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Zechariah, Prophet of God's remembrance, part 2

The names of the prophets usually reveal their core message that is to be delivered to the world. In the case of Zechariah, his name means Yahweh remembers, or as some put it, remembered by Yahweh. In either case, it is Yahweh (God) who does the action. His name is derived from the Hebrew word zakar, “to remember, recall, call to mind.”

https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/h2142/nasb95/wlc/0-1/

Zechariah’s mission was to prophesy about the day when God remembers His covenant and puts an end to the captivity of Israel, Judah, and all nations. For example, Genesis 9:14-16 says,

¹⁴ It shall come about, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow will be seen in the cloud, ¹⁵ and I will remember [zakar] My covenant, which is between Me and you and every living creature of all flesh, and never again shall the water become a flood to destroy all flesh. ¹⁶ when the bow is in the cloud, then I will look upon it, to remember [zakar] the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.

This is the first clear reference to the New Covenant, the promise of God that is defined specifically in terms of universal salvation. With Abraham, the New Covenant defined the people through whom this salvation would come, beginning with Isaac, the type of Christ, and then extending to all who are children of Sarah, the New Covenant (Galatians 4:31). Yet the scope of the promise was given earlier to Noah in Genesis 9.

If God remembers, does this mean that He has also forgotten? No, not in a literal sense but in a legal sense. To remember is to invoke God’s promise in order to make it part of the court record. Otherwise, the court gives the appearance of forgetting the promise (ignorance). Therefore, something must be done officially to remind the judge of the covenant made earlier and to appeal to its continuing validity.

In the prophetic revelation of the New Covenant, Jeremiah 31:34 says,

³⁴ “They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother,, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” declares the Lord, ‘for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember [zakar] no more.”

During periods of divine judgment, when the promises of God are legally forgotten, or set aside temporarily, God remembers their sin. In other words, a time of captivity defines the time in which God remembers their sin and forgets His promise. This is what it means to be “under the law.” In Romans 6:14 Paul refers to this:

¹⁴ For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.

Paul was writing to believers whose sins had been paid in full by Christ’s death on the cross. For them, God no longer remembered their sins but instead remembered His covenant, which had put them “under grace.” To be under law means that the law demanded full payment for their sin-debt, which had not yet been paid. As long as there is an unpaid debt, the law retains the power to enforce payment through slavery.

While Christ’s death paid for the sin of the world as a whole (1 John 2:2), this payment still needs to be applied on a personal level to be effective to individuals. Hence, unbelievers are still under law, still liable for the debt to sin that they have incurred. The only way to be debt-free is to have faith in Christ’s payment for sin when He died on the cross.

Jeremiah 31:34 says, “their sin I will remember no more,” indicating a time of judgment for sin in which the lawful verdict of the Judge had sentenced them. But God also sent Zechariah to prophesy the end of that time of judgment, when His New Covenant promise would be remembered in the divine court.

So Zechariah prophesied at the end of the Babylonian captivity in the second year of Darius the Great (520 B.C.). God had remembered His covenant, and those who immigrated from Babylon to Jerusalem represented those who believed that promise. This, of course, was not the highest fulfillment of the New Covenant, because Christ had not yet come to ratify the New Covenant with His blood. It was a partial fulfillment that provided us with a prophetic pattern of the fulness yet to come at “the restoration of all things” (Acts 3:21).

Today we are reaching the end of a long cycle of Babylonian captivity since God put Jerusalem under the law in the days of Jeremiah. The initial 70-year captivity, prophesied in Jeremiah 25:11, had passed when God raised up Zechariah to encourage the returning remnant. But the overall captivity was still ongoing, because to Daniel it was revealed that the Babylonian empire was only the first of four beast empires. The captivity was to last thousands of years, ending only in our time. (See my three books, Daniel, Prophet of the Ages.)

The return of the captives in Zechariah’s day was a partial pattern of delivery from captivity. A greater deliverance took place when Jesus paid the debt on the cross to complete His earthly ministry. But another pattern is playing out today with the fall of Mystery Babylon, making Zechariah’s message relevant to those who live at the end of this age.

A thousand years later at the great White Throne judgment, a greater body of people will be delivered, according in John 5:28, 29. The rest of the world will find deliverance at the end of that final Age of Judgment, which ends when the Creation Jubilee allows all men to return to their lost inheritance. Only then will the promise of God be fulfilled in its entirety. All prior deliverances are partial patterns.

Therefore, when we study the prophecies of Zechariah, we will note that he speaks on more than one level. The immediate context is in the deliverance of the earthly Jerusalem after its 70-year Babylonian captivity. But because Jerusalem literally means two Jerusalems, he also spoke of God remembering the New Jerusalem, which John described in Revelation 21.