Christ the Judge as a Back-Packer Hiking in Zechariah 9

Kyungpook National University

Visiting Professor

Kyungpook National University

Sangju Campus

South Korea

Conjoint lecturer of Avondale College

Australia

24 July 2011

The prophet Zechariah may have preached his 7th chapter in 518 BCE in the year of Darius the Great. Darius the Mede was ruler of Babylon it seems only two years before Cyrus took over, that is with inclusive reckoning.

In chapter 8 the Lord gives the promise that He will return to Zion.

At this point we need to understand that there are two Zion's, heavenly and earthly and two Jerusalems, heavenly and earthly and two Israels, one spiritual and one literal.

God's focus is primarily on spiritual Zion, Jerusalem and Israel and not so much on literal Zion, Jerusalem and Israel. The spiritual principle is already in the Old Testament operative and explicitly indicated in the New Testament. We can see it with the discussion of the role of ethnicity connected to the children of Abraham statements and the spiritual children of Abraham. Texts in the New Testament are overwhelming about this.

When God or Christ wants to return to Zion or speaks of Zion, it is the faithful people that He has in mind. It is the spiritual aspect related to Zion. In the book of Joel for example there are seven Zion's mentioned throughout the book. Each Zion statement shows how God is far from Zion and then systematically He comes closer and closer to Zion. Finally He joined the faithful in Zion to live with them forever, which is the spiritual Zion or Heavenly Zion.

So again in chapter 8, the Lord said that He wants to come again to Zion, to His faithful. Zion is said to be in the middle of Jerusalem (Zechariah 8:3).

When the children storybooks end with a saying that they live ever after very happily, you know that it is an overstatement or hyperboly for a situation that never exists. They die but the children feels good about it. All fairy tales have this last line. When the prophets of the Old Testament says that God or the Lord will do such and such and it will be forever, it is reality not fairy tale material.

Another point that we need to understand before we enter chapter 9, is that the prophets were not preterists per se. Unless clearly indicated the prophecy may have future and very distant future to the point of the apocalyps or eschatology applications. Which one it is we need to keep our eyes attentive. Hermeneutics of suspicion is discarded due to its connection with the history of rationalism. Hermeneutics of affirmation is the favorite for our methodology.

Time markers in the text must be respected but when the linguistic elements of eternity or forever appear, it is no longer within this historical time concept but within the domain of God's eternal plan for the recovery of humanity and happiness. Denial of that aspect is rationalism in any of its trends or forms in history. The serious student has to work with this reality also and not deconstruct the text to fit his own analogia entis or experiences. It is God speaking and the whole of scripture is God-breathed, Holy Spirit edited and approved although written by humans.

Another important remark is the danger of the biblical analyzer that he/she is using the fallacy of the Eichrodtian methodology in describing Biblical reality. Walther Eichrodt was a scholar in the heyday of Baby Booming and neo-Orthodoxy who wrote many works but two volumes are important namely his Old Testament Theology volumes 1 and 2. I just came back from Avondale College from a conference there and the Loma Linda presenter operated with this fallacy unknowingly. He of course wishes to finally polarize or dump what it meant and follows what it means. But the undercurrent of his methodology is faulty. Eichrodt worked with the false axiom that what is in scripture is the full reality of the past. Therefore, one can quantitatively deal with the data and accept it to be the volume of ideas of the past. Thus, hardly any prophecy, resurrection, eschatology in Genesis to Isaiah, means, they were absent in the epistemology of scholars. So, the presence in the time of Isaiah and later means that they were developed in an advanced way in those days. Our conclusion is just the opposite. When Torah or Law of God was vivid in the memory of the remnant, a Sinai experience was not necessary. When the resurrection was fully understood elaboration about its detail was not necessary. It is because the Bible is fragments of realities of the past not the total of reality. This is called the fallacy of the Eichrodtian method.

Accepting this methodological agenda for analysis, the student is now ready to start analysing chapter 9 provided that it is on the knees of humility and with faith and reason cleansed from sin and selfishness by the Holy Spirit. It is a constant attempt to say, "Speak to me God through your Word and let my self, my arrogancy, my prescriptives for the text, my modernizing of the text, disappear. May I not be misled by famous universities, or famous scholars, or conventionalism, or the latest trends or paradigm".

If the reader or student knows nothing of preterism, historicism and futurism, the analysis is bound to be without the proper navigation. Seventh-day Adventists have a highly developed historicist model, tested and almost watertight, except for the small percentage of grey areas that should still be fulfilled in future like the area in Daniel 11:36-12:2.

With this introduction on methodology of Christian analysis of the text, we are ready to start with Zechariah.

Zechariah 9 is the giving of the Word of the Lord upon the earth, the Walker (Hadrach)

Our understanding of Hadrach differs from how traditional Rabbis of the Middle Ages suggested it to be. It also differs from the modern translators. In our understanding it is a noun describing God or the Lord Himself, as a walker, hiker, someone on the road or derech. The giving (missa) of the Word is really the giving of judgment situations connected with the verbal actions. It is the Warrior Messiah Himself. After the judgment, His resting place is Damascus (9:1). Mankind (adam) shall be to the Lord and all the tribes of Israel. It appears to be an action after the actions of judgment of the Lord.

The judgmental actions of the Lord is wider than Damascus

What strike us in (9:2) is that the actions of the Lord is wider than Damascus. Also Hamath shall border thereon. It is still wider since Tyre and Sidon is not left out. We definitely know that there was a prophecy against Tyre that he or she or it acted like Satan in the Rebellion in Heaven Motif of the rest of Scripture, as we can see in Isaiah 14 and Ezechiel 28. As each of these empires are switched off, the Arameans, the Phoenicians, the Philistines, and one wonders if Damascus represents the Assyrian influence since it is the place where Hezekiah's father patterned his altar for Jerusalem according to Assyrian models. The Lord is never tired and sleepy says Psalm 121 so why the resting space? The Lord instituted the Sabbath as a resting space in time during the week, every seventh day for the same purpose, that we may worship Him and to the full. The Rabbis of the Middle Ages were confused by this verse. They did not want to make Damascus the resting place of the Lord for they said that only Jerusalem is the resting place of the Lord. They cited Psalm 132:14 saying "This is my resting place to eternity". It is also a Messianic Psalm. Fused in the Psalm is what David's desires were for God to have a resting place and God's answers about His desires and wishes for a resting place. All David said and desired was answered by the Lord that He also said it and desired it. The exact same words are repeated in a doublet with this difference, David speaking in the first part and God answering in the second part of the doublet. A Messianic announcement is made at the end of the Psalm saying that an anointed will be sent. His enemies will be destroyed (Warrior Messiah) and He will bear a crown (Kingly Messiah) (Psalm 132:18a "His [Warrior Messiah's] enemies I will clothe with shame" and 18b "but upon himself his crown shall shine"). Look at it this way, the fact that God did not stick with David and his history and his life and his desires alone, but has surpassed it in history [Jesus as Messiah to come nearly a millennium later] and the eschatology of dealing with His enemies and Satan and death as final enemy [18a] simply means that David is left behind in what it meant in David's historical humanistic divine interactive frame and God predicted what it should mean or means in God's Divine Future Plan. When one comes to this aspect, especially in the zone of God talking future whereas David is talking his own present, then Zion is no longer David's little area or zone next to the physical temple in Jerusalem. It has also expanded beyond the earthly physical boundaries to the divinely spiritual and even heavenly sphere. David's prayer is in Psalm 132:1-10 and the doublet or answer of the Lord to his desire is in Psalm 132:11-18. When the rabbis of the Middle Ages do cite that Zion is God's habitation forever, they unfortunately cited from the enlarged concept of the Lord that is beyond the earthly and include the divine heavenly sphere and wishes. To cling in their thinking to a physical literal Jerusalem here is a oversight on their part and not on God's or ours.

The Rabbis want to make God stationary at Jerusalem but biblically God is where the faithful are. It is both in the Old and New Testament. Space exclusiveness or allocation is only a human construct not a divine biblical one, except when God had strict rules to that effect. Then misuse of it was forbidden and punished. Sacred space unless explicitly defined by God to be such, is not humanly engineered. It is the taboos allocated to the presumed place where the temple use to stand on the Herodian temple platform by modern day orthodox and conservative Jews. If Yahweh is still there, as they presume the case is, none of the Islam strollers over the area would have survived. Human allocation of a taboo or sacredness, no matter how saintly or how faithful, cannot move the Almighty to compliance. He follows His own agenda, He moves, He comes, He goes. He was gone from Zion in Chapter 8 of Zechariah since He promised to come back. He arrives eventually in Chapter 9 there.

In 9:3 Zechariah explains the history of Tyre, namely that she built a fortification for herself and gathered precious metals to enrich herself. The judgment of the Lord will be against her and impoverish her (9:4). We have here the Judgment of God against Empire capitals motif. In the Ancient Near East, many lamentations exist of empire cities after the fall of the empire. There is a genre dealing with that. Sumerian songs on Ur exists for the end of the Ur III period and fall of Ur in 2004 BCE. The fall of various cities in the Bible can be found. In Revelation 18 it will be the fall of Babylon of prophecy, a term that was given wider connotations within the covers of the whole scripture. We know that in Ancient Near Eastern cuneiform texts, Niniveh of the Assyrian empire was known as Babylon.

The end of 9:4 says that she will be consumed by fire.

Nebuchadnezzar had an unsuccessful siege of 13 years 585-572 of the city of Tyre and in 332 Alexander the Great reduced the city to ruins, the way the Romans found it and rebuilt it.

In the Bible, major cities of empires are sometimes used to describe the Rebellion in Heaven event as a motif of similarity. Judgment by God was to follow the same lines as what has happened to Lucifer in Heaven, see Isaiah 14 and Ezechiel 28. My phraseology above is actually not correct. Think about it, following a non-Eichrodtian methodology, we have to assume that the Rebellion in Heaven Motif was well known but sometimes in periods of misunderstanding or absence of knowledge of that Motif, the prophet employs the Motif to compare the fall of the particular empire city. From what is commonly widely known a description is given of the prediction of the city, from the more known to the less known. Both are used since a wider audience do not have that knowledge of the "more known Motif". He didactically fills in the gaps of their understanding, so that the whole audience can step from the common to the new data. It also answers why empires comes to an end. There are factors below in history that scholars outline, but the prophets brings a vertical dimension to it.

Askhelon and Gaza, on the seacoast in southern Israel were connected in Ancient times strongly to Tyre and Sidon by trade. They admired these cities and in 9:5 they will see and fear. Tyre will shake violently, it is predicted in 9:5. Also Ekron had its eyes on Tyre with trade and the Fall of Tyre means that Tyre will be ashamed. The ashaming of an empire's city is described in the Bible as God bringing judgment.

After the Judgment of Damascus, of Hamath, of Tyre, one asks, where is the Lord and Judge moving now? It is the Judge on the move. The mobile Judge.

To Ashkelon and Gaza. Even today the ruins of Ashkelon and Gaza are not inhabited (9:5). The Lord arrived at Ashkelon and Gaza.

Which city next?

Ashdod in 9:6. God will cut off the pride of the Philistines. Philistines were not an ethnic group. They were squatters. There is no such thing as a Philistine language. They were migrants from other nations that squatted and colonialized Israel and Canaan. It is the same with the Canaanites. They were composite squatters and migrants from other nations, including Hittites, who do have a language, and Amorites also. So the modern anti-colonial theology for the Old Testament is based on liberation theology paradigms that is not harmonizing with the text nor history of the past. It is modern politics seeking a horse for revolution on modern revolutionary and marxistic principles. It is non-biblical and against what Christ outlined in His own lifestyle. The greatest liberation theologian of the New Testament was Judas Iscariot who hanged himself when he found out that Jesus do not want to have anything to do with liberation theology. Civil human rights activism is just another garment of liberation theology. Non-biblical from the start to the end.

Ashdod was eating blood against the explicit command in the laws of Israel and also detestable things as is commanded against in Leviticus 11. Christ did not remove the standards of health outlined by God in Leviticus 11 since Isaiah 66 indicate that at the end of time pig eaters and rodent eaters will have a problem.

Now that the Lord arrived at Ashdod and finished His judgment there, it is time for some positive build up things to happen.

Zechariah 9:7 explain that in Ashdod there will be those who remain to God, also studyhalls which will be found in Judah anyway, and Ekron and Jebusi or the old name for Jerusalem.

Now, strolling all the way in Syria, Lebanon, Philistia, the Back Packing Judge arrived in Jerusalem.

Zechariah 9:8 says that He will encamp to His house, meaning the temple area. He camps there against enemies against the remnant of spiritual Israel. Ethnic Israel? Maybe not. Spiritual Israel will be returning, of course mostly ethnic Israel but God focuses on faith of the mind not blood of the veins.

When God arrived at His house, there is some eternal terms used at the end of the verse. 9:8 at the end says that no oppressor shall pass over them. If this was fulfilled in a time shortly after 518 BCE or after Tyre was taken by Alexander in 332 BCE, then we find a contradiction when Titus came in 70-73 to destroy both temple and city. Not so if we accept that God is talking about the eschatology here. He moves from the mere historical to the end of times scenario. His arrival at the Second Advent. Why do we do that? God is not talking with forked tongues and he is not lying as well.

God may be talking beyond in history, beyond in His timeline for in 9:9 He undoubtedly does.

In 9:9 there is a Messianic announcement of a Sign of the Messiah's First Coming. He will ride a donkey and come to the daughter of Zion. He is just, victorious and humble. Fulfilled in the life of Christ the Lord is definitely removed by over half a millennium in this verse from the time of Zechariah. Preterism no longer works in this verse. In Middle Ages Judaism Ibn Ezra interpreted it to mean the Messiah, the son of Joseph, to Nehemiah or to Judah Maccabee. Rashi said that Sanhedrin 98a says it refers to the Messiah the son of David. The New Testament says it refers to Jesus the Messiah, son of David and son of Joseph who was born in 4 BCE and died in 31 CE by crucifixion.

God has the right to let His eyes go up and down the rest of history. That is what He does in 9:10, namely to go to the End of Time when He will cut off the chariots from Ehraim, and the horses from Jerusalem, and the bow of war. With Armegiddon, God will Battle and bring ends to all battles forever. We know it is eschatological since God's reaction in 9:10 is to the "ends of the earth". It is after the New Creation of Revelation 22 that the Lord will be Lord over the whole earth. It is after the Second Advent. Judas Iscariot may have had problems in linking 9:9 with 9:10 and wanted to enact 9:10 since 9:9 was fulfilled the week before crucifixion. He did not see the clinical break between 9:9 and 9:10 and maybe not even the disciples were willing to see it that way despite Jesus‘ lectures on these matters to them for more than 3 years since 27 CE.

In 9:11 the Lord says that He saved the remnant by the blood of the covenant they made with God by relation and that He freed the prisoners of sin from a pit that has not water. Satan will be dumped into a pit in the eschaton, a pit of circumstances of loneliness. So by His first Advent and what followed in the sanctuary in Heaven ministry of Christ He freed prisoners from sin by atonement in its many phases.

Prisoners of sin are asked to return to the stronghold of God which can only be spiritual Zion (9:12). Zion in 9:13 is a relationship that faithful has with God and resultant of that is that they are in Zion and called children of Zion. Safely in Zion at the Second Advent and safely in Jerusalem at the end of Time also after His second Advent, the Lord will make them strong.

In the final battle of God (9:14) the Lord shall appear over the remnant who are now in the city of Jerusalem or in Zion. His arrows goes forth like lightning. There are no arrows but lightning. There will be a loud sound and with the whirlwind of the South He will go since millions of Angels will accompany Him. The Lord shall protect the faithful in Zion in the air and the evil shall devour (9:15). The remnant shall do a couple of things: the comparisons does not mean that they are doing what they are compared with, it means they are doing the same quality of sound, intensity or some measurable quality that one find in those other actions, negative or positive. The remnant will be very noisy during the battle of the Lord according to Psalm 46 also since at the end of the Psalm, the king of glory coming into the everlasting gates, have to ask the remnant to "hush" to be silent. In the final battle it is the Lord God that will safe them (9:16). Christ shall be Victor over the Battle of the Lord and how is His goodness and how is His beauty. The awe is also present in Psalm 46 when He return from the Battle, which in content covers the same terrain. The last part of 9:17 is directed to the young generation. Corn is associated to the young men and fresh grapejuice to the maids. The image is one of wedding and honeymoon and happiness.