Zechariah 1:16 Commentary and Bible Study

But now things are going to change. ‘Therefore thus says the Lord, I am returned to Jerusalem with mercies.’ The Hebrew says, with ‘tender love’ in the plural. That is great mercy: the tender love of God for his people. He is now going to switch to great comfort and kindness. ‘My house shall be built in it.’ The footings have been laid but the construction has not yet begun. It will be built, despite the opposition, ‘says the Lord of hosts, and a line shall be stretched forth upon Jerusalem’, which refers to a surveyor's line of those days. In due course, the building of the city, the city and its walls, will commence. That is the promise. But why is God so jealously affected and full of pity for them, when he has been disciplining them? Well, the answer is this: most of God's affection is not for the disobedient people, it is for the people who are designated to bring forth the seed royal in due time, Jesus Christ the Lord, the descendant of David. Those people are going to bring forth the Messiah. He is going to be born in due course from that nation. So God says, ‘I am jealous for the nation that I have determined will bring forth the Saviour, and so I will bring an end to the punishment, and I will fondle them.’ That is all in the verses. He cares for them, and will build them up again, because this nation has not only to survive, but to flourish and to exist for several more centuries yet, before the Saviour is born. So the main reason for the love of God toward the people as a whole is not their behaviour or their niceness, but the fact that they are the designated people to bring forth the Saviour, so they must be preserved.