DYING MEN AND THE UNDYING WORD

’Your fathers, where are they? and the prophets, do they live for ever? 6.  But My words and My statutes, which I commanded My servants the prophets, did they not take hold of your fathers?’-Zechariah i. 5, 6.

Zechariah was the Prophet of the Restoration.  Some sixteen years before this date a feeble band of exiles had returned from Babylon, with high hopes of rebuilding the ruined Temple.  But their designs had been thwarted, and for long years the foundations stood unbuilded upon.  The delay had shattered their hopes and flattened their enthusiasm; and when, with the advent of a new Persian king, a brighter day dawned, the little band was almost too dispirited to avail itself of it.  At that crisis, two prophets ‘blew soul-animating strains,’ and as the narrative says elsewhere, ’the work prospered through the prophesying of Haggai and Zechariah.’

My text comes from the first of Zechariah’s prophecies.  In it he lays the foundation for all that he has subsequently to say.  He points to the past, and summons up the august figures of the great pre-Exilic prophets, and reminds his contemporaries that the words which they spoke had been verified in the experience of past generations.  He puts himself in line with these, his mighty predecessors, and declares that, though the hearers and the speakers of that prophetic word had glided away into the vast unknown, the word remained, lived still, and on his lips demanded the same obedience as it had vainly demanded from the generation that was past.

It has sometimes been supposed that of the two questions in my text the first is the Prophet’s—­’Your fathers, where are they?’ and that the second is the retort of the people—­’The prophets, do they live for ever?’ ’It is true that our fathers are gone, but what about the prophets that you are talking of?  Are they any better off?  Are they not dead, too?’ But though the separation of the words into dialogue gives vivacity, it is wholly unnecessary.  And it seems to me that Zechariah’s appeal is all the more impressive if we suppose that he here gathers the mortal hearers and speakers of the immortal word into one class, and sets over against them the Eternal Word, which lives to-day as it did then, and has new lessons for a new generation.  So it is from that point of view that I wish to look at these words now, and try to gather from them some of the solemn, and, as it seems to me, striking lessons which they inculcate.  I follow with absolute simplicity the Prophet’s thoughts.

I. The mortal hearers and speakers of the abiding Word.

‘Your fathers, where are they? and the prophets, do they live for ever?’ It is all but impossible to invest that well-known thought with any fresh force; but, perhaps, if we look at it from the special angle from which the Prophet here regards it, we may get some new impression of the old truth.  That special angle is to bring into connection the Eternal Word and the transient vehicles and hearers of it.