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Zechariah - The Prophet Who Saw the Messiah 500 Years Early · truthunedited

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Speaker 1: There was a morning in spring on the eastern slope
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Speaker 1: outside Jerusalem, when a crowd tore branches from the trees
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Speaker 1: and threw their cloaks across the road. A man was
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Speaker 1: riding toward the city gate. He was not riding a
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Speaker 1: war horse the way conquerors came. He was riding a
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Speaker 1: young donkey, an unbroken colt, and the people who watched
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Speaker 1: him pass were shouting as if a king had finally arrived.
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Speaker 1: Most of them could not have told you why that
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Speaker 1: animal mattered. They did not know they were standing inside
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Speaker 1: the closing line of a prophecy. The words had been
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Speaker 1: written down more than 500 years earlier by a man
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Speaker 1: almost no one in that crowd could have named in
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Speaker 1: a city that at the time had been little more
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Speaker 1: than broken stone and ash. He had written this, Rejoice greatly,
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Speaker 1: daughter Zion. Shout, daughter Jerusalem. See, your king comes to you,
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Speaker 1: righteous and victorious, lowly, and riding on a donkey, on
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Speaker 1: a colt, the foal of a donkey. That sentence sits
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Speaker 1: in the book of Zechariah, chapter 9, verse 9. The
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Speaker 1: man on the donkey was fulfilling it to the letter.
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Speaker 1: And to understand how a line written in the ruins
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Speaker 1: of one century could land with such precision in another.
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Speaker 1: We have to go back to where Zechariah actually stood
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Speaker 1: when he first spoke, because he did not begin in triumph.
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Speaker 1: He began in rubble. Picture Jerusalem near the end of
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Speaker 1: the 6th century before Christ. For 70 years, the city
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Speaker 1: had been a ghost. In 586 BC, the armies of
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Speaker 1: Babylon had broken its walls, burned the temple that Solomon
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Speaker 1: had built, and marched the leading families east into exile
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Speaker 1: beside the rivers of Babylon. What remained behind was a
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Speaker 1: depopulated hill country, a scatter of villages, a capital reduced
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Speaker 1: to charred foundations. The great house of God, the center
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Speaker 1: of the nation's entire identity, was gone. The gold was
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Speaker 1: carried off, the altar cold, the courts empty. An entire
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Speaker 1: generation grew up in a foreign empire, singing about a
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Speaker 1: homeland they had never seen, asking the question recorded in
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Speaker 1: the Psalms, How do you sing the Lord's song in
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Speaker 1: a strange land? Then the political map of the world changed. Babylon,
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Speaker 1: which had seemed unbreakable, fell in a single night to
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Speaker 1: the rising power of Persia, and the Persian king who
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Speaker 1: took the city had a different policy toward conquered peoples
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Speaker 1: than the Babylonians had. where Babylon had deported populations to
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Speaker 1: break them, Persia preferred to send them home, rebuild their shrines,
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Speaker 1: and win their loyalty. We are not depending only on
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Speaker 1: the Bible for this. There is an object in the
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Speaker 1: British Museum, a barrel-shaped clay cylinder covered in cuneiform that
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Speaker 1: historians call the Cyrus Cylinder. On it, Cyrus presents himself
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Speaker 1: as a restorer of temples, and a returner of exiled
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Speaker 1: peoples to their own cities. The biblical record describes exactly
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Speaker 1: such a decree falling on the Jewish exiles. The opening
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Speaker 1: of the book of Ezra in chapter 1 verses 1
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Speaker 1: through 3 puts it this way. In the first year
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Speaker 1: of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to fulfill the
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Speaker 1: word of the Lord, spoken by Jeremiah, the Lord moved
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Speaker 1: the heart of Cyrus king of Persia to make a
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Speaker 1: proclamation throughout his realm, and also to put it in writing,
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Speaker 1: This is what Cyrus king of Persia says, The Lord,
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Speaker 1: the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms
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Speaker 1: of the earth, and he has appointed me to build
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Speaker 1: a temple for him. At Jerusalem in Judah, any of
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Speaker 1: his people among you may go up. In 538 BC,
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Speaker 1: the door home swung open. But coming home and rebuilding
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Speaker 1: home are two different things. The first wave of returnees
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Speaker 1: crossed hundreds of miles of desert road back to a
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Speaker 1: province the Persians called Yehud, a small, poor, lightly populated
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Speaker 1: district in the southern hill country. Archaeology of this period
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Speaker 1: paints a sober picture. This was not a thriving nation
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Speaker 1: reclaiming its glory. It was a thin population settling into
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Speaker 1: a damaged land, Surrounded by neighbors who had moved into
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Speaker 1: the vacuum during the exile and were not eager to
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Speaker 1: see Jerusalem strong again. The returnees had a decree, a memory,
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Speaker 1: and very little else. They did what their faith demanded first.
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Speaker 1: They cleared a space, set up an altar, and laid
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Speaker 1: the foundation of a new temple on the site of
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Speaker 1: the old one. And the Bible preserves one of the
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Speaker 1: most human scenes in all of Scripture from that day.
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Speaker 1: When the foundation was laid, the people reacted in two
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Speaker 1: completely different ways at the same time. The book of
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Speaker 1: Ezra in chapter 3 verses 12 and 13 records it.
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Speaker 1: But many of the older priests and Levites and family
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Speaker 1: heads who had seen the former temple wept aloud when
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Speaker 1: they saw the foundation of this temple being laid, while
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Speaker 1: many others shouted for joy. No one could distinguish the
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Speaker 1: sound of the shouts of joy from the sound of weeping,
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Speaker 1: because the people made so much noise, and the sound
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Speaker 1: was heard far away. The old men wept because they
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Speaker 1: remembered Solomon's temple, the gold and the grandeur. and they
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Speaker 1: could see that this replacement would be smaller, plainer, poorer.
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Speaker 1: The young shouted because to them any temple at all
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Speaker 1: was a miracle. Joy and grief in one unbroken roar
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Speaker 1: carried out across the hills, and then the work stopped.
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Speaker 1: This is the part that matters for understanding the prophet.
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Speaker 1: The momentum died. Local opposition, official complaints sent up the
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Speaker 1: Persian chain of command. Drought, discouragement, and the daily grind
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Speaker 1: of survival all pressed in. People turned from building God's
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Speaker 1: house to panelling their own. The foundation sat exposed to
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Speaker 1: the weather. Years passed. What had begun in tears and
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Speaker 1: shouting settled into silence. For roughly 16 years, the half-built
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Speaker 1: temple stood as a monument, not to faith, but to
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Speaker 1: a project abandoned. the generation that had marched home full
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Speaker 1: of hope, grew older, looking at a foundation going nowhere.
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Speaker 1: And the question underneath everything was whether the god of
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Speaker 1: their fathers was really still with them at all, or
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Speaker 1: whether the exile had been the end of the story
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Speaker 1: and this return just a quiet epilogue. It is into
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Speaker 1: exactly that mood, that flat grey exhaustion, that two voices
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Speaker 1: suddenly broke. In the same year, In the same small province,
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Speaker 1: two prophets stood up and started speaking. One was an
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Speaker 1: older man named Haggai, blunt and practical, who pointed at
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Speaker 1: the empty temple site and asked how the people could
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Speaker 1: live in finished houses while the house of God lay
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Speaker 1: in ruins. The other was far younger, a man from
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Speaker 1: a priestly family, and his message would turn out to
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Speaker 1: be the strangest and the longest-reaching prophetic voice of the
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Speaker 1: entire return. His visions would run far past the stalled
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Speaker 1: construction site in front of him. They would run past
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Speaker 1: the modest temple that was about to rise, past the
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Speaker 1: Persian Empire, past the Greeks who would come after Persia,
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Speaker 1: all the way to a spring morning and a man
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Speaker 1: on a donkey who had not yet been born and
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Speaker 1: would not be born for half a thousand years. His
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Speaker 1: name was Zechariah. And before he ever described that distant king,
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Speaker 1: he had to convince a defeated handful of people standing
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Speaker 1: in the rubble that their God had never left, and
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Speaker 1: that the small thing they were building mattered more than
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Speaker 1: they could possibly imagine. Prophets in the Hebrew Bible rarely
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Speaker 1: tell you the calendar date of their words. They speak
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Speaker 1: of the reign of a king, a famine, a war,
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Speaker 1: and leave the rest to memory. Zechariah is different, and
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Speaker 1: the difference is the first clue to the kind of
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Speaker 1: book this is. He dates himself with the precision of
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Speaker 1: an administrator filing a record. The very first verse in
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Speaker 1: chapter 1 verse 1 reads, In the eighth month of
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Speaker 1: the second year of Darius, the word of the Lord
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Speaker 1: came to the prophet Zechariah, son of Berechiah, the son
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Speaker 1: of Edo. There is no poetry in that opening. It
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Speaker 1: is a timestamp. And because the Persian kings are among
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Speaker 1: the best documented rulers of the ancient world, that time
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Speaker 1: stamp can be pinned to an actual month in an
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Speaker 1: actual year. The second year of Darius was 520 BC.
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Speaker 1: We can stand in that autumn with a confidence we
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Speaker 1: almost never have for the older prophets. It helps to
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Speaker 1: know who this Darius was, because the empire Zechariah lived
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Speaker 1: in had just been through an accident. earthquake. Cyrus, the
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Speaker 1: king who sent the exiles home, was dead. His son
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Speaker 1: had reigned and died. And in the scramble that followed,
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Speaker 1: the throne of the largest empire the world had yet
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Speaker 1: seen was seized by a young officer named Darius. who
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Speaker 1: took power in 522 BC and then spent the next
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Speaker 1: two years putting down rebellion after rebellion across the provinces.
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Speaker 1: From Babylon to Persia to Media, pretenders rose and were crushed.
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Speaker 1: The whole structure of the known world shook and, then
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Speaker 1: by about 520, went quiet again as Darius consolidated his grip.
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Speaker 1: We are not guessing at this. Darius left his own
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Speaker 1: account carved into a cliff face at Behistun, in what
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Speaker 1: is now western Iran, hundreds of feet above an old road.
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Speaker 1: The Behistun inscription is a massive trilingual relief in which
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Speaker 1: Darius lists the rebels he defeated, names the provinces, and
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Speaker 1: presents himself as the king. The gods had chosen to
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Speaker 1: restore order. It is one of the foundation documents of
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Speaker 1: ancient Near Eastern history, the text that allowed scholars to
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Speaker 1: finally crack the cuneiform script and it lets us reconstruct
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Speaker 1: almost year by year the political world humming in the
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Speaker 1: background while Zechariah began to speak a great empire had
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Speaker 1: convulsed and then settled to a small community in Jerusalem
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Speaker 1: watching from the far western edge it must have looked
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Speaker 1: as if the whole earth had been at rest after
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Speaker 1: a storm which is precisely the image that will open
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Speaker 1: Zechariah's first vision. Now place the man inside that moment.
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Speaker 1: His name itself was a sermon. Zechariah means the Lord remembers.
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Speaker 1: And to a people who had spent 70 years wondering
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Speaker 1: whether God had forgotten them, a prophet walking around with
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Speaker 1: that name was already a message before he opened his mouth.
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Speaker 1: He came from a priestly family. His grandfather, Iddo, is
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Speaker 1: listed among the heads of priestly houses who had returned
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Speaker 1: from Babylon, which tells us something important. Zechariah was not
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Speaker 1: an outsider shouting at the religious establishment, as some of
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Speaker 1: the older prophets had been. He was inside it. He
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Speaker 1: was a priest as well as a prophet, and that
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Speaker 1: double identity shapes everything that follows. His visions will be
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Speaker 1: saturated with priests' lampstands, altars, and the temples. because the
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Speaker 1: temple was his world. When he describes the cleansing of
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Speaker 1: a high priest or a golden lampstand, he is describing
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Speaker 1: the furniture of his own calling. He also did not
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Speaker 1: work alone. Two months before Zechariah's first dated word, an
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Speaker 1: older prophet named Haggai had already started hammering at the
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Speaker 1: same defeated community. demanding to know how they could live
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Speaker 1: in finished houses while the house of God sat unbuilt.
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Speaker 1: Haggai was direct, almost gruff, focused entirely on the practical
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Speaker 1: scandal of the abandoned construction site. Then Zechariah joined him,
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Speaker 1: younger and stranger, speaking in symbols and night visions. The
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Speaker 1: two of them worked the same field at the same time,
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Speaker 1: and the book of Ezra remembers them as a pair
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Speaker 1: In chapter 5, verses 1 and 2, the record says,
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Speaker 1: Now Haggai the prophet and Zechariah the prophet, a descendant
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Speaker 1: of Iddo, prophesied to the Jews in Judah and Jerusalem
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Speaker 1: in the name of the God of Israel, who was
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Speaker 1: over them. Then Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel and Joshua son
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Speaker 1: of Josedach set to work to rebuild the house of
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Speaker 1: God in Jerusalem. And the prophets of God were with
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Speaker 1: them helping them. Notice what that passage credits the prophets with.
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Speaker 1: It does not say they predicted the future. It says
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Speaker 1: they got the work moving again. The two names that
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Speaker 1: will dominate Zechariah's visions, Zerubbabel, the governor of the line
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Speaker 1: of David and Joshua, the high priest, are introduced here
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Speaker 1: as the two men who picked up their tools because
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Speaker 1: two prophets would not let them rest. But Zechariah's opening
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Speaker 1: message says was not about lumber and stone. Before any vision,
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Speaker 1: before any prediction, he delivered a warning rooted entirely in
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Speaker 1: the past. His first recorded oracle is a plea not
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Speaker 1: to repeat the mistake that had destroyed the previous generation.
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Speaker 1: In chapter 1, verses 2 through 6, he says, The
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Speaker 1: Lord was very angry with your ancestors. Therefore tell the people,
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Speaker 1: This is what the Lord Almighty says. Return to me,
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Speaker 1: declares the Lord Almighty, and I will return to you,
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Speaker 1: says the Lord Almighty. Do not be like your ancestors,
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Speaker 1: to whom the earlier prophets proclaimed. This is what the
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Speaker 1: Lord Almighty says. Turn from your evil ways and your
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Speaker 1: evil practices. But they would not listen or pay attention
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Speaker 1: to me. declares the Lord, Where are your ancestors now?
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Speaker 1: And the prophets, Do they live forever? But did not
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Speaker 1: my words and my decrees, which I commanded my servants
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Speaker 1: the prophets, overtake your ancestors? It is a sobering opening.
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Speaker 1: He is essentially telling the survivors, The generation before the
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Speaker 1: exile heard prophets too, and ignored them, and the words
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Speaker 1: came true anyway. and now both the people and the
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Speaker 1: prophets are dead in the ground. The only thing that
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Speaker 1: outlasted them was the word of God, which arrived exactly
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Speaker 1: as promised. That is the foundation he lays before he
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Speaker 1: lifts anyone's eyes to the future. The God who keeps
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Speaker 1: his threatening words also keeps his promising ones, a people
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Speaker 1: who learn that their history was not random, that the
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Speaker 1: catastrophe came because the word was real, are a people
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Speaker 1: who can be told something astonishing about what is still
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Speaker 1: to come, and be expected to take it seriously. And
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Speaker 1: his audience, to their credit, did take it seriously. The
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Speaker 1: passage ends with the people's response, recorded in verse 6.
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Speaker 1: Then they repented and said, The Lord Almighty has done
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Speaker 1: to us what our ways and practices deserve. just as
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Speaker 1: he had determined to do. That admission is the hinge
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Speaker 1: of the whole book. The community accepts that the exile
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Speaker 1: was deserved, and that God's word governs events. Only on
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Speaker 1: that ground can the vision stand. Because the moment they
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Speaker 1: agree that God's word reliably becomes history, every strange thing
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Speaker 1: Zechariah is about to describe stops being decorations. and becomes prophecy.
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Speaker 1: The lampstands and horsemen, the crowned priest, the rejected shepherd,
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Speaker 1: the pierced one, the king on the colt. He has
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Speaker 1: just established the rule by which all of it must
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Speaker 1: be read. The word of the Lord overtakes its hearers.
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Speaker 1: It does not return empty. And on a quiet night
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Speaker 1: in that same year, with the empire newly at rest
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Speaker 1: and the temple still half built, that word came to
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Speaker 1: Zechariah not in a sentence, but in a series of
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Speaker 1: pictures that would carry the people of God far beyond
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Speaker 1: anything they had asked to see. Everything Zechariah had said
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Speaker 1: so far could have come from any faithful preacher. Repent, return,
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Speaker 1: do not repeat your ancestors' deafness. But on a single night,
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Speaker 1: sometime around the start of 519 BC, the book turns
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Speaker 1: into something far rarer. In the space of one night,
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Speaker 1: Zechariah received a sequence of eight visions, one after another,
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Speaker 1: each introduced by an angel who walks him through the
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Speaker 1: imagery and explains what he is seeing. This is a
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Speaker 1: different mode of revelation from the older prophets. It is
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Speaker 1: closer to what scholars call apocalyptic, the symbolic dreamlike visionary
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Speaker 1: style that would later flower in books like Daniel and Revelation.
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Speaker 1: Zechariah stands near the headwaters of that stream. And the
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Speaker 1: first four visions, taken together, answer the one question the
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Speaker 1: discouraged community could not stop asking. Does God still see us?
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Speaker 1: And does he still intend to act? The first vision
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Speaker 1: opens in the dark. In chapter 1, verse 8, he reports,
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Speaker 1: During the night I had of visions. and there before
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Speaker 1: me was a man mounted on a red horse. He
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Speaker 1: was standing among the myrtle trees in a ravine. Behind
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Speaker 1: him were red, brown, and white horses. These are riders
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Speaker 1: sent out to patrol the earth, and when they return,
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Speaker 1: they make a report that would have sounded almost cruel
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Speaker 1: to a people long for upheaval. They say they have
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Speaker 1: gone throughout the earth and found the Eiu, Giu, whole
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Speaker 1: world at rest and in peace. Remember the political background.
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Speaker 1: Darius had just finished crushing every revolt and the empire
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Speaker 1: had gone calm. For Jerusalem, that calm was bad news.
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Speaker 1: The exiles had hoped that the shaking of the Eao
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Speaker 1: nations might mean their own restoration was breaking in, that
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Speaker 1: God was about to overthrow the powers and lift them up. Instead,
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Speaker 1: everything was quiet, and they were still small, still surrounded,
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Speaker 1: still waiting. So the angel asks the question on everyone's heart.
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Speaker 1: In verse 12, he cries out, Lord Almighty, how long
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Speaker 1: will you withhold mercy from Jerusalem and from the towns
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Speaker 1: of Judah, which you have been angry with these seventy years?
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Speaker 1: And the answer that comes back is the turning point
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Speaker 1: of the whole night. God is not indifferent. He is
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Speaker 1: jealous for Jerusalem and angry at the nations that push
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Speaker 1: the punishment too far. In verse 16, the verdict lands,
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Speaker 1: Therefore this is what the Lord says, I will return
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Speaker 1: to Jerusalem with mercy, and there my house will be rebuilt,
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Speaker 1: and the measuring line will be stretched out over Jerusalem.
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Speaker 1: The quiet was not abandonment, it was the held breath
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Speaker 1: before mercy. The second vision is brief and brutal in
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Speaker 1: its imagery. Zechariah looks up and sees four horns. The
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Speaker 1: angel tells him these are the powers that scattered Judah, Israel,
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Speaker 1: and Jerusalem, the empires and forces that had gored the
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Speaker 1: people of God and flung them to the winds. A
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Speaker 1: horn in Hebrew imagery is raw power, the strength of
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Speaker 1: a charging animal. Four of them stand for the totality
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Speaker 1: of the hostile world, pressure from every direction. But then
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Speaker 1: Zechariah sees four craftsmen, four workmen coming to throw the
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Speaker 1: horns down. The very powers that seemed unstoppable have their
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Speaker 1: own destroyers already appointed. It is a compact theology of
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Speaker 1: history in a single picture. No empire that strikes God's
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Speaker 1: people is the last word. For every horn, there is
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Speaker 1: already a craftsman walking toward it with a hammer. The
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Speaker 1: third vision is the one that would have made the
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Speaker 1: original audience catch their breath, because it describes something that,
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Speaker 1: on the ground, looked impossible. Zechariah sees a man going
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Speaker 1: out with a measuring line in his hand, heading off
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Speaker 1: to measure Jerusalem, to take the dimensions of the city
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Speaker 1: so it can be rebuilt and walled, and an angel
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Speaker 1: stops him. The city, he is told, cannot be measured
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Speaker 1: that way. In chapter 2, verses 4 and 5, the
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Speaker 1: word comes, Jerusalem will be a city without walls because
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Speaker 1: of the great number of people and animals in it,
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Speaker 1: and I myself will be a wall of fire around it,
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Speaker 1: declares the Lord, and I will be its glory within.
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Speaker 1: Sit with how strange that promise was. The real Jerusalem
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Speaker 1: of 519 BC was a fraction of its former size.
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Speaker 1: Archaeology of the Persian period province paints a picture of
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Speaker 1: a thin, struggling population. The city was underpopulated, its old
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Speaker 1: walls broken, its people few enough that decades later, Nehemiah
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Speaker 1: would have to draft settlers just to fill it. And
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Speaker 1: into that emptiness, the vision says, You will not be
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Speaker 1: able to wall this city because it will overflow with
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Speaker 1: people and livestock, and God himself will be the only
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Speaker 1: wall it needs, a wall of fire. The promise deliberately
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Speaker 1: outruns anything the returnees could imagine for themselves. It is
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Speaker 1: the gap between the small thing in front of them
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Speaker 1: and the enormous thing God intends, the same gap that
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Speaker 1: will eventually stretch all the way to a messiah. But
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Speaker 1: the fourth vision is the one that reaches forward in time,
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Speaker 1: and it is worth slowing down for. Here, the imagery
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Speaker 1: leaves the landscape and enters the courtroom of heaven. Zechariah
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Speaker 1: sees Joshua, the high priest, the real man who had
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Speaker 1: come back from Babylon, and was trying to lead worship
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Speaker 1: in a half-built temple, standing before the angel of the Lord.
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Speaker 1: And he is not standing comfortably. Beside him stands an accuser,
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Speaker 1: the Satan, the adversary, there to accuse him. Joshua is
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Speaker 1: dressed in filthy garments, which in the symbolism of the
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Speaker 1: vision means the guilt of the priest and the people
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Speaker 1: he represents. The accusation is real. The priesthood is compromised.
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Speaker 1: The nation has a history of failure. The charge is
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Speaker 1: not invented. And then God intervenes. In chapter 3, verse 2,
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Speaker 1: the rebuke comes. The Lord rebuke you, Satan. Is not
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Speaker 1: this man a burning stick snatched from the fire? Joshua
25:29
Speaker 1: is a brand pulled out of the flames, a survivor
25:32
Speaker 1: of the exile that should have consumed him. Then comes
25:36
Speaker 1: the act that the discouraged community most needed to see.
25:40
Speaker 1: The filthy clothes are stripped off and clean ones put on.
25:45
Speaker 1: In verse 4, the angel declares... See, I have taken
25:49
Speaker 1: away your sin, and I will put fine garments on you.
25:53
Speaker 1: A clean turban is placed on his head. The high priest,
25:58
Speaker 1: and through him the whole nation, is cleansed not by
26:02
Speaker 1: his own effort, but by divine decree, in a moment,
26:06
Speaker 1: by command. And it is right at this point, with
26:09
Speaker 1: the cleansed priest standing there in fresh garments, that the
26:13
Speaker 1: first unmistakable arrow is toward the distant future is fired.
26:19
Speaker 1: God says that Joshua and his fellow priests are more
26:23
Speaker 1: than themselves. In chapter 3, verse 8, the words come, Listen,
26:29
Speaker 1: high priest Joshua, you and your associates seated before you
26:34
Speaker 1: who are men symbolic of things to come. I am
26:38
Speaker 1: going to bring my servant, the branch, men symbolic of
26:43
Speaker 1: things to come. The priest in front of Zechariah is
26:47
Speaker 1: a sign pointing past himself to someone else and that
26:52
Speaker 1: someone is given a title, the branch, a word the
26:55
Speaker 1: earlier prophets had used for a coming king from the
26:59
Speaker 1: line of David, a fresh shoot growing out of a
27:02
Speaker 1: cut down royal tree. Then God adds a promise that
27:06
Speaker 1: no single day in the temple could fulfill. He speaks
27:10
Speaker 1: of a stone with seven eyes and says in verse 9,
27:14
Speaker 1: that he will remove the sin of the land in
27:18
Speaker 1: a single day. A priest cleansed in a moment, a
27:22
Speaker 1: servant called the branch, the sin of a whole land
27:26
Speaker 1: taken away in one day. The audience standing in the
27:31
Speaker 1: rubble heard a word of comfort for their own priest,
27:35
Speaker 1: but the language was already too large for him. It
27:39
Speaker 1: was reaching over his head, over the temple they were building,
27:43
Speaker 1: toward a figure who would unite the cleansing of the
27:46
Speaker 1: priest and the throne of David in one person, and
27:50
Speaker 1: who would take away sin, not with the blood of bulls,
27:55
Speaker 1: but in a single day, that none of them would
27:58
Speaker 1: live to see. The night was not finished. Four more
28:02
Speaker 1: visions were coming, but the door to the Messiah had
28:06
Speaker 1: just been opened. In a courtroom, over the head of
28:10
Speaker 1: a man in clean clothes, the night was only half over.
28:15
Speaker 1: Having seen the high priest cleansed and heard the first
28:18
Speaker 1: whisper of the branch, Zechariah's eyes were opened to four
28:22
Speaker 1: more images, and the second half of the sequence turns
28:26
Speaker 1: from the cleansing of the priest to the question of power.
28:31
Speaker 1: Who would actually finish the work? Where would the strength
28:35
Speaker 1: come from to raise a temple in a province too
28:38
Speaker 1: poor and too thin to wall its own capitals? The
28:43
Speaker 1: fifth vision answers that question with one of the most
28:46
Speaker 1: quoted lines in the entire Hebrew, Bible, and it answers
28:51
Speaker 1: it by pointing away from everything the ancient world trusted.
28:56
Speaker 1: Zechariah is roused as if from sleep and shown a
28:59
Speaker 1: solid gold lampstand. On top of it is a bowl
29:04
Speaker 1: and around it seven lamps with seven channels feeding each lamp.
29:08
Speaker 1: Beside the lampstand stand two olive trees, one on the
29:12
Speaker 1: right and one on the left, and these trees pour
29:15
Speaker 1: their oil directly into the bowl through golden pipes, so
29:19
Speaker 1: the lamps never need a human hand to refill them.
29:24
Speaker 1: It is a self-feeding light. Zechariah, like a good student,
29:30
Speaker 1: asks what it means, and before the full explanation comes,
29:35
Speaker 1: the angel gives him the heart of it as a
29:37
Speaker 1: word for Zerubbabel, the governor trying to rebuild the temple.
29:43
Speaker 1: In chapter 4, verse 6, the message arrives. This is
29:47
Speaker 1: the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel, not by might
29:51
Speaker 1: nor by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord Almighty.
29:56
Speaker 1: That sentence is the theological center of the night. The
30:01
Speaker 1: temple would not rise because the returnees were numerous, or wealthy,
30:06
Speaker 1: or militarily strong. They were none of those things. It
30:10
Speaker 1: would rise because the Spirit of God supplied. The oil,
30:15
Speaker 1: the lampstand burning without a human refilling it, was a
30:19
Speaker 1: picture of a work sustained by God rather than by
30:23
Speaker 1: the resources of men. And then the vision turns directly
30:28
Speaker 1: to the discouragement on the ground the way the half-built
30:32
Speaker 1: foundation seemed laughably small next to Solomon's lost glory. God
30:37
Speaker 1: asks who dares despise the day of small things, and
30:41
Speaker 1: promises that the same Zerubbabel, whose hands laid the foundation
30:46
Speaker 1: will see it completed, with a capstone brought out to
30:49
Speaker 1: shouts of grace. The two olive trees, the angel explains,
30:54
Speaker 1: are the two anointed ones who serve the Lord of
30:58
Speaker 1: all the earth. almost certainly the governor and the high priest,
31:02
Speaker 1: the civil and the priestly leaders, the same two men
31:06
Speaker 1: the book, keeps pairing, royal line and priestly line, standing
31:11
Speaker 1: on either side of the light of God, feeding it.
31:15
Speaker 1: Even here, in a vision about finishing a building, the
31:19
Speaker 1: architecture of the future is being sketched, two anointed offices
31:24
Speaker 1: flanking the presence of God, waiting for the one who
31:27
Speaker 1: will one day hold both at once. The sixth vision
31:31
Speaker 1: swings hard the other way, from grace to judgment. Zechariah
31:36
Speaker 1: looks up and sees a giant scroll flying through the air,
31:41
Speaker 1: and he is given its dimensions, around 30 feet long
31:45
Speaker 1: and 15 feet wide, the size of a banner stretched
31:49
Speaker 1: across the sky. The angel tells him this is the
31:53
Speaker 1: curse going out over the whole land, and it singles
31:56
Speaker 1: out two sins, by name, the thief, and the one
32:00
Speaker 1: who swears falsely, by God's name. The flying scroll will
32:05
Speaker 1: enter their houses and consume them. The point is sobering
32:09
Speaker 1: and necessary. A community that has just been told its
32:13
Speaker 1: sin is removed and its work will be finished by
32:17
Speaker 1: the Spirit might conclude that anything now goes. The flying
32:22
Speaker 1: scroll says no. The restored people are still accountable. A
32:27
Speaker 1: cleansed priesthood does not mean a lawless nation. The same
32:32
Speaker 1: God who pardons also enforces. And His written word, here
32:37
Speaker 1: pictured as a scroll loosed to fly over every rooftop,
32:41
Speaker 1: will not leave dishonesty and false oaths untouched. Grace and
32:47
Speaker 1: holiness travel together through Zechariah's night. The Seventh Vision is
32:54
Speaker 1: the strangest to modern ears, and the most theologically pointed.
33:00
Speaker 1: Zechariah sees a basket, a measuring container called an ephah,
33:05
Speaker 1: and as he watches, its heavy lead cover is lifted,
33:09
Speaker 1: and inside sits a woman. The angel names her. She
33:14
Speaker 1: is wickedness itself, evil personified, and he pushes her back
33:19
Speaker 1: down into the basket. and slams the lead weight over
33:23
Speaker 1: the mouth of it. Then two more women appear, with
33:28
Speaker 1: wings like a stalk, and they lift the basket between
33:32
Speaker 1: earth and sky, and carry it away. Zechariah asks where
33:37
Speaker 1: they are taking it, and the answer is precise. They
33:41
Speaker 1: are carrying it to the land of Shinar, which is
33:45
Speaker 1: to say Babylonia, to build it a house there, and
33:49
Speaker 1: set it on a pedestal, This is a vision of
33:52
Speaker 1: evil being deported. For generations, sin had lived in the
33:57
Speaker 1: land of Judah and dragged the people into exile. Now
34:01
Speaker 1: the picture is reversed. Wickedness is the one being boxed up,
34:07
Speaker 1: sealed and shipped east to Babylon, the very place from
34:11
Speaker 1: which the people had just returned. The land is being
34:16
Speaker 1: cleansed not only of guilt, as in the vision of Joshua,
34:21
Speaker 1: but of the active presence of evil, removed and given
34:25
Speaker 1: its own house far away, a purified land for a
34:30
Speaker 1: purified priesthood. Then comes the eighth and final vision, which
34:36
Speaker 1: closes the night by circling back to where it began.
34:41
Speaker 1: The first vision had opened with horsemen patrolling a world
34:44
Speaker 1: at rest. The last one opens with chariots. Zechariah sees
34:50
Speaker 1: four chariots coming out from between two mountains of bronze,
34:54
Speaker 1: drawn by red, black, white, and dappled horses. The angel
35:00
Speaker 1: tells him, These are the four spirits of heaven, going
35:04
Speaker 1: out from standing in the presence of the Lord of
35:07
Speaker 1: all the earth, sent to patrol north and south and
35:11
Speaker 1: across the world, and the chariots going toward the north country.
35:16
Speaker 1: toward the direction from which Babylon and the great empires
35:21
Speaker 1: had always come down on Israel, are said to have
35:24
Speaker 1: given God's spirit rest in that northern land. The enemy's
35:28
Speaker 1: territory is brought under control. The night that began with
35:34
Speaker 1: riders reporting an ominous calm ends with chariots establishing God's
35:40
Speaker 1: settled rule over the very lands that had threatened his people.
35:44
Speaker 1: The frame closes. The patrol of the earth, which had
35:49
Speaker 1: felt like abandonment at the start of the night, is
35:52
Speaker 1: revealed by the end to be the quiet machinery of
35:56
Speaker 1: God's sovereignty. Moving across the whole map, step back and
36:01
Speaker 1: look at what one night had done. Eight visions, beginning
36:06
Speaker 1: in a dark ravine among myrtle trees, and ending with
36:09
Speaker 1: bronze mountains and chariots, had answered every fear the returnees carried.
36:15
Speaker 1: Does God see us? Yes. His riders cover the earth.
36:20
Speaker 1: Will the powers that crushed us go unpunished? No. Craftsmen
36:25
Speaker 1: are coming for every horn. Will the city stay small
36:29
Speaker 1: and broken? No. It will overflow beyond any wall. Is
36:35
Speaker 1: our priest too guilty to serve? No. His filth is
36:39
Speaker 1: taken and clean garments given. Where will the strength to
36:43
Speaker 1: finish come from? not from might or power, but from
36:48
Speaker 1: the Spirit. Will sin run loose now that we are forgiven? No.
36:53
Speaker 1: The scroll flies, and wickedness itself is shipped away. Is
36:58
Speaker 1: the world out of God's hands? No. His chariots patrol
37:02
Speaker 1: it from sea to sea. It was a complete reassurance,
37:06
Speaker 1: delivered in pictures, to a people who had run out
37:09
Speaker 1: of confidence. But woven through it, almost quietly, were the
37:14
Speaker 1: threads that did not belong to 519 BC at all.
37:19
Speaker 1: A servant called the branch, a stone with seven eyes,
37:23
Speaker 1: sin removed in a single day, two anointed ones flanking
37:28
Speaker 1: the light of God. The visions had steadied the present.
37:33
Speaker 1: Now Zechariah would take one of those threads, the figure
37:37
Speaker 1: of the branch, and do something with it in broad daylight.
37:42
Speaker 1: with a crown of silver and gold in his hands,
37:46
Speaker 1: and a name on his lips that pointed centuries down
37:49
Speaker 1: the road. The visions ended with the night, but God
37:54
Speaker 1: was not finished with the figure of the branch, and
37:58
Speaker 1: the next act takes place in daylight, with a real
38:01
Speaker 1: object that Zechariah could hold in his hands. Word comes
38:06
Speaker 1: to him that a delegation has arrived from Babylon. Exiles
38:10
Speaker 1: bringing silver and gold from the Jewish community, still living
38:14
Speaker 1: in the east, a gift for the temple effort. And
38:18
Speaker 1: Zechariah is told to do something unusual with that metal.
38:23
Speaker 1: In chapter 6, verses 11 through 13, the instruction reads,
38:28
Speaker 1: Take the silver and gold, and make a crown, and
38:33
Speaker 1: set it on the head of the high priest, Joshua
38:36
Speaker 1: son of Josedach. Tell him this is what the Lord
38:39
Speaker 1: Almighty says. Here is the man whose name is the branch,
38:44
Speaker 1: and he will branch out from his place and build
38:47
Speaker 1: the temple of the Lord. It is he who will
38:50
Speaker 1: build the temple of the Lord, and he will be
38:52
Speaker 1: clothed with majesty, and will sit and rule on his throne.
38:58
Speaker 1: And he will be a priest on his throne, and
39:01
Speaker 1: there will be harmony between the two. To feel why
39:04
Speaker 1: this scene is so strange is You have to understand
39:07
Speaker 1: how rigidly ancient Israel kept two offices apart. Kings came
39:12
Speaker 1: from the tribe of Judah, from the line of David,
39:16
Speaker 1: and they sat on thrones. Priests came from the tribe
39:20
Speaker 1: of Levi, from the line of Aaron, and they served
39:24
Speaker 1: at altars. The two lines never merged. When a king
39:29
Speaker 1: named Uzziah once tried to burn incense in the temple,
39:33
Speaker 1: a priestly act, the Bible records that he was struck
39:37
Speaker 1: with leprosy on the spot for crossing the line. Crowns
39:41
Speaker 1: belonged to kings. And yet here Zechariah is told to
39:46
Speaker 1: make a crown, the headgear of royalty. and set it
39:50
Speaker 1: not on the governor from David's line, but on the
39:54
Speaker 1: head of Joshua, the priest. A priest is being crowned.
39:59
Speaker 1: And the explanation given is not that Joshua has become king,
40:04
Speaker 1: but that he is a living sign, just as he
40:08
Speaker 1: was in the courtroom vision of someone else, the man
40:12
Speaker 1: whose name is the branch, will do what no one
40:16
Speaker 1: in Israel's history had been allowed to do. He will
40:20
Speaker 1: build the temple of the Lord, and he will sit
40:23
Speaker 1: and rule on a throne, and he will be a
40:25
Speaker 1: priest on that throne, and the two offices that had
40:29
Speaker 1: been held apart for a thousand years will exist in
40:32
Speaker 1: harmony in one person. Many scholars note the interpretive tension
40:38
Speaker 1: in this passage, and some argue that the royal language
40:42
Speaker 1: originally also gestured towards Zerubbabel, the Davidic heir standing right there.
40:48
Speaker 1: But the text, as it has come down deliberately, places
40:52
Speaker 1: the crown on the priest while speaking of a throne,
40:55
Speaker 1: and the effect is to fuse the two roles in
40:58
Speaker 1: a way no contemporary figure could satisfy. Neither Joshua nor
41:02
Speaker 1: Zerubbabel ever became a priest-king. The crown was, in the end,
41:08
Speaker 1: a prophecy made of metal, and Zechariah was told to
41:11
Speaker 1: keep it in the temple as a memorial. a reminder
41:15
Speaker 1: hanging in the sanctuary that someone was still coming who
41:18
Speaker 1: would wear both. After this, the book shifts its tone.
41:23
Speaker 1: The visions and the crowning give way to a more
41:26
Speaker 1: ordinary scene, and it is precisely its ordinariness that makes
41:31
Speaker 1: it moving. Roughly two years later, in the fourth year
41:35
Speaker 1: of Darius, another delegation arrives, this time with a practical,
41:41
Speaker 1: religious question. For seventy years, all through the exile, the
41:46
Speaker 1: people had observed fasts in certain months to mourn the
41:50
Speaker 1: destruction of the temple and the city. Now that the
41:54
Speaker 1: temple was rising again, they wanted to know whether they
41:58
Speaker 1: should keep mourning. Should they still fast for a ruin
42:02
Speaker 1: that was being rebuilt? It is a small, human, almost
42:06
Speaker 1: bureaucratic question. And Zechariah's answer cuts straight past it to
42:12
Speaker 1: something deeper. In chapter 7, verse 5, the word comes back.
42:17
Speaker 1: Ask all the people of the land and the priests.
42:20
Speaker 1: When you fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh
42:24
Speaker 1: months for the past 70 years, was it really for
42:27
Speaker 1: me that you fasted? God turns the question around. Your fasting,
42:33
Speaker 1: he says, was always more about you than about me.
42:37
Speaker 1: And then he reminds them what he had actually asked
42:40
Speaker 1: of their ancestors. The thing the earlier prophets had begged
42:45
Speaker 1: for and been ignored about. In chapter 7 verses 9
42:50
Speaker 1: and 10 he says, This is what the Lord Almighty said,
42:55
Speaker 1: Administer true justice, show mercy and compassion to one another.
43:00
Speaker 1: Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner
43:04
Speaker 1: or the poor. The religion God wants is not a
43:08
Speaker 1: calendar of mournful fasts. It is justice for the powerless.
43:14
Speaker 1: The whole exile, Zechariah reminds them, had come because that
43:18
Speaker 1: one demand was refused. But the book does not end
43:22
Speaker 1: the conversation on a hard word. It opens out in
43:25
Speaker 1: chapter 8 into one of the most tender visions of
43:28
Speaker 1: restoration in all the prophets. And here the fasting question
43:33
Speaker 1: finally gets its answer. God promises to return and dwell
43:38
Speaker 1: in the city, so that Jerusalem will be called the
43:42
Speaker 1: faithful city, and its mountain the holy mountain. And then
43:47
Speaker 1: he paints a picture, not of soldiers or glory, but
43:51
Speaker 1: of ordinary peace. Old men and old women will again
43:55
Speaker 1: sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each leaning on a
43:58
Speaker 1: staff because of great age, and the streets will be
44:02
Speaker 1: filled with boys and girls playing in them. After everything,
44:07
Speaker 1: the image of salvation is the very young and the
44:10
Speaker 1: very old safe in the same streets. The elderly living
44:14
Speaker 1: to lean on their canes and children playing without fear.
44:19
Speaker 1: To a community that had buried a generation in exile.
44:22
Speaker 1: The promise that grandparents and grandchildren would fill the same.
44:27
Speaker 1: Streets was almost unbearable hope. The mournful fasts, God says...
44:32
Speaker 1: will be turned into joyful feasts and glad festivals. Grief
44:37
Speaker 1: itself would be converted into celebration. And the chapter closes
44:42
Speaker 1: by widening the lens past Jerusalem to the whole world.
44:47
Speaker 1: In a sentence that quietly anticipates everything the rest of
44:51
Speaker 1: the book is building toward. In chapter 8 verse 23,
44:56
Speaker 1: the promise reaches its horizon. This is what the Lord
45:00
Speaker 1: Almighty says. In those days, ten people from all languages
45:05
Speaker 1: and nations will take firm hold of one Jew by
45:09
Speaker 1: the hem of his robe and say, Let us go
45:13
Speaker 1: with you, because we have heard that God is with you.
45:24
Speaker 1: The Deutuken, nations that had scattered Judah, would one day
45:29
Speaker 1: come running to grab the hem of a Jewish robe,
45:33
Speaker 1: begging to be brought along, because they had heard that
45:36
Speaker 1: God was with this people. That is an astonishing reversal
45:41
Speaker 1: for a tiny province on the edge of an empire,
45:44
Speaker 1: a people who could not even fill their own city,
45:48
Speaker 1: and it is the bridge into the second half of
45:51
Speaker 1: the book. The temple would in fact be finished, completed
45:55
Speaker 1: in 516 B.C., in the sixth year of Darius, exactly
46:00
Speaker 1: as Zechariah and Haggai had promised. The day of small
46:05
Speaker 1: things ended in a dedicated house of God, but the
46:08
Speaker 1: larger promises, the priest on a throne, the nation streaming in,
46:14
Speaker 1: the sin of the land removed in, a single day,
46:18
Speaker 1: none of those were fulfilled when the last stone was set.
46:22
Speaker 1: They hung over the finished temple like the crown hanging
46:25
Speaker 1: in its sanctuary, waiting, and in the chapters that follow,
46:30
Speaker 1: Zechariah stops describing the near future of his own generation
46:34
Speaker 1: and begins to describe, with disturbing specificity, a king who
46:39
Speaker 1: would arrive in that city centuries later, riding through a
46:43
Speaker 1: celebrating crowd on the back of a borrowed donkey. The
46:47
Speaker 1: second half of Zechariah changes character. The dated visions stop.
46:53
Speaker 1: The angel who explained everything falls silent. What follows are
46:59
Speaker 1: two long oracles, two burdens that read less like a
47:03
Speaker 1: diary of one prophet's nights and more like poetry launched
47:08
Speaker 1: far into the future. And the first of them opens
47:12
Speaker 1: not with Jerusalem, but with a military road. In chapter 9,
47:17
Speaker 1: the word of the Lord marches down the map from
47:20
Speaker 1: the north, naming city after city. It falls on Hadrach
47:25
Speaker 1: and Damascus, on Hamath, on the great Phoenician ports of
47:30
Speaker 1: Tyre and Sidon, with all their wealth and their fortifications.
47:36
Speaker 1: And then it sweeps south down the coast, through the
47:40
Speaker 1: Philistine cities, Ashkelon, Gaza, Ekron, Ashdod. The oracle describes a
47:48
Speaker 1: power passing through the region like a blade, and the
47:52
Speaker 1: fortified coastal cities, Tyre, especially with its proud island stronghold,
47:57
Speaker 1: being humbled. This passage has fascinated historians, because the path
48:02
Speaker 1: it traces is almost exactly the path that Alexander the
48:07
Speaker 1: Great would take when he came through the Levant in
48:10
Speaker 1: 332 BC, roughly two centuries after Zechariah. Alexander swept down
48:16
Speaker 1: from the north, and the one city that defied him
48:19
Speaker 1: was Tyre, whose island fortress he reduced. only after a
48:24
Speaker 1: brutal siege, building a causeway out to it through the sea.
48:28
Speaker 1: Then he continued south down the Philistine coast, taking Gaza
48:33
Speaker 1: after another hard fight. The correspondence between Zechariah 9 and
48:38
Speaker 1: Alexander's march is close enough that it has been part
48:41
Speaker 1: of the scholarly debate over the dating of these chapters
48:45
Speaker 1: for a very long time. With some arguing, the oracle
48:49
Speaker 1: anticipates the Greek conqueror, and others reading it as a
48:53
Speaker 1: more general picture of judgment on the surrounding nations. Either way,
48:58
Speaker 1: the literary effect inside the book is deliberate. The oracle
49:03
Speaker 1: lets a great earthly conqueror storm down the coast, the
49:07
Speaker 1: kind of king the ancient world understood, mounted power and
49:11
Speaker 1: siege engines and toppled walls. And then, Having set that
49:16
Speaker 1: image in the reader's mind, it stops the conqueror at
49:19
Speaker 1: the right time. the gate of Jerusalem and announces a
49:22
Speaker 1: completely different kind of king. This is the prophecy that
49:27
Speaker 1: opened this whole story, the line we began with. The
49:31
Speaker 1: king coming to daughter Zion lowly and riding on a donkey,
49:36
Speaker 1: on a colt, the foal of a donkey. Now we
49:40
Speaker 1: can see what it is doing in its place. After
49:43
Speaker 1: a chapter of war horses and falling fortresses, the king
49:47
Speaker 1: who actually comes to Zion arrives on the least military
49:51
Speaker 1: animal imaginable. In the ancient Near East, a king rode
49:56
Speaker 1: a horse or a chariot when he came in war,
49:59
Speaker 1: and a donkey when he came in peace. A conqueror
50:03
Speaker 1: enters a beaten city on a stallion, surrounded by spears.
50:08
Speaker 1: this king enters on a young donkey, a colt that
50:12
Speaker 1: had never been ridden, the mount of a man who
50:15
Speaker 1: has nothing to prove and no one to crush. Everything
50:20
Speaker 1: about the image is calibrated against the conqueror who just
50:23
Speaker 1: swept through the previous verses. He is called righteous and victorious,
50:29
Speaker 1: but his victory does not look like Alexander's. And the
50:32
Speaker 1: next line spells out exactly what his reign abolishes. In
50:36
Speaker 1: chapter 9, verse 10, The oracle continues, I will take
50:41
Speaker 1: away the chariots from Ephraim and the war horses from
50:45
Speaker 1: Jerusalem and the battle bow will be broken. He will
50:49
Speaker 1: proclaim peace to the nations. His rule will extend from
50:53
Speaker 1: sea to sea and from the river to the ends
50:56
Speaker 1: of the earth. The donkey was not an accident of poverty.
51:01
Speaker 1: It was the policy of the kingdom. This king disarms
51:04
Speaker 1: his own people, breaks the war bow, and rules the
51:09
Speaker 1: whole earth not by conquest, but by proclaiming peace. The
51:14
Speaker 1: reach is total from sea to sea to the ends
51:18
Speaker 1: of the earth. But the method is the opposite of
51:21
Speaker 1: every empire the oracle had just named. For a people
51:25
Speaker 1: living under Persia and about to live under the Greeks
51:29
Speaker 1: and then under Rome, this was an almost impossible promise
51:33
Speaker 1: to hold on to. Kings did not come in peace.
51:37
Speaker 1: Kings came with armies. Generation after generation read this line
51:42
Speaker 1: about the gentle king on the donkey and waited, and
51:46
Speaker 1: no such king arrived. The temple was finished, then centuries passed.
51:52
Speaker 1: Persia gave way to the Greeks, the Greeks to civil wars,
51:56
Speaker 1: and eventually to Rome. The donkey king did not come.
52:01
Speaker 1: The prophecies sat in the scroll, read in synagogues, copied
52:05
Speaker 1: by scribes, carried forward by a people who refused to
52:09
Speaker 1: let it go, even though nothing in their history matched it.
52:14
Speaker 1: And then, on a particular spring day, at the start
52:18
Speaker 1: of the first century, in the days when Rome ruled, Judea,
52:24
Speaker 1: a teacher from Galilee, approached Jerusalem from the east, over
52:28
Speaker 1: the Mount of Olives, for the festival of Passover. According
52:32
Speaker 1: to the gospel accounts, he stopped and deliberately sent two
52:35
Speaker 1: of his followers ahead into a village to bring back
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Speaker 1: a specific animal, a young donkey, a colt that had
52:43
Speaker 1: never been ridden. He did not stumble onto a donkey.
52:47
Speaker 1: He arranged for one, and he rode it down the
52:50
Speaker 1: slope toward the city gate. The crowds, swollen with festival pilgrims,
52:57
Speaker 1: understood the gesture even if they could not have sighted
53:00
Speaker 1: the chapter. The Gospel of Matthew, in chapter 21, verses
53:04
Speaker 1: 8 and 9, describes it. A very large crowd spread
53:09
Speaker 1: their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from
53:13
Speaker 1: the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds
53:16
Speaker 1: that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted,
53:20
Speaker 1: Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who
53:24
Speaker 1: comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the
53:28
Speaker 1: highest heavens! They hailed him as the son of David,
53:34
Speaker 1: the royal line, and they did it as he rode
53:37
Speaker 1: the one animal that the prophets had marked out for
53:41
Speaker 1: the coming king. Matthew, writing for readers who knew their scriptures,
53:47
Speaker 1: states plainly that this happened in order to fulfill what
53:51
Speaker 1: had been spoken through the prophet, and quotes the very
53:55
Speaker 1: line about the king coming, gentle and riding on a donkey.
54:00
Speaker 1: The man on the colt was, in the gospel's own claim,
54:04
Speaker 1: stepping straight into a sentence written more than 500 years
54:08
Speaker 1: earlier in the ruins of a poorer Jerusalem. Whatever a
54:12
Speaker 1: person concludes about that claim, the structure of it is
54:16
Speaker 1: remarkable and worth stating precisely. A line was written down, preserved, copied,
54:23
Speaker 1: and read publicly for five centuries. It described a king
54:27
Speaker 1: arriving in Jerusalem on a particular animal in peace against
54:31
Speaker 1: the whole grain of how kings behaved. And a man
54:36
Speaker 1: arrived by his own apparent design matching it. This is
54:41
Speaker 1: the heart of why the title calls Zechariah the prophet
54:44
Speaker 1: who saw the Messiah 500 years early. The donkey was
54:49
Speaker 1: only the beginning because the same second half of the
54:53
Speaker 1: book the same stretch of oracles that gave the world
54:57
Speaker 1: its gentle king also contained darker pictures of a shepherd
55:02
Speaker 1: rejected by his own flock, of a price weighed out
55:06
Speaker 1: in silver, of a leader struck down and his people scattered.
55:11
Speaker 1: And those pictures too would be read back into the
55:14
Speaker 1: events of that one Passover week with a precision that
55:18
Speaker 1: has unsettled readers ever since. The eleventh chapter of Zechariah
55:24
Speaker 1: is one of the most difficult passages in the prophetic books,
55:28
Speaker 1: and even careful readers have argued for centuries about exactly
55:33
Speaker 1: what is happening in it. But its broad shape is clear,
55:36
Speaker 1: and its details are unforgettable. God tells Zechariah to act
55:42
Speaker 1: out a role. He is to become a shepherd, to
55:46
Speaker 1: take up the care of a flock that is described
55:49
Speaker 1: chillingly as a flock marked for slaughter. sheep bought and
55:53
Speaker 1: sold by traders who feel no pity for them. It
55:57
Speaker 1: is a portrait of the people of God being mishandled
56:00
Speaker 1: by their own leaders, treated as merchandise rather than as
56:05
Speaker 1: a flock to be protected. Zechariah takes two shepherd's staffs
56:10
Speaker 1: and names them. One he calls favor, standing for God's
56:14
Speaker 1: gracious covenant, and the other he calls union, standing for
56:19
Speaker 1: the bond between the people He shepherds the doomed flock
56:23
Speaker 1: for a time, and he removes worthless leaders. But the
56:27
Speaker 1: relationship sours. The flock detests him, and he grows weary
56:33
Speaker 1: of them, and the symbolic shepherding collapses. He breaks the
56:37
Speaker 1: first star favor, signaling the breaking of the covenant protection,
56:42
Speaker 1: and later he breaks the second union, signaling the fracturing
56:47
Speaker 1: of the people themselves. And then, at the center of
56:51
Speaker 1: this strange enacted parable, comes a transaction. The rejected shepherd
56:57
Speaker 1: asks to be paid off, to settle accounts before walking
57:01
Speaker 1: away from the flock that despises him. In chapter 11,
57:06
Speaker 1: verses 12 and 13, the scene unfolds. I told them,
57:11
Speaker 1: If you think it best, give me my pay, but
57:13
Speaker 1: if not, keep it. So they paid me thirty pieces
57:17
Speaker 1: of silver. And the Lord said to me, Throw it
57:21
Speaker 1: to the potter, the handsome, price at which they valued me.
57:26
Speaker 1: So I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw
57:29
Speaker 1: them to the potter at the house of the Lord.
57:33
Speaker 1: Every word in that passage carries weight, and to feel
57:37
Speaker 1: it you have to know what thirty pieces of silver meant.
57:41
Speaker 1: It was not a random number. In the law given
57:45
Speaker 1: through Moses, in the book of Exodus, Chapter 21, verse 32.
57:50
Speaker 1: The value of a slave who had been killed was
57:53
Speaker 1: fixed precisely. If the bull gores a male or female slave,
57:59
Speaker 1: the owner must pay 30 shekels of silver to the
58:02
Speaker 1: slave's master. 30 shekels was the going compensation for a
58:06
Speaker 1: dead slave, the price of the lowest valued life in
58:10
Speaker 1: the legal code. So when the flock weighs out 30
58:14
Speaker 1: pieces of silver as the wage of God's shepherd, The
58:17
Speaker 1: insult is exact and deliberate. They have valued the shepherd
58:21
Speaker 1: of the Lord at the price of a gaudy slave.
58:25
Speaker 1: God's own sarcastic words drive it home. The handsome price
58:30
Speaker 1: at which they valued me. And then the silver is
58:34
Speaker 1: not kept or banked. It is thrown to the potter,
58:38
Speaker 1: hurled down in the house of the Lord in the
58:41
Speaker 1: temple itself. The detail is oddly specific, not given away.
58:47
Speaker 1: not returned to the donors, but flung into the sanctuary
58:51
Speaker 1: and somehow connected to a potter, a maker of cheap
58:55
Speaker 1: clay vessels. Held inside its own century, this is a
58:59
Speaker 1: dark allegory about leaders who reject God's care and assign
59:04
Speaker 1: his shepherd a contemptible value. But the specificity of the details...
59:10
Speaker 1: the exact sum, the throwing of the silver, the temple,
59:14
Speaker 1: the potter, is what made later readers stop in their tracks.
59:19
Speaker 1: Because in the accounts of Jesus' final week, those same
59:23
Speaker 1: details reassemble themselves around a single betrayal. The Gospel of Matthew,
59:29
Speaker 1: in chapter 26, verses 14 through 16, records the beginning
59:34
Speaker 1: of it. Then one of the twelve, the one called
59:37
Speaker 1: Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and asked, What
59:42
Speaker 1: are you willing to give me if I deliver him
59:44
Speaker 1: over to you? So they counted out for him thirty
59:48
Speaker 1: pieces of silver. From then on, Judas watched for an
59:52
Speaker 1: opportunity to hand him over. There is the number again,
59:55
Speaker 1: thirty pieces of silver. the price of a slave, counted
1:00:00
Speaker 1: out by the temple authorities for the betrayal of the shepherd.
1:00:05
Speaker 1: And the story does not stop there. After the arrest,
1:00:09
Speaker 1: Matthew tells us, Judas was seized with remorse and tried
1:00:14
Speaker 1: to give the money back. In chapter 27, verses 5
1:00:17
Speaker 1: through 7, the rest of the pattern falls into place.
1:00:22
Speaker 1: So Judas threw the money into the temple and left.
1:00:27
Speaker 1: Then he went away and hanged himself. The chief priests
1:00:31
Speaker 1: picked up the coins and said, It is against the
1:00:34
Speaker 1: law to put this into the treasury, since it is
1:00:38
Speaker 1: blood money. So they decided to use the money to
1:00:43
Speaker 1: buy the potter's field as a burial, place for foreigners.
1:00:47
Speaker 1: The silver is thrown into the temple, exactly as in Zechariah,
1:00:52
Speaker 1: and the priests, refusing to keep blood money, spend it
1:00:55
Speaker 1: on a field belonging to a potter the thirty pieces,
1:00:59
Speaker 1: the temple, the potter, all three details from the prophet's
1:01:03
Speaker 1: enacted parable surface, together in one sequence, of events five
1:01:08
Speaker 1: hundred years later. Matthew himself draws the line explicitly, and
1:01:14
Speaker 1: here the passage hands us a genuine, scholarly puzzle worth
1:01:18
Speaker 1: naming honestly. In chapter 27, verses 9 and 10, Matthew
1:01:24
Speaker 1: writes that this fulfilled what was spoken. by the prophet,
1:01:29
Speaker 1: and then quotes the prophecy about the thirty pieces of
1:01:32
Speaker 1: silver and the potter's field. But Matthew attributes the words
1:01:37
Speaker 1: to Jeremiah, while the closest wording clearly comes from Zechariah.
1:01:42
Speaker 1: Interpreters have offered several explanations for this. Some note that
1:01:47
Speaker 1: the scroll of the prophets in that period sometimes open
1:01:51
Speaker 1: with Jeremiah so that his name could stand for the
1:01:55
Speaker 1: whole collection. Others point out that Jeremiah also has a
1:01:59
Speaker 1: scene involving a potter and a field he purchases, and
1:02:03
Speaker 1: that Matthew may be deliberately weaving the two prophets together.
1:02:07
Speaker 1: The difficulty is real, and worth stating plainly rather than
1:02:12
Speaker 1: smoothing over. What is not in dispute is that the
1:02:15
Speaker 1: language of the thirty pieces and the potter comes from Zechariah,
1:02:21
Speaker 1: and that Matthew saw the betrayal of Jesus as the
1:02:24
Speaker 1: moment it came true, There is one more thread, and
1:02:28
Speaker 1: it ties the betrayal to the arrest that followed. Later
1:02:32
Speaker 1: in Zechariah, the image of the struck shepherd returns in
1:02:36
Speaker 1: an even starker form. In chapter 13, verse 7, the
1:02:40
Speaker 1: word comes, Awake, sword, against my shepherd, against the man
1:02:45
Speaker 1: who is close to me, declares the Lord Almighty. Strike
1:02:50
Speaker 1: the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered, and I
1:02:54
Speaker 1: will turn my hand. against the little ones. The shepherd
1:02:59
Speaker 1: is not merely rejected now. He is struck down by
1:03:03
Speaker 1: the sword, and the immediate result is a scattered flock.
1:03:08
Speaker 1: And according to the Gospels, on the very night of
1:03:11
Speaker 1: his arrest, in the garden across the Kidron Valley, Jesus
1:03:15
Speaker 1: quoted this exact line to his disciples. He told them
1:03:19
Speaker 1: that they would all fall away that night, and he
1:03:23
Speaker 1: said it was written, that the shepherd would be struck,
1:03:26
Speaker 1: and the sheep of the flock scattered. Within hours it
1:03:30
Speaker 1: happened just as he said. He was seized, and his
1:03:34
Speaker 1: closest followers fled into the dark, scattered exactly as the
1:03:39
Speaker 1: prophet had written. The shepherd who had ridden in on
1:03:42
Speaker 1: the donkey was now the shepherd, valued at the price
1:03:47
Speaker 1: of a slave, and struck down by the sword, his
1:03:50
Speaker 1: sheep running in every direction. The picture Zechariah had drawn
1:03:55
Speaker 1: was almost complete. A king coming in peace, then rejected,
1:04:00
Speaker 1: sold for the price of a dead slave, the money
1:04:04
Speaker 1: flung into the temple and spent on a potter's field.
1:04:08
Speaker 1: The shepherds struck and the flock scattered. Only one image remained,
1:04:14
Speaker 1: the darkest and, to the people who first read it,
1:04:18
Speaker 1: the most baffling of all. It was a single line
1:04:22
Speaker 1: about looking upon someone who had been pierced, and a
1:04:26
Speaker 1: mourning that would follow, and a fountain opened to wash
1:04:30
Speaker 1: away sin. It is the last and sharpest point of
1:04:33
Speaker 1: Zechariah's vision, and it brings the whole 500-year arc to
1:04:38
Speaker 1: the foot of a Roman cross. Everything in Zechariah's second
1:04:43
Speaker 1: half has been moving toward a single, almost unbearable image,
1:04:48
Speaker 1: and in chapter 12 it finally arrives. God speaks of
1:04:52
Speaker 1: a day when he will pour out his spirit on Jerusalem,
1:04:56
Speaker 1: a spirit of grace and of prayer, and in that
1:04:59
Speaker 1: moment the people will see something that breaks them open.
1:05:04
Speaker 1: In chapter 12, verse 10, the words come, And I
1:05:09
Speaker 1: will pour out on the house of David and the
1:05:12
Speaker 1: inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplication. They
1:05:18
Speaker 1: will look on me, the one they have pierced, and
1:05:22
Speaker 1: they will mourn for him as one mourns for an
1:05:25
Speaker 1: only child, and grieve bitterly for him as one grieves
1:05:30
Speaker 1: for a firstborn son. Read that sentence slowly, because it
1:05:35
Speaker 1: contains a mystery that Jewish and Christian interpreters alike have
1:05:40
Speaker 1: wrestled with for 2,000 years. God is speaking in the
1:05:44
Speaker 1: first person. I will pour out. And then in the
1:05:48
Speaker 1: same breath, The people look on me, the one they
1:05:52
Speaker 1: have pierced. The speaker is God, and yet the one
1:05:56
Speaker 1: pierced is somehow also God, looked upon, mourned over like
1:06:01
Speaker 1: an only son, like a firstborn child who has died.
1:06:07
Speaker 1: How can the unpierceable God be the pierced one? The
1:06:11
Speaker 1: grammar itself seems to strain toward a figure who is
1:06:14
Speaker 1: both divine and able to be wounded. And the grief
1:06:18
Speaker 1: that follows is the deepest grief a family can know.
1:06:22
Speaker 1: The loss of an only child. And the very next
1:06:26
Speaker 1: line tells what that piercing accomplishes. In chapter 13, verse 1,
1:06:31
Speaker 1: the promise lands. On that day, a fountain will be
1:06:35
Speaker 1: opened to the house of David and the inhabitants of
1:06:38
Speaker 1: Jerusalem to cleanse them from sin and impurity. Recall what
1:06:44
Speaker 1: God had said back in the courtroom visions that he
1:06:48
Speaker 1: would remove the sin of the land in a single day.
1:06:51
Speaker 1: Here that single day arrives, and it is tied to
1:06:54
Speaker 1: the pierced one. A fountain opens, and the sin and
1:06:58
Speaker 1: impurity of the people are washed away. The mourning over
1:07:02
Speaker 1: the pierced figure and the cleansing of the nation are
1:07:06
Speaker 1: the same event. The wound and the washing belong together.
1:07:11
Speaker 1: For the gospel writers, this was the final peace. They
1:07:14
Speaker 1: had watched a man ride in on a donkey, Be
1:07:17
Speaker 1: sold for thirty pieces of silver. See that silver thrown
1:07:21
Speaker 1: into the temple and spent on a potter's field, and
1:07:24
Speaker 1: be struck down so that his followers scattered. And then
1:07:29
Speaker 1: they watched him die on a Roman cross. The Gospel
1:07:33
Speaker 1: of John records a detail that the other accounts do
1:07:36
Speaker 1: not dwell on. After Jesus had died, a soldier, to
1:07:40
Speaker 1: confirm the death, drove a spear into his side. In
1:07:44
Speaker 1: chapter 19, verse 34, John writes, Instead, one of the
1:07:49
Speaker 1: soldiers pierced Jesus' side with a spear, bringing a sudden
1:07:53
Speaker 1: flow of blood and water. And John, who structures his
1:07:58
Speaker 1: entire account around the fulfillment of Scripture, immediately points to
1:08:03
Speaker 1: where that act had been written down. In chapter 19,
1:08:07
Speaker 1: verse 37, he says simply, And as another Scripture says,
1:08:12
Speaker 1: they will look on the one they have pierced. He
1:08:16
Speaker 1: is quoting Zechariah, the line about the pierced one, written
1:08:21
Speaker 1: five centuries earlier in a prophecy about mourning and a
1:08:25
Speaker 1: cleansing fountain. John attaches directly to a spear thrust on
1:08:29
Speaker 1: a hill outside Jerusalem. The same gospel notes that blood
1:08:33
Speaker 1: and water flowed from the wound, and Christian readers have
1:08:37
Speaker 1: long heard in that detail an echo of the fountain
1:08:41
Speaker 1: opened to cleanse from sin. Now, This is exactly the
1:08:46
Speaker 1: point where a careful listener should ask the hard question.
1:08:51
Speaker 1: Is it not possible that the gospel writers simply invented
1:08:55
Speaker 1: these events to match the prophecies working backward from Zechariah?
1:09:00
Speaker 1: to construct a story? It is the most important objection,
1:09:06
Speaker 1: and the answer is where archaeology earns its place in
1:09:09
Speaker 1: this account. We know, beyond reasonable dispute, that the book
1:09:13
Speaker 1: of Zechariah existed in its current form long before Jesus
1:09:18
Speaker 1: was born. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, the library hidden
1:09:23
Speaker 1: in caves near the shore of the Dead Sea, and
1:09:26
Speaker 1: discovered in the middle of the 20th century, are copies
1:09:30
Speaker 1: and fragments of the Minor Prophets that include Zechariah, some
1:09:35
Speaker 1: of them dating to well over a century before the
1:09:38
Speaker 1: Christian era. A Greek scroll of the Minor Prophets recovered
1:09:42
Speaker 1: from the same region preserves these chapters in a pre-Christian text.
1:09:48
Speaker 1: The prophecies of the donkey king, the thirty pieces of silver,
1:09:52
Speaker 1: the struck shepherd, and the pierced one were demonstrably written down, copied,
1:09:58
Speaker 1: and circulating among the Jewish people generations before the events
1:10:03
Speaker 1: the Gospels describe. Whatever one concludes about the fulfillment, the
1:10:08
Speaker 1: sequence cannot be reversed. The target was painted first, centuries first.
1:10:15
Speaker 1: and it was painted by a hand that had no
1:10:18
Speaker 1: way of knowing where the arrow would land. This is
1:10:21
Speaker 1: also why, among all the prophets, Zechariah casts such a
1:10:25
Speaker 1: long shadow over the accounts of Jesus' final week. The
1:10:30
Speaker 1: concentration is remarkable. From a single prophetic book come the
1:10:36
Speaker 1: king on the colt. The wage of thirty silver pieces,
1:10:40
Speaker 1: the money flung into the temple, the potter, the shepherd struck,
1:10:44
Speaker 1: and the flock scattered, and the pierced one mourned like
1:10:48
Speaker 1: an only son. Few prophetic books are woven so densely
1:10:53
Speaker 1: into the Passion, and the book's reach does not stop
1:10:56
Speaker 1: at the cross. Its imagery surges back up in the
1:11:00
Speaker 1: last book of the Bible, where the vision of all
1:11:03
Speaker 1: peoples looking upon the pierced one returns. where lampstands and
1:11:08
Speaker 1: olive trees and horsemen ride again through the book of Revelation. Zechariah,
1:11:15
Speaker 1: the priest from the rubble, became one of the deepest
1:11:18
Speaker 1: wells the New Testament drew from. But the prophet himself
1:11:24
Speaker 1: did not end his book at the piercing. His final
1:11:27
Speaker 1: chapter lifts past the wound to a horizon that, in
1:11:31
Speaker 1: the Christian reading, is still ahead even now. Chapter 14
1:11:36
Speaker 1: describes the day of the Lord, a day of upheaval
1:11:40
Speaker 1: and then of dazzling resolution when God himself comes to
1:11:44
Speaker 1: stand on the earth. In a detail that has struck
1:11:48
Speaker 1: every reader who knows the geography of the city, the
1:11:52
Speaker 1: prophet names the exact spot. In chapter 14, verse 4,
1:11:58
Speaker 1: he writes that on that day the feet of the
1:12:01
Speaker 1: Lord will stand on the Mount of Olives, east of Jerusalem,
1:12:05
Speaker 1: the very ridge over which the king had ridden on
1:12:08
Speaker 1: the donkey, and the mountain will split in two, and
1:12:12
Speaker 1: the chapter rises to a final note of unbroken unity.
1:12:16
Speaker 1: In chapter 14, verse 9, it declares the Lord will
1:12:21
Speaker 1: be king over the whole earth. On that day there
1:12:25
Speaker 1: will be one Lord, and his name the only name.
1:12:29
Speaker 1: That is where Zechariah ends. Not at a grave, but
1:12:33
Speaker 1: at a throne over. The whole earth, the same universal reign,
1:12:39
Speaker 1: the donkey king had been promised when the war bow
1:12:42
Speaker 1: was broken. End. Peace proclaimed to the nations. Stand back
1:12:47
Speaker 1: now and look at the whole span. We began among
1:12:51
Speaker 1: broken stones. with a discouraged handful of returnees laying a
1:12:55
Speaker 1: foundation in tears, and a young priest with a name
1:12:59
Speaker 1: that meant the Lord remembers. He spoke to people who
1:13:03
Speaker 1: could not even fill their own small city, and he
1:13:06
Speaker 1: told them to keep building a temple that would never
1:13:10
Speaker 1: rival the one they had lost. By every earthly measure,
1:13:15
Speaker 1: he was a minor figure, in a minor province on
1:13:18
Speaker 1: the rim of someone else's empire. And yet, threaded through
1:13:24
Speaker 1: his visions in the dark and his oracles in the daylight,
1:13:28
Speaker 1: was the most detailed portrait of a coming Messiah that
1:13:31
Speaker 1: any single prophet would leave behind. The gentle king on
1:13:36
Speaker 1: the colt, the price of a slave counted out in silver,
1:13:40
Speaker 1: the coins thrown to the potter in the house of God.
1:13:44
Speaker 1: The shepherd struck and the sheep scattered. The pierced one
1:13:49
Speaker 1: mourned like a firstborn. and the fountain opened to wash
1:13:53
Speaker 1: away sin. Each detail set down 500 years early, copied
1:13:58
Speaker 1: and carried by a people who kept waiting through Persia
1:14:02
Speaker 1: and Greece and Rome until a week in Jerusalem when,
1:14:06
Speaker 1: one after another, the pictures stepped out of the scroll
1:14:09
Speaker 1: and into the streets. That is why this prophet, of
1:14:13
Speaker 1: all of them, is remembered as the man who saw
1:14:16
Speaker 1: the Messiah five centuries before he came. He saw him
1:14:21
Speaker 1: from the rubble, and he wrote down what he saw.