Where is Your Heart?
Zechariah 7:1-7

Zechariah, through divine inspiration, has taken us on quite a journey—up the chiastic mountain, across the summit of God’s revelation, and back down the other side. Along the way, we have learned profound truths about God’s character and His covenant love. But we have also learned about the BRANCH—the Son of David, the Messiah, our High Priest and King—who mediates the Father’s goodness and steadfast love toward us. And in these visions, we have encountered the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Godhead, whom the Messiah sends to empower His people to live as God’s temple, His Church on earth.

Now we arrive at the second major division of the book of Zechariah. Many scholars believe these words were spoken several years after the night visions of chapters 1–6. The narrative marks this shift with a very specific timestamp:

“Now in the fourth year of King Darius it came to pass that the word of the LORD came to Zechariah on the fourth day of the ninth month, Chislev, when the people sent Sherezer, with Regem-Melech and his men, to the house of God, to pray before the LORD, and to ask the priests who were in the house of the LORD of hosts, and the prophets, saying, ‘Should I weep in the fifth month and fast as I have done for so many years?’”
—Zechariah 7:1–3

Too often, the people of God drift from the heart of God while still maintaining the appearance of devotion. Ritual remains. Schedules remain. Traditions remain. But the living pulse of obedience, mercy, righteousness, and compassion slowly fades. This is the prophetic concern running through Zechariah 7—a chapter in which God confronts a returned remnant with a question that pierces through every generation: Will your worship be shaped by My heart, or by your habits?

The exiles have returned from Babylon. The temple is rising again. The fasts commemorating Jerusalem’s destruction have been observed for seventy years. And now a delegation arrives to ask a simple question: Should we keep fasting?

But rather than give a simple yes or no, God answers by exposing a deeper issue: the problem was never the fasting—it was the heart behind it.

Zechariah does not want us to miss the timing. He anchors this message in the fourth year of King Darius, and then adds an exact date: the fourth day of the ninth month, Chislev. This specificity is not accidental. Such exact dating in prophetic literature usually signals that the moment itself—its history, its context, its memory—matters deeply for understanding the message that follows.

On our calendar, this corresponds to approximately December 7, 518 BCE. On this date, a delegation arrived in Jerusalem, sent to seek guidance from the priests and prophets concerning a long-standing religious practice:
Should the people continue fasting in the fifth month as they had done for decades during the exile?

Before we address their question, there is an important detail that some translations make clearer than others.

In Zechariah 7:2, the King James and New King James Versions render the opening phrase simply as, “the people sent.” But the NIV, ESV, and NET preserve a key piece of information: the place from which the delegation was sent.

This matters because the identity of the senders and their location sheds light on:

• why they are asking the question,
• how the priests and prophets should interpret it, and
• what God is about to reveal about the nature of true worship.

Understanding the origin of the delegation clarifies the underlying issue behind their inquiry—whether their hearts have ever truly returned to the Lord. The delegation did not arrive from an obscure village. They came from Bethel, a place whose very name means “House of God.” This is the location where Jacob saw the heavenly ladder and heard God reaffirm His covenant promises (Genesis 28). Bethel was once a major center of authentic worship—a place where heaven and earth seemed to touch.

But over time, Bethel’s story became more complicated and tragic. It was later the site of Jeroboam’s golden calf, where false worship mixed with the memory of true worship. Bethel had become symbolic of Israel’s divided heart—still religious, still using God’s vocabulary, but not always walking in God’s ways.

It is from this spiritually conflicted place that the delegation now comes. The people of this former religious center send messengers to Jerusalem to seek guidance from the priests and prophets. Their question is simple on the surface but loaded with deeper meaning:

“Should we continue to weep and fast in the fifth month, as we have done for so many years?”

The spokesman’s words emphasize the long duration: “I have done this for so many years.”

This had been their tradition—decades of ritual fasting during the exile. And now that the temple is being rebuilt and worship restored, they wonder:

• Does this ritual still matter?
• Does God still require it?
• Should we keep doing what we’ve always done?

Zechariah does not need to explain this practice to his audience; they already know exactly what is being asked. But we do not. And that means we must pause long enough to ask the obvious and necessary question: “Why were they weeping and fasting in the fifth month?”

This question will lead directly into God’s profound response about the nature of true worship—not ritual for ritual’s sake, not external practices devoid of heart, but a return to covenant faithfulness, mercy, and justice.

This practice of weeping and fasting in the fifth month began after a traumatic moment in Judah’s history: August 14, 586 BCE—the day the Babylonians destroyed Solomon’s Temple to the ground. That day did more than destroy a building; it shattered the center of Israel’s identity. The Temple was the visible sign of God’s dwelling among His people. Its destruction left a wound so deep that the exiles marked it annually with a day of mourning, fasting, and lament.

For nearly seventy years, through captivity and displacement, this fifth-month fast became a ritualized expression of grief. It reminded each generation of the consequences of covenant unfaithfulness and of the pain of losing the house where God had placed His name.

And now, in Zechariah’s day, everything has changed. The exile has ended. The altar has been rebuilt. The sacrifices have resumed. And the Temple itself—once a heap of rubble—is rising again stone by stone.

So the delegation from Bethel arrives in Jerusalem with a sincere and understandable question:

“Since the Temple is being rebuilt, do we still need to keep weeping and fasting in the fifth month? Do we still commemorate the destruction of the Temple now that the Temple is being restored?”

On the surface, it sounds like a simple liturgical question. But in reality, it is a spiritual diagnostic question—the kind of question that reveals the true condition of the heart.

Are they seeking God’s will, or simply seeking permission to discontinue a ritual? Do they long for God Himself, or only for the end of religious burdens?

God’s response through Zechariah will expose the difference. Because the real issue is not the fast itself, but why they fasted—and whether their hearts have genuinely returned to the Lord who restored them.

Let’s start at the beginning: How did the practice of “fasting” begin in Israel?
We have already discovered that the people are fasting in the fifth month to commemorate the destruction of Solomon’s Temple. But this immediately raises a deeper question: Are they fasting because of their love for God, or because of the loss of the building? Everything about their inquiry suggests the latter. Their fast centers not on devotion to God, but on grief over losing the temple—a grief that, while understandable, does not necessarily reflect a heart turned toward the Lord.

Yet this does not answer the larger question: Where did fasting itself originate in Israel’s worship life?

What is striking is that the first mention of the practice does not use the word “fast” at all—it uses the word “afflict.” This occurs in Leviticus 16, the foundational chapter describing the Day of Atonement.

“This shall be a statute forever for you: In the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, you shall afflict your souls, and do no work at all… For on that day the priest shall make atonement for you, to cleanse you… It is a sabbath of solemn rest for you, and you shall afflict your souls.”
—Leviticus 16:29–31

The emphasis is unmistakable: on the Day of Atonement, Israel was commanded to “afflict” their souls.

But what does “afflict” mean?

The Torah: A Modern Commentary explains that on Yom Kippur a person refrains from eating, drinking, washing, anointing with oil, marital relations, and even wearing leather sandals. Why? Because every one of these activities is a gift from God. To withhold them for a day is to confess that our pleasure, our sustenance, our comfort, and even our dignity come from the gracious hand of the Lord.
Affliction, in this context, is not about punishing ourselves; it is about recognizing total dependence upon God for life and forgiveness.

From this foundation, fasting in Israel developed further. It arose spontaneously in moments of crisis—war, famine, national danger, or impending judgment. Israel fasted when they needed divine intervention, or when they mourned national calamities—such as the destruction of the temple in 586 BCE. That is the occasion behind the delegation’s question to Zechariah:

“Now that the temple is being rebuilt, do we still continue the fifth-month fast that commemorates its destruction?”

This is an understandable question. But it is also revealing. Because outside of the Day of Atonement, there is no other divine command to fast. Every other fast in Scripture grows out of the people’s experience—moments of crisis, mourning, or repentance. So the Lord is about to ask them the most important question of all:

Was your fasting ever about Me?
Or was it merely about your circumstances?

And that is where Zechariah will lead them next.

It is true that in the appeasement theology of the ancient Near East, fasting and self-affliction were common practices. Pagan worshipers often deprived themselves in order to manipulate their gods—to secure favor, to avert disaster, or to persuade the deity to act on their behalf. In these religious systems, suffering was a kind of currency. The more you afflicted yourself, the more likely the god was to respond.

And tragically, this mindset began to creep into Israel’s worship whenever the nation drifted from the Lord. As Israel adopted pagan customs, some began to treat fasting not as an expression of humility and dependence on Yahweh, but as a technique—an attempt to get God’s attention, to earn His favor, or to demonstrate a level of outward piety that masked an inwardly unchanged heart.

The prophets repeatedly confront this distortion:

• Isaiah 58 rebukes a fast that seeks to impress God while continuing injustice.
• Jeremiah condemns outward acts of devotion that are disconnected from obedience.
• Zechariah, in our passage, exposes a fast rooted not in love for God but in nostalgia, ritual habit, or misplaced grief.

Whenever Israel adopted a pagan view of affliction—treating fasting as a bargaining chip—it hollowed out the very heart of worship. The external practice remained, but the covenant relationship was absent.

The Lord is about to make this painfully clear. In the divine response that follows, God will show that true fasting is not a ritual of appeasement but a posture of repentance; not an act of manipulating God but an act of returning to Him with a whole heart.

And that is precisely the question confronting the delegation in Zechariah’s day:
Have they truly returned to the Lord? Or have they merely preserved a religious custom without the covenant loyalty it was intended to express?

Here comes God’s response through Zechariah. We see this in verses 4-7.

“Then the word of the LORD of hosts came to me, saying, ‘Say to all the people of the land, and to the priests: “When you fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh months during those seventy years, did you really fast for Me – for Me? When you eat and when you drink, do you not eat and drink for yourselves? Should you not have obeyed the words which the LORD proclaimed through the former prophets when Jerusalem and the cities around it were inhabited and prosperous, and the South and the Lowland were inhabited?”’”

We will later see that Zechariah mentions two other fast months in addition to the fifth month: the fast of the fourth month and the fast of the tenth month (Zechariah 8:18–19). Interestingly, Zechariah never specifies the exact days on which these fasts were observed, nor does he spell out the commemorative events behind them. Yet the people of Judah understood precisely what they were mourning.

Many scholars note that all four fasts correspond to the tragic events surrounding the Babylonian siege and destruction of Judah between 588–586 BCE:

• Tenth Month: when Nebuchadnezzar’s armies laid siege to Jerusalem (2 Kings 25:1).
• Fourth Month: when the walls of Jerusalem were breached (Jer. 39:2).
• Fifth Month: when Solomon’s Temple was burned (2 Kings 25:8–9).
• Seventh Month: when Gedaliah, the governor appointed by Babylon, was assassinated, plunging the remnant into chaos (Jer. 41).

These fasts had become deeply embedded in Israel’s worship life. Yet the exile was now over. The temple was being rebuilt. God was restoring His people. And the delegation from Bethel wanted to know: “Should we continue to fast? Or has that season ended?”

What is striking is that the Lord does not restrict His answer to the delegation alone. The message is to be proclaimed throughout all Judah (Zech. 7:7). This is not a private ruling; it is a spiritual reckoning for the entire covenant community.

And what does God ask? He asks why they fasted. “Did you really fast for Me?” “Or were you fasting for yourselves?”

In other words: Was this an act of devotion? Or an act of tradition? Was it worship? Or was it self-focus wrapped in religious clothing?

At the heart of the matter lies a truth that Scripture always insists upon: Fasting is not valuable because it is done; it is valuable because of why it is done.

A true fast is an outward expression of an inward posture—a heart humbled before God, aware of its dependence on Him for life, forgiveness, restoration, and hope. It is a physical way of confessing, “Lord, You alone sustain me.”

But a fast without a heart turned toward God is no fast at all. It is only hunger. It is a ritual without relationship. It is mourning without repentance. And through Zechariah, God is preparing to expose precisely this difference. The question of the fast becomes a question of the soul—a test of whether the people’s return from exile has also been a return of their hearts to Yahweh.

Back to Zechariah: Go Deeper

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