Now no one would preach on Zechariah 11 unless he was a seminary student who was assigned to do it. No one would voluntarily do this. But I thought, on a Sunday night like this when weâre going to have the really committed people--those who arenât at home in a sugar coma for overeating over the weekend, those of you who are serious about the Word of God--that it would be a wonderful exercise for us to look at Zechariah chapter 11, one of the more challenging chapters in the Old Testament. And as I said, it is not a chapter that you would probably ever hear anybody preach on because it is a challenge to any interpreter. But in order to get us into this chapter, let me just...let me just start with something very familiar. We are all highly aware of the recent situation escalating in the land of Israel where the Palestinians and the Hamas folks have long been their enemies. They periodically escalate the assaults and coming from Gaza in the south, as you know, hundreds and hundreds of missiles have been raining down on Israel and approximately even getting into Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and great population centers of the land, and this is a picture of the difficulty that the people of Israel have in surviving. We all know they have equally serious enemies surrounding them in other countries--of course Iran, their archenemy who would by every self-confession want to obliterate them from the planet. We know they sit in a very fragile place surrounded by enemies. And theyâre continually under assault, and that threatens continually to escalate; may well escalate, as we all understand. . . .
