The prophecies of Zechariah are among the most difficult in the Bible. It’s not only that Zechariah is so rich in imagery and symbols; it’s a strange mixture of the past and the future—an odd mixture of events in history, of people, personages, places, things that happened…and of things that never happened then, but are going to happen before man’s age is finished.

There’s absolutely no doubt that some of Zechariah has been fulfilled in history. It is just as certain that much of it is prophetic; and I was debating with myself as to whether more of it is future or whether more of it is past, and I think I have come down on the side of more of it is future. Some of it is prophetic to the coming of the Messiah. Some of it looks all the way to the Millennium. And right in the middle of this difficult prophecy is a prophecy of a great king to come. But, oddly, it is not what we would expect to hear about a great king. He says,

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, your King comes to you: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding on an ass, and on a colt the foal of an ass.

This is not what one would expect. A king, you would think, would ride into town on a chariot. A king would ride in on a chariot with someone holding a laurel over his head and with crowds of people praising him. Or maybe he would come in on a horse; but of course, in the Bible, horses and chariots are the cavalry—they are instruments of war. They are the tanks and the Bradley Fighting Vehicles of that age. They are war-making instruments.

And the Hebrew word for lowly [ani, עָנִי, Strong’s h6041] means, basically, poor, needy, and in depressed circumstances. Not exactly the sort of thing you would ever think would in any way represent a king. Here is the Messiah, here is the Savior, here is the one who is coming to save his people.

[…] when they drew near to Jerusalem, and were come to Bethphage, to the mount of Olives, then sent Jesus two disciples, saying to them, Go into the village over against you, and straightway you shall find an ass tied, and a colt with her: loose them, and bring them to me. And if any man say ought to you, you shall say, The Lord has need of them; and straightway he will send them. All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, Tell you the daughter of Sion, Behold, your King comes to you, meek, and sitting on an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass.

Right in the middle of Zechariah, this prophecy is found; and Jesus fulfills this prophecy in his (if you want to call it) triumphal entry into Jerusalem, where the people who are praising him are children, and the things that they’re laying out in front of him on the road as he goes through are palm fronds.

And so, what does all this mean? Why is it that the king, when he comes, why is it that the Messiah, when he comes, is coming lowly? And I can’t imagine, frankly, how the first readers took Zechariah. For indeed, the expectations of a messiah were there, but the expectations generally were of a restoration of the Kingdom of Israel. The restoration was, We’re going to throw the Romans out. We’ll do what the Maccabees failed to do; we will actually succeed in establishing once again the Kingdom of Israel. What did they think when they read Zechariah? And your king is going to be just, and he’ll have salvation, and he’ll ride into town lowly—riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass. All of this must’ve seemed very, very strange to people long ago. I think it even seemed strange to Jesus’ own disciples when he did it.

But this was prophesied long before this by Isaiah. And Isaiah is another prophet whose work is convoluted, and kind of confusing in a way, and a little hard to follow. It’s a strange admixture of history and prophecy, of the past and of the future. We’ll begin in chaper 9, verse 1...

Should we take God seriously? it may seem a stupid question to ask, in a way. We’re dealing with someone here who could blink his eyes and start the Big Bang. God spoke the word, and out of that comes a universe that is some 14 billion light years across. That’s who we’re talking about here, with that kind of power. But I’m asking it anyway because it seems to me that a lot of people really don’t—they really don’t take God very seriously. It's been said that the First Commandment reveals that our relationship with God is not casual—it’s rather covenantal. And I am persuaded that a lot of people take God very casually, and I want to explain to you what I mean. If you’d turn to the 50th psalm, there is coming a time when God will come, not quietly, but in a storm of fire devouring before him...

At the Last Supper, after washing his disciples' feet, Jesus said something of singular importance. He said, You call me master and lord, and you say well for so I am. The American reader is likely to take these two words, master and lord, as synonyms; but when the King James translators sat down and wrote this out, the head of a school was a master. Even to this day in most English schools the person who runs the school is the headmaster. Consequently, they chose the word master because to their English readers it would convey the idea of a teacher; and not merely a garden-variety, run-of-the-mill teacher, but a significant master of his subject.

Jesus said, You call me teacher and lord, and rightly so because that is what I am. The words in the Greek mean a master of a school and a sovereign lord, so they are not synonyms at all; and they define two very different relationships that a person will have with Jesus Christ. So let's take a closer look at these two words, these two relationships, and their significance for a Christian.

We Christians have an anxiety about us—about who we are, about our failures, about our differences, about our spats—and we let these anxieties prevent us from doing and saying things that need to be said and done; not only in church, but in the community and in the world.

Peggy Noonan - Patriots, Then and Now Link 1 | Link 2

Halloween is an odd event—very odd, in a way, because in its origins it was not evil; it was actually good. A number of you probably know that Halloween is All Hallows Even; in other words, All Hallows Eve—the evening before All Hallows. And All Hallows is All Saints day. And, originally, All Saints Day (November 1st) was the day when all the saints were honored. In other words, it's a time that the Church had set aside to honor those people who had lived exemplary lives, who had blessed others by their lives, and were considered saints by the Church at that time.

October 31st, though, among non-Christian Celtic people, was a different matter altogether. It was the festival of Samhain. What you may not know is the fact it was also New Year's Eve in Celtic and Anglo-Saxon England at that time. It was actually the end of the old year and the beginning of the new. It took place in the autumn, as a matter of fact. It was an occasion for fire festivals, they lit huge bonfires on top of hills to frighten off the evil spirits, and also it was a time when laws and land tenures were renewed.

It harkens back, in a way, to the Old Testament. You'll recall where, in the year of release, all the captives were released. People who have been enslaved because of having been a thief and caught and sold into slavery were turned loose, in the seventh year. That was always in the autumn, not in the spring. In that Jubilee year, all the land again went back to its original family owner—the one who received it by lot. Here they had, in the autumn, a time when all the laws and land tenures were renewed.

In the Celtic religions, the dead were supposed to visit their homes on this night. As a consequence, you get the sinister aspects of the festival. And, of course, you had the Celtic Church right alongside of the Roman Church; and the gradual melding that took place in these things over time created something along the lines of Halloween. And though it really became in later times a secular holiday, at the same time it has also retained a lot of those sinister overtones.

Halloween was thought to be the most favorable time for divinations, for marriage, for health, for death, and for luck. And it was the only day when the help of the Devil was invoked in such matters. I think that is fascinating. For people who call themselves Christians—who are believers in Christ, people who try to serve God—you can almost see how it would be tempting, in certain circumstances (and I want to talk about that a little later), to get some guidance from that side of the spirit world.

Halloween is a night of great evil. But really, it's a night of great evil only because the Devil is invoked in some of the customs and some of the practices. If it were nothing but a harvest festival, it probably wouldn't amount to much. The question is: Is there really a Devil, and are there demons in a spirit world that come out on Halloween or at other times? I recently received a letter from a long-time correspondent, and he had what I think is easily the most comprehensive set of questions about the spirit world and the paranormal that I have ever received in my life. I mean, to answer it would require me to write a book, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Spirit World But Were Afraid To Ask. And he gave me a really good list. He asked me about spirit sightings, dreams that come true, UFOs, abductions, strange lights, hauntings, healings, psychics, miracles that seem to have nothing to do with God and yet are miracles, and a whole long list. And he asked that, somewhere along the line, I would do a sermon or a tape or something on the subject. And so you owe this sermon today to my friend who wrote to me about this.