The Branch, My Servant

Scripture: Zechariah 1–6 (with Hebrews 7 and Psalm 110)

Before this session, read Zechariah 1–6: the prophet’s opening call to return to the LORD, the eight night visions given in a single night, the cleansing and reclothing of Joshua the high priest, the promise of the servant called the Branch (3:8), the word to Zerubbabel that the work is done not by strength and not by power, but by the LORD’s Spirit (4:6), and the crowning of Joshua as a sign of the priest-king to come (6:11–13). It is strange and vivid material; read it slowly and let the images work. Keep your Bible open, and ask: how does a filthy priest declared clean picture the gospel? And who is the Branch, the priest on His throne?

I am about to introduce my servant, the Branch.

(Zechariah 3:8)

The Apocalypse of the Old Testament

Zechariah prophesied in the very same months as Haggai, to the very same small and discouraged community, about the very same stalled temple, the two of them raised up together in the second year of Darius to stir the people to build. But where Haggai is blunt, brief, and practical, Zechariah is vast, strange, and luminous. He is given a series of eight visions in a single night, full of horsemen and horns, lampstands and flying scrolls, a man with a measuring line and four chariots coming out from between mountains of bronze. The book is so dense with the imagery of the world to come, and so saturated with the Coming One, that it has long been called the Apocalypse of the Old Testament. No book of the Twelve points more often or more clearly to Christ; the New Testament reaches into Zechariah again and again, especially into his account of the Passion, as we shall see in the sessions to come.

Precisely because Zechariah is so rich and so strange, it is also the most fought-over, and we must say a word at the outset about how we will read it. The night visions and the later chapters have become the favorite quarry of those who mine the prophets for a detailed end-times program: a calendar of future events, a blueprint for a rebuilt temple and a restored nation. We will not read it that way. Our rule is the apostles’ own: where the New Testament tells us how a passage of Zechariah is fulfilled, we follow it without flinching; and where it does not, we read the visions as what they plainly are, the LORD comforting a struggling people with the promise of His presence, His cleansing, and the coming of His King, fulfilled in Christ and in the Church He gathers, not as a real-estate forecast for the last days. Where we see Christ in a detail the New Testament does not name, we will say so, and offer it as a fitting canonical reading rather than a certainty. The book opens, fittingly, with a call that sets the tone for everything after: “Turn to me,” says the LORD who rules over all, “and I will turn to you” (1:3). Before the visions of comfort comes the summons to repent; the God who is about to show His servant such glories first calls His people home, and His call itself carries the power to turn those it calls.

It will help to say a word about how to read these strange night visions before we enter them. They belong to a kind of writing the Bible uses sparingly (apocalyptic, the literature of symbol and vision), where horns and horses and lampstands and measuring lines are not to be taken as a literal forecast of dated events but as vivid pictures carrying spiritual truth. The visions are not a coded newspaper of things to come; they are a series of comforts and promises given in images, to a people who needed to see, and not merely hear, that God had not forgotten them. Read as a struggling remnant would have received them, they move with a clear logic: from the LORD’s jealous love for His afflicted city, through the casting down of the powers that scattered her, to the cleansing of her sin and the promise of her coming King. We are not meant to decode them like a puzzle, but to be comforted by them like children shown, in pictures, that their Father is near, that He is at work, and that His King is coming.

I Am Jealous for Jerusalem

The first vision sets the key for them all. The prophet sees horsemen who have patrolled the whole earth and report that everything is at rest and quiet (1:11): the nations at ease while the people of God languish. And the angel of the LORD cries out, LORD who rules over all, how long before you have compassion on Jerusalem and the other cities of Judah? (1:12), the very how long we heard from Habakkuk. The answer comes in words of fierce tenderness: I am very much moved for Jerusalem and for Zion (1:14). The Hebrew is stronger still: “I am jealous for Jerusalem and for Zion with a great jealousy.” We learned in Nahum that the jealousy of God is the fierce protectiveness of covenant love; here it is turned wholly toward comfort. The LORD has not forgotten His afflicted people; He burns with a jealous love for them, and He is returning to them in mercy: I have become compassionate toward Jerusalem and will rebuild my temple in it (1:16). To a remnant that felt abandoned, slaving away at a building project the world ignored, this is the first and sweetest word: you are not forgotten; I am jealous for you still.

The vision that follows presses this comfort against the powers that had crushed God’s people. The prophet sees four horns (the symbol of brute power), the horns that have scattered Judah, Israel, and Jerusalem (1:19). And then he sees four blacksmiths, who have come to terrify Judah’s enemies and cut off the horns of the nations (1:21). The powers that scatter the people of God are themselves not the last word; they will be broken by the hand of the God who raises up whatever instruments He pleases to bring them low. To a people living under the heel of a great empire, who had watched Babylon devour them and now lived as subjects of Persia, this was a word of steadying hope: the horns that gore you are not eternal; the LORD has His craftsmen ready to fell them. The empires that seem so permanent are, in His sight, already marked for the workshop. No power that lifts itself against His people will stand forever.

The visions that follow press the comfort further. A man goes out with a measuring line to measure Jerusalem, as though to fix its walls, and is told to put the line away, for the city will be too full to be walled: Jerusalem will no longer be enclosed by walls because of the multitude of people and animals there. But I (the LORD says) will be a wall of fire surrounding Jerusalem and the source of glory in her midst (2:4–5). The LORD Himself will be the city’s defense and the city’s glory: a wall of fire no enemy can breach, and a glory dwelling in the midst. And then the promise opens out to the whole world: “Sing out and be happy, Zion my daughter! For look, I have come; I will settle in your midst,” says the LORD. “Many nations will join themselves to the LORD on the day of salvation, and they will also be my people” (2:10–11). There it is again: the LORD dwelling in your midst, the thread that ran through Zephaniah and Haggai; and the nations joining themselves to the LORD, the Gentile ingathering promised all through the Twelve. This is no walled-off ethnic enclave; it is the city of God, defended by God, filled with His glory, and gathering the nations into one people. We know now that the LORD came to dwell in the midst of His people in the flesh of the Lord Jesus, and that the many nations have been joined to Him in the Church.

There is rich comfort in the particular images the LORD chooses here. A city without walls was a city defenseless, open to every raider; and yet the LORD says His people need no walls, for He Himself will be a wall of fire surrounding them. A wall of stone can be breached, undermined, scaled; a wall of fire cannot be crossed by any enemy. The defense of the people of God is not their own fortifications, their numbers, their resources, or their standing in the world, but the living God who surrounds them like flame. And He will be not only their defense but their splendor, the source of glory in her midst: the very glory that had departed from the first temple, returning to dwell among them. The Church in every age is tempted to trust in walls of her own building, in institutional strength and worldly security; Zechariah’s vision tells her she is safest when she has no walls but the LORD, and most glorious not when she is impressive to the world but when His glory dwells in her midst.

A Burning Stick Snatched from the Fire

The fourth vision is the heart of the first half of the book, and it is the gospel set out in a single scene. Next I saw Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the LORD, with Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him (3:1). Here is a courtroom, and the accused is Joshua: not the great Joshua of old, but the high priest of the returned exiles, the man who represented the whole people before God. He stands in the holy presence, and at his right hand stands the adversary, Satan, whose very name means the accuser, pressing his case against the priest. And the case is not baseless, for Joshua, we are immediately told, was dressed in filthy clothes (3:3); the word is a strong one, garments fouled and defiled. The priest who should be clean is filthy; the accuser has every ground to accuse; and there is nothing Joshua can say in his own defense.

We should linger on the figure at Joshua’s right hand, for he is at work still. The adversary’s whole trade is accusation; the book of Revelation calls him the accuser of our brothers and sisters, the one who accuses them day and night before our God (Revelation 12:10). And his accusations are not always lies. He stood beside Joshua and pointed at garments that were genuinely filthy; he stands beside us and points at sins we have genuinely committed. The terror of the accusing conscience, the voice that recites our failures and asks how such a one as we could ever stand before a holy God, is in part his work and in part simply the truth. This is why the believer can never answer the accuser by protesting his own innocence, for the accuser is too often right about the facts. The only answer that silences him is the one the LORD gives here: not the charge is false, but “May the LORD rebuke you; this one is Mine, snatched from the fire, and I have taken away his iniquity.” Luther counseled the accused conscience to send the devil to Christ, who has answered every charge in His own blood; the accusation may be true, but it has already been paid.

And then the LORD intervenes, not by arguing that the accusation is false, but by silencing the accuser with sheer grace. The LORD said to Satan, “May the LORD rebuke you, Satan! May the LORD, who has chosen Jerusalem, rebuke you! Isn’t this man like a burning stick snatched from the fire?” (3:2). Joshua is a burning stick snatched from the fire (the older versions say “a brand plucked out of the fire”): a half-charred stick pulled from the flames at the last moment, black and smoking, with no beauty of its own, saved only because a hand reached in and pulled it out. That is what every sinner is: not a fine specimen God was pleased to choose, but a burning stick snatched from the fire by grace alone. And the accuser is not answered with a denial (Joshua is filthy) but with a rebuke: the LORD has chosen, and the LORD will not have this man accused. Then comes the gospel in action: “Remove his filthy clothes.” Then he said to Joshua, “I have freely forgiven your iniquity and will dress you in fine clothing” (3:4). The Hebrew says, word for word, “I have caused your iniquity to pass from you.” The filthy garments (his sin) are stripped off and carried away, and in their place he is clothed with clean and costly robes he did not provide.

That change of clothing is one of the great gospel pictures of the Scriptures, and it runs all through them. Isaiah rejoiced that the LORD clothes me in garments of deliverance; he puts on me a robe symbolizing vindication (Isaiah 61:10), words that in Hebrew speak of the garments of salvation and the robe of righteousness. The Lord Jesus told of a wedding feast where a man without the provided wedding garment was cast out, for the garment of acceptance was the host’s to give and not the guest’s to supply. John saw a great multitude in white robes and was told, They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb! (Revelation 7:14). And Paul says simply, For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ (Galatians 3:27): in Baptism God has wrapped us in His Son like a garment. This is the great exchange at the heart of the gospel: our filthy garments are stripped away and laid upon Him, and His spotless righteousness is wrapped around us. We do not stand before God in the rags of our own striving, however laundered; we stand clothed in the righteousness of Christ, a garment we did not weave and could never have afforded, given freely to burning sticks snatched from the fire.

Could the gospel be drawn more plainly? Here is the sinner, accused justly, with no defense; here is the adversary pressing the charge; and here is the LORD removing the iniquity, silencing the accuser, and clothing the guilty in a righteousness not his own. This is justification in a picture: not that the sinner is found innocent, but that his sin is taken away and the righteousness of Another is put upon him. The apostle Paul would ask the same courtroom question and give the same answer: Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is the one who will condemn? Christ is the one who died (and more than that, he was raised), who is at the right hand of God, and who also is interceding for us (Romans 8:33–34). The accuser still stands at our right hand, still presses his charges, and his charges are often true. But the believer is a burning stick snatched from the fire, his filthy garments carried away by the One who bore them, and clothed in the spotless righteousness of Christ; and against that, the accuser has no case. When Satan accuses, the answer is not that we are clean in ourselves, but that the LORD has clothed us, and the LORD rebukes the accuser.

I Am About to Introduce My Servant, the Branch

The cleansing of Joshua is not the end of the vision but the doorway to a promise, and the promise is one of the great Messianic words of the Old Testament. The LORD charges the cleansed priest to walk in His ways, and then says: Listen now, Joshua the high priest, both you and your colleagues who are sitting before you, all of you are a symbol that I am about to introduce my servant, the Branch (3:8). The Branch (in Hebrew, the tsemach, the green shoot) was already a known name for the Coming One. Isaiah had seen a shoot grow out of the felled stump of Jesse; Jeremiah had promised a righteous Branch raised up to David, whose name would be The LORD has provided us with justice, or, in the older and more literal rendering, “The LORD Our Righteousness.” Now Zechariah takes up the title and announces that the LORD will bring Him forth: a tender green shoot springing from what looked like a dead stump, the royal line of David that the exile had seemed to cut off at the ground. The cleansing of the priest and the promise of the Branch belong together, for the One who cleanses sinners and the Branch who is coming are bound up in the same saving work.

It is worth gathering the prophets’ witness to this Branch, for they speak with one voice. Isaiah had spoken of a day when the tsemach of the LORD, the “branch” or “growth” that He gives, would be beautiful and glorious (Isaiah 4:2; the NET takes the word there in its plain agricultural sense, the crops given by the LORD), and had seen that A shoot will grow out of Jesse’s root stock, a bud will sprout from his roots (Isaiah 11:1): a living shoot springing from a tree cut down to a stump. Jeremiah had twice promised (23:5; 33:15) that the LORD would raise up for them a righteous branch, a descendant of David, a King who would rule over them with wisdom and understanding, and whose very name would be The LORD has provided us with justice (Jeremiah 23:5–6). The Hebrew name is YHWH tsidqenu, “the LORD is our righteousness”: the righteousness is the LORD’s, and it is given to His people. And now Zechariah adds his voice: I am about to introduce my servant, the Branch. The image is always the same and always full of hope. The house of David had been felled by the exile and looked, to every eye, like a dead stump in the ground. But a stump is not a grave; from the deadest-looking stock the LORD would bring forth a green and living shoot, a kind of resurrection out of what seemed finished, the Branch sprung up where the line of David had been cut off, bearing in His very name the righteousness of the LORD given to His people.

And the LORD adds two things that, read canonically, point us toward the cross. He sets before Joshua a stone with seven eyes, and promises to engrave an inscription upon it, to the effect that I will remove the iniquity of this land in a single day (3:9). A single day. The cleansing of Joshua was a picture; the reality, as the New Testament teaches, would be accomplished once for all. The whole sacrificial system, with its endless repetition, was pointing to the time when sin would be dealt with once for all (Hebrews 10:10–14); and read in that light, Zechariah’s single day fittingly directs us to the day the Lord Jesus, the true Branch, bore the iniquity of His people on the cross and removed it in a single, sufficient sacrifice. The stone with seven eyes is harder to identify, and interpreters have read it in several ways; the next chapter tells us that the seven eyes are the eyes of the LORD, which constantly range across the whole earth (4:10). The text does not require us to identify the stone with Christ, but it may echo the stone the builders rejected that became the cornerstone (Psalm 118:22; 1 Peter 2:6–7), the tested and precious foundation stone on which the whole house of God is built. The vision ends with the picture of the kingdom that follows: everyone will invite his friend to fellowship under his vine and under his fig tree (3:10), the peace of Micah’s vision, the rest of a people whose iniquity has been removed.

Not by Strength and Not by Power

The next vision turns from the priest to the prince. The prophet sees a golden lampstand, a menorah, fed by two olive trees, and is told that the two olive trees are the two anointed ones who stand by the Lord of the whole earth (4:14): Joshua the priest and Zerubbabel the prince, the two anointed offices on which the life of the restored community depended. But the great word of the vision is spoken to Zerubbabel, who must have despaired of ever finishing the temple with such slender means: Not by strength and not by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD who rules over all (4:6). The work would not be done by human strength or human resources (there was precious little of either) but by the Spirit of God. The mountain of obstacles before Zerubbabel would become a plain; his hands that had laid the foundation would also finish it; and he will bring forth the temple capstone with shoutings of “Grace! Grace!” (4:7).

That word, not by strength and not by power, but by my Spirit, is not for Zerubbabel only, but for the whole work of God in every age. The kingdom of God has never advanced by the things the world calls strength and power: not by armies, not by political dominance, not by wealth or numbers or cultural influence, but by the Spirit of God working through the humble means He has chosen. The gospel is preached in weakness, and the Spirit makes it God’s power for salvation. Water, bread and the cup, and the spoken word: these are the unimpressive instruments through which the Spirit builds the temple of living stones. The Church is forever tempted to reach instead for strength and power, to imagine her cause will prosper if only she gains enough worldly leverage; and forever the Lord recalls her to His own way, which is the way of the Spirit and the word. The Reformation itself was no revolution of armies but a recovery of the word, by which the Spirit cleansed and rebuilt the house of God. The mountain becomes a plain not by our striving but by His Spirit.

And to the discouraged who looked at the modest work and despised it, the LORD asks a question that has comforted the small and faithful ever since: For who dares make light of small beginnings? (4:10). The Hebrew says, literally, “Who has despised the day of small things?” We met this comfort already in Haggai’s session, and here is its source. The kingdom of God has always advanced not by strength or power (not by the impressive resources the world respects) but by the Spirit, working quietly through small and unlikely means: a handful of fishermen; a gospel preached in weakness; a little flock; water and bread and the cup and the spoken word. The world despises the day of small things; the Lord chooses it, so that the surpassing power may be seen to belong to God and not to us. The two anointed ones, the priest and the prince, kept the lampstand burning in their day; but they were only shadows, two men holding two offices, pointing forward to the One in whom both offices would at last be joined.

The Curse Carried Away

Two of the remaining visions deal with the removal of sin and wickedness from the land, and they are worth a brief look, for they complete the picture of cleansing. The prophet sees a great flying scroll, thirty feet long and fifteen feet wide (5:2), a curse traveling across the whole earth (5:3), the written curse of the law going forth to enter the house of the thief and of the person who swears falsely (5:4) and consume it: a sobering reminder that the law’s curse is real and pursues the sinner. And then he sees a woman who represents wickedness (5:8), pressed down into an ephah, a basket for measuring grain, sealed under a lead cover, and carried away on the wings of two other women to the land of Babylonia (5:11), the Hebrew “land of Shinar,” where Babel’s tower once rose, the very seat of rebellion against God. Wickedness itself is gathered up, sealed, and removed far away, back to the place from which it came. The land is to be cleansed not only of the guilt of sin, in the cleansing of the priest, but of the very presence and power of wickedness, carried bodily away.

There is gospel hidden even in the vision of the flying scroll. That scroll was the curse of the law, written and going forth to consume the lawbreaker, and it is a true and terrible thing: Cursed is everyone who does not keep on doing everything written in the book of the law (Galatians 3:10). The curse really does fly over the whole earth, seeking out the thief and the false swearer and every transgressor, and none of us could stand before it. But the gospel is that the curse which pursued us came to rest, at last, upon One who had broken no law. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, the apostle writes (Galatians 3:13). Zechariah’s vision does not say this, but it can serve as a picture of it: the scroll that lands in the middle of the sinner’s house may fittingly direct us to the cross, where the Lord Jesus took into Himself the whole written curse that was pursuing us, and exhausted it in His own body. The curse is not pretended away, nor merely ignored; it is borne, and borne by Him, so that for those who are His it has nothing left to consume. The curse has done its worst on the only One it could not rightly touch, and so has been emptied of its terror for all the rest.

And the last vision before the crowning shows four chariots, drawn by horses of different colors, going forth from between two mountains of bronze to patrol the earth: the four spirits of heaven that have been presenting themselves before the Lord of all the earth (6:5), going out to do the LORD’s will among the nations. The book began with horsemen finding all the earth at rest while Zion suffered; it returns now to the same theme, but transformed: the powers of heaven are not idle, but going forth in every direction to accomplish the purposes of God. Behind the quiet surface of history, the Lord of the whole earth is at work, watching, cleansing, removing the curse, carrying away wickedness, and bending all the nations toward the day of His King. The night of visions has prepared the way; now the prophet is told to do something in the daylight, something that gathers all the visions into a single, startling sign.

A Priest upon His Throne

The LORD tells Zechariah to take some silver and gold to make a crown and set it on the head of Joshua son of Jehozadak, the high priest (6:11). It was an astonishing thing to do, and every Israelite would have felt the shock of it. For in Israel the two great offices were always kept rigorously apart: the kings of David’s house came from the tribe of Judah, and the priests from the tribe of Levi, and never the two might be joined. When King Uzziah once dared to enter the temple to burn incense, a priestly act, he was struck with leprosy on the spot (2 Chronicles 26:16–21). A king could not be a priest; a priest could not be a king. And yet here, at the LORD’s command, a royal crown is set upon the head of a high priest, and a word is spoken over him that explains the sign.

Look, here is the man whose name is Branch, who will sprout up from his place and build the temple of the LORD. Indeed, he will build the temple of the LORD, and he will be clothed in splendor, sitting as king on his throne. Moreover, there will be a priest with him on his throne and they will see eye to eye on everything (6:12–13). Joshua, crowned, is a living sign of One who is coming, the Branch, in whom the two offices that Israel kept forever apart will at last be united in a single person. The NET reads the Hebrew of verse 13 as a second figure, a priest with him on his throne; the words can also be read, as many translations have them, “he will be a priest on his throne,” and the last clause says literally, “the counsel of peace will be between the two of them.” The Hebrew allows both readings, and we need not settle the grammar to see the sign, for the sign itself is plain: it is on the priest’s head that the royal crown is set, and it is to the crowned priest that the LORD says, here is the man whose name is Branch. King and priest are joined in one sign, and the two offices are at perfect peace. No son of David could be this, and no son of Levi; only One could hold both crowns at once. And the Scriptures tell us who, not by guesswork but by the plain word of the New Testament: the Lord Jesus, the Branch sprung from David’s stump, who is King upon the throne of His father David and at the same time our great High Priest, not after the order of Aaron, who could not be king, but after the order of Melchizedek, that mysterious figure who was king of Salem, priest of the most high God (Hebrews 7:1) at once, the type to which the psalm pointed when it sang, You are a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek (Hebrews 7:17, quoting Psalm 110:4).

It is worth dwelling on what it means that our King is also a Priest, for the comfort of it is immense. A king may rule us, command us, defend us; but a priest stands between us and God, offering sacrifice and making intercession on our behalf. In the Lord Jesus the two are one, and so His reign is never the bare rule of a sovereign but the rule of One who is also pleading for us. The writer to the Hebrews makes the comfort explicit: because He holds His priesthood permanently, he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them (Hebrews 7:25). The King upon the throne is, at that very throne, our Advocate; and so the Scriptures dare to call it a throne of grace, bidding us, let us confidently approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and find grace whenever we need help (Hebrews 4:16). We do not approach a bare seat of power, but a throne where the One who reigns is the same One who bled for us and now intercedes. A King who is only a King we might fear; a King who is also our Priest we may approach with confidence.

See how the prophecy finds its answer in Him. He will build the temple of the LORD: and the Lord Jesus builds the true temple, the Church, the house of living stones, and the temple of His own risen body. He will be clothed in splendor: and to Him belongs the glory, the glory that filled the latter house, the glory of God in human flesh. Sitting as king on his throne: and He reigns now at the Father’s right hand, the King over all. And the priest on that throne: He always lives to intercede for us, our Priest who pleads His own blood even as He reigns as King. And the counsel of peace between the two: the peace of God, planned and accomplished, held in the hands of the One who is at once our King and our Priest. The crowning of Joshua was a sign that lasted a day; the reality reigns forever. The Branch has come, and He is a Priest upon His throne.

Gathering the Threads

Zechariah’s night visions are strange and vivid, but their burden is not a coded calendar of the last days; it is the comfort of the gospel held out to a small and struggling people. The LORD is jealous for His afflicted Zion with a great jealousy; He will be a wall of fire around her and the glory in her midst; He will dwell among His people and join the nations to Himself. And at the center of it all stands the vision of Joshua the high priest (accused justly by the adversary, filthy and without defense, a burning stick snatched from the fire) whose iniquity is taken away and who is clothed in clean garments he did not provide. There is justification in a single scene: the accuser silenced not by our innocence but by the LORD’s rebuke, our sin removed, the righteousness of Another put upon us. And the cleansing of the priest opens onto the promise of the Branch, the green shoot from David’s felled stump, and the promise that the LORD would remove the iniquity of the land in a single day.

And all of it is the things concerning Himself. The Branch is the Lord Jesus; the single day on which the iniquity of the land would be removed fittingly directs us to the day of His cross; the stone with seven eyes may echo the precious cornerstone the builders rejected; the work done not by strength and not by power, but by my Spirit is the way His kingdom has always advanced, through the small things the world despises. And the crown set upon the priest’s head is the sign that gathers it all: the Branch is a Priest upon His throne, the King who is also our great High Priest after the order of Melchizedek, building the true temple, bearing the glory, reigning and interceding at once, holding the counsel of peace in His own pierced hands. In Israel no man could wear both crowns; in Christ both are worn forever. The night of visions ends in the daylight with a crowned priest, and points us to the One in whom the throne and the altar are joined: our King, our Priest, our peace.

For Discussion

These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.

1. Zechariah’s visions have often been mined for a detailed end-times program. Why do we instead read the Messianic promises as the New Testament reads them, and the rest as the comfort of God’s presence and cleansing fulfilled in Christ and His Church? How does the opening call, Turn to me … and I will turn to you (1:3), set the tone?

2. The LORD is very much moved for Jerusalem and for Zion (1:14; literally, “jealous … with a great jealousy”) and will be a wall of fire surrounding Jerusalem and the source of glory in her midst (2:5). How is the jealousy of God here turned wholly toward comfort? What does it mean to a struggling people that God is jealous for them?

3. Joshua stands accused, dressed in filthy clothes, with no defense (3:1–3), and the LORD says, I have freely forgiven your iniquity and will dress you in fine clothing (3:4). How is this justification in a picture? When the accuser presses charges that are true, what is the believer’s answer (Romans 8:33–34)?

4. Isn’t this man like a burning stick snatched from the fire? (3:2). What does it mean that every sinner is a half-charred stick snatched from the burning, saved only because a hand reached in? How does this guard us from imagining God chose us for some beauty of our own?

5. I will remove the iniquity of this land in a single day (3:9). How does the single day, read in the light of Hebrews 10, point past the endless repetition of the sacrifices to the cross? Why does it matter that sin was dealt with once for all, in a single sufficient sacrifice?

6. A royal crown is set on a priest’s head (6:11), and the word is spoken over him: here is the man whose name is Branch (6:12). Why was the union of king and priest impossible for any son of David or Levi, and how is it fulfilled in the Lord Jesus, our Priest-King in the order of Melchizedek (Hebrews 7:17)? What comfort is there in a King who also intercedes for us?

Looking Ahead

We have seen the Branch promised and the priest-king foreshadowed; in the next session the King Himself comes riding into view. Zechariah turns from the night visions to a word about true fasting and the kind of worship the LORD desires, and to glorious promises of a restored Jerusalem to which the nations stream. And then, with no warning, the prophet lifts his eyes and sees the King arriving at His city: not on a war-horse, not in the trappings of conquest, but humble, riding on a donkey: Rejoice greatly, daughter of Zion! Shout, daughter of Jerusalem! Look! Your king is coming to you: he is legitimate and victorious, humble and riding on a donkey (9:9). Some five hundred years later, on a spring morning, the Lord Jesus would send two disciples for a colt and ride it down the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem while the crowds spread their garments and cried Hosanna, and the Gospels would tell us plainly that He did it to fulfill this very verse. We turn from the Branch promised to the King coming, humble, to His own.

Before the next session, read Zechariah 7–9: the question about fasting and the LORD’s call for kindness and compassion rather than empty ritual, the promises of a restored and joyful Zion that draws the nations, and the great prophecy of the King coming humble and riding on a donkey (9:9). Then read Matthew 21:1–11 and John 12:12–16, where the Lord Jesus rides into Jerusalem and the evangelists tell us He did it to fulfill Zechariah’s word. Ask what kind of King comes humble and riding on a donkey, and what it means that He came in peace before He comes in glory.

Closing Prayer

O LORD who rules over all, jealous for Your people with a great jealousy, we come before You as Joshua came: accused, and justly, clothed in the filthy garments of our sin, with the adversary at our right hand and nothing to say in our own defense. We confess that we are burning sticks snatched from the fire, black and smoking, saved by no beauty of our own but only because Your hand reached in. Rebuke our accuser; take away our filthy garments; remove our iniquity from us, as You promised.

We bless You that You brought forth Your servant the Branch, the green shoot from David’s felled stump, our Lord Jesus, who bore the iniquity of Your people upon His cross, once for all, and who is now a Priest upon His throne: our King who reigns and our Priest who intercedes, holding the counsel of peace in His pierced hands. Clothe us in the clean garments of His righteousness, which we did not provide; build us as living stones into Your true temple; and work in us, not by our strength nor by our power, but by Your Spirit, who alone can do it. Let us never despise the day of small things, but trust the King who is also our great High Priest; through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.