The Shepherd struck, the sheep scattered
“Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, against the man who is close to me!” declares the LORD Almighty.
“Strike the shepherd,
and the sheep will be scattered,
and I will turn my hand against the little ones.
8 In the whole land,” declares the LORD,
“two-thirds will be struck down and perish; yet one-third will be left in it.
9 This third I will bring into the fire;
I will refine them like silver
and test them like gold. They will call on my name and I will answer them;
I will say, ‘They are my people,’
and they will say, ‘The LORD is our God.’”
The Lord Almighty spoke these words. He is God the Father. The section has quotation marks around it.
The shepherd mentioned is none other than Jesus himself, the Good Shepherd. Jesus quoted these words on the night of his death (Mark 14:27). He knew as he sat with his disciples at the Last Supper that the sword of the prophet Zechariah was soon to strike him down. He knew also that the sheep would be scattered to the night wind of Gethsemane as it wafted its chill through Jerusalem and even down the road to Emmaus, “We had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21).
Verses 8 and 9 speak of refining from the throngs on Palm Sunday to the handful of people on Maundy Thursday to the forlorn little groups on Easter Sunday. It was a time of refining “in the whole land,” as verse 8 described it. The church was different. The disciples, who before Jesus’ death feared persecution, welcomed suffering for their faith. When they were beaten, they rejoiced “because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name” (Acts 5:41). This was gold that had been purified. They knew the Name. They called on it as Zechariah had foretold. They gladly suffered for it.
God’s purification is not a destructive process but a constructive process. The outcome is that we say, “The Lord is our God,” and he in turn now looks at us with our dross to consume and our gold to refine and says, “These are my people.”
Purification is achieved through fire. The fires of life simply teach us more and more to say, “The Lord is my God. Only he can save me through this fire. The Lord is my God. Only he can be so concerned about the good and bad in me. The Lord is my God. He wants to do this so that I become more and more like him in thought and being. The Lord is my God. How can I be impure if the Lord is my God? How can I think of trying to escape the fire of purification if the Lord is my God?” And when faith grows weak and flickers dimly on the walls of our hearts, we say, “The Lord is my God!” When death comes, and we step into that lonely valley of the shadow, we will say, “The Lord is my God!”
The outcome of the fire is that God’s people are pure, safe, and valuable forever. Because Jesus was stricken, we are different. We have the cross, and it makes a difference. What would our church be without this cross, this symbol that the Father did indeed put the sword to his own Son’s life in order to make a way to save ours. Through the awful sacrifice of the Shepherd, the Father now says, “These are my people.”