Zechariah 6:1-8 And I turned, and lifted up my eyes, and looked, and, behold, there came four chariots out from between two mountains… The general meaning of this vision is very clear. The enemies of the Church shall be punished, is the motto of the picture, and the purport of the vision. The immediate application of the truth was to the existing circumstances of the Jewish Church, but it contains a general proposition or law of the Divine procedure that is now in fulfilment, and will so continue until the restitution of all things spoken of by the holy prophets since the world began. Following the preceding vision, which denounced wrath on the Jews, it declares that after the Jews have been punished, God will destroy their enemies, who will also be the enemies of the Church. Now, as the threatened punishment of the Jews is not yet completed, so this punishment which was to follow that completion is also incomplete, and the main fulfilment yet to come. We have therefore in this vision an instance of what has been called the continuous fulfilment of prophecy. This takes place when the prophecy is not so much a simple prediction of facts, as the annunciation of a great principle of Divine procedure, in the garb of existing and well-known facts, but yet equally applicable to other facts all along the history of God's dealings with man. Thus the most abstract and formulated statement of the essence of this vision is, the enemies of the Church shall be punished. Its immediate application was to Babylon and Egypt, the existing representatives of the ancient enmity of the serpent's seed, but this application is of course a single one, that does not exclude the future examples of this principle of the Divine government that may and must arise. This is wholly different from the old double sense of prophecy, and is a most obvious and reasonable canon of interpretation. How striking the fulfilment of this threatening, when we remember the circumstances under which it was made. Could the haughty nobles of Babylon, in the gorgeousness of its magnificence and the pride of its power, have heard the threatening of this obscure Jew, amidst the ruins of Jerusalem, with what derision and contempt would they have treated the threat! The anathema that was so feebly uttered against the mightiest and richest city in the world, to the eye of sense seemed like the ravings of lunacy. Yet that feeble whisper was the uttered voice of Jehovah, and the elements of ruin in their remotest lurking place heard the summons, and began to come forth. Slowly and silently did they come up to this dread work, and yet surely and resistlessly, until the glory of these high palaces was dimmed, and the magnificence of these gardens and temples was covered, and now the winds whistle through the reeds of the Euphrates, where Babylon then sat in her pride; and loneliness, desolation, and death are stationed there the sentinel witnesses of the truth that His word returns not to Him void, that His Spirit is quieted in the land of the north. The same is true of Egypt, and later on of Greece and Rome. So it will be with guilty and godless Europe. Learn — 1. That the history of the world is all arranged and conducted in reference to the destinies of the Church, and the agencies that control that history go forth from the seat of the Church's great head, the unseen, temple. 2. God has in operation every species of agency, human and angelic, animate and inanimate, needful for the accomplishment of His purposes, and will send these forth at the proper time. Political changes and revolutions are only the moving of the shadow on the earthly dial plate that marks the mightier motions going forward in the heavens. (T. V. Moore, D D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And I turned, and lifted up mine eyes, and looked, and, behold, there came four chariots out from between two mountains; and the mountains were mountains of brass. |
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