Where are we?
Notes
Transcript
Pray
What does winning as a Christian look like?
Things going well. Health, stability, a sense of control.
Or a holier answer: Prayers answered the way we'd hoped. God feeling close, feeling real, making life make sense.
Mostly, I think we assume that ‘if’ God is for us, as he promises for his people…
we should feel God.
We should see him visibly at work in our everyday lives.
We should experience him, particularly in our emotions.
We should always feel encouraged.
And when it doesn't — when the opposite is true — something in us starts to wobble.
Maybe God isn't for me after all. Maybe I'm doing it wrong.
Maybe this faith thing isn't what I thought it was.
Maybe my church, the sermons, my friends here, are letting me down.
These feels aren’t new.
Zechariah is writing to people who know exactly what that feels like.
back from exile in Babylon.
And In chapters 1–8, they were given a series of encouraging visions — keep going, rebuild the temple, God will return, and he'll do it through a priest-king: "the Branch."
By the time we reach todays chapter, there has been a time gap, and the temple is now finished.
516 BC has come and gone. The building project is done.
And yet the great promises still haven't landed
— the nations bowing,
the Davidic king restored,
God's glory filling the earth.
They are a tiny, poor, politically insignificant community under Persian oversight.
It doesn't feel like winning. They don't feel encouraged.
They don't feel close to God. It feels like he's gone quiet.
What does winning look like?
And into that silence, God speaks again..
He brings them a meta-narrative - the big picture.
A sweep of his whole plan of salvation for his people,
reminding them exactly where they stand on it.
Their problem — and ours, often — isn't that God has stopped being for us.
It's that we've forgotten where we are on his timeline,
And when we remeber that, we see his people are always winning.
Zechariah 9 gives us three stops on that timeline.
And at each one, a lesson to remember — one that, rightly understood, will encourage us that God is for us, even when our circumstances, or our poor understanding of his plans, have knocked us off track.
1. God Cannot Be Stopped (vv. 1–8)
1. God Cannot Be Stopped (vv. 1–8)
A prophecy: The word of the Lord is against the land of Hadrak and will come to rest on Damascus— for the eyes of all people and all the tribes of Israel are on the Lord. and on Hamath too, which borders on it, and on Tyre and Sidon, though they are very skilful.
If you happen to know your ancient Near East geography, this is a very specific route. North to south.
From Syria south and then down the Phoenician coast to Tyre and Sidon.
Then, later in the chapter, the Philistine cities.
This is God’s planned military campaign route, named city by city
- against Israel's enemies.
about 170years after this prophesy,
Alexander the Great, or Greece, led his campaign of destruction and as he swept through this region his route was near identical.
Zechariah seems to have been predicting Alexander the Great conquests.
But notice — Alexander isn't the hero of this passage.
He's going to be an instrument in the hand of someone greater.
The LORD. "I will do this," he says, over and over.
City after city falls under that "I will."
V3: Tyre — the most heavily fortified city in the ancient world,
famously took Alexander seven months of siege warfare to capture — is dealt with by God in a single verse.
Verse 7: the Philistines, Israel's oldest and cruellest enemies, are not just defeated but incorporated — "those who are left will belong to our God and become a clan in Judah." Even Israel's enemies get folded into God's family.
God cannot be stopped.
Hang on I hear you History buffs say, didn’t Alexander also sweep through all the way to Egypt?
Surely Alexander also destroyed Jerusalem in this same campaign?
And God promised, v8
But I will encamp at my temple to guard it against marauding forces. Never again will an oppressor overrun my people, for now I am keeping watch.
Well If you really know your history, then this porpshey just got even more accurate.
Becasue Jerusalem was not sacked.
Unlike Tyre, which resisted Alexander and paid for it with a brutal siege,
Jerusalem opened her gates and received his leniency instead.
The temple remained and respected for a further 400 years!
There's even a famous, if historically debated, tradition recorded by Josephus,
that Alexander himself bowed before Israel's God and offered sacrifice in the temple.
— the underlying fact: of every city on this list, Jerusalem was spared.
SO back to the prophesy,
That's the climax of verse 8.
God arrives at his own house and guards it himself.
His campaign is finished.
The ground is clear.
Every old enemy has been dealt with,
and God stands watch over his people.
Here's what matters for us, though.
Zechariah's first hearers don't get to see any of this play out.
They are roughly 170 years away from Alexander ever setting foot in the region.
They have no idea how this resolves.
All they have is God's bare Word, asking to be trusted before it's proved.
We today, have the advantage of looking back
and watching history quietly vindicate exactly what they could only take on faith.
God's sovereignty over history is never genuinely in question
— not because Alexander happened to be merciful,
but because God's Word had already settled the outcome long before a single Greek soldier marched.
He moves through empires,
through the rise and fall of every human power,
and not one of them sits outside his control.
Our sense today, that God has gone quiet,
that nothing's happening,
that you're losing, unless you feel God meeting your needs and feelings — doesn't change any of that.
The problem is never God's activity.
The problem is our vantage point.
We stand on a timeline facing daily battles of faith,
and we conclude the whole war is lost
— while the General is three steps ahead, having won.
We’ll see later in the passage where we sit on this timeline. But the lesson for now is:
Trust His Word - God cannot be stopped.
So what comes next on their timeline?
The divine warrior has swept through every enemy.
He's encamped at his own house.
Surely what comes next is the triumphant entry of the king
— a new David, mounted on a warhorse,
sword drawn, taking his throne by force and restoring the kingdom in visible power and glory.
But Zechariah has already quietly hinted that God's plans are going to look different from that.
2. The King Comes Differently (vv. 9–10)
2. The King Comes Differently (vv. 9–10)
The second stop on the timeline.
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.
A donkey.
Not a warhorse. Not a chariot.
The most unassuming,
unmilitary animal you could put a king on.
And the crowd is told to rejoice — loudly, greatly — because this, somehow, is the arrival of the king.
God has just swept through every enemy,
And His king finally arrives, humbly, gently.
Zechariah isn't describing a king who simply failed to find a horse.
He's showing us a king whose victory is an entirely different kind to what we think.
The military sweep of verses 1–8 was never the main battle to fight.
The battle this king faced, required him to come like this — in lowliness —
a battle no sword, however sharp, could ever have won.
Look closely at how he's described. "Righteous" — perfect before God.
And then in the NIV we get Victorious,
But the origional says: ‘having salvation."
it really means: ‘he has been saved’, vindicated, rescued by God.
This king arrives not simply as a victor,
but as someone who has himself been through something — vindicated on the far side of it.
There's suffering and God’s deliverance, folded into this King before there's triumph.
And Then "lowly" or "humble" — this isn't describing a pleasant personality. It's describing a status: poverty, dependence, having nothing to bring but himself.
We read on:
I will take away the chariots from Ephraim and the war-horses from Jerusalem, and the battle-bow will be broken. He will proclaim peace to the nations. His rule will extend from sea to sea and from the River to the ends of the earth.
When he arrives, he disarms — not just his enemies, but his own people too.
He proclaims peace to the nations, not war.
And his reign is total: sea to sea, river to the ends of the earth.
Read Psalm 72 later today - this reign comes about not through conquest, but through who this king is and what he does.
And We know exactly who this is.
Matthew 21 and John 12 both quote verse 9 here word for word,
Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey.
The crowds shout "Hosanna" — save us —
But they had forgotten this promise in Zech 9.
They want a political liberator, a warrior to drive out Rome the way God drove out Syria and Phillistines back in verses 1–8.
They want the warhorse king.
They get the donkey king instead.
And by Friday, most of them are calling for his death on a cross.
A king who arrives on a donkey: he doesn't look like winning.
He doesn't feel like winning.
He's heading toward a cross, not a throne.
And if your definition of winning is power, visibility, and triumph that you can see and feel,
you will not be satisfied with Jesus.
Suffering, humility, righteous, a saved one - delivered, saved by God as he rises on the third day.
That is the central step on the timeline of God’s salvation plan for his people.
A lot of us are quietly waiting for a different kind of Jesus
— one who makes life work,
who makes faith feel exhilarating,
who gives clear signs and unmistakable feelings of his presence,
who answers prayer the way we hoped,
who makes us feel — genuinely, emotionally — that he's with us and for us.
And when he doesn't do that,
when prayer feels like talking to a wall,
when life falls apart despite our faith,
we conclude something has gone wrong.
God isn't showing up. We must be losing.
The lesson to remember: the King's victory was never meant to feel like winning.
The humble arrival on a donkey wasn't a failure of power
— it was a completely different kind of power,
deployed exactly where it was needed.
The battle for our sin, our guilt, our separation from God
required humility and suffering,
not strength on display.
And that battle has, for us, already been won
The king came, and he won it, and the proof is a lowly king, and an empty tomb,
not a feeling in our chest.
Your standing before God was settled on a Friday afternoon outside Jerusalem.
It isn't reassessed weekly based on how close you feel to him.
Zechariahs people felt far from God, and he simply reminded them.
Trust my word, and look for the lowly King who will save you.
And Look what Jesus achives on the 3rd stop on our timeline
3. The People Who Will Not Be Lost (vv. 11–17)
3. The People Who Will Not Be Lost (vv. 11–17)
As for you, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will free your prisoners from the waterless pit.
A waterless pit hear just means a dry pit, the kind used as a dungeon or prison to keep slaves in at night.
these pDople are stuck, forgotten, no way out by their own effort.
Think of Jospeh - It's the pit Joseph's brothers threw him into in Genesis 37. It's the pit the prophet Jeremiah was lowered into and left to die. It's a picture of total abandonment — forgotten, trapped, slowly running out of hope.
And God says: because of the blood of my covenant, I will free your prisoners from exactly that place.
The blood of the covenant takes us back to Mount Sinai, where Moses sprinkled blood on the people and said, "this is the blood of the covenant."
It was the seal on God's relationship with his people.
And now God reaches for that same image as the basis for rescue.
Not their performance. Not their faithfulness.
The covenant, sealed in blood, is the reason prisoners come out of the pit.
Trust God’s Word - his promises.
Reading this after the cross, we can't help but hear it pointing further still — the blood of the new covenant, poured out for many.
Our rescue has never been our own spiritual track record. It's the blood of Jesus.
That is what gets you out of the pit.
Return to your fortress, you prisoners of hope; even now I announce that I will restore twice as much to you.
"Prisoners of hope" — what a phrase.
It’s a tricky phrase really, but I think best taken simply.
Go home, you’re no longer in the pit,
you now belong to the lowly king who will come to rescue and fulfil the blood covenant.
And while you wait - have hope!
Freed prisoners of hope - based on God’s Word and the lowly king.
That’s where they sit on the timeline.
For them right at the beginning,
awaiting the military campagn,
then the lowly king,
and eventually this restoration of ‘twice as much’!
Verses 13–15 intensify the picture further:
God bends Judah like a bow,
raises up Zion like a sword,
appears over his people like a storm,
his arrows flashing like lightning.
This is God fighting for his people, for what, what is their double portions, their twice as much?
The Lord their God will save his people on that day as a shepherd saves his flock. They will sparkle in his land like jewels in a crown. How attractive and beautiful they will be! Grain will make the young men thrive, and new wine the young women.
A flock, saved by their shepherd.
Jewels in a crown.
Abundance and beauty and life.
This is where the whole timeline has been heading.
Eternal residence in the Kingdom of God, the new creation,
with our All saving, all giving Lowly King Jesus.
Pause
So where does that leave us, right now, today?
We need to be honest:
we are not yet living in verses 16–17.
The sparkling jewels, the overflowing grain, and new wine
— that's the final chapter,
- the consummation,
still ahead of us.
Christs Return
We're not there yet.
But we're not standing in the pre-cross silence of Zechariah's first hearers either.
We're living after verses 9–10.
The king has already come.
The blood of the covenant has already been shed.
The prisoners have already been freed from the deepest pit of all
— the death of sin itself couldn't hold him there.
So we live in the in-between —
The now and not yet,
after the fulfilemnt of God’s OT Word for military and lowly spiritual decisive victory,
but before the final unveiling of a double portion reward for all.
And in this in-between, what is God doing?
He is not passive. He is not distant.
He is not waiting until the very end to get involved again.
Right now he fights for us through his Spirit at work in His church.
As the Spirit reassures us Through His Word of promises that holds us steady when nothing else does.
Through suffering that is, slowly and invisibly,
producing a weight of glory we can't yet see,
as we share in the suffering of Christ.
He is the shepherd of verse 16, and his flock does not wander out of his hands.
Not one is lost. Not one slips through.
— even the ones who feel most lost, most spiritually dry, most certain God has forgotten them.
The shepherd does not sleep.
This is the Word for every one of us who doesn't feel like we're winning.
You want to feel God close.
You want clear signs, electric faith, prayers that feel obviously heard.
And when you don't get that, you wonder if something has gone wrong
— if God is disappointed in you,
if you've drifted too far,
if you're not the kind of Christian who gets to experience the real thing.
WHAT DOES WINNING LOOK LIKE?
The lesson to remember: you don't have to feel held to be held.
Trust God’s Word and remember where we are on the timeline. Glory is coming. Christ has won.
It’s not a feeling, it’s a historically proved, reliable promise from the unstoppable God with a timeline for his peoples salavtion, through his lowly King.
The day is coming — and it really is coming — when all of this is made fully visible.
When the warrior appears over his people like lightning.
When the flock sparkles like jewels.
When there's no more gap between what's true and what's felt.
We're not there yet.
But we're heading there,
held by a God who has already swept through every enemy,
who sent his king on a donkey to win the deepest battle,
and who does not lose what belongs to him.
Pray
chorus by faith
