The Lord Will Be King Over the Whole Earth | Zechariah
Brian Hedges | August 24, 2025
Let me invite you to turn in Scripture this morning to the book of Zechariah, the Old Testament prophet Zechariah—page 793 if you’re following along in one of the Bibles in the chairs in front of you.
I think any of us, when we begin to learn something new, whether it’s a new field of study or it’s diving into a new hobby, we have to become familiar with the terms and the people and the places and the events around that world. Sometimes it just takes a deep immersion before you really understand what’s going on in that world.
For me, of course, one of my familiar worlds is the world of golf, and if you were to become interested in golfing there are lots of things to learn. There’s terminology, like fairways and greens and pars and birdies and regulation. There are significant people in the history of golf, like Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods and now Scottie Scheffler. There are significant places: Old St. Andrews and Augusta National and Pebble Beach. And there are significant events, like the U.S. Open, the Masters, and the Ryder Cup, and so on.
Similar examples could be given with any world: the world of college football, the world of philosophy, the world of World War II, the world of watches, the world of Star Wars, or of manga or of gaming—pick your area of interest. Whatever that world is, there’s terminology and there’s significant people and significant events in that world. You don’t really understand much of that world until you take a deep dive and you really start to get a feel for that language, that terminology, and try to understand the world in its own terms.
Friends, that is also true with the Bible. To understand the world of the Bible, we need some acquaintance with that world: the world of the Old Testament, the world of the ancient Near East, and in our case today, the world of prophetic and apocalyptic literature.
This has a couple of implications for us. It means that it’s one reason why it is sometimes so hard for us to understand the Bible, because we don’t know the world very well. We don’t live in this world. Most of us have not spent much time studying that world, and even when we try to read the Bible, sometimes we come to places and passages, maybe even whole books of the Bible, that just seem so foreign to us, seem so strange to us, that it’s hard for us to really get any benefit from it, because we don’t understand the world in its own terms.
That, in turn, is one reason why it’s so important for us as believers to study the Bible together and to teach through parts of the Bible that maybe seem strange and unfamiliar to us.
That’s particularly true with the book of Zechariah today. This is another one of the minor prophets—we’re almost done with this series, we have one week to go after today—and Zechariah is both the longest of the minor prophets and also the most difficult, the most challenging. Jerome called it “the most obscure book of the Hebrew Bible.”
You read this book of Zechariah, and it’s pretty strange, because you are being confronted with images and ideas that are just pretty foreign to our everyday experience. I was telling Holly this week that trying to explain the book of Zechariah to people who don’t really understand the Bible and apocalyptic literature is like trying to explain Star Wars to someone who’s never even seen the movie and knows nothing about science fiction. There’s just a lot to grasp for you to understand this world.
So we’re going to do our best this morning, and it’s important to understand that even though this is an obscure book, this is a book that actually figures pretty prominently in the New Testament. Walter Kaiser, a famous Old Testament scholar, traced seventy-one quotations or allusions of Zechariah in the New Testament, with a third of those taking place in the passion narratives, the gospels that tell us the story of Jesus’ suffering and death; and then almost another third in the book of Revelation.
I want to start by giving us a little bit of context, and then we’ll read some Scripture and talk about the shape of this book, and then give you the outline. So hang in there for a minute as we do some of this introductory work.
The context is essentially the same as the book of Haggai, and Brad did a fantastic job last week explaining that book. Haggai and Zechariah were contemporaries; they were both post-exilic prophets who were ministering to the people of God in Jerusalem roughly sixty-five years after the Babylonians had destroyed the temple in Jerusalem. Now the people have returned, a remnant has returned, the temple is in the process of being rebuilt, but it’s not finished; and God’s people are discouraged. They need hope. They need encouragement that God will be with them and that this process of completing the rebuilding of the temple will be blessed by God, that it will actually be accomplished, and that God will once again dwell with his people. That’s the context when Zechariah begins his ministry in 520 B.C., five years before the rebuilding of the temple is complete in 515.
Essentially, this book is written to give people encouragement and hope in the face of their disillusionment and discouragement. One of the books I consulted this week was called Longing for God in an Age of Discouragement, and it’s a summary of the book of Zechariah. That’s really what’s going on. You have people here who are longing to hear from God, they’re deeply discouraged and they need hope, and Zechariah comes on the scene to provide that hope to the people of God.
Let’s read the first three verses, Zechariah 1:1-3. It says,
“In the eighth month of the second year of Darius, the word of the Lord came to the prophet Zechariah son of Berekiah, the son of Iddo:
“‘The Lord was very angry with your ancestors. Therefore tell the people: This is what the Lord Almighty says: “Return to me,” declares the Lord Almighty, “and I will return to you,” says the Lord Almighty.’”
That essentially gives you the theme of this book. This book is a call to God’s people to return to him in faith, and it is an encouragement that the Lord will also return to them.
This gets worked out in a number of different ways in this book. Let me just give you a brief overview now of the structure of this book. It can be divided into three parts.
In Zechariah 1-6 you have visions, and this is the strange, weird part of the book, as there are eight visions in these six chapters, and they are essentially visions that are intended to encourage the post-exilic people of God. We’ll look at an example of one of those visions here in just a moment.
In Zechariah 7-8, kind of tucked there in the middle, you have exhortations. These are calls to exercise justice and mercy, and encouragements to them, with the promises of God’s future blessing. It’s essentially sermonic material, and I’m not going to spend time on this this morning because it really repeats what you find in the earlier prophets. The call to do justice and love mercy that you have in Micah essentially gets repeated here in chapters 7-8.
Then, in the final section of the book, Zechariah 9-14, you have promises; essentially two prophetic oracles that focus on two things: overcoming Israel’s enemies and then the establishing of God’s kingdom. We’ll look at some of those sections here in a few minutes.
So, there’s a mix of different genres, and included in these genres is this world of visionary, prophetic revelation. This is the stuff that’s pretty strange, and we’re going to dig into this in the first point. I really want to look at three things today:
1. The Visions of the Prophet
2. The Rejection of the Shepherd
3. The Coming of the Kingdom
1. The Visions of the Prophet
We start with the visions of the prophet. These visions are strange. You have eight of these visions, and you have all kinds of strange imagery. You have these four horses and you have four horns and craftsmen or blacksmiths. You have the Lord with his seven eyes and you have a woman in a basket and a man with a measuring line and flying squirrels and walls of fire! And you read this and your head’s kind of spinning. “What is going on in all these visions?”
Actually, I think if we just understand how these are put together, it’s fairly easy to grasp what the Lord intended these visions to do for the people of God and then to draw a benefit for us today. So let’s look at one of these visions. We’ll just look at the first one together, and then I want to show you how the way this vision works is essentially how all the visions work in Zechariah. So let’s read Zechariah 1:7-17. This will be the longest passage from Zechariah that we read; everything else is going to be shorter, just a few verses here and there. I’ll read this with minimal commentary along the way. Zechariah 1:7-17 says:
“On the twenty-fourth day of the eleventh month, the month of Shebat [which is the name of a Babylonian month, from the Babylonian calendar], in the second year of Darius [who was a Persian king], the word of the Lord came to the prophet Zechariah son of Berekiah, the son of Iddo.
“During the night I had a vision, and there before me was a man mounted on a red horse.
Okay, now get this. All of the visions seem to occur in the night. All of these are night visions, and he sees these strange things. Don’t get too caught up with the details, because what’s going to happen is an angel is going to give an explanation at the end of the vision. Alright, verse 8.
“During the night I had a vision, and there before me was a man mounted on a red horse. He was standing among the myrtle trees in a ravine. Behind him were red, brown and white horses.
“I asked, ‘What are these, my lord?’
“The angel who was talking with me answered, ‘I will show you what they are.’
“Then the man standing among the myrtle trees explained, ‘They are the ones the Lord has sent to go throughout the earth.’”
So essentially, these horses, these horsemen, patrol the earth providing surveillance around the world—what’s going on in the political sphere in the world—and bringing that report back to God. Verse 11:
“And they reported to the angel of the Lord who was standing among the myrtle trees, ‘We have gone throughout the earth and found the whole world at rest and in peace.’
“Then the angel of the Lord said, ‘Lord Almighty, how long will you withhold mercy from Jerusalem and from the towns of Judah, which you have been angry with these seventy years?’
Okay, here’s the historical situation. While it seems that the nations of the world, and particularly these nations which had been persecuting the people of God during exile, seem like they’re prosperous and at peace, here are the people of God at Jerusalem discouraged, and still feeling the effects of having been under the judgment of God. So they’re asking this question: “How long will you be angry with Jerusalem? When will you show mercy again? We’ve been in this situation seventy years,” and that, of course, is referring back to the prophet Jeremiah, who said that the exile would last seventy years. Read Jeremiah 25.
So that’s the crisis here. Verse 13 now:
“So the Lord spoke kind and comforting words to the angel who talked with me.
“Then the angel who was speaking to me said [here’s the explanation of the vision], ‘Proclaim this word: This is what the Lord Almighty says: “I am very jealous for Jerusalem and Zion, and I am very angry with the nations that feel secure. I was only a little angry, but they went too far with the punishment.”’
“‘Therefore this is what the Lord says: “I will return to Jerusalem with mercy, and there my house will be rebuilt. And the measuring line will be stretched out over Jerusalem,” declares the Lord Almighty.
“‘Proclaim further: This is what the Lord Almighty says: “My towns will again overflow with prosperity, and the Lord will again comfort Zion and choose Jerusalem.”’”
Okay, there are a lot of details in that vision, but this vision is essentially proclaiming, from the angel to Zechariah and from Zechariah to the people of God, the end of the exile, God’s coming judgment on the nations, and God’s return to Jerusalem in mercy and peace and then prosperity.
That’s really the pattern you have in all these visions. You have a vision that seems pretty strange, then you have an angel giving an interpretation, which is a message for the people of God, in the midst of their historical situation where they are really needing hope and encouragement that God is going to be with them.
We could say that Zechariah’s visions are highly symbolic forms of divine communication that are intended to convey reassuring truths to God’s disheartened and discouraged people. That’s how the visions function in this book.
In a minute I’ll show you that there is a practical application for us in this; but let me just show you the other visions in summary form, and you can see this in this chart. You have these visions that form something of a chiasm, so the first and the last visions somewhat parallel one another, and then so on until you get to those central visions.
So if the vision of the four horsemen is really Yahweh’s promise of prosperity for his people, you also have promises in the other visions. The vision of the four horns and the blacksmith is really God’s promise of justice for his people. Then in chapter 2, the vision of a measuring line is God’s promise of his presence. He’s going to be with his people once again.
Then you have this really wonderful passage—I wish we had the time to deal with it; we don’t this morning—where Joshua the priest is clothed in dirty clothes and the adversary is accusing him before the Lord, and God comes and strips away the dirty garments and clothes him in clean clothes. It is the promise of Yahweh’s cleansing for his people. They’ve been judged because of their sins, they’ve been exiled from God; now God is cleansing Joshua the high priest and he’s cleansing the people. This is so the temple worship can resume.
Then in chapter 4 you have the lampstand and the olive trees, and it’s really the promise of God’s Spirit, who will be with Zerubbabel. We heard about Zerubbabel last week; he’s leading the charge to rebuild the temple. And the Lord says to Zerubbabel, “It’s not by might, it’s not by power, it’s by my Spirit, says the Lord.” It’s God’s promise that his Spirit is going to be with him to equip him and to help him in this process.
Then you have a couple of visions in chapter 5, a flying scroll and a woman in a basket. These are really God’s promises of judgment and the removal of sin from Israel.
Then finally, in chapter 6, the promise of God’s triumph with this final vision of four chariots.
Now again, the imagery is strange, but if you read the interpretation of the angel, it becomes pretty clear that this is meant to be real-world hope given to the people of God in the face of their discouragement.
Friends, there is an application for us, and the application is simply this: whatever you’re going through right now, you also can turn to the Lord and trust the promises of his word and receive hope. We need that. When we’re going through difficult things, we need to turn to God’s word and receive hope from God’s word that God is with us.
Listen to Spurgeon on this. This is from a wonderful sermon from Spurgeon called “Man’s Extremity, God’s Opportunity.” Spurgeon said,
“Your extremity is God’s opportunity. The difficulty all along has been to get to the end of you, for when a man gets to the end of himself he has reached the beginning of God’s working.”
You see, that’s what had happened to the people of God in the Old Testament through the exile, and now you have these post-exilic Jews in their discouragement, and they’re faced with the daunting task of rebuilding the temple, and they need reassurance that God will be with them, that God will carry them through, that God will give them hope, that his Spirit will dwell with them and empower them and his presence will return, and he will forgive them of their sins. They needed that reassurance.
We’re not faced with that task, but you’re faced with something else. “Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.” What is your extremity today? What difficult circumstance are you going through? What problem are you facing, what trial? For some of you it is a huge obstacle, some mountain that you can’t see a way to overcome. For some of you it may be problems in relationship, maybe it’s breakdown in marriage or family life; maybe it’s a rebellious child or grandchild or someone who’s far from the Lord. This is what keeps you awake at night. For some of you it may be financial issues or issues related to your job or your work, or maybe it’s your health. Maybe you have received some kind of medical diagnosis that is deeply discouraging to you, or you are facing the gradual decline of your health in old age. Or maybe you are a caretaker for someone in your family who is facing that.
Listen, friends: whatever it is that you’re facing today, your extremity is God’s opportunity. Your problem is no problem for God; your trial may very well be a blessing from God that is wrapped up in a difficulty, but it is an occasion through which God can show the sufficiency of his grace in your life. Your present suffering, the Scriptures tell us, is working for you an eternal weight of glory. We need to know that. The people of God needed to know that in the Old Testament; we need to know it today. We need to know that there is no obstacle that is too big for God, that there is no problem that is beyond the scope of his sovereign purposes, that there is no sin that he can’t forgive, there’s no mountain he can’t help you climb, there is no trial he can’t get you through, and there’s no pain or suffering that he will not sanctify for your good! Whatever it is you’re facing, take hope from the promises of God’s word that God is for you, he is not against you. Be encouraged with the truth of God’s love and his grace and his favor.
That’s the message of the prophet Zechariah. That’s the meaning, really, of these visions, as strange as they seem. They were meant to reassure God’s people of his favor and of his presence with them, and we can take similar encouragement today.
2. The Rejection of the Shepherd
So you have the visions of the prophet, and now I want to jump ahead to the last part of this book and think for a few minutes about another image, the image of a shepherd—the rejection of the shepherd.
The shepherd language is somewhat familiar to us. We know Jesus as the good Shepherd who laid down his life for the sheep. But the language of the shepherd especially was important for the agrarian culture of the people of God in the Old Testament, and it wasn’t just the idea of a shepherd tending sheep, but it was a metaphor for the leaders. So the kings, and sometimes even priests, would be referred to as shepherds.
What becomes really clear as you read through the Old Testament—and you have this in Zechariah—is that God is angry with the shepherds of Israel, and part of the judgment coming on the people of God is because of the disobedience and the disloyalty of the shepherds. You can see this in a couple of places in the book of Zechariah. Let me just read a couple of passages.
First of all, Zechariah 10:3. The Lord says,
“My anger burns against the shepherds,
and I will punish the leaders [you see the parallelism between shepherd and leader];
for the Lord Almighty will care
for his flock, the people of Judah,
and make them like a proud horse in battle.”
You have an implicit contrast right there, don’t you, a contrast between the shepherds or the leaders of Israel with whom God is displeased and God himself, who is a shepherd and considers the people of Judah his flock.
This really gets built out in Zechariah 11. We don’t have time to read it or dig into it deeply, but you have essentially condemnation of the foolish and the worthless shepherds, these leaders who had led God’s people astray, and you really have a reflection on the experience of exile, as Zechariah symbolically takes two shepherd’s staves and names one of the staves Favor and the other staff Union, and then he breaks the staves in half to show that the covenant has been broken and the union between Israel and Judah, the northern and the southern kingdoms, has been broken. All of this is setting us up for the need for someone to come in and fill this space of a Davidic priest-king who will fill the role of shepherd for the people of God.
That leads to another passage I want us to read, Zechariah 13:7-9. Even if you’ve never read Zechariah, if you’re familiar with the New Testament and you’ve read the Gospel of Matthew, this one might sound familiar to you, because Matthew quotes from this in Matthew 26. So the passage goes like this:
“‘Awake, sword, against my shepherd,
against the man who is close to me!’
declares the Lord Almighty.
‘Strike the shepherd,
and the sheep will be scattered,
and I will turn my hand against the little ones.
In the whole land,’ declares the Lord,
‘two-thirds will be struck down and perish;
yet one-third will be left in it.
This third I will put into the fire;
I will refine them like silver
and test them like gold.
They will call on my name
and I will answer them;
I will say, “They are my people,”
and they will say, “The Lord is our God.”’”
That’s a really interesting passage. Here the shepherd, unlike the false shepherds, is someone who is close to the Lord, and yet a sword is going to strike this shepherd. And as the sword strikes the shepherd the sheep are going to be scattered, but a third of them are going to be refined. Here’s the theme of the remnant. A remnant is going to be preserved and refined, and that remnant will call on the name of the Lord, and God will answer them, and there’s a restoration and renewal of the covenant as they say, “The Lord is our God,” and God says, “These are my people.”
So, who is this shepherd, this shepherd who is struck by a sword? I think the answer you find in the New Testament use of this passage, in Matthew 26:31, when Jesus, on the night of his betrayal, uses these words in speaking to his disciples. Here’s the verse, Matthew 26:31.
“Then Jesus told them, ‘This very night you will all fall away on account of me, for it is written:
‘“I will strike the shepherd,
and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.”’”
So, here’s what I think is going on in Zechariah. Zechariah’s oracles about shepherds are part of a biblical pattern established in the Old Testament and more deeply fulfilled in the story of Christ in the new. This is what we call typology. You have these types, you have these patterns in the Old Testament that get established in the story of Israel, and then they get brought up again in the New Testament, so that Jesus is living out this pattern and fulfilling it in a way far beyond what the original audience of those Old Testament prophets could ever have understood.
It’s one reason why Zechariah figures in so prominently in the New Testament. In fact—get this—Zechariah is the most quoted Old Testament prophet in the Passion narratives of Jesus. More than any other prophet, more than any other Old Testament passage, Zechariah is quoted again and again, and you find it in the various Gospels.
Let me give you one more example, and then lean into two points of application. Zechariah 12:10—the shepherd language gets dropped, but you still have this language of piercing or striking. It says,
“I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplication. They will look on me, the one they have pierced [the word literally means to be stabbed with a sword], and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and grieve bitterly for him as one grieves for a firstborn son.”
It’s a kind of mysterious passage, but one that gets quoted by the apostle John in his Passion narrative, in John 19, when Jesus, dying on the cross, is speared in the side, pierced in the side by a Roman soldier’s spear, and the blood and the water flow out, and then the passage says in John 19:37 that this was to fulfill the Scripture, “They will look on the one they have pierced.”
It’s all right here in the Old Testament Scriptures, these types, these patterns that then get fulfilled in Jesus.
I want to suggest two applications, one that’s a broad application that has to do with our study of Scripture and then one that is a very specific application of Zechariah 12:10 and this whole idea of mourning when we see the one who is pierced for our sins.
(1) So application one: in your study of the Scriptures, learn to look for Christ on every page. Now, that’s been a thread through this series, and really it’s a core value here at Redeemer. We say we’re a gospel-centered or a Christ-centered church, and one of the things we mean by that is that Jesus is the hero of every story, Jesus is the theme of every book of the Bible, and Jesus should be the centerpoint of every message and all of our teaching and ministry. We want to get your eyes on Jesus, and this is how to read the Bible.
One reason we get so lost and confused when we’re reading the Old Testament is we get sidetracked. “What does the red horse mean? What does the brown horse mean? What does the white horse mean?” We’re forgetting that there is a more dominant point that’s being made in these passages that’s to set our eyes on the Messiah, Jesus Christ, crucified for us. So one reason we’ve done this whole series is to try to lay out some of those connections in the minor prophets. Whether it has to do with covenant renewal or it has to do with the kingdom of God or it has to do with a shepherd—whatever the theme is—to show you that these lines all converge in Jesus, and that Jesus is the point of the story. Our main interest in studying the Old Testament prophets isn’t what they may or may not be saying about the nation of Israel today, it’s what they are saying about Jesus Christ.
Listen, friends. We can miss this point in many varied ways, including some pretty subtle ways that maybe we’re not conscious of. We can think that we’re focused on Christ because we believe in Jesus, but we can think we’re focused on Christ when our absorbing concern is really something else other than Jesus.
Let me illustrate this by telling you about an interaction I had a number of years ago. This was a long time ago. There was a young man who was coming to our church who had come from a very charismatic background, and this was a major shaping influence in his life as a Christian. He and I became very good friends; I really loved this brother. We became pretty close, we did a lot of things together, a lot of ministry together. But he was so shaped by the charismatic influences that he was always pushing me towards those things. He really wanted me to speak in tongues, he really wanted me to share my dreams with a friend of his who he believed had a gift for interpreting dreams. (I essentially said, “Listen, when he can tell me what my dream is without me telling him, then maybe I’ll listen to his interpretation! Let’s do it the way the Bible does it.”) He was always pushing me to this stuff.
Finally one day—we were pretty close by this point—one day we were sitting together at lunch and he brought it up again, and I said, “Listen, it seems like the bright, shining star in your universe is spiritual gifts! It’s not Jesus. Jesus needs to be what you’re about, not the spiritual gifts.”
I think it’s very possible that for many of us the bright, shining star in our universe can be something other than Jesus, and we may even put a Christian label or a theological label on it. We may think that it’s devotion to Jesus, but we’re sidetracked into something else.
Just ask yourself today, what is the bright, shining star in your universe? What is it that gets you most excited? What are you most interested in when you’re reading the Bible or when you come to church? What is it that you want to hear about and talk about and gets your heart racing? Maybe it’s eschatology, maybe it’s end times, it’s the prophetic calendar, and you just want to know how all this stuff is going to work out in history. Or maybe it’s things about the church; it’s ecclesiology, it’s church order, it’s getting the sacraments right and a certain kind of liturgy and church government and all that. More likely, for many of us it’s maybe Reformed theology, and you want to hear about the doctrines of grace and you want to hear about the doctrine of election and you want to cross that t and dot that i in just the right way. For some it may be politics and patriotism, whatever your party is, and maybe making America great again. But the question for us is this: is it Jesus Christ? Is it the Son of God, crucified for our sins, risen for our justification, exalted and enthroned to the right hand of God, for the glory of God? Is he the bright, shining star in the center of your universe?
It makes all the difference in the world what gets our hearts excited, and if it’s not Jesus, we’re going to be sidetracked and we’re going to miss the main point of the Scriptures and we’re going to miss the great treasure of our hearts and lives. So, make Jesus the focus in your study of the Bible. In all your reading of Scripture, look for Christ on every page.
(2) Here’s another application, this time from this verse, Zechariah 12:10. You might even think of this as an example of how to do the first thing. How do you make Jesus the focus in your Christian life, using a specific passage of Scripture in a way that makes an actual difference in your life? How do you do that? Well, look at Zechariah 12:10. We just read it. They will look on him whom they have pierced, and they will mourn.” That’s, of course, applied to Jesus in John 19.
What does that mean for us? What does that mean that you mourn when you look on the one whom you have pierced? Think about this in your struggles against sin. In your struggles against sin, learn to look upon Christ crucified. This is the way of sanctification.
Listen, there are lots of ways to combat sin. There are practical methods, there are psychological aspects to this, there are disciplines involved in this. I would say that a well-rounded doctrine of sanctification can include all of these other things as subordinate helps in our fight against sin, but the most foundational means of killing sin in your heart and in your life is seeing Christ crucified for your sins and meditating on that until it begins to break your heart for sin and break the hold of sin on your heart. That’s what we need. That’s one reason I think we make such slow progress in our spiritual growth, because we’re not meditating on Christ in this way. We’re not thinking of Christ in this way. This is the gospel-centered approach to sanctification! This is the motivation for dealing with your addiction or your lying or your covetous, greedy heart or your anger problem, or whatever it is. It’s seeing that those sins put Jesus on the cross, and he loved you so much he was willing to suffer the wrath of God for you so that you could be free from that sin.
Listen to Spurgeon one more time. This is lightly edited from a beautiful sermon from Spurgeon—I read this years ago—on Zechariah 12:10, called “The Pierced One Pierces the Heart.” Look it up; you can read it online. But here’s a great paragraph from this. Spurgeon’s doing this for us, okay? He’s modeling the meditation. He says,
“Remember that Jesus Christ does not merely suffer for sin, but he suffers for you. Perhaps this may be the heartbreaker with some who never repented of sin before. O you who look to him with faith, Jesus Christ loves your poor, guilty soul so much that he suffered all this for you! As you look upon him dying upon the cross, do not forget that every drop flows for you. How could you have despised him who died for you?”
He determined to save you and went down to the very lowest depths to bring you up, and yet you’ve heard the gospel and neglected it. You’ve lived all these years in sin; you neglected the world of God. Maybe you’ve been a swearer, using this very name of Christ to curse by, and yet he suffered this for you.
“O believing sinner, for you these wounds, for you that sweat, for you that cross, for you that spear, for you that mangled body lying motionless in the tomb in the grasp of death! Will not this make you feel that you can no longer harbor the sins which are the enemies of Christ, but instead must once and for all cast out from your soul these cruel foes which made the Savior bleed?”
I don’t know about you, but just reading something like that starts to stir the heart, makes me want to fight my sin because of what Jesus did for me on the cross.
We sing it together often, we’ll sing it this morning:
“Behold the man upon a cross,
My sin upon His shoulders;
Ashamed, I hear my mocking voice
Call out among the scoffers.
It was my sin that held Him there
Until it was accomplished;
His dying breath has brought me life –
I know that it is finished.”
You meditate on that until the grip of sin on your heart begins to loosen, until the ice-cold heart begins to thaw out, until you begin to move in your affections back towards Christ, who is your Savior. This is what we have to do in our spiritual lives in order to really grow.
3. The Coming of the Kingdom
We see this modeled in the New Testament’s use of Zechariah. We looked at two things so far, and I’m pretty much out of time, so I’m just going to give you a summary of the last point. We’ve seen the visions of the prophet and the rejection of the shepherd. The third thing—you really get this in the last third of the book—is the coming of the kingdom. Zechariah is not only the most often-quoted of the prophets in the Passion narratives, but (at least according to Tremper Longman) apart from Ezekiel, Zechariah exercised more influence than any other Old Testament book on the book of Revelation. You do have this theme, this thread that runs through Zechariah, of the kingdom of God.
I think you see indications of both the first installment and the first coming of Christ and the second, the consummation of the kingdom in his second coming; and I’ll just give you two verses, and then I’m almost done.
This one’s familiar, Zechariah 9:9-10. Actually, I’ll just read verse 9.
“Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion!
Shout, Daughter Jerusalem!
See, your king comes to you,
righteous and victorious,
lowly and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
You know that because we read it, probably, every Palm Sunday, because this is the passage that’s used in the New Testament when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey’s colt, showing that he is this humble king coming to Jerusalem not on a warhorse to fight off the Romans, but on this humble donkey to die as the suffering servant for God’s people. The first coming of Christ.
Maybe less familiar to us is the second passage, Zechariah 14:4-9. As I read it, notice the emphasis on “the day.” There’s a lot in the minor prophets about “the day of the Lord,” and we’ve seen that this is a day of judgment, and sometimes it has a temporal reference. So the Babylonian exile was a day of the Lord for Jerusalem. But here the day is something beyond. Here’s a post-exilic prophet; he’s looking to that day, and the day is a glorious day when Israel’s enemies, the enemies of God’s people, are defeated, and where God, in a very personal way, begins to reign over his people. So, Zechariah 14:4-9.
“On that day his feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, east of Jerusalem, and the Mount of Olives will be split in two from east to west, forming a great valley, with half of the mountain moving north and half moving south. You will flee by my mountain valley, for it will extend to Azel. You will flee as you fled from the earthquake in the days of Uzziah king of Judah. Then the Lord my God will come, and all the holy ones with him.
“On that day there will be neither sunlight nor cold, frosty darkness. It will be a unique day—a day known only to the Lord—with no distinction between day and night. When evening comes, there will be light.
“On that day living water will flow out from Jerusalem, half of it east to the Dead Sea and half of it west to the Mediterranean Sea, in summer and in winter.
“The Lord will be king over the whole earth. On that day there will be one Lord, and his name the only name.”
You read that passage, and you have this mixture of real geographic locations but then imagery—living water, no night, mountains split in two—you have this imagery that’s telling us that there’s something like a cosmic aspect to this, as when God comes to reign creation is reshaped. I think it’s evoking Isaiah’s imagery of a new heavens and new earth and pointing forward to that same language in the book of Revelation. It’s pointing us to that day when God himself will dwell among his people in the person of Christ, where there’s this reunion between heaven and earth, when the kingdoms of this world become the kingdom of our God and his Christ, when God himself reigns over his people and these healing streams—the living water—flow from Jerusalem to bring renewal to the world. It is that day when, to evoke the language of Tolkien, that day when everything sad will be untrue.
You know, Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings. He also wrote an essay called “On Fairy Stories,” and in that essay he actually created a new word. He coined a term. The word was eucatastrophe. We know what a catastrophe is. A catastrophe is a sudden, cataclysmic, destructive event; a tragedy. But a eucatastrophe is the opposite of that. With the prefix eu- it means a good catastrophe. It’s a good sudden turn. He called it “the sudden and joyous turn, the sudden and miraculous grace.” He says, “It doesn’t deny the existence of sorrow and failure but denies the universal defeat, and it gives a fleeting glimpse of joy, joy beyond the walls of this world.”
In The Lord of the Rings, of course, it happens at the end when the ring is finally destroyed and Sam is reunited with his friends, and he says, “Is everything sad going to become untrue?” It’s a wonderful story, but it’s just a shadow of the true story.
There is coming a day when Christ comes, and when every tear is wiped from our eyes, and where there’s no more night; when God himself is the light, and where living water and the tree of life are there for the healing of the nations. It’s what we’re looking for! This is the ultimate fulfillment of our longings for peace, for justice, for hope, for righteousness, for a world made new. It’s the coming kingdom of God.
Friends, what it means for us—this is the application—is that as we face the uncertainty of life in the present world, we should anchor our hope in the unbreakable promise of God’s future reign. Zechariah points us to that; Christ especially points us to that and will be the great fulfillment of that in the age to come.
So, let me end by just encouraging us this morning, let’s take hope from the Scriptures, even the strange parts. They’re there for our encouragement and for our hope. Let’s meditate on the sufferings of Christ and seek Christ as the point of Scripture. This is the means of our transformation. And let’s anchor our hope in God’s promise of his future kingdom. This is what our hearts are longing for. Let’s pray.
Lord, we thank you this morning for your word. We thank you, Lord, for the promise of your kingdom and for what you have already done to establish your kingdom in our hearts through the death and resurrection of Jesus and through the gift of your Spirit. We pray this morning that in response to your word our hearts would move a little more in the direction of faithfulness and of obedience and of holiness; that there would be gradual transformation that takes place through our meditations on Scripture and now our meditations at the table; that you would use both word and table as a means of grace today to renew our hearts, to deepen our faith and our repentance, and especially to deepen our love for you; and that this love would be in our hearts the expulsive power of a new affection that sets us free from the grip of lesser loves and even of sinful desires. Lord, this is the work of your Spirit through the instrumentality of your word, and we pray now that your Spirit would do what only your Spirit can do. Work deeply in our hearts what’s pleasing in your sight, and draw near to us now by the Spirit as we come to the table to remember not just in word but through the symbolic elements and through the actions of taking and eating and drinking the elements, to remember what Christ has done for us because of his great love for us. So Lord, draw near in these moments, we pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
