Yesterday at last the King rode into view. Today Zechariah tells us some things about His kingdom.
"I will take away the chariots from Ephraim and the warhorses from Jerusalem, and the battle bow will be broken." (Zechariah 9:10a) The King makes this promise in His own words. He promises peace to Israel (called "Ephraim" here, a common expression in the Old Testament in which the name of the largest of the ten northern tribes is used interchangeably with the name "Israel").
We must keep in mind that most Biblical prophecies are twofold without any clear demarcation between the first half and the second half. Jesus of Nazareth fulfilled verse 9, which we studied yesterday. At His first advent, the King rode into Jerusalem on a donkey to shouts of praise and thanksgiving, but He did not fulfill verse 10 by bringing military and political peace to Israel. He couldn't, for as the Apostle John sadly states, "He came to that which was His own, but His own did not receive Him." (John 1:11) The kingdom would have come if the religious leaders of Israel had accepted the King rather than shouting out, "Crucify Him! Crucify Him!" (Luke 23:21)
The scribes and Pharisees and teachers of the law rejected Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah, but lest we shake our heads judgmentally at them, let's keep in mind that many of us (like me) are of Gentile ancestry. Where would we be if the kingdom had come in the days of Jesus of Nazareth? We were not a part of Israel. The promises of God were not made to us. As a Gentile, I have to assume my forebears were ignorantly bowing down to graven images instead of to the living God. The Apostle Paul, a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin and a former Pharisee, reminds those of us who are Gentiles that "at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ." (Ephesians 2:12-13)
God always intended to bring the Gentiles into His family. We've been studying His promise to Abraham, in which He declared that all nations would be blessed by Abraham's offspring (literally "seed"). The covenant promises were not given to the Gentiles, but to the Jews. But through Abraham's seed, "who is Christ" (Galatians 3:16), the Gentiles have been given the opportunity to share in the blessings of Abraham and in the family of God. At His first advent, the King did not bring political or military peace on the earth, but He brought peace between man and God and peace between Jews and the Gentiles who believed in Him, "For He Himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility." (Ephesians 2:14) This is why Christians have such love toward the nation of Israel, why we consider them our friends, and why we feel as if we share a common ancestry.
At His second advent, Zechariah tells us what Christ will do. "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." (Zechariah 9:10b) When He came into the world the first time, the Lord orchestrated a peace treaty between man and God by His own blood. He also made peace between the Gentiles who believed on Him and the Jews. But when He comes the second time, He will bring political and military peace on the earth. His reign will be worldwide and "He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore." (Isaiah 2:4)
The King speaks again, "As for you, because of the blood of My covenant with you, I will free your prisoners from the waterless pit." (Zechariah 9:11) Commentators are divided over which blood covenant verse 11 refers to. Our passage today appears to be exclusively for the nation of Israel (Ephraim), and that leads us to believe that He means the blood covenant God made with Abraham. On the other hand, it is Christ who speaks these words, who made a new covenant with His own blood. I feel that since the Lord is speaking to Israel here, He is referring to the Abrahamic covenant and is promising to keep His side of the bargain. He is reminding the nation that He has not set these promises aside. But either way, we can safely say that only the Lord can set us free from the dry cistern of sin in which we were trapped. Only He can give us newness of life.
This King continues, "Return to your fortress, you prisoners of hope; even now I announce that I will restore twice as much to you." (Zechariah 9:12) The people of Zechariah's day have been through many hopeless decades. Sitting captive in a foreign land, they must have wondered whether God's covenant with Abraham had been made null and void because they had strayed from the God who made the promises. But the King is still coming and His kingdom is still coming. They are to be held captive now by hope, not by the chains of foreign invaders or by the chains of sin. It is the hope of the coming King and His eternal kingdom that holds them fast. They are to cling tightly to this hope and never let it go. The Lord promises to restore Israel, not simply to her former glory, but to give her twice as much as she had before. The prophet Joel foretold of the day in which the King will reign over Israel and when all the promises of God to Israel will be fulfilled, "Then you will know that I am in Israel, that I am the Lord your God, and that there is no other; never again will My people be shamed." (Joel 2:27)
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