God speaks. Formerly stern rebuke; here sweet encouragement. Glowing picture of the good time coming.

I. GOD'S ABIDING LOVE TO HIS CHURCH. There are times when it would seem as if God had cast off his people. "Has God forgotten to be gracious?" Here is the answer. "I am jealous," etc. There is real, intense, and abiding attachment. Words of good cheer verified by facts. "I am returned," etc.

II. GOD'S GRACIOUS PURPOSE TO RESTORE HIS CHURCH. God's withdrawal was because of sin. But for a season. When we return to God, he will return to us. The very righteousness that obliges him to punish the impenitent, birds him to bless the penitent. The light will shine more and more. Times of revival are times of refreshment. The release of the captives pledges freedom to all. The return of the exiles prophesies of the final restoration.

III. GOD'S DELIGHT IN THE PROSPERITY OF HIS CHURCH. (Vers. 4-6.) Sweet and ravishing picture. So far fulfilled in the heroic times of the Maccabees (1 Macc. 14:8-12). Finds a grander fulfilment under the gospel, and will be perfectly fulfilled in the latter days.

IV. GOD'S FAITHFULNESS IN FULFILLING HIS PROMISES TO HIS CHURCH. There am things which seem too great to be possible - too good to be true. It may be so with man, but not with God. Eternal Wisdom cannot err. Absolute truth cannot alto. Omnipotent love cannot fail. - F.

Here is a prophetic picture of a time of peace and prosperity. To the man of his time the prophet's picture seemed wholly incredible. They were not prepared for such an optimistic view of things. The scene, however desirable, seemed utterly incredible. Then to their despairing mood comes this soul-inspiring message from God: "If it be marvellous in the eyes of the remnant of this people in those days, shall it also be marvellous in My eyes?" There is no room for marvelling when God is taken into account. Many things that are marvels to men are but the orderly and ordinary carrying out of God's purposes and plans. The miracles of Jesus were not miracles to Him. They were the spontaneous exercise of His ordinary healing and restorative powers. Finite minds have a tendency to be crushed by consternation in the presence of the marvellous, except they have learned to see God in all events. The only steadying and strengthening principle of human life is God, and faith in His wisdom and power. These disheartened captives were in a despairing mood. Hope had deserted them. They had given up their work in despair. When the prophet assured them that the work would be completed, that Jerusalem would be restored, and that peace and security would yet be enjoyed within its walls, they shook their heads incredibly. They said: "It is too good to be true." They failed to take God into account, and hence were crushed and disheartened. God comes to them and says: "It may seem incredible to you, but it is not incredible to Me." And God comes to us all in the same way, and tells us that we are not to limit His power or to doubt His love. He is behind all events, making them work out His own gracious purpose. The true solution of the marvellous is found in the recognition of God. Illustrate by two men who are bent on making the world brighter and better. One yields to despair because he has been limited to means and agencies. The other clings to the belief that a remedy may be found for the ills of society, because he sees God overhead, and recognises His power to regenerate society. The same is true of our own personal experience, especially of the higher experiences of the Christian life. The timid heart often shrinks from claiming the perfect peace that God promises to them that love and trust Him. The true answer to our marvelling mood is that God will do it. He will lift the worried, fretting soul up out of its own feebleness. The same principle holds good in those strange and bewildering experiences that so often surprise and perplex the believer. But the hand of God may be recognised in the times of doubt and darkness. No matter what form the trial may take, the way out of it is the same. And in the matter of service there are many things that surprise and perplex us. We are often sadly perplexed at our failures, and sometimes we are greatly surprised at our successes. Such a view of God, as an ever-present factor in all human experiences, cannot fail to enlarge our lives, and to lift us up above the countless petty perplexities and annoyances that tend to fret and worry the life. We thus learn to look at life as a whole, taking in its entire plan and scope, as seen and known by God. We need this view of God also to steady us and strengthen our faith as we look abroad upon the spiritual life of Christendom. We look for fruit, and behold there is barrenness. What marvellously slow progress the Church is making! But God is the same God still, and therefore we are not to yield to despair, and cease to labour and to pray. The Churches may be dead, but God still lives. We may strengthen our faith and encourage our drooping hearts by remembering God's gracious dealings with ourselves in early life. He came to our desolate hearts, and filled us with His own fulness, and made us sing for joy. God, who wrought such wonders in us, can do the same in His Church.

(Samuel Macnaughton, M. A.)

This is a wonderful age, not merely in the number of strange and unprecedented things happening in it, and in the strange and unprecedented character that belongs to it as a whole, but also in the prominence of wonder as an element in the view which it takes of itself. It is wonderful, because it is an age full of wonder. It does not seem as if there ever could be a time which so stood off, as it were, and looked at itself, in which so many men lived under a continual sense of the strangeness of their own circumstances. You will see how important such an element must be in the character of an age which possesses it, if you remember what it is to an individual. A child who thinks himself singular and different from other children grows up under the power of that thought more than any other which is in his mind about himself. Whatever kind of effect is produced by it, this is an element in the life and growth of every man — this wonder at the age he lives in, at the world, at men, at himself — this wonder that everywhere pervades our wonderful, our wondering age.

I. WONDERFULNESS OF LIFE. What is the reason that this sense of the wonderfulness of life, this sense of the strangeness and mystery everywhere, has such a different effect upon different men that it brings one man peace and another man tumult, that it brings to one man hope and despair to another? No doubt the reason lies deep in the essential differences there are between our natures, and cannot be wholly stated. One cause of the difference, and not the least one, lies here: in the difference of our ideas as to whether there is any Being who knows what we are reminded every hour we do not know; whether there is any Being in whose eyes this age, so strange to us, is not strange and bewildering, but perfectly natural and orderly and clear. We are too ready to think that God is surprised with this endless surprising strangeness that comes into our human life. Our only hope lies in knowing that there is One whom nothing disappoints and nothing amazes. Wonder is so much a part of ourselves, and such a constant experience, that we can hardly leave out wonder from the thought of any high nature. In the strong remonstrance with which Zechariah met the incredulity of the people there is the substance of what I have been saying. "It is all strange to you," God by His prophet seems to say; "but does that prove it will be strange to Me? You must not limit My knowledge by your wonder." Where we are ignorant, God is wise; where we are standing blindly in the dark, He is in the light; where we wonder, He calmly knows. God knows: this should bring us comfort, in a sense of safety and of enlargement.

II. THE SENSE OF DANGER. Where does so much of the sense of danger and the sense of unsafety in life come from? It is from the half-seen things that hover upon the borders of reality and unreality; from things which evidently are something, but of which we cannot perfectly make out just what they are. It is not clear, sound, well-proved truths which frighten men for the stability of their faith; it is the ghostly speculations, the vaguely outlined, faint suggestions that hover in the misty light of dim hypothesis, that make the dim uneasy sense of danger that besets the minds of so many believers. Behind all my conceptions, and all other men's conceptions, of what things are, and how things came to be, there always must be the first fact about things, about what they are, and how they came to be; and that fact must correspond exactly with the knowledge which is in the supreme intelligence of Him who knows all things accurately and completely. If my conception of that fact, however it was reached, differs today from His knowledge of the fact, danger must be in the persistence of that difference, and safety in its being set right. Ignorance is always dangerous; knowledge is never dangerous. He who believes truth only as the way to God, he who regards opinions as valueless except as they agree with the infallible judgments of God, and so bring him who holds them into sympathy with God and keep him there, he is the man for whom all life is safe, and whose faith faces the changing thoughts and destinies of the world, however astounding they may seem, without a thought of fear.

III. THE SENSE OF FREEDOM. Such a man is also free. The safety of life and the enlargement or freedom of life must go together. No man is safe who is not free; no man is free who is not safe. Our effort, our action, our whole life in the thought and will is limited by that which we account possible. The conception of what is possible enlarges and widens as the quality of any being's life becomes higher; and so the loftier being is able freely to attempt things which the lower being is shut out from if he lives only in the contemplation of his own powers and never looks beyond himself. Freedom to attempt belongs to the larger vision. If He who sits at the centre of everything, and sees the visions of the universe with the perfect clearness of its Maker — if God can really speak so that we can hear Him, and say, "It is impossible to you, but it is not impossible to Me; it is marvellous in your eyes, but it is not in Mine"; if He can say that of any task that is overwhelming men with its immensity, that word of His must snap our fetters, must set free the little strength of all of us to strike our little blows, must enlarge our lives, and send them out to bolder ventures with earnestness and hope.

IV. THE ESSENCE OF FAITH. It seems to me as if, through all these ages of Christendom, God had been trying to teach the Christian world to enlarge its notions of the possibility of faith by the perpetual revelations of His own. God must be teaching us all that faith is the essential relation of the human soul to His soul faith, the deep rest of the child's life upon the Father's love faith, the reception by man of the word of God, which comes to him in voices as manifold as the nature of God Himself, — that faith, a thing so deep, essential, and eternal, is not to be conditioned on the permanence of any one of the temporary forms in which it may be clothed. The fearful believer says, "I do not see how it can be, it is so strange"; but God answers him out of all the richness of Christian history, "If it be marvellous in your eyes, should it also be marvellous in Mine?" Apply this truth to the personal life; for there, most of all, a man needs the enlargement that comes of always feeling the infinite knowledge that God is about him, encompassing his ignorance with Himself. How easily, with our self-distrust and spiritual laziness, we shut down iron curtains about ourselves, and limit our own higher possibilities! This is truest in religious things.

(Phillips Brooks, D. D.)

ZechariahJerusalem, ZionAffirmation, Almighty, Armies, Declares, Difficult, Hosts, Marvellous, Marvelous, Remnant, Rest, Says, Seem, Sight, Surely, Thus, Wonder, Wonderful1. The restoration of Jerusalem.
9. They are encouraged to build the temple by God's favor to them.
16. Good works are required of them.
18. Joy and blessing are promised.

Zechariah 8:6-12

     7145   remnant

Sad Fasts Changed to Glad Feasts
"Thus saith the LORD of hosts; The fast of the fourth month, and the fast of the fifth, and the fast of the seventh, and the fast of the tenth, shall be to the house of Judah joy and gladness, and cheerful feasts; therefore love the truth and peace."--Zechariah 8:19 MY time for discourse upon this subject will be limited, as we shall gather around the communion-table immediately afterwards. So in the former part of my sermon I shall give you an outline of what might be said upon the text if we had …
Charles Haddon Spurgeon—Spurgeon's Sermons Volume 38: 1892

The Temptation of Jesus
The proclamation and inauguration of the Kingdom of Heaven' at such a time, and under such circumstances, was one of the great antitheses of history. With reverence be it said, it is only God Who would thus begin His Kingdom. A similar, even greater antithesis, was the commencement of the Ministry of Christ. From the Jordan to the wilderness with its wild Beasts; from the devout acknowledgment of the Baptist, the consecration and filial prayer of Jesus, the descent of the Holy Spirit, and the heard …
Alfred Edersheim—The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah

Healing the Centurion's Servant.
(at Capernaum.) ^A Matt. VIII. 1, 5-13; ^C Luke VII. 1-10. ^c 1 After he had ended all his sayings in the ears of the people, ^a 1 And when he was come down from the mountain, great multitudes followed him. ^c he entered into Capernaum. [Jesus proceeded from the mountain to Capernaum, which was now his home, or headquarters. The multitudes which are now mentioned for the third time were not wearied by his sermon, and so continued to follow him. Their presence showed the popularity of Jesus, and also …
J. W. McGarvey—The Four-Fold Gospel

Concerning Peaceableness
Blessed are the peacemakers. Matthew 5:9 This is the seventh step of the golden ladder which leads to blessedness. The name of peace is sweet, and the work of peace is a blessed work. Blessed are the peacemakers'. Observe the connection. The Scripture links these two together, pureness of heart and peaceableness of spirit. The wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable' (James 3:17). Follow peace and holiness' (Hebrews 12:14). And here Christ joins them together pure in heart, and peacemakers', …
Thomas Watson—The Beatitudes: An Exposition of Matthew 5:1-12

The Ninth Commandment
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.' Exod 20: 16. THE tongue which at first was made to be an organ of God's praise, is now become an instrument of unrighteousness. This commandment binds the tongue to its good behaviour. God has set two natural fences to keep in the tongue, the teeth and lips; and this commandment is a third fence set about it, that it should not break forth into evil. It has a prohibitory and a mandatory part: the first is set down in plain words, the other …
Thomas Watson—The Ten Commandments

Appendix ix. List of Old Testament Passages Messianically Applied in Ancient Rabbinic Writings
THE following list contains the passages in the Old Testament applied to the Messiah or to Messianic times in the most ancient Jewish writings. They amount in all to 456, thus distributed: 75 from the Pentateuch, 243 from the Prophets, and 138 from the Hagiorgrapha, and supported by more than 558 separate quotations from Rabbinic writings. Despite all labour care, it can scarcely be hoped that the list is quite complete, although, it is hoped, no important passage has been omitted. The Rabbinic references …
Alfred Edersheim—The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah

Zechariah
CHAPTERS I-VIII Two months after Haggai had delivered his first address to the people in 520 B.C., and a little over a month after the building of the temple had begun (Hag. i. 15), Zechariah appeared with another message of encouragement. How much it was needed we see from the popular despondency reflected in Hag. ii. 3, Jerusalem is still disconsolate (Zech. i. 17), there has been fasting and mourning, vii. 5, the city is without walls, ii. 5, the population scanty, ii. 4, and most of the people …
John Edgar McFadyen—Introduction to the Old Testament

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