Zechariah6chapter 6

Zechariah 6:1-3

The last night vision closes the series where it began, with chariots rather than a single horseman, four of them coming out from between two mountains of brass, each drawn by horses of a different color, red, black, white, and grisled with bay. Keil reads the bronze mountains as the fixed gate of heaven's own decree, the place from which God's providence issues out over the whole earth, and the four colors as the same range of judgment and peace the first vision's four horses already carried in chapter one.

Zechariah 6:4-5

Zechariah asks again what these are, and the angel answers plainly this time, these are the four spirits of the heavens, which go forth from standing before the Lord of all the earth. Henry reads the chariots as the same watching, active providence the seven eyes of chapter four already named, sent out now under a fuller picture of agents dispatched to the four quarters of the earth.

Zechariah 6:6-8

The black horses go north, the white after them, the grisled south, and the bay range the whole earth on the angel's own command, get you hence, walk to and fro through the earth. The north country is Babylon's own direction from Judah, and the angel's word that those going north have quieted my spirit there reads as judgment on Babylon satisfying the wrath the earlier chapters of the book have already announced against her, the empire's account closed.

Zechariah 6:9-11

The vision ends and an acted sign begins: Zechariah is to take silver and gold from named men of the exile community, Heldai, Tobijah, and Jedaiah, freshly arrived with an offering from Babylon, and make crowns to set on the head of Joshua the high priest. Gill reads the sign as one more prophetic act in the line of Jeremiah's yoke and Ezekiel's baggage, a plain object made to say publicly what words alone might not fix in the people's memory.

Zechariah 6:12-13

The word given with the crowning names a title rather than only a man: behold the man whose name is the Branch, the same word Isaiah and Jeremiah already used for the righteous shoot of David's line, here spoken over a high priest rather than a king. He shall build the temple of the Lord, bear the glory, sit and rule upon his throne, and be a priest upon his throne, offices the law had always kept apart, David's tribe for the crown and Levi's for the altar, joined here in one figure with the counsel of peace between them both. The older bench, Keil among them, reads the union at full messianic strength, a king who is also a priest after no line the law provided, which the writer to the Hebrews later grounds in Melchizedek's own order rather than Aaron's.

Zechariah 6:14-15

The crowns are kept in the temple itself as a memorial to the men who brought the offering, a standing witness rather than a one-time ceremony. The chapter and the whole cycle of night visions close on a wider hope, that those far off shall come and build in the temple of the Lord, and on a plain condition, if ye will diligently obey the voice of the Lord your God, the promise held together with the same call to obedience the book has carried from its opening word.