TEXT:
"[5] Then the angel who talked with me came forward and said to me, "Lift your eyes and see what this is that is going out." [6] And I said, "What is it?" He said, "This is the basket that is going out." And he said, "This is their iniquity in all the land." [7] And behold, the leaden cover was lifted, and there was a woman sitting in the basket! [8] And he said, "This is Wickedness." And he thrust her back into the basket, and thrust down the leaden weight on its opening. [9] Then I lifted my eyes and saw, and behold, two women coming forward! The wind was in their wings. They had wings like the wings of a stork, and they lifted up the basket between earth and heaven. [10] Then I said to the angel who talked with me, "Where are they taking the basket?" [11] He said to me, "To the land of Shinar, to build a house for it. And when this is prepared, they will set the basket down there on its base."
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:
Spend a few quick moments discussing something God showed you in your personal reading of the Bible this week (either in your Bible reading plan or something else).
When thinking about sin/wickedness/iniquity, why does it seem our natural reaction is to think about someone else’s sins instead of our own sin?
Why is it important to see iniquity portrayed a tiny woman in a basket being carried out with ease?
What is the significance of their wickedness being carried off to Shinar? How does this give us hope for the future?
SERMON MANUSCRIPT
Several years ago, my wife and I went to a BYOM party. BYOM (bring your own meat) is a joyous celebration where everyone brings their own choice of meat to grill. Together we feast and fellowship all through the night.
It's one of my favorite things to do.
Well, I was coming from work that evening, and my wife and I didn't communicate well. So, she brought chicken, and I brought steaks. As delicious as chicken is, steak always trumps chicken. So, we obviously had steak for dinner that night.
It was a joy-filled night, and we ate steak until our hearts were content. But little did we know that this joy-filled evening would soon lead to months of misery.
Unfortunately, we had placed the raw chicken in a secret compartment on the top of the cooler. You see, we didn't want to run the risk of having chicken juice cross-contaminate our drinks and sides. So, when we got home and emptied the cooler, we forgot about the chicken. We poured out the ice, put the leftovers and drinks back in the fridge, and placed the cooler at the bottom of the pantry.
Several months later, we began to smell this awful odor in our kitchen, and we couldn't pinpoint the source of the smell. We thought it might be our sink, so we cleaned our sink. We thought it might be rotten vegetables. But you must first buy vegetables for them to rot in your home, and we hadn't bought vegetables. We thought a rat might have died behind the fridge. But we couldn't find anything.
Well, one evening, I had enough. I turned on my inner inspector gadget and put my hound dog nose to the test. I was bound and determined to get to the bottom of this stench of death that permeated throughout our home. I started in the pantry, taking every single item out of it.
After about an hour of searching, I narrowed in on the source of the smell. It was coming from this cooler.
I opened up the main compartment. Nothing...
I opened up the front zipper. Nothing...
But, as soon as I slowly unzipped the secret compartment on top of this cooler, a giant cloud of rotten salmonella hit me in the face. I have never walked the tightrope of puking and dying so gingerly. It felt as if Mike Tyson had sucker-punched me in the nose. For a split second, I was sure I would die.
But, once I came to my senses, I realized it wasn't Mike Tyson that hit me. It was his cruel older brother, Tyson's Chicken. So, I quickly realized our error, and I sprung to action. There was only one thing to do. The chicken had to go. I promptly zipped that cooler back up, wrapped it in a garbage bag, and immediately took it outside to the dumpster.
To no one's surprise, our house quickly began to smell better. Breathing became a little bit easier. The farther away the rotten chicken got, the less we began to smell it, leading to a sense of joy and peace within the Parazine home.
Church, I believe my family's experience with rotten chicken is a healthy metaphor for the passage we're looking at today. In the same way Kayla and I could walk around our house and sense that something is off, you and I can walk through life sensing that something isn't right. It's as if with every turn we take in life, there's always this lingering smell of sin and wickedness. Sometimes it's more potent than others. But it's always there, always lingering. It's present in our own hearts. It rears its ugly head in our relationships. We look out into the world and see men and women profiting off of wickedness and saying in their hearts, "God has forgotten, he has hidden his face, and he will never see it." And sometimes, we're tempted to believe that God has forgotten. Maybe God doesn't care about the wickedness in this life?
But, in our passage today, we will be reminded that God hasn't forgotten. God does care. In these verses, we find the LORD promising his people that wickedness will be taken far from their land. The air they breathe will soon be clean because sin will be removed from them.
The vision we will unpack today is a beautiful message of hope. In it, we are reminded that one day sin will be defeated once and for all. You may be weighed down by the burden of sin today. You may feel like your marriage is so tangled in sin that there's no hope of repair. You may be fighting to walk in purity, but there's temptation lurking behind every corner. You may be working for a bad boss and be feeling helplessly trapped and crushed. But today's passage will put wickedness into its proper perspective for us. We will see that no amount of wickedness will ever be able to overtake God. God has and will take out the trash of wickedness. He is not distant, nor is he oblivious. He is attentively aware of what's going on in his world. And he can, has, and will wipe away all sin. So, if our faith resides in Jesus, we cling to the hope that we will one day dwell with God in perfect harmony forever.
So, let's go ahead and dive in.
"[5] Then the angel who talked with me came forward and said to me, "Lift your eyes and see what this is that is going out." [6] And I said, "What is it?" He said, "This is the basket that is going out." And he said, "This is their iniquity in all the land." [7] And behold, the leaden cover was lifted, and there was a woman sitting in the basket! [8] And he said, "This is Wickedness." And he thrust her back into the basket, and thrust down the leaden weight on its opening. [9] Then I lifted my eyes and saw, and behold, two women coming forward! The wind was in their wings. They had wings like the wings of a stork, and they lifted up the basket between earth and heaven. [10] Then I said to the angel who talked with me, "Where are they taking the basket?" [11] He said to me, "To the land of Shinar, to build a house for it. And when this is prepared, they will set the basket down there on its base."
THE WOMAN, WICKEDNESS
At the start of this vision, we see a woman who symbolizes wickedness in a basket being sent out from their land (husbands, I highly recommend you not introduce your wife in this way). Wickedness is a word that entails wrongdoing and guilt. It is often described as the opposite of righteousness in the Old Testament. Proverbs 11:5, for example, says, "The righteousness of the blameless keeps his way straight, but the wicked falls by his own wickedness." So, here we find God telling his people that he will act on behalf of the wickedness in their land. As God's temple is being restored, he is preparing his people for the upcoming purging of wickedness. He will deal justly with the wicked. If God's people wanted God to be with them, they must be prepared for God to address the sin within them. Close intimacy with God will always lead to a distancing from sin.
Now, with that baseline understanding, I want to unpack a few things in these first few verses that will help add color to the black-and-white truth of God driving out wickedness.
THEIR WICKEDNESS
The first thing I want us to note is the language used in verse 6. Your Bible likely says, "This is their iniquity in all the land." But the Hebrew reads a bit differently. The Hebrew language is closer to, "This is their resemblance/eyes through all the earth." This phrase is difficult to translate, and I think the ESV's translation is good. But I don't want us to miss the point that what's in the basket is a direct representation/reflection of God's people.
Genesis 29:17 uses similar language to describe Leah— "Leah was tender eyed; but Rachel was beautiful and well favored." In other words, Leah's appearance/representation was not beautiful (bless her heart), but Rachel's appearance/representation was beautiful.
So, the wickedness in the basket was a direct representation of the people of the land. It wasn't someone else's sin in the basket; it was their sin in the basket. And, it wasn't a few of their sins in the basket; it was all of their sins in the basket. God was preparing to take all of their sins out of the land.
We would do well to remember that God's promise to do away with sin and wickedness is a personal message for you today. Yes, it's a message that someone else needs to hear. But it's also a message that you need to hear. You are a sinner in need of grace. You are the one in need of God's cleansing blood. And praise God that he has made way for your sin to be done away with today.
It is their iniquity that is in the basket.
SMALL BASKET, SMALL WOMAN
The second thing I want us to take note of is the basket itself. If you remember, in the previous vision, Zechariah makes a point to tell us the dimensions of the scroll. He went out of his way to inform us that the scroll was abnormally large. But in this vision, however, the measurements he gives were an 'êp̄â. An 'êp̄â was a measuring unit for dry material like grain or flour. Some say it could be between four gallons and ten gallons, but most commentators agree that an 'êp̄â held roughly five gallons of dry material. So, a good mental image for us would be the five-gallon bucket in your grandfather's work-shed. This isn't a massive basket; it's a relatively small basket, which tells us that the woman coming out of the basket was abnormally small. She didn't have the body of a goddess; she had the body of a garden gnome.
I think this is extremely important for us today.
Wickedness is not portrayed as a giant that God hopes to slay after long grueling combat; it's portrayed as a tiny woman in a tiny basket that he will send out with ease. The greatest evil of the land will be thrust into a basket and carried far away with ease. God would have no problem removing the wickedness of his people.
Listen, sometimes it may feel like the sin in our life is so large and so powerful that we have no hope of it ever going away. Sometimes it may feel like our hearts and lives are so tangled in sin that there is no escaping it. But this vision puts wickedness into perspective. No weight is too heavy for God to lift, no mountain is too high for him to climb, no debt is too large for him to pay, and no sin is too great to forgive. A leaf would have a better opportunity to knock over the Statue of Liberty than wickedness has to dethrone the all-powerful God of the universe.
Our greatest enemy—our own wickedness— is a tiny woman in a tiny basket. And, she was powerfully thrust into the basket and covered with leaden weight. The leaded cover was a "talent" of lead, which would have been close to 75 lbs.
I did some research this week and learned that the average untrained female could squat roughly 65 lbs. So, it's safe to say that this would have been an unbearable restraint for such a small woman. There was no way that wickedness could escape the basket she was placed in, reiterating that when God acts against wickedness, she will stand no chance. When it comes time for God to cast out sin, he will do so with swift judgment. His judgment is inescapable. The basket is closed.
WICKEDNESS TAKEN FAR AWAY
In verses 9-11, we see that two women come forward once the basket is closed and secure. These women have wings like a stork. Storks would have been large birds that would migrate north from Palestine yearly to hatch their eggs.
Zechariah, well acquainted with weird things by this point, doesn't bat an eye at the fact these women have wings. Instead, he simply asked, "Where are they taking the basket?" And the angel responds, "To the land of Shinar, to build a house for it. And when this is prepared, they will set the basket down there on its base."
Shinar was the district in which Babylon was found. So, these women were taking wickedness back to the land they dwelt in during their recent captivity. When you search the Scriptures, you realize that the land of Shinar wasn't the best place. It's often depicted as a place of temptation, idolatry, and judgment. Not only is this the region of their captivity, but it's where the Tower of Babel was made. It's the region where Achan had stolen a beautiful cloak from, leading to judgment.
So, we see here that God wasn't just taking his people out of Babylon; he was also taking Babylon out of his people. Sanctification is the divine work of God rooting sin out from inside us. Wickedness is being taken back to her rightful home, a land far from the people of God. It's being removed to a specific land explicitly prepared for it.
THREE TAKEAWAYS
There are three points of application I want to leave with us today:
First, if your faith resides in Jesus, your sin has already been taken to a faraway land. It has been cast as far as the east is from the west. 2 Corinthians 5:23 says, "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." Because of the finished work of the cross, your wickedness has already been taken far away. In Christ, you are justified before God, viewed and treated as if you've never sinned.
Second, these verses remind us of God's power over wickedness. God is on the throne, and wickedness will not prosper. Although we are justified, we are still being sanctified. There is still sin in our lives that we have to deal with. And at times, it will likely feel as if sin is winning. Sometimes, it may feel like our life is too big of a mess and not worth living. But these verses remind us that no mess is too big for God to clean up. It may feel like wickedness is winning today. But this vision reminds us that God is on the throne and that what man means for evil, God means for good.
Third, these verses teach us that there will be a time when the wicked and the righteous will be separated forever. The hope for us today is that one day sin will be gone forever. This vision speaks with finality and decisiveness. The beauty of the gospel is that we look ahead to a new Jerusalem, a holy city, where we will dwell with God in perfect harmony. The new Jerusalem will be a place where sin will be gone entirely and where we dwell with God in perfect harmony forever. So, we look ahead to a place where death, tears, mourning, and crying will be no more. We look ahead to a place where God's dwelling place will be with man. We look ahead to our salvation being complete, where we will be without sin completely. We look ahead to a time when we no longer have to fear because the wicked will be cast out into the lake that burns with fire and sulfur.