Zechariah 1:18-21

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Intro

As servants of the Most High God who we know is creator, sustainer and sovereign rule over all things who, as the Baptist Catechism teaches us has decreed His eternal purposes and has foreordained whatsoever comes to pass, who executes those decrees through works of creation and providence, and who powerfully preserves and governs all of His creatures and all of their actions. As servants of this God how are we to understand times of opposition to His rule and times of oppression of His people, how are we to seek to overcome here in this world, what does it look like to see our influence expand and grow and what are the means through which God has ordained that this would come to pass?
These are big questions that have often faced God’s people.
Many in our day, likely many here, wrestle with these questions and it was no different for the people in the days of Zechariah.
For their part they understood the destruction and oppression that they had faced. They had owned up for their sins and had repented as they experienced the wrath of God against them a generation earlier. They had been providentially carried off into exile for 70 years and had borne the just discipline of their covenant Lord.
Now though they were back in the land and yet they still faced opposition from the other nations that surrounded them. They had experienced some favor from their foreign king but also knew that favor to be fickle and fleeting and they certainly could feel the displeasure and ardent opposition to them from the nations who immediately surrounded them.
They had set themselves to the task again of rebuilding the temple and they had gotten their hearts right with God in the process as a result of the ministries of our two prophets, Haggai and Zechariah.
But now what were they to expect. God had seemed to promise a return of sorts to the high times of Israel under the reigns of David and his son Solomon.

Thus says the LORD of hosts: My cities shall again overflow with prosperity, and the LORD will again comfort Zion and again choose Jerusalem.’ ”

But how do we get there, what are we to do and what are we to expect from the Lord as we move in that direction?
It is to these types of questions that Zechariah now turns with the second of his night visions.

Pray and Read

Now as we approach this vision lets just remember quickly our context. As we have already stated the people are right at the outset of the renewed efforts to rebuild the temple. Haggai called them to this task and then Zechariah three months ago had called them to true repentance within the pursuit of that task. Both of these messages seem to have been heeded because we find now the people being encouraged by both prophets in the work and the blessings of God promised to them.

But from this day on I will bless you.”

Haggai had said and now two months after that declaration Zechariah receives this series of 8 visions all in one night.
These visions as we discussed in our last time together seem to be aimed at the encouragement of the work of building the temple and in that regard and because of Zechariah’s membership in a priestly line we expect that we are going to find lots of temple and worship imagery in these visions.
And so we see here that after his vision of the horses and their riders in the myrtle grove in the deep ravine the vision that had declared to them that they would indeed begin to see God remove the rest from the nations that they were experiencing, a rest that we said was a rest from God’s judgement against them, and that as they experienced the removal of rest and return to a state of judgement before God that God’s people in Jerusalem would conversely experience the blessing of a rebuilt temple and also of a rebuilt Jerusalem. The work they had begun would succeed, they would build the temple and they would rebuild the city.
And now we see then the transition to the next vision in verse 18.
Zechariah looks again, he lifts up his eyes and he sees another sight before him.
Now we are going to wrestle with this vision for a while this morning because its lack of details causes no shortage of disagreement between Bible scholars as to its meaning.
But lets just take in the sight with Zechariah for a moment.
He sees four horns.... that's int, that's all we are given. Not much detail. I told you, we are given very little initially to go on other than the horns and the number of the horns.
Now Zechariah turns to the angle who is with him, the angle that we said will accompany him through most of these visions, this is not the angle of the Lord from amongst the myrtle trees this is the prophets guide for the visions. Zechariah asks the angle:
“What are these?”
Good question! A question that highlights the vagueness of the vision itself even for the prophet. There doesn't seem to be yet much to go on.
And so the angle replies:

“These are the horns that have scattered Judah, Israel, and Jerusalem.”

Now we have some information and we will come back to this momentarily, these are in some way representative of what in the immediate context seems to be the exile of the people of Israel and Judah.
The vision then continues. We simply read that:

Then the LORD showed me four craftsmen.

Again the vision seems to be less than specific. Even the wording in the Hebrew doesn't give us much help in understanding what kind of craftsmen these are.
And so as we are driven to ask so also Zechariah asks:

“What are these coming to do?”

Zachariah knows that there must be a purpose for these 4 craftsmen that he sees and so he asks the angle what are they coming to do? A very reasonable question especially when it isn't immediately clear what kind of craftsmen that these are.
The angle then replies with the heart of the message of this vision weaving together both of these things that ave been seen, the horns and the craftsmen:

“These are the horns that scattered Judah, so that no one raised his head. And these have come to terrify them, to cast down the horns of the nations who lifted up their horns against the land of Judah to scatter it.”

Horns

OK, now lets back up to the beginning. I think that we can find that while this has been a historically difficult prophecy for commentators to come to an agreement on that if we pick a course we can come to an answer for the purpose and meaning of the prophecy that is not nearly as complicated as the individual pieces that make it up.
And so lets take a look first at the horns.
For both the horns and the craftsmen there are as I have hinted at, several viable choices as to the meaning of the symbols.
For horns the general thrust of their use in the Bible is to denote strength, power, and authority.
Many of the strong and fearful beasts that these people knew had horns. It was with the horns that an ox would charge and gore a man. The horn was a strong a fearful weapon wielded by these beasts in their defense against those whom they perceived as enemies. Conversely one could take refuge behind the horns that were charged with their safe keeping.
Deuteronomy 33 in referencing the tribes of Joseph says this:

17  A firstborn bull—he has majesty,

and his horns are the horns of a wild ox;

with them he shall gore the peoples,

all of them, to the ends of the earth;

they are the ten thousands of Ephraim,

and they are the thousands of Manasseh.”

Psalm 18:2 says:

2  The LORD is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer,

my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge,

my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.

In Psalm 75 the Psalmist talks about God cutting off the horns of the wicked, a symbol of their might and power being defeated and it also talks about God lifting up the horns of the righteous a symbol of their might and power and authority being exalted.
Horns play a large role in both the prophecies of Daniel and John to describe the might and power of nations and their representative beasts.
You will also note that the anointing oil for kings was also often poured forth from a horn, not just an apt vessel but one that signified the granting of divine power and authority to the king.
I watched a video of a young child being tossed in the air by a bison in Yellowstone park. Terrifying to come face to face with a beast of such might and power, you don't want to get on the wrong side of those horns.
Now what do our horns represent?
We get an answer from the angle that is of some help but not of specific help.

These are the horns that have scattered Judah, Israel, and Jerusalem.”

So these horns scattered the people. Again this seems to be most directly in the context of the exile and so these horns in some way represent the might and power that scattered the people in the exile.
Now we get into a rub when we try and work with the number 4. It seems to be significant, numbers often have significance and when they are given in a context like this where there is very little other information to work with it is almost certain that the numbers are of important to our understanding of what is seen.
Many commentators jump directly to assigning the horns to nations that took part in the exile but this becomes difficult because there were two main nations, Assyria and Babylon and if you try and expand and pick two other nations that surrounded Israel and Judah who gave aid to these nations you start getting a little arbitrary.
Some commentators go a little farther and note that this prophecy may be reflective of the people of God across a larger period of time and guess that the nations spoken of are Babylon, the Meads and the Persians, Greece and Rome.
All of these observations seem to run into difficulty with the number 4. To try and pick 4 specific nations here is always problematic.
Now there is another option, one brought forth by James Jordan (Our interpretative maximalist) and one that is dismissed almost out of hand by many other commentators but one that I find very convincing and the one that I am going to run with this morning.
Jordan brings us back to our theme and notes that one of the places where horns were quite common was on alters.
We read for example of the bronze alter constructed for the tabernacle in Exodus 27:1-2
Exodus 27:1–2 ESV
“You shall make the altar of acacia wood, five cubits long and five cubits broad. The altar shall be square, and its height shall be three cubits. And you shall make horns for it on its four corners; its horns shall be of one piece with it, and you shall overlay it with bronze.
These horns serves several purposes. In Psalm 118:27 we read:
Psalm 118:27 ESV
The Lord is God, and he has made his light to shine upon us. Bind the festal sacrifice with cords, up to the horns of the altar!
So the horns could be used to bind a sacrifice upon the alter.
We read in Exodus 29:12
Exodus 29:12 ESV
and shall take part of the blood of the bull and put it on the horns of the altar with your finger, and the rest of the blood you shall pour out at the base of the altar.
And so some of the blood of the sacrifice was put on the horns of the alter, symbolizing the sacrifice being offered so that the might and power of God might not be directed toward the punishment of their sins.
And we read in 1 Kings 1:50
1 Kings 1:50 ESV
And Adonijah feared Solomon. So he arose and went and took hold of the horns of the altar.
Remember we said that you could find safety in horns and here we see this man clinging for safety to the horns of the alter and we find that for a time he actually find some protection though after a while he tries to again take the throne from Solomon and is killed but momentarily at least he does find safety in clinging to the horns of the alter.
And so when see that alters often had this precise number of horn. 4, one for each corner.
Now the number 4 is also commonly used to signify the whole world. The 4 winds, the four corners of the earth. On Israels alter it want just that there needed to be a horn on each corner for symmetry, this also represented the abiding power and presence of God over all of the earth.
Now commentators point out that it seems a stretch to see an alter here when the explanation for the horns is that they are the horns that have scattered the people.
For example one says:
Haggai, Zechariah Detailed Analysis

The final context is the temple. Some interpreters associate the horns with the four-horned altars found within temples in Palestine. This fits well with the period in which parts of Zechariah are dated, during which temple construction was underway, while providing a link between the horns and the craftsmen who appear in the vision.

This third suggestion must be dismissed immediately. It is difficult to ascertain how “horns” that scatter Judah and are related to foreign nations can somehow be connected to the horns of an altar.

How they say can we draw a connection between the horns of alters and the scattering of Israel and it is here that I think Jordan make a very astute observation.
When we ask what it was that caused the downfall of the people of Israel we have to come to the conclusion that while mighty and powerful nations like Assyria and Babylon certainly marched over the people with vast military might that could easily be represented by horns we also know that when we are talking about Israel it wasn't the size of the army that mattered. These were slaves who had fled Egypt and saw the might and power of Pharoah drowned in the red sea, the might and power of Jericho fall flat before their shouts, and over and over again we find that when God was for them there was not might and power militarily that could bring destruction to Israel!
So then what was it that ultimately led to the scattering of the people?
It was idolatry! The people of Israel and Judah had been seduced by the pagan worship of the nations of the word and as a result of their idolatry they had broken covenant with their God and lost his blessing and protection and it was only as a result of this that these large and powerful nations had been able to come in and destroy them and carry them off into exile. The root of Israel’s scattering was not military might it was being seduced by the pagan alters and worship of the nations!

19 And I said to the angel who talked with me, “What are these?” And he said to me, “These are the horns that have scattered Judah, Israel, and Jerusalem.”

I believe it very likely that this is what Zechariah saw and that these horns as there were four of them symbolized the pagan alters that had seduced Israel. I also don't have any problem with concluding that 4 also represents the span of the earth, this is the case with Israels alter, the four horns represent God’s global power, and so here when we consider Israel’s idolatry we learn for Israels sordid history that there was hardly a false god of the nations that they hadn't pursued!

Craftsmen

Now, I think this interpretation of the horns is further reinforced when we consider the next part of the vision, the craftsmen.
As we have seen Zechariah sees 4 craftsmen and we have already mentioned that the word can be used for a variety of trades type work. However, this term is most often associated with the work that was done in the building of the tabernacle and the temple.
ASIDE: Now we need to understand, and this is a good thing to remember in your bible study, numbers alone do not become the ultimate determiner in defining of a term in a particular context. We can’t say that since the most common use of the term is for a temple craftsmen that this must be its use here. There is a simple reason why this term is most often associated with temple building and that is because there are very large swaths of text int he OT that describe this work. When we have large blocks of text dedicated to this work it is not surprising then that the numbers would favor this view. We need to ask not primarily how many times a word means such but why is that meaning so common. The answer is similar, the building of the tabernacle and then the temple and then the rebuilding of the temple feature prominently in the OT literature because they are of central importance.
Now in considering these craftsmen many commentators have taken the line of interpretation that these craftsmen are the Persians or some other force that raises up to deal with the military might of Babylon or some other nation that has mistreated God’s people.
There is an almost unconscious assumption that what takes place here is that these craftsmen must lift up hammers and dash these horns into pieces. However, note that this is not what the text says. The text doesn't show us explicitly how it is that these craftsmen cast down these horns. We have to be careful of making assumptions in the text!
So first and foremost we have the association of the horns with the alters and pagan worship of the nations that had seduced Israel and so I think we ought to think of these craftsmen first and foremost in association with that pagan alter imagery.
How was it that the influence of the pagan nations would be broken, Israel freed and the pagan nations thrown down? It was not primarily through military victory but through a return to right and proper worship.
In the context here then we can hardly see these craftsmen as anything other than representative of those who were coming to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem and to aid in the restoring of the right and proper worship of God by his people which in turn becomes a terror to the nations as God’s peace return to His people and his terror and wrath fall upon those who have long taken part int he mistreatment of those whom God loves.
I liked hos Anthony Peterson puts it in his commentary:

If the associations of the ‘craftsmen’ with temple workmen elsewhere in the OT is taken seriously, a different interpretation more in keeping with the overall thrust of the night visions ensues. Rather than looking to Persia for deliverance, this vision functions to demonstrate the significance of temple-building. The book of Haggai notes that temple-building began in earnest some five months earlier (Hag. 1:14–15). Zechariah’s vision demonstrates the important role the craftsmen have in rebuilding the temple. The nations who have oppressed God’s people will be terrified and thrown down when the temple is rebuilt (cf. Hag. 2:20–23). While the craftsmen may seem too passive for these activities, this misses the point. The craftsmen end up doing to the horns what horns normally do to others, but, ironically, this destruction does not come through their own power, but through God’s return to the rebuilt temple.

The thing that will be the downfall of the nations is for God’s people to return to the right and proper worship of God, it is then that God in His faithfulness will turn toward them with blessing and will turn towards the nations with terror. His people will be blessed and built up and the nations will be thrown down.
When God’s people are committed to worshiping Him rightly the power of the nations to seduce God’s people into false pagan worship is broken and thus they are powerless, the “horns of the nations” their great might and power expressed primarily in the seductive nature of their worship is utterly cast down!
Two other points if time:
4 is a doubling of the original craftsmen who had been given

Bezalel and Oholiab

When Jerusalem have been capture we read:

He carried away all Jerusalem and all the officials and all the mighty men of valor, 10,000 captives, and all the craftsmen and the smiths. None remained, except the poorest people of the land. 15

Nebuchadnezzar had carried away the craftsmen of Israel, perhaps so that the work of rebuilding the temple could not begin until the appointed time.

Conclusion

So lets summarize the vision that Zechariah sees and its meaning for the people.
Zechariah sees 4 horns that represent the pagan alters of the nations of the world that has so seduced God’s people into false worship that they had in turn been scattered among these nations in the exile. However, God has now sent craftsmen to rebuild the temple and in this rebuilding the right and proper worship of God is once again going to be established in Jerusalem and the power of the nations to seduce God’s people into idolatry is going to be broken so that the nations are cast down while Israel is blessed.
This understanding of this text then draws the right and proper worship of God to the center of the stage and shows how it is this that has the power to overcome the might and power of the nations! This seems to me to fit the best with the theme of the book and the general thrust of this period in History of rebuilding the temple and the call to Israel to return to faithfulness in the worship of their Covenant God.
This understanding of the text then is very instrumental for us today. As I mentioned at the start the questions facing Israel in this post exilic period are not questions that are foreign to God’s people at any point in history.
We look around us and we see opposition and yet we also find promises from God of victory and blessing and power to overcome the world and we ask what are we to do, what ought to be the focus of our efforts to see this come into the world?
The answer for Israel was, “build My house, commit yourselves to worshiping Me rightly and I will bless you and you will see these things come to pass.”
This is an answer that has the power to even transcend ideological lines surrounding the various eschatological view points. Weather you believe that sinfulness and wickedness is going to continue to grow in the world until the return of Christ to crush it once and for all or you believe that there is a promise that there might be more of a victory to be found by God’s people here in this world over the world’s systems so that we see something of a christianized world come about, regardless of your view there remains this central call to the people of God, our victory, what ever that victory in this world may in the end look like, that victory will come through the people of God now seeking to be built up together into the living temple of God and committing themselves to rightly worshiping God together in all of the ways that He has commanded that this be done.
We also ought to see the caution in these verses!
Israel found that the power of the nations to overthrow them did not ultimately come from their might or power to physically oppress the people! The most dangerous power at work in these nations was the power to seduce the people of God into false worship.
Remember for Israel this started in the most subtle and seducing of ways. They didn't jump right into the deep end of idolatry and set up a false alter in God’s tabernacle or temple right away, no they subtly gave way to the ways of the worship of the world and weather out of a seductive desire to imitate the world or a dreadful pragmatism that saw the ways of the worship of the nations and sought to add those into their own as a way of making their worship as broad and applicable as possible, for what ever reason these people had slowly Incorporated the worship of the word into their worship of God until you could not tell the two apart.
If that isn't the story of our day I don't know what is and we must be ever on our guard to not assume that we, unlike those crazy people we see around us, are not susceptible to being wooed by the seductive ways of the world!
No we must be ever on our guard against this seduction and we must press into God’s word learning from Him how it is that we are to worship Him and then coming to him in those ways as His faithful people committed to this pure and faithful worship of Him. And it is through this that we will overcome the world!
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