Sola panel readers will remember my first post on Zechariah where I expressed a certain degree of anxiety about understanding it, even with the wonderfully worthwhile help of Tim McMahon, whose studies on this book I’ve just been editing. Today, the story continues …
My sense of direction is not all bad, but it’s not all good either. I could tell you where west is when the sun is setting (imagine me waving vaguely, about now). On the other hand, I’ve been known to take a wrong turn five blocks from home, having lived in an area for seven years. After a while, you learn to pass these things off as deliberate rather than the blunders that they are, but really, it’s not good.
So part of my fear in being asked to edit Tim McMahon’s Zechariah studies was that he’d included maps—maps of Jerusalem and surrounds—maps of city walls in the time of Hezekiah and Nehemiah. Gaa! Worse, he’d included directions. Things like:
Geba was 6 miles NE of Jerusalem, and though actually in the territory of Benjamin, it was considered to be the northernmost border of Judah (1 Kings 15:22; 2 Kings 23:8). Rimmon was 35 miles SW of Jerusalem and was on the southern border of Judah where the hill country merged into the Negev (Josh 15:32; 19:7).
Tim! Gimme a break! It’s my wife who has the sense of direction in our family. She reads the maps and listens when people give directions. What are you trying to do to me?
Anyway.
One of the things I tried to do in preparation for looking at Tim’s studies was to read and re-read Zechariah—twice before choir practice one night, several times on the bus on the way to work, and at several other random locations, like school at pick-up time. Oh, and Tim, if you’re reading this, school is 2.3 kilometres east-south-east of our home. You can walk there in 25 minutes carrying a five-year-old. I hope I’m speaking your language here.
So by the end of several re-readings, without the benefit of maps, I had worked out one or two things. Jerusalem is the capital of Judah. Babylon, that’s a long way away, and not a good place to be, so escape if possible. Tyre, Sidon, Ashkelon, Gaza, Ekron, Hamath, Damascus—all mentioned in Zechariah—well, I’m going to say they are near neighbours, mainly because that’s what I found out when I read Genesis, Deuteronomy, Judges, 1 Samuel and various other bits of the Old Testament. Egypt? Too easy. That’s a long way away, full of bad guys. Escape from there if possible. In fact, using my handy-dandy ESV Bible cross reference system, I worked out that there was quite a lot about escaping from Egypt back in Exodus, so wherever it was, it’s probably best not to go back there again.
One of the geographically trickiest verses of all was Zechariah 14:10, because it featured a number of places that looked like they were going to be very important in God’s plans—or at least, seriously affected by those plans. The verse says:
The whole land shall be turned into a plain from Geba to Rimmon south of Jerusalem. But Jerusalem shall remain aloft on its site from the Gate of Benjamin to the place of the former gate, to the Corner Gate, and from the Tower of Hananel to the king’s winepresses.
My impression here was only too clear. Whatever geography of ancient Israel I had managed to lodge in my mind, with the greatest of effort, the Lord God of Israel had it in mind to rearrange it. Jerusalem was, relatively speaking, to be lifted up even higher than its existing location on Mount Zion (also in Israel, I managed to work out by a process of logic and by reading the Psalms). Everything around was going to be flattened into a plain, much like I’d also read in Isaiah 40:
A voice cries:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord;
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.
And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all flesh shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”(Isa 40:3-5)
Why was this going to happen? That reading from Isaiah, not to mention my reading of Zechariah, helped me out once again. It was going to happen to bring glory to God and blessing to his people, and to provide a focus for all the nations of the the world to stream into Jerusalem to bring honour to Israel and to the king of Israel, the Lord of hosts (Zech 14:16).
All this is wonderful stuff, and a reminder to me that when King Jesus came to Jerusalem “mounted on a donkey” (Zech 9:9; cited in Matt 21:5), he was riding to the most important city in the world, the centre of the universe, in order to be crucified:
[T]hey will look … on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn. (Zech 12:10; cited in John 19:37)
Why was Jesus crucified in Jerusalem, the most important city in creation? Why, it was to cleanse his people from our sins. For
On that day there shall be a fountain opened for the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to cleanse them from sin and uncleanness. (Zech 13:1; referred to in the hymn Rock of Ages, as Andrew Barry once pointed out to me.)
If only I could find my way to Jerusalem to share in that cleansing! But of course, I already had the answer to that, because I’d read ahead in Zechariah 14. And I knew that even the most completely geographically challenged person would be able to find their way in to Jerusalem for the land around it was to be levelled to a plain, and the city was going to be raised up higher and even higher so that the nations could stream into Jerusalem together.
Armed with the help and assistance that my reading of Zechariah had given me, I was able to turn back to Tim McMahon’s maps and directions around ancient Israel, confident that I would now be able to understand them nearly as well as my wife could.
