Can God Make Broken People Whole?

Call to Worship

Revelation 4:11 ESV

11 “Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.”

Prayer of Adoration

Almighty and eternal God, we come before You with hearts lifted in awe. You are holy beyond measure, faithful beyond our understanding, and glorious in all Your works. Your power sustains the heavens, and Your wisdom orders the cosmos. You are worthy of all honor, all praise, and all worship. You are the Priest who intercedes for Your people, the King who rules with justice and mercy, and the Lord whose plans cannot be thwarted. Today we rejoice that You alone are worthy of our hearts, our lives, and our songs. May our worship reflect the greatness of Your name and the wonder of Your salvation. Amen.

Pastoral Prayer

Sermon

INTRODUCTION

We are continuing our study in the Minor Prophets in Zechariah this morning. Remember, the minor prophets are not minor because they are less important, but only because they are shorter.

Due to the way the calendar worked out, we needed to skip one of the prophets and come back to them in January and Zechariah actually does a great job leading us into the Advent season, so we are skipping Haggai for the time being.

But, fair warning to everyone, this was a difficult sermon to prepare because Zechariah is 14 chapters long and it is packed full of incredible symbolism and is directly tied to events that happen all throughout the Bible. To really do it justice you would need more like 12 sermons.

So, in order to get it to a single sermon, there’s a lot I had to leave on the cutting room floor. But that just means you’ll have to go back and read it for yourself this week.

There’s a question humming underneath almost every heart in this room. For some it’s a quiet hum that we do not often notice. For others, it is loud and makes it hard to think of much else.

It’s the kind of question people bury under routines and responsibilities because they’re afraid of what the answer might require:

Can God make a broken person whole?

Not, “Can God help me behave better?” Not, “Can God tidy up the rough edges?”

The real question—the one Zechariah forces into the light—is whether God can take people who have failed, who have lived through ruin, who carry the scars of their own decisions and the wounds of others… and make those people whole again.

We have just come from Zephaniah, preaching in the days of Josiah, warning Judah that the Day of the LORD was coming—judgment that would shake the nation. And it came. Babylon flattened Jerusalem. The temple burned. The people were dragged into exile for 70 years. It was in the exile that the great stories of Daniel in the lions’ den and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace happened.

Now, decades later, a remnant has returned. Ezra has brought the Law. Nehemiah has rebuilt the walls. And the people have put their hands to the temple.

But only for a moment. Because once they laid the foundation, they stopped.

Because the truth is this: the people didn’t just stop building because they were tired. They stopped because they were afraid of the external pressures around them.

They stopped because they were discouraged. And they stopped because their hearts were still bent inward. For sixteen years, the temple foundation lay there—just a slab in the dirt—while the people built their own houses, tended their own comfort, and quietly postponed obedience to God.

They were back in the land, but not back in fellowship with God. They were home in Jerusalem, but they were still in a spiritual exiled. They were a broken, disobedient people trying to rebuild a life without dealing with what broke them.

And beneath all of it was the question they didn’t want to say out loud: Has God actually returned to us? Is He still with us? After everything we’ve done… can we even be restored?

Zechariah steps straight into that mess—not with scolding, but with visions that expose their brokenness and promises that reveal God’s heart. He doesn’t offer them a motivational speech. He gives them a Priest who removes their guilt and a King who bears their wounds. In other words, he gives them the One who makes broken people whole.

I. THE PRIEST WHO MAKES US WHOLE (Zechariah 1–8)

God heals us by dealing with our guilt.

A. God moves toward His people before they ever move toward Him (1:1–6)

The book opens with a call that sounds familiar to anyone who has read the prophets: “Return to Me.” Israel has come back from exile physically, but spiritually they haven’t come home at all. They’re in the land, but not in the Lord. The temple foundation is down, but their hearts are running on fumes.

But here’s what’s easy to miss: God speaks first. “Return to Me,” He says, “and I will return to you.” But the whole reason they can return at all is because He has already drawn near. Repentance is never humanity waking up from a moral nap and deciding to get itself together. Repentance is answering a call that God Himself has already spoken into the rubble of our lives.

Zechariah makes no attempt to flatter us here. He wants us to understand that the first spark of renewal isn’t human resolve—it’s divine mercy. Before you ever took a step toward the Lord, He took a step toward you. Before Israel repented, God initiated. Before the prodigal son turned his feet toward home, the father had already been watching the road.

God makes the first move. That’s where wholeness begins.

And once God calls His people back, He shows them what they need cleansing from in the first place.

B. God reveals the depth of our brokenness through strange visions (1:7–6:8)

Now, the rest of the first 6 chapters are what often scares us as we’re reading the prophets. We get these weird, layered visions from God.

There are riders on red horses patrolling the world. Four horns—symbols of oppressive nations—rise up, and four craftsmen appear to dismantle them. A man with a measuring line walks Jerusalem’s streets. A lampstand glows with endless oil fed by two olive trees that somehow never run dry. A flying scroll swoops through the land like divine law enforcement. A woman named Wickedness is locked in a basket and hauled off to Babylon as if sin itself is being deported. And then come the chariots thundering out from between two bronze mountains, racing to carry out the judgment of God.

No one pretends these scenes are normal. They’re supposed to unsettle you. Zechariah is showing Israel—and us—that human brokenness is deeper and darker than we think. These visions are not puzzles for scholars to decode; they are diagnoses revealing the seriousness of the disease.

And if parts of this feel like Revelation, that’s intentional. Zechariah is the prophetic DNA from which John draws. The riders, the lampstands, the scrolls, the cosmic sweep of judgment and restoration—it’s all related. Both books lift the curtain on the spiritual realities behind human history and say: God sees. God judges. God restores. Nothing escapes His eye.

This is why it’s an exercise in futility to try to interpret Revelation without putting the time and effort into reading and understanding the whole Bible.

Revelation is a capstone to the structure that was built over centuries in Scripture. It does not stand alone and if you try to interpret it alone (without books like Zechariah giving the foundation to your understanding), or if you listen to people who are not taking the rest of the Bible as seriously as they take the book of Revelation, you will be left confused and anxious. And that is the opposite of the purpose of the book of Revelation.

But in the middle of all these visions, Scripture brings us to the heart of the matter in one unforgettable scene.

C. A Filthy Priest Made Clean (Zechariah 3:1–10)

In chapter 3, the fourth vision, we come to the center of Zechariah’s first movement—maybe the center of the whole book. If you miss Zechariah 3, you’ve missed the bloodstream of the gospel running right through the middle of the Old Testament.

The scene is a courtroom. Joshua the high priest is standing before the Lord, and he is filthy—not dusty from a hard day’s work, but smeared with the symbolic grime of Israel’s sin. In the law, a priest this unclean would never walk into the Holy Place. He isn’t fit to stand in God’s presence. And that’s the point. Israel has come home from exile, but their hearts have not come home clean. They stand guilty.

And standing at Joshua’s right hand is Satan—the accuser—doing exactly what he always does. He tells the truth with malicious delight.

“Look at him. Look how unworthy he is. Look how stained he is. You can’t use him. You can’t accept him.”

Each of us knows that voice. Anyone who has sat awake at 2 a.m. remembering every failure knows that voice. Satan accuses because he wants Israel to despair. He wants the people to believe there is no path back to wholeness.

And God cuts him off.

“The LORD rebuke you, O Satan!… Is not this a brand plucked from the fire?”

That’s the sound of grace interrupting the accusation of the Enemy.

God does not defend Joshua’s righteousness—he has none. God defends His own mercy. God declares, “He is Mine. I pulled him out. I saved him. I am not finished with him.”

And then the miracle happens.

The Lord commands the angels: “Remove the filthy garments.” Strip away the symbols of guilt, the record of sin, the moral uncleanliness. And then God Himself says the words that every sinner longs to hear: “Behold, I have taken your iniquity away from you.”

Joshua doesn’t clean himself. He doesn’t redeem himself.

God removes his guilt, and then God clothes him in pure vestments. The priest is not cleaned up to be made presentable. He is made new.

This is the root of what it means for you to be made whole.

Not self-improvement. Not moral polish. Not trying again.

Wholeness begins when God removes the guilt that you cannot remove, and clothes you in a righteousness that you did not earn.

THIS IS THE GOSPEL! THE GOOD NEWS FOR SINNERS LIKE YOU AND ME!

Zechariah even hears the promise: “I will remove the iniquity of this land in a single day.”

And this brings the Day of Atonement, where God removes his people’s sin (in Leviticus), into view. It brings Calvary into view.

The cross—where guilt is removed once and for all—stands in the background of Joshua’s cleansing. This is what our Priest does.

He takes filthy people and makes them clean. He takes broken people and makes them whole.

This is the gospel according to Zechariah: God does not wait for the sinner to show signs of improvement before He steps in. God steps in to make the sinner clean and whole through his son Jesus Christ.

And if you let Zechariah 3 sink into your bones, you’ll start hearing its echoes everywhere in the New Testament—clothed in Christ, washed clean, justified, made new, presented faultless. The prophets were preaching Christ long before the baby was heard crying in Bethlehem.

D. The Branch Crowned: A Priest Who Rules (Zechariah 6:9–15)

And let’s jump forward to see what happens to this renewed priest in the end of chapter 6.

We move now to something even stranger, even richer—a prophetic act that breaks every category Israel had grown comfortable with.

God tells Zechariah to take silver and gold, fashion a crown, and place it not on the head of a king, but on the head of Joshua the high priest.

If you were an Israelite standing there watching, your jaw would’ve hit the ground.

This is not done. Priests don’t wear crowns. Kings don’t offer sacrifices.

God Himself had separated those roles for good reason. When a king tried to play priest it ended in judgment.

And yet here, by God’s own command, a priest is crowned.

Why?

Because God is revealing the kind of Messiah He intends to send.

Not a half-Savior. Not a figure who handles spiritual things while someone else handles power.

Zechariah sees a man who holds both offices—the priestly cleansing and the kingly authority.

The Lord explains it: “Behold, the man whose name is the Branch.” The Branch has already appeared earlier in the book—a messianic figure growing up not from a throne room, but from the stump of Israel’s failure.

The Branch was already a messianic title.

God had promised David a forever-King, and the prophets kept pointing to a coming Son of David who would restore His people. Zechariah is picking that up and saying: ‘That’s Him.’

And now the Branch is crowned.

He will “build the temple of the LORD,” and He “shall sit and rule on His throne,” and—this is the line that ought to ring in our ears—“He shall be a priest on His throne.”

A priest on a throne. The cleansing from Zechariah 3 does not float in abstraction. That cleansing has a ruler attached to it.

And again, Zechariah is preaching the Gospel and he didn’t even know it!

The one who removes your guilt is the one who reigns over your life. The one who atones for your sin is the one who shepherds your future. He is not merely a mediator between you and God; He is a king who deserves, and demands, your obedience.

You can already hear the book of Hebrews whispering from centuries away. A Priest-King after the order of Melchizedek. A Priest who sits down because the work is finished. A King who subdues His enemies by reconciling His people.

And notice the promise tucked in the middle: “He shall build the temple of the LORD.” The first temple was rubble when Zechariah preached this. The second temple would be small, unimpressive. But God says the real temple—the ultimate place where God dwells with His people—will be built by the Branch Himself. Not with stones, but with living people. Not on Mount Zion alone, but from every tribe and tongue brought near by grace.

Zechariah is preaching Christ with astonishing clarity. He saw a Priest-King wearing a crown long before the Magi ever brought gold to a manger. He saw the Branch who would unite heaven and earth long before Jesus said, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” He saw the Messiah who would remove guilt “in a single day” and then gather a people from far off to belong to His house.

And here’s where this should press on your soul: if your Priest is also your King, then the One who forgives you also commands you.

The One who cleanses you, leads you.

The grace that makes you whole is the grace that rules you.

Wholeness is not merely the removal of guilt—it is life brought to wholeness and surrender under the reign of the Priest-King.

Zechariah wants his audience to feel the weight of that glory. A priest crowned. A king who removes sin. A ruler who restores what exile destroyed. It is one of the clearest Advent beams in the entire Old Testament—long before shepherds trembled at angels or wise men followed a star, a simple prophet placed a crown on a priest’s head and said, “This is what the Messiah will be like.”

E. God Calls His Restored People to Restored Obedience (Zechariah 7–8)

The visions quiet down after chapter 6, but the message becomes intensely personal. God turns from symbolic imagery to the everyday life of His people, and the question becomes painfully simple: If God has made you clean, will you now walk clean?

Chapters 7 and 8 begin with a delegation asking whether they should keep observing certain fasts—rituals they had developed during the exile. But God refuses to get caught in their religious technicalities. He cuts through their piety like a hot knife through wax.

“When you fasted… was it for Me that you fasted?”

It’s a devastating question. Zechariah exposes the danger of going through spiritual motions while the heart stays cold. God reminds them that their fathers once ignored His commands for justice, mercy, and compassion—and that hardheartedness is what led them into exile in the first place.

But then chapter 8 arrives like the sun after an all-night storm. God piles promise upon promise. He speaks of jealousy to bless His people, of returning to dwell in their midst, of old men and women filling the streets in peace, of boys and girls playing without fear. He calls them to truth-telling, to peacemaking, to faithful living—not to earn His presence, but because His presence is coming.

This is the heartbeat of restored obedience: not fear-based rule-keeping, but grace-fueled transformation.

They are to do justice because God has been just to them. They are to show mercy because they have received mercy. They are to walk in faithfulness because God has bound Himself to them in faithfulness.

The wholeness of God produces the holiness of God. The Priest-King who cleanses his people also remakes his people.

Zechariah’s people were rebuilding the temple of stone and God was rebuilding the temple of their hearts. And He continues that work in the hearts of his people to this very day, in this very room.

Transition

The first half of Zechariah shows a God who doesn’t wait for His people to get their act together. He returns first. He cleanses first. He crowns the Priest who will build His true temple. But the book doesn’t end with personal renewal. The God who makes people whole is the God who intends to make the world whole.

At this point the visions shift. The camera pulls back from Jerusalem’s rubble to the nations. We see a humble King riding toward His destiny, a Shepherd rejected, pierced, and struck for the salvation of His people. If chapters 1–8 show how God restores sinners, chapters 9–14 show how God restores creation through the saving work of His King.

This is where Zechariah begins to sound even more explicitly like the Gospel accounts before the Gospels were written. And it’s here—just on the edge of Advent—that the book becomes a powerful teacher, helping us see the glory and the cost of the One who brings wholeness to a broken world.

II. THE KING WHO MAKES THE WORLD WHOLE (Zechariah 9–14)

God heals not only His people—but creation itself.

A. The Coming King of Peace (Zechariah 9)

Zechariah 9 opens with judgment on the nations around Israel, but judgment isn’t the main melody—it's the drumroll leading to the arrival of the King. Then suddenly we hit one of the most beloved lines in all Scripture:

“Rejoice greatly… Behold, your King is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is He, humble and mounted on a donkey.”

No Israelite king had ever looked like this. Kings ride warhorses. Kings arrive to seize power, not to lay it down. Yet Zechariah announces that the King who brings cosmic peace will come in humility—not as a conqueror with a raised sword, but as a servant who brings salvation.

And His peace isn’t sentimental. It is global. It stretches “from sea to sea,” swallowing the very nations once judged.

Zechariah is telling us something essential: God’s wholeness begins with forgiveness, but it ends with a King who restores the entire created order.

This is Advent centuries before Advent—Bethlehem in prophetic outline. The humble King comes to undo the fracture of the world.

B. The Rejected Shepherd Exposes Our Sin (Zechariah 11)

Wholeness doesn’t come without confrontation. Chapter 11 is jarring, symbolic, and painfully honest. God tells Zechariah to embody the role of a shepherd— not a royal figure but a humble caretaker. Instead of welcoming him, the people despise him.

They reject the shepherd who protects them. They insult him. They pay him thirty pieces of silver—the price of a slave.

You don’t need a commentary to see the shape of the cross forming here.

Zechariah sketches in shadow what the Gospels later paint in full. The Messiah would be betrayed and valued at the cheapest price imaginable. And the details run astonishingly deep. God tells Zechariah to throw the silver “to the potter,” so Zechariah throws it into the temple “to the potter.”

Fast forward to Matthew 27. Judas tries to return the betrayal money. The priests refuse, so Judas throws it into the temple… and they use it to buy the potter’s field. Matthew ties this moment back to the prophets—Jeremiah by name, but Jeremiah and Zechariah together by theme—both pointing to a Shepherd rejected by His own.

This isn’t trivia. It’s diagnosis.

The rejection of Zechariah’s symbolic shepherd is the window into the human heart. When the true Shepherd came—Jesus, gentle and lowly—we did the same thing. We wanted autonomy more than rescue. We wanted our sin more than His wholeness.

And this is part of God’s healing: He exposes the wound so He can apply the cure.

He shows us what’s broken so that Christ can make us whole.

C. The Pierced One Who Opens a Fountain (Zechariah 12:10–13:1)

Suddenly the tone shifts again. Judgment and rejection give way to grace so overwhelming it feels like a flood.

“I will pour out… a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy… And they shall look on Me, on Him whom they have pierced.”

It’s one of the clearest windows into the cross in the entire Old Testament. God Himself speaks. God Himself is pierced. And God Himself promises that this piercing will create something nothing else could ever create: a fountain of cleansing. Not a trickle. Not a drop. A fountain—overflowing, abundant, inexhaustible.

This is the heart of the gospel in Zechariah’s language: the wound of the King becomes the cleansing of His people.

It’s the answer to the deepest human ache: Can God make broken people whole?

Yes. And He does it by taking our brokenness into Himself.

D. The Shepherd Struck so His Sheep Might Live (Zechariah 13:7)

God tightens the focus even further.

“Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.”

Jesus quotes this on the night of His betrayal to explain what’s about to happen. He wasn’t a victim of chaos. He wasn’t swallowed by the gears of political power. He wasn’t subject to the free will of his created beings.

The Shepherd was struck by divine design, bearing judgment in the place of His sheep. God always knew that his creation would strike him when he stepped into creation with them. This is why Jesus says, “No one takes my life from me. I give it away willingly.”

Wholeness always comes through sacrifice.

The sheep live because their Shepherd dies for them.

There’s no path to restored humanity apart from this. Zechariah preaches substitution centuries before the word “substitutionary” existed. He shows us what it costs God to remake the human heart.

E. A World Remade Under the Reign of the King (Zechariah 14)

Zechariah ends with a picture almost too large to hold in your hands: Jerusalem restored, nations gathered, holiness flooding every corner of creation. Even the mundane becomes sacred—pots in the kitchen, bells on the horses, everyday objects inscribed with “Holy to the LORD.”

It’s a way of saying: When God finishes His work, nothing will remain untouched and the LORD will be king over all the earth. Wholeness won’t just be personal—it will be cosmic.

The same King who rode in humility, who was betrayed, pierced, and struck, will one day stand on the Mount of Olives and make all things new. Advent begins in Bethlehem, but it ends in Zechariah 14 (and ultimately Revelation 21)—with holiness covering the earth like water covers the sea.

This is where the story is going. A people made whole. A creation made whole. A kingdom made whole under the King who makes broken things whole.

Conclusion

This is the heart of Zechariah and really the whole Bible.

We’ve walked with Zechariah through visions that stretch the imagination and promises that stretch the heart. We’ve seen God return before His people return. We’ve seen a filthy priest made clean, a humble King riding toward His mission, a Shepherd rejected and pierced, and a world lifted out of ruin and remade in holiness.

So what does all of this mean for us? It means the question we started with—Can God make broken people whole?—is no longer theoretical. It’s been answered right in front of us.

Zechariah’s answer is not tentative. It’s not qualified. It’s not “maybe.” It is a loud, clear, ringing yes.

Yes—because the Priest has cleansed the guilt of his people. Yes—because the King has borne our wounds. Yes—because the Shepherd has been struck in our place. Yes—because the presence of God has returned to dwell with His people. And yes—because the same King who entered Jerusalem in humility will one day stand on the Mount of Olives in glory and finish what He started.

This isn’t wishful thinking. It isn’t religious comfort food. It is the solid backbone of God’s redemptive plan.

But here’s where it presses on us: We don’t become whole by avoiding the parts of Scripture that confuse us. We don’t grow by staying near the shallow end. The prophets force us into the deep water—and that is where Christ shines the brightest. Their imagery may unsettle us, but the One they are pointing to is the same Savior who walked the dusty roads of Galilee and hung on a Roman cross.

So let me urge you—don’t skip the prophets. Let them lead you into Advent. Let their warnings sober you and their promises steady you. Let their visions train your eyes to see the King-Priest who came once in humility and will come again in glory.

And as we step into Advent, hear this clearly: Wholeness does not start with your resolve or your performance. It starts with God drawing near. It starts with mercy poured out like a fountain. It starts with a Shepherd who lays down His life for the sheep. It starts with a King who carries your wounds in His own body.

And it ends—one day—with a world where holiness fills every corner, where nothing is common, nothing is cursed, nothing is fractured anymore.

Can God make broken people whole? He already has in Christ. And He will finish the work when He makes all things new.

That’s the hope Zechariah wanted Israel to cling to. And it’s the hope we cling to this Advent: The King-Priest who came to make His people whole is coming again to make everything whole.

Confession and Repentance

Scriptural Assurance

Hear the Word of the Lord:

Zechariah 3:2–4 ESV

2 And the Lord said to Satan, “The Lord rebuke you, O Satan! The Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is not this a brand plucked from the fire?” 3 Now Joshua was standing before the angel, clothed with filthy garments. 4 And the angel said to those who were standing before him, “Remove the filthy garments from him.” And to him he said, “Behold, I have taken your iniquity away from you, and I will clothe you with pure vestments.”

This is the promise of our God: the guilt that weighed you down has been removed. Your sins are forgiven. You are not standing in filthy garments before Him—you are clothed in the righteousness of Christ. The same God who cleansed Joshua in Zechariah cleanses you today. Rejoice, for you are made whole.

Benediction

May the God who crowned the Priest and King go with you. May He clothe you in righteousness, forgive your sins, and cleanse your hearts. May the Shepherd who was struck for His sheep guide your steps and give you peace. And may the One who will make all things new fill you with hope, joy, and courage to live as His restored people, now and forevermore. Go in the mercy, grace, and power of the Lord. Amen.