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Zechariah 5-6
We are in the Exile Stream reading from the New Living Translation.
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Commentary by Dr. Drake Travis
Lord, you feel about us the same way we feel about everything we care about – you just want us to be clean. The cleaner we are, the closer we can become to you. Thank you for sending Jesus (the Joshua) for our cleansing. Amen.
Just a brief review as we are approaching the middle of Zechariah. His prophecy is a two-year period that occurred within the four-year period of rebuilding the Temple. This was in the 530’s B.C. The tone of Zechariah here is that sin drove you out of this land. Don’t even think of resorting to going back to it. Sin has got to go. You all “had to go” 70 years ago because you were more committed to sin than to God. Remember what causes what and let God have His Way in cleansing His people; you. Cling to God, not sin, and live His joy.
5 – The vision of the flying scroll means that God has no patience with thieves and liars. They will be crushed, not just them, their whole property will be crushed along with them. The vision of a flying basket with a woman named Wickedness in it that is carried away by two other “women” who resemble storks with wings…? What of that? What’s being said here. is that the sex cults, the Asherah poles, the prostitution, the divorcing and wife-swapping … knock it off, all of you and don’t ever have that be in my country again, says the Lord. I ran you away to Babylon and let you think about your sinful ways for a few decades. Don’t be thinking, “ok, we’re home now, let’s get back to a favorite old vice of ours…NO, NEVER. That trash IS “Babylon”, and it doesn’t belong here in my land. The two women who take this Wicked woman back to Babylon? What’s the deal? One scholar says that it is a grand scale picture of the source of sin and the cure for sin. The Sin of the earth entered the world through the transgression of one woman; Eve. No man forced her to do this. The Savior also enters the world through one woman; Mary. No man was involved in this endeavor of bringing the Savior to earth. So the problem needing to be removed and the one removing the problem of sin, all three are women here – symbolic of the problem and solution.
6 – remember the horns/nations and the craftsmen in ch. 1 of Zechariah? This is a thematic allusion to that in ch. six. The people who have terrorized the Hebrews, the people that have come from the north, will experience severe retribution. The Crowning of Jeshua is the balance of the chapter from v. 9 to the end. The Branch, the person who brings the matter of Salvation to within reach, will be one who comes to Jerusalem and is perfect in the building of the Temple, of being King AND being Priest. King Saul illicitly tried to be both [and more] as Israel’s first king. His crazed ineptitude revealed itself. No one could pull this together (being King and Priest and Savior) except for the Savior Himself. This Savior is coming. Did they know this even with Zechariah’s message to them? Were they even able to understand this in Zechariah’s day? Would they understand it when the Savior actually did arrive*?!