Zechariah 7:5
Speak unto all the people of the land, and to the priests, saying, When ye fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh month, even those seventy years, did ye at all fast unto me, even to me? Speak unto all the people of the land, and to the priests, saying, When ye fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh month, even those seventy years, did ye at all fast unto me, even to me?
The fasting and mourning in the fifth and seventh months were observances kept throughout the seventy years of exile. The question is addressed to all the people of the land and to the priests, pressing whether their fasting was at all directed to God, even to Him. The implied answer is that those fasts were not offered to God at all but were done for themselves.
The question exposes religious observance separated from obedience, and calls for examination of whether religious acts are truly for God rather than merely outward. Their conduct rejected His will in violation of His law. They lived selfishly while neglecting the work He had appointed them to do. Even their eating and drinking was for themselves and not for God.
Instead of mere ritual, what is required is heeding what the Lord proclaimed through the former prophets when Jerusalem was inhabited and prosperous, with the surrounding cities and the south and the plain settled: to carry out true judgment, show mercy and compassion to one another, refuse to oppress the widow, the fatherless, the stranger and the poor, and harbor no evil against a brother in the heart. Refusing to listen by shrugging the shoulder away, stopping the ears, and hardening the heart like adamant stone against the law and the words sent by His Spirit through the former prophets brings great wrath, so that as He called and they would not hear, they will call and He will not hear, and He will scatter them with a whirlwind among unknown nations, leaving the pleasant land desolate.