Today, I am reading and commenting on  Zechariah 1-6.

The first thing I want to comment on is this phrase which Zechariah writes that the Lord said, “I was only a little angry, but they went too far with the punishment.”  This suggests to me that when God chooses a nation to punish His people, sometimes that nation goes beyond what God intended.  I want to note that in this context “His people” means the people of Israel, the descendants of Jacob, but this message may also apply to Christians (I do not know that such is the case, but I believe that many Old Testament prophecies concerning the people of Israel also have application to Christians).  As an example, one my father actually suggested to me many years ago, God may have allowed the Nazis to come to power in Germany in order to punish the Jewish people in Europe, but the Holocaust was them going far beyond the punishment God intended.  The Holocaust was evil which impacted more than the Jewish people, but it did result in the establishment of the modern state of Israel.  Even if God allowed the Nazis to rise to power in order to punish the Jewish people (something I am not convinced is the case), it does not mean that the Jewish people are to blame for the Holocaust.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.