Suddenly: narrative! Okay, mostly a monologue from God, but also some narrative. After six chapters of vision, we snap back to earth, where Sharezer and Regemmelech and their companions bring a question to the priests and prophets. They want to know whether to continue weeping and fasting, but God’s response…well, let’s check it out for ourselves.
The horses from chapter one are back today. They don’t have anything to say this time around, but they’re accompanied by chariots coming from mountains made out of bronze. Also, Joshua the high priest gets crowned, but he doesn’t get crowned king. He gets crowned branch. In other words, the vision is still a little bit weird.
I’ve read Zechariah before, but I hadn’t remembered how vision-intensive it was until I opened it up for this study. Seriously, it’s like Ezekiel in microcosm up in here. On the docket for today we have a flying scroll, an ephah, and three women, two of whom have stork wings because how else are they going to fly while carrying the third woman and the ephah.
The visions continue with Zechariah 4. After his angel guide snaps him out of an apparent lapse in attention, Zechariah sees a lampstand with seven lamps and two olive trees. He asks the angel their significance, and the angel offers an explanation that, upon my first read-through, still didn’t shine much light on the scene. So here I am, trying to figure out what the angel means when he tells Zechariah what the vision means.
Picking up where we left off yesterday, we’ve identified Zechariah 3 as a symbolic vision about a historical person: Joshua the high priest, a spiritual leader for the Jewish people during the reconstruction of the temple in Jerusalem. Today we’re going to get into the details of the vision and what it means.
Today’s chapter introduces Joshua the high priest. Satan is prepared to accuse him, but the Lord steps in to his defense. Upon reading the passage, I wondered: who is Joshua? While I had some theories, I wanted to get my hands on reliable information about Joshua before I started speculating, and I have vast swaths of information from all over the globe at my fingertips because it’s 2017.
Let’s talk about Axiom Verge again. Axiom Verge is a retro action-adventure computer game, and one of its weapons is called the Firewall. It launches a short-range bomb which, on impact, erupts in a vertical pillar of flame. Literalism! It’s a play on words, because computers! But God made the same play on words thousands of years ago, long before digital firewalls were even a thing.
I think it was shortly after my family moved to Ohio in the fall of 1990 that my dad got into biking. I don’t remember why he started, although I do remember that he stopped biking downtown with friends and coworkers because of my mom’s concerns about his safety. I recall his increased interest in trail riding and racing events after he stopped city biking; if memory serves, he participated more than once in the MS150, a fundraising bike ride held by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. I wish I remembered more about his biking phase, because then I could catch your attention with an engaging anecdote, rather than my usual practice of writing an introductory paragraph better suited for your Introduction to Biblical Studies essay. But I do remember that he used to call his biking excursions “patrolling the earth,” and he drew the name from the first chapter of Zechariah.
Chocolate Book 