Sermon Transcript
Zechariah 9:1-12. The oracle of the word of the Lord is against the land of Hadraq, and Damascus is its resting place. For the Lord has an eye on mankind and on all the tribes of Israel. And on Hamath also, which borders on it. Tyre and Sidon, though they are very wise— Tyre has built herself a rampart and heaped up silver like dust and fine gold like the mud of the streets.
But behold, the Lord will strip her of her possessions and strike down her power on the sea, and she will be devoured by fire. Ashkelon shall see it and be afraid, Gaza too, and shall writhe in anguish. Akron also, because its hopes are confounded. The king shall perish from Gaza. Ashkelon shall be uninhabited.
A mixed people shall dwell in Ashdod, and I will cut off the pride of Philistia. I will take away its blood from its mouth. And its abominations from between its teeth. It too shall be a remnant of our God. It shall be like a clan in Judah, and Akron shall be like you Jebusites.
Then I will encamp at my house as a guard, so that none shall march to and fro. No oppressors shall again march over them. For now I see with my own eyes. Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion, Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, my King is coming to you, righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the warhorse from Jerusalem, and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall speak peace to the nations. His rule shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth. As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit. Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope. Today I declare that I will restore to you double.
There’s something in the human heart that continues to search for a hero, for a singular individual who will set things right, who will defeat the foe, who will restore order, who will make peace, who will bring happiness, who will meet all of our needs. We hope for, we wait for the one. We read that story over and over again in fiction. We watch that story over and over again in movies. It’s, you know, when you were little, you learned about Camelot, right?
It’s the sword in the stone. It’s whoever pulleth out this sword from this stone is the rightwise king born of all of England. England. They were waiting for the one. And of course in that story Arthur comes along, pulls out the sword, becomes king and ushers in a mythologically peaceful era for England.
It’s a similar plot in The Matrix franchise, right? The setting is this future dystopia where they are waiting for literally they say the one, right, who can defeat the AI machine oppressors. The one who is supposed to be able to rewrite the machine code and bring liberation to the humans. But it’s not just in fiction. We have the same hope in our real everyday lives.
If you love a sports team, and let’s say that sports team is not doing that well, you are waiting on the one. Right? You believe there is someone out there who could bring your team out of mediocrity, right? You say, if we had that quarterback, if we had that coach, if we had that owner, or maybe this year in the draft we will finally get him, or, you know, could we have a manager someday that understands what talent looks like? You’re waiting for the one who can save your team.
Or a little more personal, before you get married, who are you looking for? The one, right? You hope there is one out there who will complete you, who will cure you of your loneliness, um, and, and will cure your need to feel loved and accepted, who won’t ever hurt you, who will give you that feeling of being swept off your feet every single day. That’s who you’re hoping for. But the longer you’ve been alive, the more seasons you’ve seen come and go, the more, you know, coaches your team has fired without the victory that you needed, you know, the more boyfriends, the more girlfriends, more people who have broken your heart and not turned out who you thought that they would be, or you get married and then you realize marriage wasn’t actually the cure for loneliness that you thought it would be.
The more you’ve been disappointed by those who promised to be the one but didn’t come through, somewhere along the way you might have begun to think there’s no such thing as the one. There isn’t going to be someone who sets all the wrongs right, who cures the brokenness of my heart, right? You’ve seen so many promising messiahs on the horizon who didn’t deliver, or they did deliver but it only lasted for a short period of time. So you’ve learned kind of a self-protection. You tell yourself things like, don’t get your hopes up again, you’ll just end up being disappointed this time like last time and the time before that.
We have maybe an impulse to give up hope, but Scripture contends that we should just keep keep hoping. Christianity, especially this time of year, says that impulse in our heart, that longing for the one who can set all the wrongs right, who will complete us, who will sweep us off our feet forever and ever, who gives us victory that can’t be taken away, that longing in our hearts is there because it can be fulfilled. The one really does exist. He’s not anyone or anything from this world, but he he’s real. And the very fact that we desire him might be an indication to us that he really can be found.
C.S. Lewis has this great quote, it’s kind of long, but he says, creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger, well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim, well, there is such a thing as water. Water.
So if I find myself with a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, like longing for the one for instance, he says the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world where the desire will be fulfilled by someone from another world. He says if none of my earthly pleasures can satisfy my longing, it does not prove that the universe is a fraud. So, if we hope for the one and we can’t find him in the world, that doesn’t mean the universe is a fraud. He continues, probably it means earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy that desire in the first place. The earthly pleasures were only meant to arouse that desire in order to suggest the real thing.
And if that is so, he concludes, then I must take care on the one hand never to despise or to be unthankful for these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only kind of a copy or echo or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country. I must never let my desire get snowed under or turned aside. I must make it the main object of my life to press on to that country where my desire can be fulfilled and help others do the same. He’s saying don’t let yourself get disillusioned when you hoped someone or something would be the one and you were let down and then let down again and then let down again.
He says instead of falling into despair, instead of giving up on the whole idea of the one, his advice is redirect your heart to the real the one. Who is meant to fulfill that desire? This time of year, in fact, there is enormous focus on what Christians believe is that person, on a child who was born 2,000 years ago, a child who was called the hope of the world, the Messiah, the One. We sing, you know, O Holy Night, and it describes when the child appears, something about him made the weary world rejoice. He was and he is someone from the outside of our world who broke into our world to be the one for which our hearts have always longed, to fulfill our hopes, to win all the victories, to never let us down.
His arrival was long foretold many ways throughout the Old Testament. And recently, we’ve been going through the minor prophets, which, of course, all point to Christ, but especially here in December as we study the rest of our Minor Prophets, we’re looking at passages that don’t just hint about Jesus or that only speak about Jesus in a vague kind of way, but that explicitly foretell pretty specific information about Christ. And today here in Zechariah, we find a pretty well-known messianic prophecy. We hear it usually around Easter, not much at Christmas, because it describes— you just heard Jesus rode in on a donkey, donkey, on the colt, on the foal of a donkey. It’s a baby donkey.
And that moment occurred at the beginning of Holy Week. But Zechariah also speaks to this idea of the one, the one who is going to come, the one on whom we’ve been waiting. And Zechariah contrasts this one to the other people and the other things we have often hoped would deliver but they never do. So as we look at this pretty well-known passage today, we’ll see 3 false hopes that didn’t deliver, how the true hope, how the one is similar to those false hopes, and then how the true hope, the one, is very dissimilar and therefore can be trusted where we can’t trust the false hopes. 3 false hopes, how the true hope is similar, how the true hope is dissimilar.
So first, 3 false hopes. Hopes: wisdom, wealth, and worldly leaders. Each of those are in our text. We’ll take them one by one: wisdom, wealth, and worldly leaders. These were all potential deliverers for the people contemporary to the text, and the people had rested their hopes in each of them for salvation, really.
But none of them worked out. You see wisdom mentioned in verse 2. People are trusting the wisdom of certain cities. Carrie, you did a great job reading those names, but those names are probably not super familiar to many of us, right? They’re located in, you know, modern Middle East, Lebanon, Syria, throughout the region.
But the point is they were great civilizations. We don’t know all the specifics, but we know their technological advancements, their commerce, world-class at the time. If you were a citizen of one of those great cities, you would have had tremendous confidence simply because you lived lived there. You would have said, I live in the most advanced society in the history of the world. What could possibly bring us down?
Well, something did because those aren’t world powers anymore. If you look up their history, each of those cities was conquered by this group, then that group, then there’s natural disaster, then conquered again, then renamed, and then kind of forgotten. They lost their place as a world leader. Same thing happened with Egypt, same thing happened with Greece, same thing happened with Rome. These were tremendously advanced societies.
Their wisdom created incredible architecture and roads, systems of war, culture, arts, music, philosophy. If you lived there, it would have been easy to believe nothing can slow us down because in your experience nothing ever had slowed it down. But the lesson from those civilizations is that the wisdom, their societal superiority, was not as stable as it seemed. Every single one of them lost their place at the top. So resting their hope in the wisdom of the nation did not provide the security they thought it would.
Wisdom turned out not to be the one. The parallel to ourselves are obvious, of course, right? We live in the most advanced society the world has ever seen. More people come here to the U.S. to attend our colleges than any other nation in the world. Everyone wants our wisdom.
English is the most spoken language in the world. We have the most advanced economy in the world. If you don’t believe me, there are 11 foreign nations that use the U.S. dollar as their official currency because their currency wasn’t stable enough to trust. We have the most advanced military in the world, and in our entire history, we’ve only had just a couple of attacks on our actual own soil. So we’ve never had to worry, for instance, about missiles flying into our neighborhoods like we see happens on the news in other countries.
That’s thanks to our strong military. We’re about as stable as we can get, so it would be easy to think the wisdom of our nation will protect us forever. And who knows, we might be stable for a long, long time. I’m not a prophet. It would be nice if we could keep our dominance until Jesus comes back.
Don’t know if that’ll happen. But I will tell you this, there are some of us who are worried that the US might be slipping in superiority and influence in the world. World. It causes some of us anxiety that we could fall to second place behind China, for example. And I would point out, if the idea, if the possibility that we might not be the undisputed world leader, the world power, if that idea makes you feel uneasy that we could lose our place at the top, if that’s you, it probably indicates you’ve put hope in the wisdom and strength of the nation.
You might think wisdom is the one, and now you’re learning it’s not as stable as it looked. So if that’s you, recognize it, admit it, use it as an opportunity to cry out for the one who will never fail you to come rescue you. Like Lewis said, just because you were let down here, don’t let that lead you to believe that you will always be let down. Down because there really is a the one in whom you can hope who will come to rescue. Okay, that’s wisdom.
Second false hope we see in the text is wealth. See that in verse 3. They apparently had so much wealth— this is how Zechariah describes it— so much gold and silver that it was like dust and mud in their streets. Like, it’s a wild excess of silver and gold, and I’m sure that’s hyperbole Right? But even still, it indicates they must have been off-the-charts rich.
Very few of us will ever reach that level of wealth. You know, it sounds like it’s in the same stratosphere as like Jeff Bezos, right? It’s, it’s when you can buy anything you want and it just doesn’t matter. You could fly to Milan tonight on a private jet you bought this afternoon, and chefs will prepare anything you want to eat anytime you want to eat it, right? You’ve reached financial escape velocity.
Even if the markets crash, you’re probably still okay, right? You feel insulated enough to endure whatever comes your way because of your wealth. Very few of us will get there. But so many of us believe if we had that kind of money, we’d never need to worry about anything again. We’d say, if I had that level of wealth, I would feel safe no matter what.
You might have even thought that a second ago.
But it’s an illusion. Wealth is a false hope of security. Wealth is not the one even though it looks like it might be. It’s just an illusion. You know how we know it’s an illusion?
This is just one way, many ways. I don’t know if this will prove it to you or not, but hey, when you meet people with enormous wealth, wealth. Are they worry-free?
They have the wealth you think would make you feel totally secure if you had it, and they have it, but they’re not secure. In fact, they often say things like, more money, more problems. Right? And this is just my experience, okay? You might know different people, but they’re the ones who, at least I know, who try the to get out of paying taxes because they think they need to have even more than they have.
That’s not a feeling of security. Wealth is not the security we think it is. We would be wise instead of scrambling and scraping and stressing to get a little more, to get a little more, to get a little more so that finally maybe someday we can feel secure. Instead of pushing ourselves, trying so hard to get wealth Instead of that, we should use all that energy crying out for the one who actually is stable to come rescue us. We should use that anxiety over wealth to motivate us toward rest in the true security.
Okay, that’s wisdom and wealth. Last false hope in the text is worldly leaders. This is verse 5, the king shall perish. Perish. The king who was of course the embodiment of the prosperity of the nation falls.
He was undoubtedly of course one of the key people responsible for the massive wisdom and wealth of the nation, that’s what you’d always think. Leader gets too much credit and too much blame but they had a lot of things to credit so he gets it and now he’s gone.
Before he fell of course people in the nation would have been thinking, thinking, we’ll be okay because that guy’s in charge. He led us to victory in the past. He will do it again. We are safe because he’s on the throne. People had to be thinking that, otherwise it wouldn’t be listed in the text as a reason of people losing security if they didn’t have security in him in the first place.
And we aren’t that much different, right? I’m sure many of us think if that guy gets elected, then we will be okay. Okay, if that guy or if that lady were in charge, I would feel a lot better. Not that we shouldn’t be engaged politically or support certain candidates, of course we should, but if we’ve put our hope in them, we’ve gone too far because they will never provide what we’re really looking for. I’m a little embarrassed to tell you this, but anything to facilitate the understanding of the text, right?
The first time I could vote in a presidential election was 2000. I turned 18 in 1999, and I was so excited to vote for the next president. So you can do the math on how old I must be. But as an 18-year-old, I was actually pretty politically zealous, and I told everyone I knew. I told my teachers, my boss at work, people at church.
I said, and I meant it is the embarrassing part, I said, don’t worry, guys. Now that I’m voting, everything’s going to be okay. From now on, we will always get the right person in office because my vote is going to make the difference. My vote is going to be what tips the scales in the right direction. I really thought that because I was young and naive.
Now, 20-something years later, I can confidently tell you my vote has not made everything okay.
Even the times when my candidate won, that’s happened. I’ve had wins and losses. He wasn’t the answer I thought he would be. Listen, I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but I am telling all of us something we need to be reminded of frequently. For those of us who are so emotionally wrapped up in who wins whatever election, Aren’t you tired of being anxious and worried all the time?
Aren’t you tired of being stressed over what the other side is doing, obsessed over whether your opponent is gaining any ground? Isn’t it wearing you out? Don’t put your hope there, right? The very fact that you’re stressed and anxious shows it’s not a stable place to put your hope. If it were a stable place to put your hope, you wouldn’t be so stressed and anxious about it.
It. So if political news causes you to worry, what does that tell you? It tells you you put your hope in the wrong thing. So like wisdom and wealth, use it as an opportunity. Let your anxiety lead you to cry out for the one who will rescue, for the one who is stable, who won’t let you down.
So let’s talk about him. He’s the one born on Christmas Day. He is the right-wise King of all of England and the rest of the universe, by the way. He is the unshakable stronghold. Verse 12, where it says, return to your stronghold, it’s not talking about some kind of fortress.
It’s referring to him. He is the stronghold. He is the refuge. And some of us may hesitate to trust him, right? We may be unsure of how reliable he is.
Or, or to say that another way, all of us may go through times or seasons where we hesitate to trust him. And the reason we may do that is because his claims in many ways sound similar to the claims of our false hopes. And if you’ve been burned by false hopes, it might be easier to think Jesus is just another imposter. His— he promises the moon just like everyone else, but none of them deliver This guy’s promising peace just like all of them.
And Jesus promises like off-the-charts peace from sea to sea, from mountain to river, even into other nations, universal peace. Oppression will cease. You don’t need chariots and warhorses anymore, verse 10. Even verse 12, he will restore all that is lost. That’s the kind of thing we’ve been burned on before anywhere else we’ve placed our hope.
Even if we’ve never trusted, say, wisdom, wealth, worldly leaders for restoration in our lives, we’ve trusted something. We hoped this job, this promotion, if I can make this connection, if I get selected, if I get into that school, then not only will I have peace, but I will be made. Everything will be restored to me. All the difficulty of my life will be over. My past struggles will be totally overshadowed.
We say, if I could get that, the relationship, the notoriety, the respect, if I had that, it would more than make up for any pain that I’ve ever had. We’re after that. It’s salvation, really. But none of the imposters have been able to deliver it, at least for long. And Jesus promises the same thing.
So why would we believe him? Him? How do we know that he’s any different from all the other places we’ve looked for salvation and been disappointed? The answer is because of how unique he is. He is dissimilar from all the other false hopes because unlike them, Jesus bears the cost of our salvation himself.
None of our other potential saviors are willing to give up everything they have to make us whole. Whole again. Wealth won’t give up everything for you, obviously. Wisdom or societal advances, of course those can’t give up everything for you. Worldly leaders won’t sacrifice everything they have to make you whole.
In fact, often the opposite, right? They demand you give up everything for them. But even if it’s not those, if it’s something else, if we hope in the promotion or climbing the ladder or, you know, that fame will erase all of our worries, all of those, they demand more and more and more from you. They say, keep scrambling, keep crawling, and eventually maybe you’ll find the peace that we promised you. But the true Savior is exactly the opposite.
He provides peace and salvation for you through his own sacrifice, through his own scraping and clawing and crawling. He provides for it up front before we do anything for him. The text gets this idea across in several different ways. Verse 9, behold, your King is coming to you with righteousness and salvation. So he takes the initiative.
He’s the first mover. You don’t need to go on some kind of quest to find him or prove yourself to him. It’s the opposite. He comes to you with rescue. And when he comes, continuing same verse, Zechariah says, speaking of what Jesus would do, he He comes, like we said earlier, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, on the foal of a donkey, which literally happened when Jesus rode into Jerusalem at the beginning of Holy Week.
But the description of humble and mounted on a baby donkey, it’s in deliberate contrast to, like, warhorses that are mentioned in the next verse. The point is he doesn’t come like any other savior or rescuer. The kings and powers of this world, they try to win. They try to provide peace through conquest and domination, right? Wealth promises you peace.
How? Only if you have more of it than everyone else around you. That’s why you feel pretty unsatisfied— that’s why you feel pretty satisfied with what you have until you hang out with someone who has 10 or 100 times more than what you have, and then suddenly you feel inadequate all over again, right? You lost the peace that it supposedly provided because you’re not on top anymore. Similarly, wisdom, societal superiority promises peace only if your society is in the first place.
If you can beat everyone else. If you’re the superpower. You lose peace the moment someone else is stronger. Same thing with worldly leaders. They try to institute their version of peace by crushing the other side.
Right? Force everyone into my policies and then we will have peace. It’s what messiahs of the world always do. They attempt to accomplish peace through strength, through conquest, domination, being superior, having more, through warhorses, so to speak. But the true Savior comes not on a warhorse to dominate, but on a baby donkey to serve.
He doesn’t provide peace through strength. He provides it through weakness, He comes as one who will spend himself for the sake of others, and he spends all of himself. You see that in verse 11. He says, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will free you. You will no longer be a prisoner to these other hopes that always disappoint.
Because of my blood, you will be returned twice of whatever you’ve lost. When Zechariah wrote these words, he’s probably thinking backward to Exodus 24 when there was a blood covenant between the Lord and the people of Israel, but it also points forward to what Jesus would do. The very week that Jesus rides in on a baby donkey as a symbol of spending himself for others, that is the week when he makes a new covenant with his own blood. When he substitutes himself for us, when he exchanges places with us on the cross. He takes the mess we’ve made in the world on himself.
He takes our sin. He carries what justice demands we should pay for our sin, and he pays it. And in exchange, he gives us his status, his dignity, his honor, his respect, his notoriety, his fame, his whole His future, all the rights and privileges of His glorious kingdom become ours through this exchange, which is one way, right? I mean, that’s way more than twice as much as anything we’ve lost, way more. And if that is our refuge, if we would receive that we have that, then we really would be made.
All the difficulty, all the difficulties of our life really would seem faint. Our past struggles would be totally overshadowed. It is the salvation we’re after. Right now, we’re in an in-between time. The future that awaits us is already bought and paid for, but we’re still entangled in a broken world for now.
We have some of the benefits of the future kingdom. We have unrestricted access to God. We have Christ’s respect, honor in the universe, but we don’t have all the benefits of the coming kingdom. We don’t yet live in a remade world where there is peace from sea to sea. But we do know that future is certain because it was sealed with a blood covenant with God himself.
It was paid for through his own sacrifice. It awaits us. It is real. He is the one we’ve longed for.
Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for being unlike anyone else who promises salvation. Thank you for being unlike every other false messiah that says, if you had me, you would be okay.
Because unlike them, Lord, you were willing to sacrifice everything to provide for us. We pray that we could trust you, that our hearts would be willing to risk again placing our trust in the one to come. May we reach for you in this season and always and cry out for your rescue. Of us. May it be real to us, Lord.
We pray those things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
