Zechariah 1:6 Commentary and Bible Study

In a sense the prophets do live on, but only in the sense that the word from the Lord which they spoke has not failed. So the prophets may have died in the Babylonian Empire or before then, but they are vindicated; the message lives on. ‘The message of the prophets: did they not take hold of your fathers?’ The modern versions tend to translate that as, ‘Did not the words of the prophets overtake your fathers?’, but our King James translation is rather clearer: ‘Did they not take hold of your fathers?’, because the words of the prophets – that the people would be disciplined and punished and expelled and routed – were carried out, and the people were literally taken hold of and transported out of their country, out of Judah and Jerusalem. So the words of the prophets took hold of their fathers, as they were fulfilled.‘And they returned’ – well 50,000 of them after the Babylonian captivity did – and this is what they said. It is quite truculent, at the end of verse six: ‘Like as the LORD of hosts thought to do unto us, according to our ways, and according to our doings, so hath he dealt with us.’ Now you could read that in a good light – the Jews have accepted that they have been punished and it is by the hand of God, fulfilling God's warnings that they would be evicted from their land, and punished in this way. But look at the way they say it, and the construction of the words: ‘Like as the Lord of hosts thought to do unto us’, and the way this is constructed shows that the attitude of the Jews was something like this: ‘Well it was all predestinated. It was in the will of God that we should be expelled, and we should sin, and that we should deserve it. We have done wrong. It is all the predestinating will of God’, and they have ducked out of responsibility. It was not so much their actions for which they are accountable and responsible. It was not their free voluntary action to rebel against their God. It was all predestinated: not only the judgment, but the sin also. Well, that is awful, but that is the attitude, which is betrayed in their language. It is ultimately a fatalistic attitude. We are not ultimately responsible. So they are warned that they must start to see things that have happened to them differently.