Daily Manna · Day 232 · August 20
Not by Might
“Then he answered and spake unto me, saying, This is the word of the LORD unto Zerubbabel, saying, Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts.”
Four verses after today's verse, God asks, "For who hath despised the day of small things?" It was a day of small things, so meet the man God is speaking to.
Zerubbabel was the grandson of Jehoiachin, a king of Judah who had been carried away to Babylon. Zerubbabel came back from that exile as governor of Judah, a small province that was a fraction of what his family had once ruled. He had laid the foundation of a new temple about seventeen years earlier, and then the work stopped. Neighbours opposed it, and an order came to halt the building. There may have been another reason too. When the foundation was laid, the old men who remembered Solomon's temple "wept with a loud voice," because they could see how small the new one would be. So he had a small, tired, discouraged crew and little money, and the ruins of the first temple were still lying around him.
God gave the prophet Zechariah a vision for that man. He saw a golden lampstand with two olive trees beside it, and the oil flowed into the lamps by itself, with nobody carrying a jar. The meaning is given in one sentence: "Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts."
Notice that the vision does not tell Zerubbabel to stop working, and he does not stop. The same chapter says, "The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house; his hands shall also finish it." The Hebrew word for might can mean an army, and the word for power means a person's own strength. God is telling Zerubbabel where the supply comes from.
None of this gave anyone permission to sit down. The work went on, with the same small crew in the same ruined city, for about four more years of ordinary labour, until the house was finished "in the sixth year of the reign of Darius the king." What changed was where the oil came from, and it had never been coming from the size of the crew.
If your work looks small today, do not despise it. The Spirit who kept that lamp burning still supplies the people God sends, and He finishes His work through hands like yours.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 232 is How Shall They Hear (Romans 10:17).