Zechariah Week 5
OUTLINE -
There is a brief introduction (vs. 1-6)
There are 8 visions followed by a sign-act (chs. 1-6)
Story of Fasting and Feasting (7-8)
Images of Messiah’s Kingdom (9-14)
2 of them (9-11, 12-14)
We are on week 5 of Zechariah. We started off with some visions in the beginning of the book, then there was a story about a question the people asked God and God’s response to their question. Now we’re back into what is more typical of prophetic writings - oracles. And in Zechariah it particularly deals with the coming Messiah and so we see several things related to Jesus here. Last week we saw some rather specific prophecies that were repeated in the book of Matthew. One was concerning the king coming in riding on a donkey, which we saw in Jesus entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. The other was concerning the shepherd only being valued at 30 pieces of silver, which we saw in Jesus being sold for that exact price by Jesus. We’ll see some more interesting things today.
12:1-9
If we were naming this section, it would be called something like Jerusalem vs. the World. You’ll notice that there a few words/phrases that show up repeatedly. The first is Jerusalem and Judah. These two words show up 15 times here. That seems pretty significant. If you want to highlight those two words somehow you can, but it’s a bunch so I’m not going to walk us through it.
Also what we see repeated here over and over is the people and the nations. Let’s look at vs 2-4. We see in verse 2 “the surrounding peoples”. In verse 3 we see “all the peoples” and “all the nations”. In verse 4 we see “the peoples” If we jumped down to verse 6 we see “all the surrounding peoples” and finally the last one is in verse 9 “all the nations”
Before we explain this, there’s one last repeated phrase here that’s actually going to show up all throughout these last 3 chapters. It’s a phrase that we always put a box around! “On that day”. This last portion of Zechariah is very concerned with “on that day” which, as we know from our studies in the rest of the prophets, refers to the Day of the Lord.
So with just those three repeated phrases we can have a good grasp of what this section is about. It’s God’s people in Jerusalem against all of the other nations that are battling them on the day of the Lord. Some future day. (As a reminder the Day of the Lord isn’t necessarily a single 24 hour day, but stands for a period of time)
The description of this battle is an absolute massacre. Jerusalem and Judah are able to completely crush their enemies. In verse 4-5, the enemies' horses are blinded. The riders are all thrown into madness. And look at that last line in verse 5 - The inhabitants of Jerusalem have strength through the LORD of hosts, their God. - underline that. This isn’t a simple army vs army battle. It’s a man vs. God battle.
Verse 6 describes it as a battle of fire vs sheaves. The fire is going to win rather heartily
Verse 8 is pretty creative and says that even the weakest of all the people will be as strong as David, and the others will be as strong as God himself.
The closing line wraps it up with “I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem”. Underline that one.
12:10-14
It seems as if the tone of the passage shifts completely from one of victory to one of mourning. They had just been defeating all of their enemies with the help of the Lord, but now they find themselves all mourning. What happened?
To help us understand we're going to consider a similar passage we came across wayyy back in the book of Joel. Joel was the first book we studied and it really introduced the Day of the Lord imagery. Here’s what it said in Joel 2:28-29:
“And it shall come to pass afterward,
that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh;
your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
your old men shall dream dreams,
and your young men shall see visions.
Even on the male and female servants
in those days I will pour out my Spirit.
So here in our passage we see on the Day of the Lord, God will pour his spirit out and in Joel it said on the Day of the Lord, God will pour his Spirit out. That’s a good parallel. And how did the people respond to the Spirit in Joel?
“And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved” - Joel 2:32
So in Joel the result of receiving the Spirit caused them to cry out to God for salvation. They are crying out in repentance to be saved. Now back to Zechariah, verse 10 says - “And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy,”
The people here respond with pleas for mercy. They are also repenting. It’s the same response as in Joel. They’re calling on the name of the Lord.
Now the rest of the verse is pretty fascinating. READ VS 10B.
They are piercing someone and then they are mourning for that person. What does it mean that they pierced him? It’s not his ears that they’re piercing but it’s a reference to stabbing, that’s how this word is used elsewhere in the Bible.
But who did they pierce? It’s a bit confusing here because God says “when they look on me” and then “on him whom they have pierced”. Is God the one being pierced here or is it someone else? It does sound like it’s God himself being pierced, but at the same time God refers to himself in the third person. Some commentators have seen this as a reference to the trinity. As God he says, I am being pierced, but as the Father he says it’s not me, but the Son who will be pierced.
The Gospel of John picks up this exact prophecy and says it refers to Jesus in John 19 it says:
But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water… And again another Scripture says, “They will look on him whom they have pierced.”
So on the Day of the Lord, Jesus is pierced and killed. God’s Spirit is poured out on his people and they respond with pleas for mercy or as we see in the rest of this passage, with mourning. Mourning for a firstborn one and only son.
Next it mentions several families and their wives and everyone is mourning by themselves. This is a bit confusing, but it seems to suggest that everyone will be repenting individually and calling out for salvation individually. It won’t be a situation where the whole nation is collectively repenting at once. Each person has to call on the name of the Lord individually.
13:1-6
Here we see several more “on that day” phrases. We can box each of those. \
We won’t spend much time in this section, but basically God is going to cleanse the land of all idol worship. It will be merciless. Parents will kill their own children who are false prophets worshipping idols.
As a result all of the false prophets will go into hiding. They’re not going to openly dress as prophets anymore, but they’ll deny being prophets at all to escape death. That last verse references seeing wounds on their back and being suspicious. Some of the ancient false prophets would cut themselves as part of their ritual worship - you may remember that when Elijah was facing the prophets of Baal they were cutting themselves. So someone sees the false prophets wounds on his back and his suspicious, but he makes up a story.
13:7-9
If you remember from last week, Zechariah had taken the role of a shepherd to watch over sheep and the sheep had rejected him. We talked about how Israel needed a good Shepherd to watch over them, but they rejected the shepherd when he showed up.
Here we see that it’s God’s plan that the shepherd be struck by the sword or we could say he would be pierced like the previous passage.
Who is this good shepherd? God calls him “my shepherd” so he’s the one God has chosen and also he’s “the man who stands next to me”. There’s something here about the shepherd having equal authority to God. He’s next to him in his throne room.
Jesus later would tell us that this prophecy is also about him. Speaking to his disciples at the Last Supper in Matthew 26:31 Jesus says:
Then Jesus said to them, “You will all fall away because of me this night. For it is written, ‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.’
All of the shepherd’s sheep will experience persecution. Many will be killed and the rest will go through a refining fire.
This is important for Christians to realize. There’s no such thing as following Jesus and not suffering for it. If our good shepherd suffered then we should anticipate suffering as well. It’s suffering that refines us. And it shouldn’t surprise that following him results in difficulty and death.
14:1-5
This is a tricky one. If you remember earlier, Jerusalem was fighting a battle and the enemies didn’t stand a chance. They were all destroyed. But now we see Jerusalem experiencing significant defeat before the Lord shows up.
Is this a different battle? It this an alternative description of the same battle? I don’t know.
What we do know is that the Lord shows up at the Mt of Olives which is directly East of the temple mount and he splits it in half - a northern half and a southern half. This allows the people to escape from Jerusalem.
I’m not going to try to work out the specifics of which battle is this and when and will Jesus literally split a mountain in half? I’m not sure. But I think the point of all of this is easy to discern.
Don’t forget when you’re reading difficult scripture like this - “What is God trying to communicate to the people that this is originally written to?” That part again is clear. He’s telling them that though you are my people, though I love you and I will fight for you, you will still go through horrible desperate times of persecution. Just don’t forget on the other side of those will always be the Lord offering deliverance.
You can imagine the people who heard Zechariah’s words, that the next time an army threatened their land they were able to have confidence regardless of frightening the enemy was. They may attack us. They may persecute us. But there will always be deliverance on the other side.
14:6-11
Verses 6-7 here are a bit cryptic, but what he’s getting at is that in the end the regular intervals of time will be done away with. There will no longer be typical patterns of light and darkness that mark off the days. There will no longer be typical patterns of cold and warm to mark off the annual seasons. Rather there will be perpetual light. This is of course what we see described in Revelation 21:23-25 at the end of time.
“And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. 24 By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, 25 and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there.”
You’ll notice that verse 8 references living waters. Now of course we immediately think of living water as being associated with Jesus. He said to the woman at the well, I’ll give you living water. But living water isn’t necessarily a spiritual term. It just refers to water that is moving. So a flowing river would be living water. A pond or a cistern would not be.
The living waters here will flow out of Jerusalem in both directions to the east into the Dead Sea and to the west into the Mediterranean Sea. This image of a river coming from God’s city shows up multiple times in the Bible. In the book of Ezekiel there’s water that flows straight out of the temple and waters the earth. And in Revelation 22 we see this same river flowing right out from the throne of God.
The point here being that God will provide light for you. God will provide water for you. You will be safe for all eternity. All of the regular predictable problems they faced previously like drought, winter, and darkness would all be done away with. This chapter is basically describing heaven before John did it in Revelation.
14:12-15
This is pretty graphic and pretty horrible. But there’s always a distinction throughout the whole Bible. Two groups and two groups only. There are God’s people who experience everlasting blessing and there are God’s enemies who wage war against him and experience everlasting torment.
There’s not much more to say here other than you want to be one of those people who repents and weeps and calls out to God, because if you don’t and you continue to battle against the Lord’s authority and you refuse to submit to him, the day comes when he will bring you into submission and there is no avoiding it
14:16-21
Keep in mind, that God doesn’t simply destroy everyone who’s not Jewish. He doesn’t just destroy all of the Gentiles. He only defeats those who refuse to submit to him and who battle against him. So here we see people from outside of Jerusalem that are still alive. These Gentiles are called to come to the city also to worship in the feasts.
As you can tell this section of Zechariah has a lot of stuff that is difficult to understand. Here we have Gentile nations coming to worship God, but sometimes they don’t and they’re punished. I don’t really know what to make of that.
But the last few verses help to clarify a little bit. They talk about everyday items that are all considered holy. Things like the little bells you put on your horse. Or the pots you use to cook food in your house. The absolute most mundane items you can think of. Each of them in that day will be Holy to the Lord.
What he’s describing is the obliteration of any secular/sacred divides. In the temple it was very clear - these holy things are separated for use by God - everything else is just a common item that’s not worthy to be used by God.
But now every aspect of their life is sacred to God. I think that’s what it was getting at in the previous verses about coming for the festivals. There will be no people who choose to “opt out” of worshipping God. All of life, every day and in every place, all things will be sacred and set apart for God.
This is where we’re going as Christians. One day we will live in a place where everything you can imagine is sacred and set apart as holy. Is that future attractive to you? Are you looking forward to a time when you will never be able to set aside pursuing Christ with your actions?
The challenge for us is to start orienting our lives towards this kind of world. Do we have time in our day that is just for me? Do we have places we go that are secular and where Christ isn’t a part of it? Do we have a strong secular/sacred divide in our lives? Most of us do. Sunday morning between 11 and 12 - that time is holy to the Lord. But when I’m at work, when I’m resting in the evenings, those times are for me. This church building, this one is holy to the Lord, but my home is just for me. I’m not using it for God’s sake.
The day comes when each of us dedicates every aspect of our lives and possessions to God. I’m looking forward to that day and I’m working to see it accomplished even now in my life.
This concludes Zechariah which is called by some as the prophet of hope. We have so much to look forward to because we have a God who fights for us.