Zechariah 14:20 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Zechariah 14:20

Comments

The bells on the horses are not mentioned because they are particularly important, but for the very reason that they are relatively insignificant, nevertheless even these will be treated as special and worthy of decoration with a message encouraging holiness. Nothing will be missed out. The commitment to holiness will be so great that nothing is overlooked. The Jews were trained to respect certain sacred objects, special places, and furniture and to treat them as untouchable – God was training them to respect what is holy. But here, the number of items treated in this way has multiplied enormously. Everything has stepped up a level of holiness. The pots in the Lord’s house have become like the more sacred bowls on the altar, and even the ordinary pots in the city which are not directly connected to the Lord’s house are to be treated as if they came from the temple. Everything in this Jerusalem will be holy. For Christians, for the true church, the great watchword will be holiness, the separation of all that is sacred from all that is profane. Everything in the church is set apart to be suitable for the service of the Lord.This is not teaching that at any time in the future God’s people will return to the old ceremonial distinctions between things, nor is it adding extra things to the category of the sacred. It is language that must translated into the spiritual. It is teaching that among the regenerate, within the church of God there must be holiness everywhere. Every area of the believer’s life must be given attention. Christ has called us to live by a higher standard than any outwardly obedient Israelite lived by. In the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, he made clear that the standard of the Pharisees which was commonly taught to the people was wholly inadequate. His disciples must serve God from the heart. This standard applies to all and not just to pastors or church officers. ‘There shall be no more the Canaanite in the house of the Lord of hosts.’ Certain nations were to be excluded from the congregation of the Lord under the law of Moses including the Moabites (Deuteronomy 23:3), but this did not prevent Ruth joining Israel. Conversion makes all the difference (1 Corinthians 6:11) and this prohibition must be understood to exclude unbelievers but not any particular ethnic groups from the new Jerusalem. There won't be any Canaanite lifestyle in the church of God.

Application

It doesn’t matter who we are; we must pursue holiness, for we serve a holy God and our hope is to be in his presence. The great attack on the churches today is the attack on holiness and the devil’s efforts to get the churches to accept an altogether inadequate standard of life. This removes all power from us, as it grieves the Spirit and renders us useless to God. We read of ministers falling into adultery or some other great sin, and yet they are soon reinstated back to the pastorate again. When people fall, they should certainly be helped to recover and returned to the life of the church, but not to full time Christian service: this is shocking. So many people are forgetting about holiness these days. They are importing the world, the instruments of the world, the rhythms of the world, the chords of entertainment music into the church. Says Zechariah, from the time of Christ, separation of the sacred for dedication to God – that is what is meant here by holiness – will be the great watchword and the motto.

So most of the book is about Christ and his church, and it is calculated and designed, but in veiled language often, to lift up the heads of all those true hearted Judeans who would live until Christ came. What we are doing, Zechariah was saying to them, is keeping the faith, and the message, and the symbols before the world, calling people out of unbelief and idolatry. We are called – God will enable us and God will keep Jerusalem in place, and the nation intact – until the coming of Christ. That is the same for us. We may be a minority today in a day of atheism, but there is a great day coming, and we are called to communicate to the people the call of God, the call of the gospel, and keep alive true worship, and to keep an example before the people until Christ comes again. See, your purpose is not just to gather out now; it is to hold everything. As the old hymn says, ‘Hold the fort, for I am coming’, and you keep that in mind. We are holding the faith by the power of Christ until he comes. So we can share the spirit of the prophet Zechariah.

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Zechariah 14:20 Commentary and Bible Study