The Change of Clothes

He has never been to a hearing and he has been getting ready for one for eleven years.

That is the truest description of what goes on in Yakov, and it took him a long time to be able to say it. There is a case. He has assembled it, and he has assembled the defense too, and the defense is not good, which he knows, because he has been over it more times than any barrister would over a real one.

Nothing is scheduled. That is the strange part. There is no date, nobody has notified him of anything, and it has been eleven years. But he is a man who understands process, and he understands that a matter of this kind does not simply evaporate, and so he waits, and he prepares, and he does not consider himself entitled to move on until the thing has been properly heard.

Which means, practically speaking, that he has been living in the clothes he did it in.

Not literally, though there is a shirt he threw away and has thought about since. In every other sense: he presents himself to God every day as the man in the middle of that morning. That is his standing posture. He does not go to God as a man who did a thing eleven years ago. He goes as a man who is doing it, still, in an ongoing present, waiting for somebody to call the case.

If you have been waiting for a hearing that nobody has scheduled, then you should be shown a courtroom scene that is in Scripture, because it is exactly this and it has a surprise in it. And the surprise is not the verdict. It is the timing of the clothes.

The scene, and where the accuser is standing

Zechariah is shown a vision. Joshua the high priest is standing before the angel of the LORD, and the adversary is standing at his right hand to accuse him. And the text says, plainly, without any attempt to soften it: Now Joshua was clothed with filthy garments, and stood before the angel.

So the picture is a man in the worst possible state, in the presence of God, with an accuser positioned at his right hand, which was the accuser's legal position.

Now the first surprise. The LORD does not turn to Joshua and ask him to respond to the charge. He turns to the accuser and rebukes him, and He does it before a word of defense is offered. Joshua does not speak once in the entire scene. Not one word.

And the second surprise, which is the verse.

And he answered and spake unto those that stood before him, saying, Take away the filthy garments from him. And unto him he said, Behold, I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe thee with change of raiment.Zechariah 3:4

Take away the filthy garments from him. Spoken to the attendants, about him, not to him. He is not instructed to change. He is changed.

You are being unclothed and reclothed by somebody else, and it is already the order that was given, and the defendant was never asked to say anything. I am not offering a picture in place of a hearing. It is written in Zechariah 3:4, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a courtroom scene from a vision and puts it in front of a man who has been preparing for eleven years.

The hearing is over and he was not called

And here is what Yakov needs, because he is a process man and a process man cannot be soothed, only informed.

The reason nothing has been scheduled is not that the matter was overlooked. It is that the matter was concluded.

That is a difficult thing for a man like him to accept because he was not in the room and did not participate, and everything in him says a hearing you were not present at cannot be binding. But this is not that kind of proceeding. The whole point of the scene in Zechariah is that the defendant contributes nothing: the accuser is silenced by somebody else, the garments are removed by somebody else, the iniquity is caused to pass by somebody else, and the new clothing is given.

He has been preparing a defense for a case that was answered by a substitute.

You are dressed in what He put on you, and it is already His doing, and the case you were preparing for was answered by somebody who did not need your notes. Scripture says behold, I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and the Holy Spirit is the one who informs a man that a proceeding he was braced for has concluded.

What it means to stop wearing it

And there is a practical difficulty here that deserves naming, because Yakov will hit it by Thursday.

If a man has been in the same clothes for eleven years, he does not know how to be in different ones. The filthy garments have become, in a strange way, his form of honesty. To put on a change of raiment feels like pretending, or like arrogance, or like a man walking around dressed as somebody he is not.

That feeling is real and it is not an argument.

Because look at who is speaking in that verse. It is not Joshua saying, I think I am probably all right now. It is the LORD saying, take these off him, I have caused his iniquity to pass, I will clothe him. A man wearing what God has put on him is not pretending. He is dressed.

You are wearing what He gave you, and it is already given, and a man in the clothes God assigned him is the only honestly dressed man in the room. It is written that I will clothe thee with change of raiment, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a man into the coat that was handed to him.