Day 342

Zechariah 5:1-8:23, Jude 1-25, Psalm 139:17-24

Sometimes I write something and then a couple of days later I read another passage which makes me wonder whether I wrote the right thing. Here I am saying that fasting might be a good thing every now and again, and then I go and read in Zechariah that God doesn’t want fasting, he wants justice and mercy!

First thing to note is that we have heard this before and it reiterates what I was saying about love. It is repeated so much because it is one of God’s major themes for our lives. He wants us to know his love, he wants us to love others and he wants us to live our lives with justice and mercy. We should never think “I have already read that, I’ll skip this bit”, in fact the more we read it, the more we should do it.

Returning to the fasting, it is funny that the person who challenged me to fast is someone who is caught up in doing justice and mercy overseas. What God is saying here, as before, is that he does not want fasting for the sake of it, because it has become a habit (because it is the 5th month for example), he wants it so that we focus on him, and if we are focusing on God in our lives then we should be living in just and merciful ways.

Over the course of this year it seems as though God has said “love others” a lot. He has certainly said that more than “do justice and mercy” and he has said both of these seemingly more than any other single instruction. So let us love others, let us be just and merciful and only then let us get on with the rest (which might just include the occasional fast).