Daily Thoughts from Zechariah: Cart It Off! (Zechariah 5:5-11)

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.” 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.” And behold, the leaden cover was lifted, and there was a woman sitting in the basket! And he said, “This is Wickedness.” And he thrust her back into the basket, and thrust down the leaden weight on its opening.

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. Then I said to the angel who talked with me, “Where are they taking the basket?” 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.” (Zechariah 5:5-11, ESV)

The gist of this vision, strange as it is, is that wickedness is being removed from the land of Israel.  When Moses was preparing the people to enter Israel for the first time he reminded them (Deuteronomy 9) that they were not gaining possession of this land because they were more righteous than the nations before them but because God had chosen them and the nations before them were under His judgment for their wickedness.  The implication, however, was that if they were to abide in the land they would need to live in covenant obedience to Yahweh or the same could happen to them.  And it happened.  Moses had predicted this (Deuteronomy 30).

But now God was returning them and wickedness needed to be purged.  It is unclear what the wickedness referred to here is, but it is personified by a woman and this leads to the suggestion that it was a return to worshiping the Asherah, a female deity whose worship included sexual sin, or that it involved marrying foreign wives who corrupted the husbands with idolatrous beliefs and practices, something that we know those newly returned to the land were guilty of in some cases (Ezra 9; Nehemiah 13:23-27), or both.  Taking this woman to Shinar or Babylon, where such worship was rampant, and building a house for “it” (a temple, that is, for the basket of wickedness), lends credence to this view.

The Bible makes clear over and over that we are extremely susceptible to idolatry.  Idolatry is marked by human-conceived worship of God that feeds our belief that we can get God to do what we need Him to do by our actions.  We want to be able to guarantee our good future and resort to behaviors of worship we think will do just that.  If I do some service for God, I think, then He will reward me with success.  We are certainly guilty of this kind of idolatry.  In a strange way, however, in our current culture of prosperity here in the U.S., we have given up feeling we need to appease God in any way and come to believe that it is our own efforts that get us what we want.  If there is any idol it is something like Capitalism or the American Spirit or the American Dream that we worship, worship in the sense that it feeds our belief that we, ourselves, can make our futures.  We worship ourselves.

God wants to purge us of this idolatry, this wickedness.  O God, that you would cart it off to a distant place and that we would turn to You and You alone.