Manna Praxis

The Book of Zechariah: Behold, Your King Comes

Introduction

Today’s Passage: An Overview of the Whole Book

You are about to walk through a book written for a discouraged people who had every reason to give up. The great exile was over, and a small remnant had come home to Jerusalem from Babylon, but home was not what they had dreamed of. The city lay in rubble, the temple was a half-built ruin, the harvests were thin, and the old enemies still pressed in on every side. The work of rebuilding the house of God had begun with high hopes and then stalled for years, and the hands that once carried stones now hung down. Into that weariness God raised up two prophets in the very same season, Haggai and Zechariah, to stir the people to finish what they had started. Haggai’s word was short and blunt, a builder’s shout to get back to work. Zechariah’s word was longer and stranger and full of light, for he was given, in a single night, a series of eight visions that lifted the eyes of a defeated people off their small pile of stones and set them on the vast purposes of God. And then, in the closing chapters, this book of a modest local temple opens out into some of the highest and most precious promises of the coming Messiah found anywhere in the Old Testament: a King who comes gentle and lowly on a donkey, betrayed for thirty pieces of silver, pierced and bitterly mourned, a shepherd struck so that the sheep are scattered, and at the end of all things the LORD Himself reigning as King over the whole earth.

As you read, hold this: To a small and weary people rebuilding a ruined temple, the LORD sends visions of hope and a promise so large it can only be Christ: a humble King riding to His own, pierced and mourned, and reigning at last over all the earth.

The name and what it means

The prophet’s name in Hebrew is זְכַרְיָה (zekaryah), pronounced zek-ar-YAH (Strong’s H2148), and it means “The LORD remembers.” It is a name to steady a shaken people, and it is no small thing that a man carrying that very promise in his name was sent to a remnant who feared they had been forgotten. They had come back to a broken city and a stalled work, and it would have been the most natural thing in the world to conclude that God had turned His face away and left them to fade quietly into the nations. The name of the prophet answered that fear before he ever opened his mouth. The LORD remembers. He had not forgotten His covenant, He had not forgotten His city, He had not forgotten His promise of a coming Redeemer, and the whole book is, in a sense, that single name unfolded into vision after vision and promise after promise. We are told Zechariah was the son of Berechiah, the son of Iddo, and Iddo is listed among the priests who returned from exile, which means Zechariah was a priest as well as a prophet, a man who stood in both the sanctuary and the street, fitted by God to speak of a coming One who would be both priest and king.

The world of the book

Zechariah began to prophesy in the year 520 before Christ, in the second year of Darius king of Persia, the same year his fellow prophet Haggai was at work. Some eighteen years earlier the first exiles had returned under Zerubbabel the governor and Joshua the high priest, and they had laid the temple’s foundation with singing. But opposition from the surrounding peoples, and the slow grinding weight of poverty and discouragement, had brought the building to a standstill, and for years the house of God sat unfinished while the people saw to their own affairs. It was into this stalled and disheartened moment that Haggai and Zechariah were sent, the one to rebuke the delay and the other to reveal the glory that hung on it, and under their preaching the work resumed and the second temple was at last completed in 516 before Christ.

Zechariah’s task, then, was not mainly to scold but to encourage, and he did it by pulling back the curtain on the unseen world. His book opens with a plain and tender summons, a call to return to the God who is waiting to return to His people, and then it plunges into eight night visions that show heaven’s horses patrolling a quiet earth, a measuring line stretched over a Jerusalem too full to need walls, the high priest cleansed and re-robed while Satan stands accusing, a golden lampstand fed by living oil, and a flying scroll and a woman in a basket carried off to Babylon as sin itself is swept from the land. These are strange pictures, and Zechariah is honest that he needed an angel at his side to explain them, but their message is clear and glad: God is at work behind the visible ruin, His enemies are being dealt with, His people are being cleansed, and His purposes cannot fail. The later chapters leave the visions behind and speak in the plainer and grander voice of prophecy, reaching far past the little temple of stone to the great temple of living people that the Messiah Himself would one day build.

The shape of the book

The one thread to carry

If you carry one thing through all fourteen chapters, carry this: the LORD who tells this small people that He remembers them is remembering, above all, His promise of a King. Zechariah’s temple was only ever a picture of the greater thing God was building, and again and again the book breaks past its own moment to show us the Christ. Read it watching for Him, and three verses will guide your eyes. First, see the King as He comes, not on a war-horse but gentle and lowly, exactly as He would one day ride into Jerusalem to the shouts of the crowd.

Zechariah 9:9 (BSB) — “Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout in triumph, O Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your King comes to you, righteous and victorious, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

Then see how this King would win His people, not by striking His enemies but by being struck Himself, pierced through and grieved over by the very ones He came to save, until the day their hard eyes are opened and their mourning turns to grace.

Zechariah 12:10 (BSB) — “Then I will pour out on the house of David and on the people of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and prayer, and they will look on Me, the One they have pierced. They will mourn for Him as one mourns for an only child, and grieve bitterly for Him as one grieves for a firstborn son.”

And then see where the whole story is going, past every besieged city and half-built temple, to the day when the reign of God fills the earth as the waters cover the sea, and there is no rival left to His throne and no other name worth naming.

Zechariah 14:9 (BSB) — “On that day the LORD will become King over all the earth—the LORD alone, and His name alone.”

The little remnant of Zechariah’s day finished their temple and passed on, and most of them never guessed how large their comfort truly was. But the King did come, riding on a donkey; He was pierced, and He is mourned and loved; and He will reign over all the earth. Learn the Word, follow the gold thread from the ruined temple to the coming King, and give thanks.