Go Deep With God's House

God's love works in two ways.

First, He loves His people with a perfect love filled with care, provision, protection, and abundance. Love is expressed in this way throughout His dealings with Israel in history. He saved them from Egypt and brought them out with great abundance. He protected and provided for them in the wilderness and gave them the land that flowed with milk and honey. 

Second, God's love will also bring divine correction, serious discipline, and great wrath against the sinfulness of His people. He sent them into exile, He took away their abundance, their temple, their nationhood, their land, and in LOVE disciplined them far away in foreign lands. 

Zechariah 8 declares that God, who has done those things in the past, will come again to live with His people in the restored city. But He is still the God of jealous love and wrath for the people He has chosen. 

Zechariah 8:2–3 (ESV) “Thus says the LORD of hosts: I am jealous for Zion with great jealousy, and I am jealous for her with great wrath. 3 Thus says the LORD: I have returned to Zion and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem shall be called the faithful city, and the mountain of the LORD of hosts, the holy mountain.

The NLT says:
Zechariah 8:2 (NLT) My love for Mount Zion is passionate and strong; I am consumed with passion for Jerusalem!

True and good love will always have protective care and protective anger. Apathy is the opposite; apathy doesn't care what happens to the other. God is not apathetic about His own.

Now with God's return to dwell among His people come once again the blessings of the LORD:
Zechariah 8:4–5 (ESV) Thus says the LORD of hosts: Old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand because of great age. 5 And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets.

Some, of course, couldn't believe it after all they had experienced. The Lord declares, this is not impossible:
Zechariah 8:6 (ESV) Thus says the LORD of hosts: If it is marvelous in the sight of the remnant of this people in those days, should it also be marvelous in my sight, declares the LORD of hosts?

God will restore even when we've been overcome by our own sin and its consequences. He can restore even from a desperate place. The prodigal son returned to find himself still a son, beloved and celebrated at home. 

All of this was intended to spur the workers on in the building of the Temple. 
Zechariah 8:9 (ESV) Thus says the LORD of hosts: “Let your hands be strong, you who in these days have been hearing these words from the mouth of the prophets who were present on the day that the foundation of the house of the LORD of hosts was laid, that the temple might be built.

God reminds them that without His presence in the Temple among them, the land was a waste, unsafe, and uninhabitable:
Zechariah 8:10 (NLT) Before the work on the Temple began, there were no jobs and no money to hire people or animals. No traveler was safe from the enemy, for there were enemies on all sides. I had turned everyone against each other.

Yet now, as they build, they have assurance that the Lord is involved, and His love will cause blessings to once again overflow into their land. 
Zechariah 8:11–12 (ESV) But now I will not deal with the remnant of this people as in the former days, declares the LORD of hosts. 12 For there shall be a sowing of peace. The vine shall give its fruit, and the ground shall give its produce, and the heavens shall give their dew. And I will cause the remnant of this people to possess all these things.

The chapter is a hopeful picture for wayward saints. When you seek the Lord in humility and dedicate yourself to His presence and family, the restoration will be completed in you. So many Christians come to the Lord, but they do not dedicate themselves to the body. When this is the case, we can only expect an up-and-down, in-and-out sort of life where we are constantly entrapped in our own evil. But when God's house is first, God's roots of goodness go deep, and we flourish in the courts of our God. 


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