Zechariah 13

CHAPTER 13THEME: The cleansing of IsraelYou are seeing, I trust, that this Book of Zechariah is a very important book. I have always appreciated it and felt that it is a neglected book. Each time I go through it I learn something new. In fact, this final section is so tremendous that I do not feel competent to interpret it on the high plane that it belongs. I would love to make it mean as much to you as it means to me. Perhaps my feeling is best expressed in the lovable language of the Pennsylvania Dutch: “We grow too soon old and too late smart.” That fits my case. In the previous chapters we have seen a very definite progress through a program which began with the first coming of Christ to the earth. At that time He had entered Jerusalem, and He had been sold for just a few pieces of silver. Only part of the prophecy of Zechariah was fulfilled at His first coming, which indicates that the other part will be fulfilled at His second coming. He was rejected as the Good Shepherd who gave His life for the sheep. Another is to come in the future. He hasn’t come yet and won’t appear until the church is removed from the earth. He will be the false shepherd who will lead the nation of Israel, as well as the world, into the Great Tribulation period. The only deliverance at that time will be the second coming of Christ to the earth when He comes to establish His Kingdom. He alone can bring peace to this earth. It was back in December, 1959, on a Thursday evening, that a Boeing 707 took off from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland and headed toward the sunrise. That jet plane bore the insignia of the President of the United States. The President was beginning the longest trip that any president had made previously. He was to visit three continents, confer with a dozen rulers, and be seen by thousands of people. The supreme objective of that trip was peace. President Eisenhower at that time expressed it by stating that it was an effort to attain peace with justice. Certainly that was a laudable and worthy objective, and he traveled 22,370 miles in 19 days in his attempt to achieve it. Since that time, every other president has traveled farther in his efforts to bring peace to this earth. But at the time President Eisenhower made the trip, the longing and the prayers of over a billion people were with him because the world wants peace. The human heart desires peace above all else. It was very interesting that he went in the season of the year when we celebrate the birth of a Baby, when it was said, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men” (Luk_2:14). Well, I must confess that back there in 1959 I very sincerely prayed for peace. My good wishes and my prayers went with the President for success and a bon voyage.

You know, I am sure, that I did not entertain the delusion that the president or any mere man could bring permanent peace to the earth. Actually I got the impression, as I listened to him on television, that he didn’t believe he could achieve peace in the world. I do not think he entertained any grandiose ideas. As a military man, he faced reality. But I think he hoped to relieve the tensions so as to postpone the evil day and to make plain the purpose and intents of this nation by clearing up misunderstandings and misrepresentations. Well, after all the years which have gone by since then, it is still true that the Baby born over nineteen hundred years ago is the only hope for permanent peace. He alone can and will bring peace to this earth. He holds in perpetuity the title “…The Prince of Peace” (Isa_9:6). He has a program and a plan to bring in permanent peace. He will establish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. The prophets, especially Zechariah, sketch this program in some detail. In this book, as elsewhere, we find out something of the character of that Kingdom, which we will note as we go along. We have already seen that the Kingdom has a great many physical aspects that appeal to men: the desert will blossom as a rose, the lame will leap, the blind will see, and there are those who like to think of the golden streets in the New Jerusalem. But when we get off on that tangent we forget the spiritual aspects. We have already seen in this little book that the Kingdom will be characterized by truth: “Thus saith the LORD; I am returned unto Zion, and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem: and Jerusalem shall be called a city of truth …” (Zec_8:3). It certainly is not that today, but it will be the city of truth when Christ reigns there. I should add that there is no capital in the world today which is noted for truth. Not only will Christ’s Kingdom be characterized by truth, it will be characterized by holiness and righteousness, as we will see in verses Zec_13:1 and Zec_13:2 of the chapter before us. And in chapter 14 we shall see that even the bells on the horses and the pots and pans in the temple will be holiness to the Lord. Also, the Kingdom will be characterized by freedom from fearwe will find that aspect in chapter 14. Added to this, the Kingdom will be characterized by joy, as we have seen in chapter 10: “And I will strengthen the house of Judah, and I will save the house of Joseph, and I will bring them again to place them; for I have mercy upon them: and they shall be as though I had not cast them off: for I am the LORD their God, and will hear them. And they of Ephraim shall be like a mighty man, and their heart shall rejoice as through wine: yea, their children shall see it, and be glad; their heart shall rejoice in the LORD” (Zec_10:6-7). It will be a time of great joy, you see. All of these are spiritualnot physicalaspects of the Kingdom, and the chief one is peace. When Christ comes to reign, He “will speak peace unto the nations.” We have been following in Zechariah’s prophecy God’s program which will ultimately bring permanent peace to the world. When Christ came the first time, He was rejected and sold and turned over to the Gentiles who crucified Him. Then a period of time lapses which Zechariah does not deal with. It is the church period in which we are living today. When it ends, there will appear the worthless shepherd, the Antichrist. He won’t usher in the Kingdom; he will bring in the Great Tribulation period. His world dictatorship can only be ended by the coming of Christ to establish His Kingdom upon the earth. This is what we have before us in chapter 13. All of this should be taken in a literal way. The reason that many folk in our day think that God has no future purpose with Israel is that they don’t believe that God means what He says. You couldn’t read the section before us and dismiss it unless you spiritualize it away. If you do that, you do not have a very high view of the inspiration of Scripture. The very center of God’s plan, as we saw back in chapter 12, is Jerusalem. In the last three chapters of this book, chapters 12-14, the name Jerusalem occurs twenty-one times.

My friend, God wouldn’t have used it that many times unless He had meant literal Jerusalem. He was not talking about London or Paris or Berlin or Moscow or Peking. He was speaking about the actual city of Jerusalem. It is quite interesting that even President Eisenhower, back in his day, bypassed Jerusalem, and heads of state have been bypassing it ever since. You will find that the better conservative expositors take the position that this section should be interpreted literally. Let me share with you a quotation from Dr.

Merrill F. Unger, whom I value very highly as an interpreter of the Book of Zechariah. I feel that his book, Unger’s Bible Commentary: Zechariah, is the finest I have found. It is scholarly, and you need a little smattering of Hebrew to get through it, but it is a wonderful book. Here on page 221 is his comment: Only a literal application of these prophecies to the restoration and conversion of the Jewish nation at the second advent of Christ can satisfy the scope of these prophetic disclosures. Other interpretations ignore the true scope of Zechariah’s prophecies as a whole, violate the immediate context, resort to pointless mysticalizing, and end up in a morass of uncertainty and confusion. I say amen to that. I believe that spiritualizing it is practically a denial of the inspiration of the Word of God.

Zechariah 13:1

THE NATIONAL CLEANSING OF ISRAEL"In that day." We have already determined that “that day” refers to the Great Tribulation and moves on into the millennial Kingdom. Christ will come to this earth at the end of the Great Tribulation, and then He will establish His Kingdom. This verse does not refer to the first coming of Christ. At that time He did not open up a fountain to the house of David and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem “for sin and for uncleanness.” Instead, they rejected Him and crucified their Savior. Even Paul writes in Rom_10:3: “For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God.” “A fountain” is God’s cleansing power which was opened by Christ’s death upon the Cross. At His first coming Israel rejected their Messiah-Savior, and this fountain will be opened to them at His second coming to the earth. The chapter before us continues the presentation of God’s program, and we saw in chapter 12 that in “that day” God would pour out His Spirit upon the people of Israel. The prophet Joel spoke of that also. It is at this time that the “fountain” will be opened to them, which will be when they realize the fact that Christ was crucified for them. We have seen that they are going to look upon Him.

Remember that this is God’s Word, and He puts it very definitely, “They shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him.” It is going to be a real Day of Atonement for these people when Christ comes the second time. They are going to be greatly moved, and the Spirit of God will remove the veil from their eyes. Paul makes it clear that the veil can be taken away even today if they really want to give up their sin. You see, the problem with man is heart trouble, not head trouble. No man really has an intellectual problem. He hasn’t got enough mentality to deal with the Creator of this universe, with an infinite God. His problem is that he does not want to give up his sin. That is true of the people of Israel, and it is true of the Gentiles. It is true of all of uslet’s face up to it.

Zechariah 13:2

“And it shall come to pass in that day"again he dates it as being “in that day.” “I will cut off the names of the idols out of the land.” When they were in Babylonian captivity, they took the “gold cure,” that is, they gave up idolatry as they had observed it before. The golden calves were never put back at Dan and Bethel. But they were still using the little household teraphim and other little fetishes. Even today a great many so-called civilized folk think that if they wear a certain object or if they put up a certain little gadget somewhere, it will ward off harm. That was the kind of idolatry that the people of Israel were engaged in. Also they dealt with the zodiac. “And also I will cause the prophets and the unclean spirit to pass out of the land.” The “prophets” are, of course, the false prophets. The “unclean spirit” refers to demons. We live in a world where demons are very active, and attention is being called to them at the present time. It may be that we are seeing an outbreak of demonic activity as we draw near the end of the age, but, candidly, I think there has been a subtle manifestation of them all along. The reason this passage is so important is that it is the only place that speaks of the demons being put out of this earth during the Millennium. The Book of Revelation tells about the false prophet and the Antichrist being put out of the earth: “And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet that wrought miracles before him, with which he deceived them that had received the mark of the beast, and them that worshipped his image.

These both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone” (Rev_19:20). And Satan will be bound during the millennial period (see Rev_20:1-3). So we know that the false prophet and the Antichrist will be in the lake of fire and the Devil will be bound in the bottomless pit. Nothing is said in the Book of Revelation about the final casting out of demons, but it is logical to believe that it will be done at this time also and that they will be put in one place or the other. At least we know that they will be removed from the earth. You would think that once a people had been delivered from paganism and heathenism, they would not go back to it. But in our day the world is going back to it because the human family is gradually moving into the darkness again due to a lack of knowledge of the Word of God. And this is the explanation for the demonic dynamic being manifested in our day. Ignorance of God’s Word gives energy to the occultthere is no energy shortage in that particular connection. What a different world this will be when there is a complete extermination of idolatry and demons are removed from the entire earth.

Zechariah 13:3

That seems like strong language, but the day is coming, my friend, when God’s children are going to put Him first. They betrayed Him the first time He came, and He is being betrayed in our day, but in that future day they are going to be faithful to Him even if the one who prophesies falsely is their own son.

Zechariah 13:4

There are two things that interest me here. First, when the Lord comes the false prophets will be ashamed, deeply convicted, of their deceptive “vision.” They will be disgraced because the Lord Jesus has come and made liars out of every one of them. The second thing that we note is that “neither shall they wear a rough garment to deceive.” The garment worn by prophets was a mantle of rough, untanned sheepskin or goatskin or a cloak of camel’s hair. (When Esau was born it is said that he looked like this kind of hairy garment!) The prophet Elijah wore this type of mantle, and it was this mantle that fell upon his successor, Elisha. It was a garment which distinguished a man as a prophet of God, and the false prophets will feel guilty about trying to impersonate a true prophet. You see, Zechariah was not introducing something new but something that was very familiar to the folk of his day.

Zechariah 13:5

The men who were false prophets will go back to the farm. The next two verses are startling. In fact, the critics have tried to eliminate them from the text because they say that it is shocking to find this prophecy given at this time. And it is! That is the wonder of it. Certainly it is no excuse to reject it; it is there to alert us. I should mention that there is a difference of opinion as to who is addressed in this verse. I believe that it is Christ.

Zechariah 13:6

“Wounded in the house of my friends” has been translated by some of the higher critics as “wounded in the house of those who loved me.” Well, they didn’t love Him the first time He camethey hated Him. Scripture says that they hated Him without cause. “He came unto his own, and his own received him not” (Joh_1:11). But to as many as received Him at that time He gave the authority to become sons of God. Well, when the Spirit is poured out, they (that is, the remnant) are going to receive Him. And they will wonder, saying, “Where did you get those wounds in your hands?” He will answer, “I was wounded here when I came the first time.” He came to His own people, the Jewish race (remember that the woman of Samaria recognized Him as a Jew). These were His people, and only a remnant received Him at that time. And, actually, it will be only a remnant who will receive him at His second coming although I think it will be a much larger remnant. “And one shall say unto him” probably refers to the spokesman for the remnant, just as Peter spoke for the other apostles when he said to Jesus, “…Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mat_16:16). There is a song in which Jesus is called “the Stranger of Galilee.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t like that song. He is not the stranger of Galilee to those who know Him. When He came the first time He was the stranger of Galilee to them. Certainly He is not the stranger of Galilee to Christians in this age in which we live, and I don’t think we should sing that song. To know Him is life eternal. The apostle Paul at the end of his life wrote, “That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death” (Php_3:10). But it is true that they did not know Jesus when He came the first time. This matter of mistaken identity has been the source of plots for writers of both comedy and tragedy down through the years. Shakespeare used it in The Comedy of Errors. Dickens used it in The Tale of Two Cities. Many dramatic productions are based upon this ideaAlexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, for example. It becomes even more tragic when it is a real life story. I read of a mother who had not seen her daughter for seventeen years, and when she went to meet her in New York, she walked right past her. It took some time to meet again because the mother didn’t recognize her own daughter. In Reedley, California, I met a mother who had come from Russia and had not seen her daughter since she was a babyof course she wouldn’t be able to recognize her. However, I think that the greatest tragedy of the ages is expressed in just eleven words: “He came unto His own, and His own received him not.” What a picture! John the Baptist elaborated upon it when he said, “…I baptize with water: but there standeth one among you, whom ye know not” (Joh_1:26, italics mine). And the Lord Jesus Himself said that they knew not the time of their visitationwhat a tremendous statement! And Paul wrote: “But their minds were blinded: for until this day remaineth [notice that!] the same veil untaken away in the reading of the old testament; which veil is done away in Christ. But even unto this day, when Moses is read, the veil is upon their heart” (2Co_3:14-15). Notice that the veil is upon their heartbut when the heart is right, they can turn to Him.

He is a stranger only to those who do not know Him as Savior. Zechariah speaks of this. In His first coming they didn’t know Him. There is a striking contrast between the first and second comings of Christ. Redemption is the high word of His first coming; revelation is the high word of His second coming. It was reconciliation at His first coming and recognition at His second coming. It was the Incarnation at His first coming and identification at His second coming. It was the mystery at His first coming, and it will be manifestation at His second coming. At His first coming it was propitiation; at His second coming it will be proclamation. What a picture this gives of Christ!

Zechariah 13:7

THE SMITTEN SHEPHERD AND THE SCATTERED SHEEPThis refers to the time that He was smitten. In fact, when Christ was here the first time, He said that this verse applied to Himself, as we shall see. We immediately identify this remarkable passage of Scripture with “…they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him …” of Zec_12:10. “Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, and against the man that is my fellow, saith the LORD of hosts.” The Lord God is the speaker, and Christ, the Messiah, is the person spoken of. The phrase, “the man that is my fellow” would be better translated, “the man my equal” or “the man of my union.” This is an unmistakable Old Testament reference to the deity of Christ. “Smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered.” Who would have thought that this would refer to the Lord Jesus Christ? We know it does because Jesus Himself quotes it. “Then saith Jesus unto them, All ye shall be offended because of me this night: for it is written, I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered abroad” (Mat_26:31). You see that He makes it applicable to Himself. If you doubt that God has a future purpose for Israel, you need to note this carefully. In the prophecies that we have here which relate to the first and second comings of Christ, did the Lord Jesus lie? He says that Zechariah was referring to Him when he said, “Smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered.” And when He comes the second time, they will ask, “What are these wounds, these nail prints, in Your hands?” And His answer will be, “I received these in the house of My friends.” And, as we saw in chapter 12, “They shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son.” This will be the great Day of Atonement for the Jewish people, and obviously it is for a future time. The final two verses of this chapter refer to the Great Tribulation period.

Zechariah 13:8

“The third shall be left therein” refers to the same remnant that shall ask, “What are these wounds in thine hands?” They will have come through the horrors of the Great Tribulation period in which two-thirds of their people have perished.

Zechariah 13:9

Isn’t that a wonderful statement? These are the ones who will take a stand for Christ and will be faithful to Him. They will make it through the Great Tribulation because He has sealed them (see Rev_7:1-8). Then we see them again in Revelation 14: “And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on the mount Sion, and with him an hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father’s name written in their foreheads…. And they sung as it were a new song before the throne, and before the four beasts, and the elders: and no man could learn that song but the hundred and forty and four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth” (Rev_14:1, Rev_14:3).