You may well know that the Bible has 2 sections to it: a first, and longer, section which we know as the Old Testament (which is also the holy book of the Jewish religion); and a shorter section concerned with Jesus Christ and with the Church, known as the New Testament. (Islam, in fact, accepts both the Jewish Old and the Christian New Testaments, calling them the ‘Torah’ and the ‘Injil’ respectively, but adds to them the Quran, revealed to the prophet Mahomet at the beginning of the 7th Century AD as the final revelation by God). So all three of those great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, accept the Old Testament. And whoever you are, Jew, Muslim, Christian, agnostic, atheist, we can’t read that Old Testament without detecting an underlying note of expectancy running all the way through it.
We’re going to look at just a single verse from the book of the prophet Zechariah now, but I shall be referring to one or two others. “On that day a fountain will be opened to the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to cleanse them from sin and impurity” (Zech. 13:1). ‘On that day ...’ if you look at the next verse you will see that it begins with the same three words: ‘On that day ...’ And if you were to glance back to verse 11 of the previous chapter you will see that it starts with the same three words: ‘On that day ...’ Go further back to verse 9: ‘On that day ...’ Go up to verse 8: ‘On that day ...’ Look also at the beginning of verses 6, 4, and 3: ‘On that day ...’ It is going to go on through chapters 13 and 14 (as the book comes to an end). This prophet Zechariah kept talking about a future day: ‘On that day ...’ I imagine his first hearers might have got quite impatient with it: “Hey, Zech., when’s this day going to be? The suspense is killing us!”
When I was very small, my sister and I developed an extraordinarily irritating habit on long family car journeys. We would bounce up and down on the back seat (it was long before the days of seat belts) and we would keep up an incessant chant for hours on end: “When are we going to get there? When are we going to get there? When are we going to get there?” Looking back, it is I think an amazing tribute to my parents’ patience and longsuffering that I ever reached adulthood at all (that was not my only infuriating habit. But we will let history draw a veil over the others that might have caused my early demise).
But the Old Testament has a similar refrain to it: “When are we going to get there?” Glance back a few pages to a passage right at the beginning of this little book of Zechariah, chapter 3 verse 9: ‘ ... says the Lord Almighty, “And I will remove the sin of this land in a single day.” ’ That was an extraordinary thought. The Jews had a complicated system of ritual sacrifice in their Temple, week by week by week – day by day, in fact – to remove the consequences of human wrongdoing. And then through this prophet, Zechariah, God says, “I will remove the sin of this land in a single day.” No wonder there’s impatience for that day: “When are we going to get there?”
The Old Testament knew that sin must be removed. For a human being to be what he/she is meant to be, moral guilt has to be dealt with. The dignity and freedom of moral choice is one of the things that separates us from the animals, isn’t it? Fundamentally we all know that we are not just dancing to the tune of our genes (whatever the behaviourists tell us). We are choosing what we do and how we behave. And, let’s face it, we all know that sometimes we choose wrong. You’ve chosen wrong today, I’ve chosen wrong today. We all know that. We do things we shouldn’t.
Hearing that a zookeeper had managed to train a lion to live in the same cage as a lamb, a man visited the zoo to see if it was true. He was amazed to find the animals lying side by side. “How did you do this?” he said to the zookeeper. “Is it a trick?” “No,” said the zookeeper. “This has been going on for three months now. Mind you,” he added confidentially, “we have had to replace the lamb a few times.” But who blames a lion for sometimes fancying a traditional Sunday lunch? While for you and me, it is a very different affair, isn’t it? We are not victims of our natures – we have chosen to do evil and there is a debt of guilt to pay. We have not lived up to our own standards (have we?); nobody here in church has lived up to their own standards, let alone God’s standards. Even just to treat others as we would like them to treat us, let alone to think of others as we would like them to think of us. Some of Shakespeare’s villains may reach epic proportions in their villainy – but their remorse, I suspect, finds an echo in all our hearts. I relate even to Richard III – that sort of caricature of a villain, who says at one point: “My conscience hath a thousand several [different] tongues, And every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain.” I know my conscience condemns me – I don’t know about yours. But I suspect we all know a little of that. We may remember Lady MacBeth’s desperation for something that would wash the imaginary blood from her hands: “Out, out damned spot.”
You see, wrong-doing and the guilt it entails are realities of the human condition. We may not care to think about them, but psychiatry tells us that we suppress these things at our cost. And the Old Testament promises a solution – in a single day: “And I will remove the sin of this land in a single day.” Or that verse 1 of chapter 13, the verse we began with: “On that day a fountain will be opened to the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to cleanse them from sin and impurity.”
Now that fountain was opened 500 years later when Jesus Christ died on the cross, so that your and my sins can be forgiven by God, because Jesus had paid the penalty for them in our place. That was the ‘single day’, that first Good Friday. And now the offer is so simple: Wash and be clean! Why are we so reluctant to take it seriously? If people gave the same excuses for not washing physically as they sometimes give for not taking Christianity and the spiritual washing that it offers us seriously, imagine how ridiculous they would sound!
Let’s just imagine this now: say I were to ask one or two folks around the place why they don’t wash. I’ll start with this person:
“Why do you never
wash?”
“Well, Mark, I was made to wash as a child. That has put me off.”
Oh! I’ll try this man: “Why do you never wash?”
“Mark, as far as I can see, people who wash are just hypocrites. They
pretend to be cleaner than other people, but they’re just the same as us.”
”I’ll have another go, I’ll try this lady: Why don’t you wash?”
“I do wash. But only on special occasions, like at Christmas and Easter.”
“That explains a lot! Now what about you over there, why don’t you wash?”
“There are so many different kinds of soap, I can’t possibly decide how to
choose between them.”
“Another possible answer! Let’s try the Director of Music: Why do you never
wash?”
“None of my friends ever wash, so why should I?”
“There we go again! Now I need to pick on someone a little younger: Hello,
why don’t you wash?”
“As you say, Mark, I am still young. I might try washing when I’m a bit
older and dirtier, like you!”
Well, I think you’ll agree those are pretty ridiculous answers. And yet the answers that are given by many for not taking the Christian faith seriously wouldn’t stand up to much scrutiny either. Why are we so nervous of such a wonderful offer? I guess it may be because we have not been as good as we could have been (I hope you are prepared to agree that much with me) and as there is therefore a measure of guilt in all of us, we find it hard to get away from the idea of God as an examiner, setting us exams in good behaviour. And we always think that examiners are trying to catch us out, don’t we? I heard a story of four Organic Chemistry students at Sydney University in Australia who had been doing so well in their coursework all along and were so confident, that they decided they would go to a friend’s 21st down in Canberra the weekend before their final exam. But they partied so hard on the Saturday that they ended up sleeping all Sunday and only getting back to Sydney in the early hours of Monday morning, with no time for any revision at all. The four of them decided together that they wouldn’t try to take the exam that Monday morning. They agreed that they would go to the senior examiner after it was over and explain that they’d gone down to Canberra to do some research; and that on the way back they had got a flat tyre and they hadn’t got a spare in the car. It had taken them an age to get it mended and they’d only just got back. So would he be prepared to reset the exam for them and could they take it the following morning? After some thought the examiner agreed to reset the exam for them next day. With relief and delight the four students studied all night and turned up the next morning. The examiner put them in four different rooms and handed them a little test booklet, to be marked out of 100, just as they’d expected. The first question was worth 5 marks, and was something pretty simple about free radical formation. Much encouraged, when the students turned the page they found there was only one more question. It was for all the remaining 95 marks. The question consisted of only two words. It read: “Which tyre?”
But God is not an examiner setting you and me an examination in good behaviour. You and I are not bent over our desks in life, trying to come up to a standard set us by God. He is the Creator of our lives and of our world, and we have tried to ignore Him. We have tried to live in His world as if He did not exist. And He is a Father who longs to have me as His child, and to pay the price Himself for my adoption: “On that day a fountain will be opened to the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to cleanse them from sin and impurity” (Zech. 13:1).
How could that be? Let us consider this passage from another of the prophets. Isaiah was writing many years before Zechariah about the death of Jesus Christ:
3We despised him and rejected
him;
he endured suffering and pain.
No one would even look at him –
we ignored him as if he were nothing.
4But he endured the suffering
that should have been ours,
the pain that we should have borne.
All the while we thought that his suffering
was punishment sent by God.
5But because of our sins he
was wounded,
beaten because of the evil we did.
We are healed by the punishment he suffered,
made whole by the blows he received.
6All of us were like sheep
that were lost,
each of us going his own way.
But the Lord made the punishment fall on him,
the punishment all of us deserved.
(Isaiah 53:3-6, GNB)
The punishment for your and for my sin is that we should have no relationship with God. It can only be a relationship of death, that of complete separation. If you have ever stood by the dead body of someone you knew and loved, you will know that there is no more complete separation in human experience than that between the living and the dead. It is the greatest divide we know. But somebody else has died and been separated from God for us, Jesus, His Son. Look again at the last two verses there: ‘But because of our sins he was wounded, beaten because of the evil we did. We are healed by the punishment he suffered, made whole by the blows he received. All of us were like sheep that were lost, each of us going his own way. But the Lord made the punishment fall on him, the punishment all of us deserved’ (Isa. 53: 5, 6). Because He died, we can live; we can have a living relationship with God: “On that day a fountain will be opened to the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to cleanse them from sin and impurity” (Zech. 13:1).
There is a rather gruesome hymn Christians sometimes sing which starts ‘There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel’s veins: and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.’ ‘Immanuel’ is a name for Jesus. It is a macabre thought, but you could see why the hymn-writer made the link. The fountain that washes us clean (that Zechariah spoke of) is actually the death of Jesus in our place on the cross. It was, as it were, a flood of blood from that death that can wash a sinner, like you and me, clean in the eyes of God.
Until I have asked for that washing I cannot know God. This is the note I want to end on: nothing else will make Him real to me. And if you have not done so, I want to ask you whether this might be the right moment for you to ask to be washed – to ask that what Jesus did on the cross might here and now apply to you; so that you might have a living relationship with God. Nothing else will make God real. We can’t do it for ourselves. Believe you me – I tried. I was a very religious person as a non-Christian. I attended churches, I read the Bible, I tried to pray. It did not make me a Christian: I had no real relationship with God. We do have to ask for it. It will bring us new life.
I’m going to say a prayer now that does just that, and it may be that you would like to listen to it carefully – perhaps even pray it yourself today.
Father God, I know I’ve never really asked you for your forgiveness. I do now. I am sorry that I have ignored you and rebelled against your will for me. Thank you that Jesus died to take the penalty for that rebellion. Thank you that He died in my place on the cross. And please now wash me from my sin. Please come into my life, through your Spirit, and make yourself real to me for evermore. Amen.
(All scripture quoted is from the New International Version of the Bible unless otherwise stated.)