From Ashes to Ale: The Gospel Reversal Text: Zechariah 8:18-19
Introduction: The Liturgical Shape of History
The Christian faith is not a set of abstract doctrines to be filed away in the mind. It is a robust, full-bodied reality that shapes everything, including our calendars. How we mark time, what we commemorate, and how we do it reveals what we truly worship. The secular world understands this instinctively. They have their high holy days, pride month, earth day, and so on, liturgical seasons of remembrance for their own gods. And the people of God have always had a calendar, a rhythm of remembrance given by God Himself.
In the Old Covenant, this rhythm included both feasting and fasting. There were the great festivals of joy, like Passover and Tabernacles, celebrating God's mighty acts of redemption and provision. But there were also fasts, solemn days of affliction and repentance. These were not arbitrary. The fasts mentioned here in Zechariah were man-made memorials, but they were memorials of a very real disaster. They were anniversaries of national catastrophe, liturgical scars marking the consequences of covenant rebellion. They were reminders of the siege of Jerusalem, the burning of the Temple, the murder of the governor, the beginning of the exile. They were calendar entries written in ash.
But God, speaking through His prophet Zechariah to the returned exiles, declares that a great reversal is coming. The divine logic of the gospel is about to turn their liturgical world upside down. The days of sorrow, the memorials of judgment, are going to be transformed into days of explosive joy. The dirge is going to become a dance. This is not positive thinking. This is not simply deciding to look on the bright side. This is a sovereign prophetic announcement of what God is about to do in history through the coming of His Son. This is the promise that the gospel doesn't just forgive sin; it redeems the consequences of sin. It goes back to the very places of our deepest shame and failure and turns them into monuments of His grace.
This passage, then, is about far more than four ancient fast days. It is about the fundamental emotional shape of the Christian religion. It tells us that in the new covenant, the age of fulfillment, the baseline is joy, the default setting is gladness, and the defining characteristic is merry feasting. But this transformation is not unconditional. It comes with a charge, a command that is the very engine of this new reality: "so love truth and peace."
The Text
Then the word of Yahweh of hosts came to me, saying,
"Thus says Yahweh of hosts, 'The fast of the fourth, the fast of the fifth, the fast of the seventh, and the fast of the tenth months will become joy, gladness, and merry appointed feasts for the house of Judah; so love truth and peace.'"
(Zechariah 8:18-19 LSB)
The Great Liturgical Reversal (v. 19a)
The prophecy begins with the authoritative declaration of Yahweh of hosts, the Lord of armies. This is a military title. The one who is about to rearrange their calendar is the one who commands all the powers of heaven and earth. He is not making a suggestion; He is issuing a command to history itself.
"Thus says Yahweh of hosts, 'The fast of the fourth, the fast of the fifth, the fast of the seventh, and the fast of the tenth months will become joy, gladness, and merry appointed feasts for the house of Judah...'" (Zechariah 8:19a)
Let's be clear about what these fasts represented. They were memorials of unmitigated disaster, the direct result of Judah's covenant infidelity. The fast of the tenth month marked the beginning of Nebuchadnezzar's siege of Jerusalem. The fast of the fourth month commemorated the day the city walls were breached. The fast of the fifth month was for the day the Temple, God's own house, was burned to the ground. And the fast of the seventh month remembered the assassination of Gedaliah, the governor appointed by Babylon, an act of political folly that extinguished the last glimmer of hope for the remnant in the land.
These were days of sackcloth and ashes, days of remembering their sin and God's righteous judgment. They were liturgical monuments to their own failure. And God says He is going to transform them. Notice the cascade of words He uses: joy, gladness, and merry appointed feasts. This is not a reluctant cheerfulness. This is exuberant, overflowing, celebratory joy. God is not just going to cancel the fasts; He is going to transfigure them. The very anniversaries of their greatest grief will become the occasions for their greatest gladness.
How is this possible? It is only possible because of the gospel of Jesus Christ. This prophecy looks forward to a redemption so total that it doesn't just paper over the past, it fundamentally changes its meaning. The cross of Christ is the ultimate example of this. The day of the greatest injustice in human history, the day of ultimate darkness and apparent defeat, has become for us Good Friday. The instrument of shameful execution has become the symbol of our glory. God took the very worst thing that ever happened and made it the very best thing that ever happened.
This is the pattern of God's working in the new covenant. He takes the places of our sin and failure, and when we bring them to Him in repentance, He makes them ground zero for a monument to His grace. He doesn't just forgive your past; He redeems it. He makes your old sins, now forgiven, occasions for deeper gratitude, greater humility, and more profound worship. The memory of the pit from which you were dug becomes a reason to sing His praises all the louder. The fast becomes a feast.
The Covenantal Condition (v. 19b)
This glorious promise of reversal is not, however, some kind of automatic spiritual escalator. It is tethered to a condition, a command that is both the requirement for and the fruit of this new joy. The verse ends with a pivotal word: "so." The Hebrew here functions like a "therefore" or "and so." The feasts will come, so do this.
"...so love truth and peace." (Zechariah 8:19b LSB)
This is the linchpin of the whole prophecy. You cannot have the gospel's joy without the gospel's ethic. You cannot have the feast without the faith. And that faith is expressed here in two foundational commitments: love truth, and love peace. These are not sentimental suggestions. They are robust, covenantal demands.
First, "love truth." This is not about being generally honest or avoiding bald-faced lies, though it certainly includes that. In the biblical worldview, truth is not a concept; it is a person. Jesus Christ said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." To love truth is to love Christ. It means loving the Word of God, which is truth (John 17:17). It means submitting your entire life, your thoughts, your words, your business dealings, your family life, to the objective, external, revealed truth of God. It means hating deception, spin, hypocrisy, and self-justification. A people who are willing to live by lies, who flatter themselves, who call evil good and good evil, cannot experience the joy of God. Their fasts will remain fasts. True joy is a byproduct of a life oriented toward reality, and God's Word is the ultimate reality.
Second, "love peace." Again, this is not a call for peace at any price. It is not the squishy, sentimental pacifism of our age. The Hebrew word is shalom. It means far more than the absence of conflict. It means wholeness, completeness, flourishing, right-relatedness. To love shalom is to love the well-ordered community that God designs. It means pursuing reconciliation with your brother. It means seeking justice for the oppressed. It means living in such a way that you are a source of stability and blessing to those around you. It is a constructive, active love for the well-being of the covenant community. And of course, the Prince of Peace is Christ (Isaiah 9:6). True peace is found only in Him, through whom we have peace with God (Romans 5:1) and peace with one another (Ephesians 2:14).
Notice the order. It is "truth and peace." You cannot have true peace without truth. Any peace that is built on a lie is a fragile, temporary truce that will shatter at the first touch of reality. We must be a people who are unflinchingly committed to the truth first, and from that foundation of truth, we build the house of peace. When a church, a family, or a nation abandons truth for the sake of a false unity, they get neither. They get lies and, eventually, war.
Conclusion: Joy is Your Battle-Axe
So what does this mean for us, the heirs of this promise? It means that the Christian life is meant to be characterized by a deep, defiant, and celebratory joy. We live on the other side of the cross. The exile is over. The true Temple has been rebuilt in three days. The great victory has been won. Therefore, our primary liturgical posture is not fasting, but feasting. Our default mode is not mourning, but merry-making.
This is not to say that there is no place for fasting or sorrow in the Christian life. We fast when we are confronted with our own sin, or when we are petitioning God in a time of great need. We grieve, but we do not grieve as those who have no hope. Our sorrow is always contained within the larger structure of an unconquerable joy. The baseline is the feast.
And this joy is not a fragile thing to be protected. It is a weapon to be wielded. "The joy of the Lord is your strength" (Nehemiah 8:10). In a world that is drowning in despair, anxiety, and bitterness, the gladness of God's people is a profound act of spiritual warfare. A cheerful, truth-loving, peace-making Christian is a walking refutation of the devil's lies. Your merry feast is a declaration that Christ is risen, that sin is forgiven, that death is defeated, and that God is making all things new.
Therefore, take God at His word. He has commanded your fasts to become feasts. So, put away your sackcloth. Love truth. Speak truth. Live truth. And on that solid ground, build peace in your homes and in your churches. Confess your sins, forgive those who have sinned against you, and come to the Lord's Table. For here, at this table, is the ultimate fulfillment of Zechariah's promise. Here the memory of the ultimate judgment becomes the source of the ultimate joy. Here is the merry feast that God has appointed for the house of Judah, and for all who have been grafted into it by faith. So come, and welcome, to Jesus Christ.