Zechariah 2:6-13

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Intro

Comfortable and complacent. These are dangerous words, especially when they are apt descriptions of a believers relationship with the surrounding world. If we are honest though I think we would have to admit that first, we have all felt the tug of those words in our own lives and second that we might at times tend to not be as put off by them as we might admit we should be in the setting of the gathered church.
It is easier to admit that we ought not grow comfortable and complacent with the world when we are gathered together as God’s people for worship as we are now, that can get harder mid week as we work our way through what ever it is that has come to us through the course of our every day lives.
The situation we find was not much different in Zechariah’s day. Though Israel had sat by the river and wept upon entering her captivity ala Psalm 137, it seems as though after nearly 70 long years of captivity many of those who had been carried away into exile had grown comfortable and complacent in their new situation.
God had instructed the people through a letter to the exiles found in Jeremiah 29:

Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: 5 Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. 6 Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. 7 But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

But he had also said in the same letter:

10 “For thus says the LORD: When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place.

And yet when Cyrus had declared:

The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the LORD his God be with him. Let him go up.’ ”

Only a few thousand of those in exile had returned to the land. In fact as we read through the post exilic narratives we find that there are Jews scattered all across the kingdom.
It seems as though at some point they had settled into that command of Jeremiah to settle down and had forgotten the hope that this settling would be only for a time and then they would be called to return. They grew comfortable, they grew complacent, and the stayed.
Well, as Zechariah now recounts his night visions we find that as we saw in our last message these glorious threefold promises that the city would grow and expand well beyond what walls could contain as the people were again allotted an inheritance in the land that God had given them, that God himself would be a wall of fire around His people to protect them, and that He would again cause the glory of His presence to be in their midst, these reversals of all of the judgments that had been pronounced for their father’s unfaithfulness, we find that as Zechariah delivers this vision now also included is an oracle that is directed most specifically not to those who are building but is to be delivered to those who have not returned. This message carries many of the same themes that we have seen already in these visions and aims to move them from their complacency to make the return back to the land of promise where God is again working among His people.
Lets read the oracle and then we will jump on in:

READ

The first words we read are Up ! Up! or you may have Ho Ho or Come Come, these are words that are often found at the beginning of prophecies and proclamations of woe and are intended to reach out and grab the readers attention. What is going to be said in following is utterly important!

Flee from the land of the north, declares the LORD. For I have spread you abroad as the four winds of the heavens, declares the LORD

The land of the north is clearly Babylon, if there is any doubt about that then the following verse will clear it up:

Up! Escape to Zion, you who dwell with the daughter of Babylon.

Now the land of Babylon is nearly due east of Jerusalem but the pat that the Babylonians took to come into Israel and the path on which the people of Judah had been lead captive lead out of Jerusalem to the north, this was just the way the roads and trade routes of the day worked and so the people had been carried off to the north but we also see that in the exile they had been scattered across the land carried by the winds of judgement all over the kingdom on Babylon.
We get an idea of the expanse of this spread of the Jewish people across the then known world when we read of the decree of Ahasuerus in the book of Esther through Mordecai at the end of the book. There we read:

9 The king’s scribes were summoned at that time, in the third month, which is the month of Sivan, on the twenty-third day. And an edict was written, according to all that Mordecai commanded concerning the Jews, to the satraps and the governors and the officials of the provinces from India to Ethiopia, 127 provinces, to each province in its own script and to each people in its own language, and also to the Jews in their script and their language. 10

India to Ethiopia and it is reasonable to assume that in some form there was Jewish representation in all of those provinces as this was an edict to allow the Jews to band together and protect themselves from being destroyed by the earlier edict from the wicked Haman.
A story by the way that takes place some 50 or so years after this prophecy showing the extent to which the Jews had been scattered and their yet failure to return en mass to the promised land.
Again it is very likely that for many they had grown complacent and comfortable, the word “dwell” may point us toward this reality, and as a result had not left their new lives to again rebuild in the promised land. (I hate moving, I can maybe relate to their hesitancy a bit, its hard work!)

Verse 8

As we move into verse 8 we need to understand that this is one of the most difficult verses in the book of Zechariah and we also need to know that I don't know that I am going to be much help in unraveling its difficulty. Much smarter men than I have tried and made cases and studied the language and the variants and at the end of the day I think we can carry through without needing to pin down the difficulty here.
The difficulty is in the phrase that the ESV translates “after His glory.” The Hebrew literally just reads “after glory” and no one has really ever been able to pin own what that means, I read that some of the earliest manuscripts show evidence of scribes wrestling with and trying to make it clearer but to no avail.
However we see that it has something to do with the following statements, the famous “apple of my eye” statement and the shaking and plundering of the following verse.
I think it may have something to do with the previous promise from verse 5 of the glory of the Lord returning to be with the people and that as God’s glory returns to them so also His judgement is going to go out to the nations that plundered them in the conquest of Judah and Jerusalem.
That certainly seems to be the force of:

for he who touches you touches the apple of his eye:

This speaks of the great care and concern that God has for His covenant people. Just as we are prone to protect our eyes because they are precious and of such a value to us that we would not trade them for anything and also we are so sensitive when our eyes are attached that even the slightest piece of dust causes us to blink even before we know what is happening. Our bodies naturally care for and protect our eyes.
This is the same with God and His people. As He had promised to be a wall of fire around them so the promise here is that He is going to care for and protect them and that those who touch or have touched them will experience the swift retribution of the God how cares for them and cherishes them.

Who is the Apple?

Now I find a need here to take a moment to address something that I have found so frustrating in this world moment we are in. I have seen so many posts over the past few weeks that use this verse and 2:5, the wall of fire, as promises of protection for the modern state of Israel.
We must be so careful with how we understand and apply scripture.
This text is speaking of the remnant, the faithful of Israel who are being called out of the nations to return to the land and the promise is that if they come and follow the Lord in the land that He has promised to give them that He will preserve and protect them. That He will cherish them like we cherish our eyes and defend them with the same tenacity with which we protect that vital organ.
Those whom God cherishes are those who as we read in the NT share in the faith of Abraham their father.
We need only to look to Jesus and see Him declare to the Jewish leaders that God was able to raise up children for Abraham from the stones of the ground to understand that it is not the literal blood of the patriarchs that causes one to be precious in God’s sight but rather the inheritance through grace of the faith of those fathers.
In this regard, unfortunately many of those in the modern state of Israel are in abject and open rebellion toward God. Many in the orthodox class spit and spew hatred toward Christians and many who are Jewish in ethnic descent only, the secular Jews are so openly progressive that they are as accepting and promoting of the gross evils of our day as any other progressive group.
Even orthodox Jews that don't hate and spit on Christians as many do still look on the Christian faith with an air of disdain, Christ for them is not the messiah, not even close.
These people are not, just because of an ethnic claim to Jewishness, those who can lay claim to being the apple of God’s eye.
Now none of this is to say that we ought not support Israel as an ally in the Middle East, it is not an excuse for any sort of anti-Semitic behavior in the least. We ought to repudiate those things and to call out the wickedness of what Hamas has done in the clearest of terms.
However we must be careful that we understand the flow of redemptive history and understand that the Old Covenant has passed away, this is why Jake’s messages from Revelation are so important. That Old Covenant has passed away and while there may yet be a blessedness in the Jews as those who had inherited those covenants and promises, all of those things have been fulfilled in Christ and when they reject Christ there is no way that we can, with fidelity to the Word of God, claim that they are the apple of His eye. This designation is reserved for God’s covenant people alone and only those who have come to God through Christ and the Blood of the new covenant qualify, Jew or gentile, all who have been made one in Christ.

Plunder

With that said lets move on to verse 9. We read:

9 “Behold, I will shake my hand over them, and they shall become plunder for those who served them. Then you will know that the LORD of hosts has sent me.

This verse again becomes somewhat difficult to parse out as well. The verses clearly speaks of God’s judgement on the nations who have opposed His chosen, covenant people and a reversal of fortunes where the plunderers become the plundered and vice versa.
Now the problems becomes that there are at least three options for what this plundering is talking about.
The first and I believe least likely is that this plundering is the plundering of the Babylonians by the Persians in the Babylonian revolt of 484 some 55 years after the Persians had conquered the Babylonians. Proponents of this view note that it was specifically Babylon who had plundered Judea and that for a time the Persians had been their slaves as well and now God uses the people of Persia, their former slaves to destroy them.
The second view is that this is a reference to the book of Esther. The events of Esther are still yet about 50 years in the future and there we clearly see the people of Israel rise up and plunder those who sought to destroy them, those who like wicked Haman had sought to touch as it were, the apple of God’s eye.
We read there in Esther 9 that:

16 Now the rest of the Jews who were in the king’s provinces also gathered to defend their lives, and got relief from their enemies and killed 75,000 of those who hated them, but they laid no hands on the plunder. 17

This was in addition to the 800 that were killed in Susa the capital.
I will admit that I am partial to this view. In it we see the Jews specifically being granted a kingdom wide victory over those who hated them and while they could have taken plunder it seems as though they chose not to take it.
Those who had heard Zechariahs message therefore could see from the victory over their enemies that this was indeed a word from the Lord, it had come to pass. They would have had no doubt if that had had doubt before that Zechariah had been sent by God.
But there is a third option that I don't believe necessarily demand to be separated from the second.
You may remember in Micah 4, that great Messianic passage that directed our minds to the coming King and the nature of the Kingdom that He would establish. There we read:

Arise and thresh,

O daughter of Zion,

for I will make your horn iron,

and I will make your hoofs bronze;

you shall beat in pieces many peoples;

and shall devote their gain to the LORD,

their wealth to the Lord of the whole earth.

We related this plundering to the plundering of the world and its Kingdoms through the proclamation of the Gospel in as the most precious treasure of that world kingdom is taken from it, its people, who through the power of the gospel are taken from that kingdom and transferred into the kingdom of Light, the Kingdom of the enthroned Messiah, our Lord Jesus Christ.
Now if as we have said, the post exilic period and what takes place there is a foreshadowing of what is to come in the Kingdom of Christ, the messianic age, then the plundering and victory over the enemies of the Jews in Persia could well give us a glimpse of the Church victoriously spreading the gospel and plundering the people of the nations.
At any rate what is promised here is not just that God is going to be a wall of protection around the people but an active victory over those who have already or would seek to touch the apple of His eye.

Messianic Kingdom Described

Now as we draw towards the close of this oracle we are going to take this next major segment all together as one piece because I believe that it is all descriptive of the same period of time or of the same events in redemptive history.
We read:

10 Sing and rejoice, O daughter of Zion, for behold, I come and I will dwell in your midst, declares the LORD. 11 And many nations shall join themselves to the LORD in that day, and shall be my people. And I will dwell in your midst, and you shall know that the LORD of hosts has sent me to you. 12 And the LORD will inherit Judah as his portion in the holy land, and will again choose Jerusalem.”

As we read over these texts, if you have been here for much of our previous prophetic books, books like Joel, Micha, Haggai, and now Zechariah, you might be able to see where we are going.
Central to this promise is verse 11, and we have seen this idea before. The idea of not just Israel and Judah being blessed by being called to God and made His people and given the glorious privilege of worshiping Him but of this grace being extended to the nations.

And many nations shall join themselves to the LORD in that day, and shall be my people.

It is these sorts of promises and those that surround this of God presence dwelling in their midst that were what cause, as we have remarked before, people like Simeon and Anna to be waiting for the consolation of Israel.
Its not just the waiting for the peoples of the nations to flow to Jerusalem, compare the account of the completion of the second temple with that of the first. The second is found in the book of Ezra chapter 6:

They finished their building by decree of the God of Israel and by decree of Cyrus and Darius and Artaxerxes king of Persia; 15 and this house was finished on the third day of the month of Adar, in the sixth year of the reign of Darius the king.

16 And the people of Israel, the priests and the Levites, and the rest of the returned exiles, celebrated the dedication of this house of God with joy. 17 They offered at the dedication of this house of God 100 bulls, 200 rams, 400 lambs, and as a sin offering for all Israel 12 male goats, according to the number of the tribes of Israel. 18 And they set the priests in their divisions and the Levites in their divisions, for the service of God at Jerusalem, as it is written in the Book of Moses.

However when the ark of the covenant was brought into Solomon’s temple in 1 Kings 8 we read:

10 And when the priests came out of the Holy Place, a cloud filled the house of the LORD, 11 so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud, for the glory of the LORD filled the house of the LORD.

We have to imagine that when the returned exiles heard of the promise of the glory of the Lord dwelling in their midst as we see 3 times in chapter 2 that they must have thought back to these moments in their history and looked forward to seeing moments like them again and yet when the temple was completed though they celebrated and offered sacrifices we never read of the glory of the Lord returning to the temple and in fact we know that there wasn't an ark of the covenant within the holy of holies. In fact it is quite likely that when the high priest entered year after year into this special place on the day of atonement with the blood of the sacrifice that he had to ritually pour the blood out on the floor or on the stone where the ark would have been set were it there.
Crazy to think about isn't it.
The passages of promise and the reality of the times really fills out the longing that we see in these faithful Israelites who know that all was not as it should be and were waiting to see the fulfilment of these things.
Now our time is nearly gone but I do want us to notice an amazing thing in verse 11. Notice the end there. “and shall be my people!” Can you imagine that?! This promise isn't just that these people will seek to walk in God’s was as in Micah, what is going to happen when God’s presence comes to dwell with the people is that the peoples of the nations that come and join themselves to the Lord will be His people.
Remember in Haggai when God called the people “these people” and then when they repented and sought to build the temple in obedience to Him they found that He promised to be with them, that He was willing to call them His people again. They experience not just his essential presence but His relational presence to use the language of our Thursday night study.
These promises direct us forward to the glory of what took place when Christ came. Jesus talked in Matthew 5 about coming to fulfill what was spoken by the prophets and we will find that the book of Zechariah is full of Messianic promises and we will see again that these very promises were brought about when Christ came and brought with Him the fulfilment off the plan of redemption and the promised Kingdom of God.

Closing

As we close this morning I want us to think back to that comfort and complacency. These promises were given specifically that the people who yet remained in the land of their exile might hear about the glorious things that God was doing and would en-devour to come and be a part of them in the promised land.
As I was studying one of the thoughts that came to my mind was that I believe often this complacency, especially the complacency can arise as a result to fully appreciate the time span across which God works. Remember these people had been in exile for almost 70 years, it would take them 4 years to build the temple and it would take over 400 more years for Christ to come and bring with Him the realized fulfilment of these glorious promises and these things have continued to work out across 2000 years since.
When we live our Christian lives with the thought that God is going to magically do some impressive work tomorrow we can grow complacent when we do not see such magnificent happenings come to pass. Rather we ought to learn that God accomplishes His work more often than not through the every day ordinary acts of His people to live faithfully before Him to honor them with His lives and to worship Him regularly together. This is the way in which His Kingdom Comes and the way in which His will is done on earth as it is in Heaven. The every day ordinary acts of obedience of His people.
This has been the call of both of these prophets. Repent and begin walking in obedience to God. They knew full well that these things were going to take time, temples aren't built from rubble in a day. No these great and glorious promises were given not that the people might get disappointed when they didn't happen immediately tomorrow, no they were given to encourage the people in their every day efforts to walk in obedience with their God.
Would we find the same encouragement in these things as we find ourselves, as they were, in the midst of bringing these very things about through the everyday ordinary obedience to God in our own lives.
One last thing to note as we close, look at that next verse:

13 Be silent, all flesh, before the LORD, for he has roused himself from his holy dwelling.

We will say more about this in our next time together but this is leading us into the central two visions of Zechariah, chapter 3 and chapter 4 which will shine a spotlight directly on these two post exilic figures Joshua the High Priest and Zerubbable the governor as they both point us forward to what Christ will come to do and to be.
The promises have been uttered and now we are going to find that our God is on the move.
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