Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3045
“You shall be a blessing,” Zechariah 8:13.
SO terribly had God punished idolatrous Israel and Judah that their names were a byword and a proverb among all the surrounding nations. If any man wished to pronounce upon his fellow man the most dreadful curse that he could utter, he would say, “May you become like a Jew—may a blight fall upon your whole life as awful as that which has fallen upon Israel!” Even the heathen used the Jewish nation as a model of their cursing and blasphemed the name of Jehovah who had poured out the vials of His wrath upon them. But God declared that He would return to His ancient people in love and mercy—and replenish them in the multitude of His loving kindnesses to them so that, from that time, instead of being the pattern of cursing, they should be used as the model of a blessing—that when men wished good things for one another, they would say, “May you be as blessed as the children of Israel, whom the Lord of Hosts has favored above all the rest of mankind!” You remember that old Jacob, when he blessed the sons of Joseph, uttered a sort of formula for future use by others, “He blessed them that day, saying, In you shall Israel bless, saying, God make you as Ephraim and as Manasseh.” And I believe that to this day, in Jewish marriages, the blessing is given to the newly-married couple, “As Isaac and Rebekah may they be!” In like manner would God make His people to become the model of benediction as before they had been the pattern of a curse.
Leaving that primary meaning of the passage, I am going to apply the promise of the text to the spiritual’Israel. In His inscrutable wisdom, God allowed His ancient people, the nation of Israel, to become a curse among the other nations of the earth. Their idolatry was not only high treason against God, but it also gave the very heathen reason to blaspheme His holy name. The Lord said, by the mouth of the Prophet Jeremiah, “Has a nation changed their gods which are yet no gods? But My people have changed their glory for that which does not profit. Be astonished, O you heavens at this and be horribly afraid, be you very desolate, says the Lord. For My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.” Israel turned aside from Jehovah to worship Baal, Ashtaroth and other false gods without number—and so, by evil example, Israel led other people into idolatry, dishonored the name of the Most High and became a curse among the nations. Yet Israel was the guardian of the Oracles of God and the time will yet come when God shall again visit His ancient people—and the branches that have been broken off, because of unbelief, shall be grafted again into their own olive tree—and their “fullness” shall be “the riches of the Gentiles,” as Paul so plainly shows in the parable of the olive trees in Romans 11:1136. Indeed, at this very hour a Jew is the riches of Jews and Gentiles alike, for our Lord sprang out of Judah and, therefore, do we “take hold of the skirt of Him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with You.” And He is to us, “more precious than fine gold; even a man than the golden wedge of Ophir.” The Son of Mary, who is also the Son of God, is our blessed Lord and Savior, and in Him is that ancient promise fulfilled which was made to Jacob at Bethel, “In you and in your seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” We cannot sing too often that grand Coronation Anthem of the Christian Church—
“All hail the power of Jesus’ name! Let angels prostrate fall. Bring forth the royal (diadem, And crown Him Lord of all!
Crown Him, you martyrs of our God, Who from His altar call. Extol the stem of Jesse’s rod, And crown Him Lord of all! You chosen seed of Israel’s race, A remnant weak and small, Hail Him who saves you by His Grace, And crown Him Lord of all!”
Yet let us not omit to sing also —
“The hymn shall yet in Zion swell
That sounds Messiah’s praise,
And Your loved name, Immanuel!
As once in ancient days.
For Israel yet shall own her King,
For her salvation waits,
And hill and dale shall sweetly sing
With praise in all her gates.”
Whereas through sin, then, Israel had been a curse to the other nations of the earth, she shall, through the mercy of God, be a blessing when she repents of her sin and accepts the Messiah whom she has so long rejected. But we need not confine to the literal Israel and Judah the promise of our text, for it belongs to all the people of God, and so to you, Beloved, who are, by faith, the true seed of believing Abraham! This promise is applicable to you—“You shall be a blessing.”
I. And first, I want to remind you that THIS PROMISE QUICKENS REGRET WITHIN OUR SPIRITS—“You shall be a blessing.”
Then the first emotion in our heart is that of penitential sorrow. If God says that He will make us a blessing, surely it is implied that once we were not so. Let us look back to the days of our unregeneracy. It may be that some of us were great curses to our families and to the neighborhood in which we dwelt. If so, we must look back with deep sorrow upon the past, for, albeit that God has blotted out the guilt of our iniquity, yet the consequences of the sin still continue. We cannot undo the evil that we have done to others. If we first tempted them and they fell into sin, we may be forgiven the temptation, but we cannot recall it, nor can we put them back into the place from which they have fallen. A child once learned an evil word from you—oh, how gladly would you unsay that word if you could! But it entered that child’s memory and it will abide there, perhaps forever! If you led others into places of frivolous amusement, or into haunts of vice, you may abhor those places, now, and God may have forgiven you the sin of your youth—but what about those whom you led there—what will become of them? You can pray for them and I know that you will do so. You will plead with them if you know where they are and you will be quickened in your service for the Savior by your remembrance of the earnestness with which you served Satan in those evil days of the past—but Beloved, there must still remain the bitter fruit of perpetual regret that you cannot destroy the results of that early sowing of bad seed! The handfuls of cockle and darnel that you scattered broadcast in the furrows—you cannot call them back again! The firebrands you have thrown, the hot coals that you have cast about and which caused such a terrible conflagration—you cannot undo the mischief and ruin that they worked! The results of good or evil deeds will abide forever and ever, so let us beware what we do since it can never be undone. So, first, when God makes us a blessing, it reminds us that we were once a curse.