It was foretold that "the children of Israel shall abide many days without a king, and without a
prince, and without a sacrifice "." Afterwards, they shall return, and seek the Lord their God, and David their King" (Hos. 3 : 4, 5).
Their " seeking" is not an entirely enlightened one in the first case. Whether it be David in the personal sense, or David in the dynastic sense, their finding goes beyond their seeking. Like Philip, they find" him of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets
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did write ", in " Jesus of Nazareth" (John 1 : 45), but without at first knowing it is he, as appears.
David truly they find at last, for David with "all the prophets" of whom he was one, appears " in the Kingdom of God " at the coming of Christthe sought and admired of the "many who shall come from the east, and the west, and the north, and the south, and sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob" (Luke 13: 28-29). But they find him in unexpected association with one whose hands show wounds, and whose identity up to this point has been concealed from them. We learn this from Zechariah 13.
There has been some attempt to divert this prophecy from application to Christ. The attempt cannot succeed with those who know the Scriptures with the affectionate intimacy that was the rule with the saints in the apostolic and previous ages. It is the effort of sceptical learning to blot Christ from prophecy as much as it can.
The whole context of Zech. 13, in the light of the gospel of the restoration of Israel's kingdom, is decisive as to its application to Christ and Christ alone. A brief analysis will show this.
In chapter 12 we have Jerusalem in the latter days, "a burdensome stone for all people". "All that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces" : for there is divine interposition in the stress to which Jerusalem is brought" though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it ". "In that day shall the Lord defend the inhabitants of Jerusalem." What day this is, we learn from chapter 14a day that has not yet come: a day when" the Lord shall go forth, and fight against those nations", and when " his feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives ". In that day, says chapter 12, " he that is feeble among them (the inhabitants of Jerusalem) shall be as David,
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and the house of David shall be AS GOD, as the angel of the Lord before them ".
The inhabitants of Jerusalem at this time only know that God has delivered them. The form of the instrumentality they have not yet understood. It dawns upon them at the next stage (verse 10). "They shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn." Like the crowd on the day of Pentecost, whom Peter convicted of having slain the Lord's Anointed, they are "pricked in their hearts" and in a mood to cry out, "What shall we do?" Chapter 13: 1 answers the question. "In that day there shall be a fountain opened to the house of David and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem for sin and for uncleanness." In this fountain they will cleanse themselves in the way that will be appointed. For God has said, " I will bring them into the bond of the covenant". "I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sins no more."
This glorious revolution accomplished in the City, the work extends to the whole land: "I will cause the prophets (that is, the false prophets) and the unclean spirit to pass out of the land" (13: 2). These prophets are an obstacle.. Their number is great in the Holy Land at the present time, of all sorts, names, and complexions: Jewish Rabbis, Mahommedan Doctors, Roman Catholic Priests, Greek Fathers, Monks and Eremites and other ecclesiastics of the current abominations. It is not in human power to suppress the deep-rooted impostures that flourish everywhere in this age, and nowhere more rankly than in the Holy Land, which reeks with their lies and their defilements. The power established by the repulse and extermination of mighty armed hosts at the reappearance of Christ in the Holy Land will be equal to it, and will effect it with this result, that" It shall come to pass that when any shall yet prophesy (for the power of ecc1e
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siastical habit is strong) then his father and mother that begat him (so awed by the terror of the new power manifested 'according to the days. of the coming out of the land of Egypt '-Micah 7: 15-16) shall say unto him, Thou shalt not live: thou speakest lies in the name of the Lord". (No toleration in those days. Toleration is all very well as between man and man: it is a childish chimera in the presence of the Creator's power and authority.) The effect of such vigorous measures is thorough. "The prophets shall be ashamed every one of his vision . . . neither shall they wear a rough garment to deceive." They will acknowledge the fictitious character of the position they now sustain with such unction (and with much pious pretence). Their reformed attitude will be that of the man who says, " I am no prophet, but--" a mere cattle-drover in true nature; "man taught me to keep cattle from my youth".
And now comes the verse about the wounds, which the sceptical interpreter contends applies to the supposed cattle-drover: a verse which with such a sense has no meaning; "And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends." Of what consequence to any mortal whatever, could wounds in an impostor's hands be? On the face of it, such an application is devoid of rational significance. If the critic say it can have no other application in the context except such as may be artificially created, his attention has to be called to two things that close his mouth and give to the prophecy a totally different meaning with much of sense, significance, and importance, of which his interpretation is entirely lacking. The first is the absence of an expressed nominative to the verb "shall say". " One" is absent from the original, as the italics in the Common Version intimate to the English reader. The words we have really to deal with are, " and shall say". The question who
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shall say, is determinable with reference to the nature of the subject entirely; in which we shall find there is perfect guidance. In verse 5, we have" He shall say": that is, the false prophet; for he shall say" I am no prophet". But in verse 6, the speaker is not specified: and if we are to supply the hiatus from verse 5, we should be obliged to put in " The false prophet shall say". Shall say to whom? "Shall say unto him". Here is another person introduced with wounds in his hands: "What are those wounds in thine hands? "
The second point is this, that the identity of this hand-wounded personage is settled for us by an immediate appendix which can apply to none but Christ. "Awake, 0 sword, against my shepherdagainst the man that is MY FELLOW, saith the Lord of hosts. Smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered, and I will turn mine hand upon the little ones." This 7th verse is in the nature of an explanatory parenthesis, thrown into the description of Israel's· latter-day deliverance to account for the wounds of the principal actor. The speaker's account of the wounds is, "They are those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends".
That he should give such an account in the day of his manifestation to Israel in power and glory, is most suitable and telling. That an explanation should be introduced in the prophecy at a time when the wounds were not yet matter of history, is part of the completeness of the prophecy. Its fulfilment is explicitly before us in the apostolic history, both as regards the shepherd and the little ones. Christ himself makes the application (Matt. 26: 31), so that we are not on speculative ground. The smiting of the shepherd is too notorious to require more than the most general reference to the crucifixion, which inflicted hand-wounds that remain with Christ for ever. The turning of God's (supporting) hand to the little ones is illustrated in the miracle
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attested labours of the Apostles when Christ had left them.
Verse 7 is a parenthesis. Verse 8 resumes the account of the latter-day events in the land, including the subjection of the.Jewish population of Palestine to a fiery ordeal that purifies and fits them for citizenship in the kingdom which their Messiah has at last arrived to establish.
But, it may be asked, why should conforming false prophets or any other class, make the wounds the subject of enquiry? We do not say the enquirer is a conforming false prophet. The hiatus above referred to might be filled in in other ways. The absence of a specific nominative shows that the pith of the verse lies in the question and not in the personality of the questioner. It would be sufficiently represented in idiomatic English if we were to read it, " And it shall be said unto him "-it matters not particularly by whom.
A consideration of the salvation to which it stands related will show to us that it is a perfectly natural question in the circumstances. Deliverance has come to Israel-miraculous deliverance-equal to anything that happened in Egypt, or to Assyrians under Sennacherib. And Jerusalem knows that the deliverance is the act of their God by the hand of the long-promised one. This promised one the Jews even now look for as destined to be of the house of David though at the time of his manifestation "no man knoweth whence he is ". This was their idea in the days of Jesus (John 7 : 27). It was one of their difficulties in receiving Jesus that they knew his origin as they supposed; "of Nazareth".
When Christ at his appearing in the first instance delivers them from the Gogian invader, it will seem that their traditional idea has been realized, and their opposition to Jesus vindicated. Messiah,
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the son of David, has appeared, and shattered the terriblepoweroftheir foe ;.andnomanknowswhence he has sprung. He overthrows, expels, and exterminates the invader, and brings the iron rod of suppression on all the superstitions and idolatries that infest the land, and for a time conceals his identity, like ]oseph, from his brethren. A suitable moment for the disclosure arrives. He allows himself on some special occasion to be freely seen, and contrives to exhibit the nail-wounds of his hands.
There is no idea of his being Jesus. That idea will have been triumphantly dismissed in view of the total discrepancy between the deeds of this man, and the Jesus of the sects of Christendom who is the only Jesus the Jews know anything about. And this man will have so totally ignored Christendom, and will have been so totally disowned by them as a false Christ, that any idea of his being Jesus of Nazareth will be out of the question with the Jews to the last moment. His handwounds are therefore a matter of curious enquiry merely, to which the enquirers address themselves with all confidence.
"What are these wounds in thine hands?
Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends." We can enter into the sequel: "They shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and moum for him as one moumeth for his only son." What a signal for Jewish humiliation throughout the world! What a confounding of Gentile pretensions! With what an interest the sufferings of Christ invest the glory, as the sale of Joseph into bitter bondage paved the way for his elevation, and for the pathos of his revelation afterwards to the brothers who sold him. All these considerations invest the wound-prophecy of Zechariah with the utmost dignity and significance and pathetic interest, of which the cattledrover interpretation would totally deprive it.