The Text
Zechariah and His Times
The prophet Zechariah places himself precisely in history. In chapter 1 he tells us his prophecy came in the eighth month of the second year of Darius — around 520 to 518 BC. The book of Ezra puts him in still sharper focus: he and Haggai were sent by God to reprove the returning Jewish exiles who, having come back from Babylon to a desolate Jerusalem, were far more occupied with feathering their own nests than with re-establishing the worship of God. Zechariah stands therefore at nearly the close of the Old Testament, the penultimate prophet before Malachi, speaking words that would look forward across nearly half a millennium to the dawn of the gospel age.
The opening verses of chapter 9 survey the nations surrounding Judah — Damascus, Hamath, Tyre, Sidon, and the Philistine cities of Ashkelon, Gaza, Ekron, and Ashdod — all of which would be overrun by Greek armies under Alexander the Great and his successors. And crucially, so would Judah. There was no political distinction, no special earthly deliverance for the covenant people. They fell to the Greeks and the Romans precisely as their neighbours did. This forces us to read the prophecy spiritually. It cannot bear a merely nationalist or futurist interpretation. The deliverance God speaks of here is of an altogether different order.
A King on a Donkey: The First Contradiction
Verse 9 presents us immediately with a striking paradox: Behold, thy King cometh unto thee… riding upon an ass. In no culture known to the ancient world would a king make his triumphal entry upon a donkey. The ass was the cheapest of beasts of burden, the recourse of the very poorest, utterly foreign to any notion of regal splendour. And yet this is what the Lord Jesus did — the only occasion in all the Gospels where he is recorded making use of any beast of burden whatsoever.
The disciples did not remember this prophecy at the time. John tells us plainly: these things understood not his disciples at the first: but when Jesus was glorified, then remembered they that these things were written of him (John 12:16). Far from engineering the fulfilment of prophecy, they were entirely unaware of it. They were astonished afterwards to realise that what they had thought were the spontaneous actions of a moment had so precisely and gloriously fulfilled a word spoken five centuries before.
Steward also takes careful note of those who would appoint a “Palm Sunday” by liturgical calculation. The dating problems are considerable: if Christ was crucified on a Friday and the triumphal entry was six days before the Passover, the counting is already internally inconsistent depending on where one begins. Scripture gives us no certain day for the entry into Jerusalem, which is one reason the church has no business elevating the traditions of men above the plain Word of God in these matters.
Just and Having Salvation: The Second Contradiction
Verse 9 presses a still deeper paradox: He is just, and having salvation. At first this may not seem remarkable — surely a person can be upright and still care for others? But the salvation in view is not the rescue of the deserving. Verses 11 and 12 make it plain: I have sent forth thy prisoners out of the pit wherein is no water. These are prisoners justly held. Their imprisonment is entirely warranted. And if justice is justice — if the penalty must be executed, if the law must run its full course — then the release of these prisoners is not justice. It is the undoing of justice.
This is one of the profound difficulties of the gospel. How can God be both just and the justifier of the ungodly? How can he forgive sin without ceasing to be righteous? The answer is given in verse 11: by the blood of thy covenant. There is a covenant. It has terms. It demands perfect righteousness and pronounces death upon all who fall short. But it has a surety — a guarantor — who has undertaken that if the indebted parties default, he himself will stand in their place, discharge the debt of righteousness they owe, and bear the death sentence they have incurred.
The Lord Jesus is that surety. He stepped forward. He took their place. He bled, and died, and that blood was witnessed and attested. And God, receiving that payment at the hand of the surety, declared: as for thee also, by the blood of thy covenant, I have sent forth thy prisoners. The prisoners are free — not because justice was set aside, but because justice was fully satisfied in another. This is how, as Paul says in Romans 3, God can be at one and the same time just, and the justifier of those who believe in Jesus.
Lowly and Glorious: The Third Contradiction
Verse 9 calls the king lowly; yet verse 14 speaks of him in terms of lightning and trumpets and whirlwinds: the Lord shall be seen over them, and his arrow shall go forth as the lightning. Abasement and glory — how can both be true of the same person at the same time?
The two disciples on the road to Emmaus thought they could not. They had believed in Jesus. They had hoped he was the promised Messiah. And now he was dead and buried, and their hope was in ruins: we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel. How could the promised king have been captured, tried, crucified, and laid in a tomb? It made no sense. The two things — messianic glory and a criminal’s death — appeared entirely irreconcilable.
Then the risen Christ, still unrecognised, turned to them and said: O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken: ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory? (Luke 24:25–26). There is no contradiction, said the Lord. The suffering is the road to glory. The humiliation and the exaltation belong together. Philippians 2 traces the same arc: he humbled himself to the death of the cross… wherefore God also hath highly exalted him. His sufferings are not a stain upon his glory — they are his highest glory. As the hymn has it: of all the crowns Jehovah wears, salvation is his dearest claim.
Martial and Peaceable: The Fourth Contradiction
Verses 13 and 15 speak in martial terms — bows bent, arrows loosed, sling stones, the noise of battle — and yet verse 10 declares that the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall speak peace unto the heathen. How can a king be simultaneously a warrior and a peacemaker?
The resolution, again, lies in understanding the nature of the warfare. Paul writes to the Corinthians: the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds. To the Ephesians he describes armour and a sword, but the armour is truth, righteousness, faith, and salvation, and the sword is the Word of God — and at the heart of this martial imagery stands the gospel of peace. The battle Christ wages and into which he sends his people is a spiritual one: against sin, against the powers of darkness, against those things which stand between the soul and God.
And when that battle is won — when sin is subdued on the battlefield of a man’s own heart, when those enemies are overthrown — what follows is peace. Peace of conscience. Peace between the most unlikely of souls who have been saved by the same grace. And above all, peace with God, with whom we were before at enmity in our minds by wicked works. Conflict and triumph resulting in reconciliation: this is the warfare of Christ’s kingdom, and it ends in peace.
Personal and Universal: The Fifth Contradiction
The language of verse 9 seems particular — O daughter of Zion… O daughter of Jerusalem — and verse 13 names Judah and Ephraim specifically. Is this king the king of one nation only? And yet verse 10 declares: his dominion shall be from sea even to sea, and from the river even to the ends of the earth.
Both things are entirely true. The subjects and citizens of Christ’s kingdom are to be found from pole to pole. They will come from Hamath and Tyre and Sidon and Gaza and all those places the ancient Jews despised as Gentile and beyond hope. Verse 7 says of them: he that remaineth, even he shall be for our God. God will call his people out of the most unlikely of nations. He will show mercy to those who had not known mercy; he will name as his people those who were not a people.
This includes those on the isles of the sea — including Britain, and every nation that has since heard and received this glorious gospel of peace. We who were foreigners to the commonwealth of Israel, aliens and strangers from the covenants of promise, have been reached by a dominion that extends from sea to sea. We who were not a people have been constituted part of the people of God — raised up not merely to be as governors in Judah, but, as the closing doxology of Revelation declares, to be kings and priests unto God and his Father.