Zechariah has always held a fascination to me, more so than even Daniel or Isaiah, since I was saved so many years ago and Leviticus has always (yes, always) been a source of my repeated return to read to try and understand more, even at the expense of neglecting to read the more straightforward works such as Chronicles or Exodus. In the NT, Matthew is the Gospel that seems to come alive to me more than any of the other three and, of all Paul’s letters, Colossians is the one that I find most insightful.
Why this should be, I can’t say - I guess that we all have our favourite books, ones that never cease to draw us to their verses and to instruct us in the way we should walk. Perhaps, even, the types of Books that we find drawn to may tell us something about our ministries in the Lord - I’ll leave that statement to the psychologists and psychoanalysts amongst you, though, as I have no intention of developing any kind of theory from my statement!
So, when I come to the question that you may be asking yourself, namely
‘Why on earth study such an obscure and difficult Book?’
I cannot offer you anything else as an explanation other than what I’ve already typed. I had already studied Zechariah some years ago and committed all my findings and thoughts to paper, so, at least, I had a start and wasn’t doing a study ‘from scratch’ but whatever possessed me in the first place to work my way through Zechariah so long ago now is open to theorising by all and sundry.
But let me include just one quote from Joyce Baldwin to justify a devotion to make sense of these passages (even though it was not my justification for doing so!). She notes that
‘...chapters 9-14 [of Zechariah] are the most quoted section of the prophets in the Passion narratives of the Gospels and, next to Ezekiel, Zechariah has influenced the author of Revelation [sic] more than any other OT writer’
If Zechariah is that important, then perhaps we should all turn to its pages and try to understand what it may have to say to us today? But, more than this, Zechariah spoke into a situation that many churches find themselves in today - a time when God has done nothing major in their midst for a great many years and when His people have failed to do what they knew God had told them to do in years passed.
It is to the Church’s shame that we find ourselves in a similar situation - but if we are entering a time when God will return and begin to move amongst His people and to encourage them to fulfil His purposes for themselves, then Zechariah is equally relevant today as it was to those people in the sixth century BC.
