Zechariah 5:10-11

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“So I asked the angel who was speaking with me, “Where are they taking the basket?” “To build a shrine for it in the land of Shinar,” he told me. “When that is ready, the basket will be placed there on its pedestal.””‬‬ (CSB – Read the chapter)

God hates sin. He hates it. He loathes it with every fiber of His being (and there are a lot of fibers of His being). But, He loves us. He loves us perfectly and completely. He could not possibly love us anymore and there’s not a single thing we could do that will make Him love us any less. Even sin. As much as He wants to have us close, though (and He created us specifically to be in a relationship with Him so He wants that a lot), sin cannot be in His presence. At all.

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Morning Musing: Zechariah 5:5-6

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“Then the angel who was speaking with me came forward and told me, “Look up and see what this is that is approaching.” So I asked, “What is it?” He responded, “It’s a measuring basket that is approaching.” And he continued, “This is their iniquity in all the land.””‬‬ (CSB – Read the chapter)

Sometimes you read passages in the Bible that just don’t make any sense. It could be that the imagery is just too weird to understand. It could be that the story takes such an unexpected direction your head is spinning too much to make heads or tails of it. It could be several different things. What do we do when we encounter one of these passages? Let’s ask that together here.

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The Leaders We Deserve

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As we continue in our journey through the book of Judges, things are getting ugly. God keeps raising up leaders to help the people when they are in trouble, but the stock of people from which He can draw is getting pretty poor. As a result, rather than leading the people, these men are merely reflecting them. There’s a lesson here for us: Our leaders are ultimately going to look like us. What kind of leaders are we meaningfully going to be able to produce? Let’s talk about it.

The Leaders We Deserve

Have you ever seen a movie in which a great leader calls a people to rise above themselves and do great things? That’s a pretty broad category of mostly good movies if you think about it. There is one, though, that stands atop the rest: Braveheart. If you’ve seen the movie, you know what scene I’m talking about. The Scottish clans are all lined up on the hill waiting to run into battle against their English oppressors. They are hopelessly outnumbered by the British regulars. And then William Wallace rides up and down their ranks and speaks courage and confidence into their very souls. The most famous passage of the speech ended like this: “And dying in your beds many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!”

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