Mining the Minors: Zechariah (14)

Get ready, we’re going to do a little time traveling for the next week or two.

Zechariah’s fourth message from God is his longest, even if you break it into two parts as many commentators do (using the words “And the word of the Lord of hosts came” as the starting point of each revelation). I prefer to keep the two revelations together, since both speak of the future restoration of Zion, and both use similar language to distinguish past from present and future. When we break them up, we lose what I feel are intentional associations.

Present Day Living in View of a Certain Future

Between the two revelations of a fully restored, millennial Zion are eleven verses in which we find seven instructions for the Jews of Zechariah’s day, which find their motive power not in threats of imminent judgment but in the promises of God listed here concerning future Zion.

The first few times I read chapter 8, I found myself lost in the “time travel” aspects of the passage. God speaks through the prophet here concerning three distinct periods — past, present and future — and if you are not paying close attention, you easily lose track of which sections of the chapter relate to each period. It helped me to observe that the prophet has labeled them for us. The past (the period prior to the day the second temple’s foundations were laid) is designated “the former days” or “before those days” (verses 10-11). The present (commencing from the laying of the foundation) is “these days” (verses 9 and 15). The future period of millennial glory is “those days” (verses 6 and 23).

Bible prophecy always has practical implications in the present, even when it concerns itself with the state of things more than 2.5 millennia in the future. Christians have something similar in the book of Revelation. We read the end of Israel’s story (and our own) in the predictive parts of the book, while taking practical lessons from the letters to the churches in chapters 2 and 3, and from other observations throughout.

The future is absolutely certain. History is a tale with the ending already written. The question for the reader, as someone has rightly observed, is how shall we then live?

II. Four Messages (continued)

4/ The Future Restoration of Zion

Zechariah 8:1-8 – A View of Days to Come

“And the word of the Lord of hosts came, saying, ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts: I am jealous for Zion with great jealousy, and I am jealous for her with great wrath. Thus says the Lord: I have returned to Zion and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem shall be called the faithful city, and the mountain of the Lord of hosts, the holy mountain. Thus says the Lord of hosts: Old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand because of great age. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets. Thus says the Lord of hosts: If it is marvelous in the sight of the remnant of this people in those days, should it also be marvelous in my sight, declares the Lord of hosts? Thus says the Lord of hosts: Behold, I will save my people from the east country and from the west country, and I will bring them to dwell in the midst of Jerusalem. And they shall be my people, and I will be their God, in faithfulness and in righteousness.’ ”

The Lord of Hosts

It’s hard to miss the Holy Spirit’s emphasis throughout the chapter on a very specific name of God: the Lord of hosts. Zechariah uses it eighteen times in twenty-three verses, far more frequently than in any other chapter, and many more times than any other Minor Prophet. (The ones who come closest are, not surprisingly, Haggai and Malachi, who prophesied during the same post-exilic era.) He is yᵊhōvâ ṣāḇā', the “Lord of armies”. The title depicts God in his military majesty, accomplishing the divine purpose through his innumerable agents.

Foremost among these, of course, are the armies of heaven, but some commentators include the armies of Israel as well. It’s hard to see how God might be depicted giving marching orders to the armies of Israel in Zechariah’s day, with the nation at its weakest and least independent point in centuries. Jerusalem didn’t even have a wall, let alone an army to defend it. Nevertheless, Zechariah’s original audience could take great comfort in the thought that the Lord of hosts, with all his heavenly agents accomplishing his stated will, were moving in the world on behalf of Zion.

There is more than a little certainty in that.

Jealous for Zion

The Hebrews words for “jealous” and “jealousy” used here are qānā' and qin'â. I have written before about the translation issues around these words: they may legitimately be translated “envy”, “jealousy” or “zeal”, which covers a wide range of emotional territory. You can only tell which is the most appropriate by examining context. Here the ESV has opted for “jealousy”, though I prefer “zeal”, as the NKJV has it. The Lord is not correcting a covenant relationship threatened by a third party or by straying affections, but rather expressing the intensity of his own desire to fulfill his promises to Israel, glorifying his people among the nations and judging their enemies on their behalf. The “wrath” he speaks of is not directed at Judah in the present moment, but against any who would injure, oppress or afflict her. We will see the Lord is speaking of a situation in the distant future, though perhaps Zechariah’s original audience did not begin to guess just how far off it might be. Ezra and Nehemiah’s descriptions of conditions in Jerusalem during this period would not lead us to call it “the faithful city” or “the holy mountain”, but one day it surely will be. It is to this state, when God himself is in her midst in the person of Jesus Christ, that the Lord looks forward with great eagerness.

Returning to Zion

It might be possible, at least in the absence of other information, to make a case that the words “I have returned to Zion and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem” refer to the Lord returning to the second temple to resume his place enthroned above the cherubim in an all-new Holy of Holies. However, we have a great deal more to work with here when we seek to assign a time to the fulfillment of God’s promise.

First, when Zechariah wrote, there were no cherubim present to serve as even a figurative throne. The last mention of the Ark of the Covenant in the OT’s historical books occurs in 2 Chronicles 35, where King Josiah instructs the Levites, who had apparently removed the Ark from Solomon’s temple, to return it. After that, the Ark disappeared forever. Exactly when and how this took place is unclear, and various stories have circulated. But if Zerubbabel and Joshua returned from captivity with the Ark, scripture does not mention it, which would seem a huge omission given that Ezra spells out exactly how many basins, censers, bowls and vessels came home with the exiles as a gift from the king of Persia. It is impossible the Ark returned at the same time without even a word of editorial comment.

For that matter, there’s no indication Nebuchadnezzar’s army ever carried the Ark away at the fall of Jerusalem. The most popular theory is that the Levites hid it prior to the city’s fall. If they did, they did a great job. It was never seen again.

Those Days

Furthermore, Zechariah assigns this prophecy of the Lord dwelling in Jerusalem to “those days”, a future time when the citizens of Jerusalem will live to great age and multiply children. This echoes the words of Isaiah, who wrote, “No more shall there be in [Jerusalem] an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not fill out his days, for the young man shall die a hundred years old.” A quick glance at the context shows Isaiah is speaking of a day in which the wolf and lamb shall graze together, most definitely a picture of millennial bliss.

It’s also a time when diaspora Jews (and their brothers and sisters from the dispersed northern kingdom) will return from the east country and west country to their ancestral homes, when the city will be called faithful and holy, and a remnant will possess it. It should be clear “east country” and “west country” refer to places considerably more remote than Moab and Gaza, to the immediate east and west of Judah. There may be a reminder of Psalm 50, which also refers to God the Lord shining forth out of Zion, “the perfection of beauty”. There, Asaph uses the phrase “from the rising of the sun (the east) to its setting (the west)” as a metaphor for universality. If so, then the idea is that there will be a complete return of all who had been scattered abroad from everywhere in the world without exception. This is manifestly not the steady trickle of returning exiles from Babylon or Persia, both of which scripture calls “north”, at the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, but something far more spectacular and conclusive.

Down the Road

This scene of millennial bliss was far from the situation in Judah when Zechariah prophesied. Sixty years later, Nehemiah would take up arms to defend the wall he was building from angry neighbors. If, shortly after 520 BC, spiritual conditions had been as Zechariah describes, the commands that follow in verses 9-19 would have been superfluous, as would Malachi’s subsequent prophesy to the returned exiles, which ends with the threat to “strike the land with a decree of utter destruction”, as in fact took place in AD70 after the rejection of Messiah. So no, Zechariah is not painting a rosy picture of conditions in Jerusalem a few years after 520 BC. He is looking much, much further down the road.

However long it takes, the glory of Zion is a certainty. The Lord of hosts will accomplish it. What then were the implications for God’s people who heard this message? We will discuss that next week.