God Knocks Us Over the Head with Jesus' Coming

I think the prophecies and symbolism in Zechariah are some of my very favorite in the Bible. So I want to just write down for myself an explanation here of why they're so great, and why God is so great. :) (Some of you may have already heard this stuff, but perhaps you will be joyfully reminded.) This exposition is by no means complete, but just the main things that I see that get me excited.
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"Shout and be glad, O Daughter of Zion. For I am coming, and I will live among you," declares the LORD. "Many nations will be joined with the LORD in that day and will become my people. I will live among you and you will know that the LORD Almighty has sent me to you." (Zechariah 2:10-11)

Look at the verse above carefully. God is speaking. He says, "I am coming, and I will live among you." That's pretty exciting! But look especially at the last sentence--"I will live among you and you will know that the LORD Almighty has sent me to you." God is still speaking (notice that he repeats "I will live among you" as before, but also that the sentence before he says that many nations will become "my people," ie God's people). But He says that "you will know that the LORD Almighty has sent me to you." In other words, God says "I'm coming to live with you and you will know God has sent me to you."

WOWWWW!!! So, 1) God will come to live among us ("God with us" = Emmanuel - Isaiah 7:14). 2) God will also in a sense "send" the Lord to us. This sounds very suspiciously like what Jesus talks about repeatedly in John, that the Father has "sent" Him. Yet both the one who is "sent" AND the one who is sending is the LORD, Yahweh, Himself. Both are God, yet one sends and one is sent. If this doesn't scream out Father and Son, I don't know what does.

Also, when that happens, he promises that "many nations will be joined with the LORD...and will become my people." Which is exactly what happened--Jesus died on the cross and broke the "dividing wall of hostility" (Ephesians 2:14), so that the "nations" (the Gentiles) would have access to God's mercy through Jesus Christ as well as the Jews--they could then become "my people." As Paul wrote, "Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household" (Eph. 2:19).

That's pretty fabulous, wouldn't you say? But wait--THERE'S MORE!!

"Take the silver and gold and make a crown, and set it on the head of the high priest, Joshua son of Jehozadak. Tell him this is what the LORD Almighty says: 'Here is the man whose name is the Branch, and he will branch out from his place and build the temple of the LORD. It is he who will build the temple of the LORD, and he will be clothed with majesty and will sit and rule on his throne. And he will be a priest on his throne. And there will be harmony between the two.'" (Zechariah 6:11-13)

So, there was a historical figure, a high priest by the name of Joshua (or Jeshua), which in Hebrew is Yeshu'a, in Greek "Jesus". He lived at the time when the exiles were returning from Babylon. God says of him, "Here is the man whose name is the Branch...He will be a priest on his throne. And there will be harmony between the two." But Joshua the high priest never sat on the throne; he was never a king. Yet God tells Zechariah to prophesy about this Joshua, that (in some sense) he is the "Branch," and that he will be a priest and a king together. Now, obviously there are strong parallels between this "Joshua" and the "Yeshu'a/Jesus" that we know of later, whom the New Testament describes both as a "high priest" (eg Hebrews 3:1) and a "king" (eg Matthew 27:11, John 18:37).

But what of this "Branch"? What is God referring to?

In Jeremiah 33, it says:

"The days are coming," declares the LORD, "when I will fulfill the gracious promise I made to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah.

"In those days and at that time
I will make a righteous Branch sprout from David's line;
he will do what is just and right in the land.

In those days Judah will be saved
and Jerusalem will live in safety.
This is the name by which it [or he] will be called:
The LORD Our Righteousness."

For this is what the LORD says: "David will never fail to have a man to sit on the throne of the house of Israel, nor will the priests, who are Levites, ever fail to have a man to stand before me continually to offer burnt offerings, to burn grain offerings and to present sacrifices." (33:14-18)

So we can see from here and elsewhere in the Scriptures that this Branch is very clearly the Messiah (the Anointed, the Christ), the King promised from David's line (see also Jeremiah 23:5-6, Isaiah 11:1-10, esp. 11:1). God's promise of the Messiah's coming in chapter 33 is tied to His promise to David (the king) and the Levites (the priests), that there will always be a King and a Priest to serve before Him. Which ties again to God's promise about Joshua the high priest in Zechariah. SO, when God (figuratively?) calls Joshua the "Branch," He is calling him the Messiah.

Now nobody believes that this dude Joshua back in the 500's BC was the Messiah of Israel. Why not? Well, for one, he never was a king, as stated before, nor did anybody call him a king. So could God have been speaking figuratively when He called Joshua the "Branch," and spoke of the unity of the kingship and priesthood in him?

To find out, let's look at Zechariah 3:8-9:

"Listen, O high priest Joshua and your associates seated before you, who are men symbolic of things to come:

WAIT!!!! What did it say?? Let's look at that again:

"Listen, O high priest Joshua and your associates seated before you, who are men symbolic of things to come:"

God WHOPS us over the head with it!!! If there were any doubt that God is speaking figuratively, symbolically in chapter 6 about this "Joshua/Yeshu'a/Jesus," the Branch, the Messiah, the King and High Priest, He dispels it with this verse. It's one thing for God to put amazing symbolic connections and prophecies in places like Isaiah chs. 7, 9, & 53; in Psalms 16, 22, 110; etc. etc. But God specifically SPELLS IT OUT for us that we should look at this Joshua as a "symbol of things to come."

Let's continue with the rest of the quote:

"Listen, O high priest Joshua and your associates seated before you, who are men symbolic of things to come: I am going to bring my servant, the Branch. See, the stone I have set in front of Joshua! There are seven eyes on that one stone, and I will engrave an inscription on it," says the LORD Almighty, "and I will remove the sin of this land in a single day."

WOW! This one is jam-packed with Jesus. God says that Joshua is a symbol (by the way, Joshua is the "son of Jehozadak," whose name in Hebrew means "the righteous LORD," so "Joshua son of Jehozadak" is equivalent to "Jesus son of the righteous LORD [Yahweh]"). God says He will bring the Branch (the Messiah); then He speaks of a stone with seven eyes, with an inscription engraved on it. Jesus is called "the stone the builders rejected" (Acts 4:11, see Psalm 118:22). In Revelation Jesus is described as "a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain" who "had...seven eyes" (Rev. 5:6). So Jesus is the stone with seven eyes. When you engrave an inscription on a rock, you make the engraved word permanent. So engraved on the stone is the Eternal Word, which is Jesus Himself.

And, of course, the best for last: What does God say will happen when He brings His servant the Branch (the Messiah), symbolized in Joshua the high priest?

"...and I will remove the sin of this land in a single day."

What is that day? The day of Jesus' crucifixion!!! Through the cross of the Messiah Yeshu'a, God will remove the sin of this land (Hebrew "eretz," which can also mean "earth") in a single day. How can this sin be removed in a single day? The writer of Hebrews answers:

Unlike the other high priests, [Jesus] does not need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people. He sacrificed for their sins once for all when he offered himself. (7:27)

Because Jesus offered Himself on the cross as a sacrifice for sins, the sin of the land, the earth, is removed immediately and absolutely, to all those who look to Him.

Oh, praise God!! It's so amazing that all of this was written hundreds of years before Jesus (and we have actual manuscripts through the Dead Sea Scrolls dating to before Jesus' birth), and yet these verses so clearly point to Him as the Messiah, the King, the One who will bring redemption and forgiveness of sin! He is the LORD who is coming to live among us, Emmanuel, whom God has sent, who will join the nations with His people. He is God Himself, the promised King, the Son of David, the High Priest who rules on His throne and brings harmony between the two, who fulfills God's promises to David and the Levites.

These Scriptures are so amazing. And what's even more amazing to me is that this is really only HALF of what's written in Zechariah about Jesus--we haven't even mentioned the most commonly cited Messianic prophecies in Zechariah, 9:9-11 and 12:10-13:1, which are quoted in the New Testament (John 12:15 and 19:36). That will have to wait for another entry.

I just pray that everyone who reads this would have their eyes wide open to the glory and majesty of this King and Priest, God with us, the Messiah Jesus, who "for the joy set before Him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God" (Hebrews 12:2). Let us fix our eyes on Him, seeing His glory reflected throughout Scriptures in the way His coming was prophesied.

!!תודה ישוע