Over these Sundays, I’ve been sharing with you what prophets of the Old Testament had to say about the one who was going to come.  He would be the fulfillment of God’s promise to David.  How could God love David—an adulterer, a savage soldier, a man of blood?  God didn’t love any of that about David.  God was quite clear that He did not love any of that and was displeased in the highest with all of that.  God loved David despite these sins.  God loved David, and, though he was a sinner, David also loved God.  Can you imagine?!  A sinner who loved God?  David was always in a struggle, wrestling as for his very life, with his entangling, ensnaring sins—just read the psalms he composed!  David wanted to know the fullness of God’s love, be in the fullness of God’s love.  David, shame-faced, hated that he still somehow so often turned from God’s love to indulge his God-dishonoring desires.

Though sin described David, it did not define David.  God loved that what defined David, what drove and motivated David—at his best—was love for God, and faith.  God put that love there because, for His own reasons, God chose David.  David did not choose God.  God had plans for David.  God has plans for you and me.

One is coming for the sake of the faithful, to bring them into the fullness of God’s love—the glorious, joyful fullness—despite all the detritus of sin yet clinging to us so horribly.  God sees the sin, oh yes.  God calls the sin by its name, even when we won’t.  God wants to and will break the sin in us.  God does not want to destroy us.  He means us for life.  He will refine us: that won’t always feel fine, or fun.

We have heard this message through Isaiah and Jeremiah, prophets whom God sent to speak His Word before He brought judgment upon His people.  He spoke through these prophets so that His people might turn and be healed.  Some did turn.  Others did not.  Judgment came, and restoration.  The restoration was not to the power and prestige of an earthly kingdom with superpower dominance.  Those who returned from the slavery and shame of exile in Babylon—a small number of a small number—struggled to rebuild their lives in and around Jerusalem.  It was not a prosperous life.  Deprivation was real, constant, hard.

What was supposed to make it all worth the effort was the opportunity to rebuild good and pure relationship with God.  Both Ezra and Nehemiah had accentuated that note.  The people became distracted and distraught by the worries and difficulties of daily life: the stones and thorns all around them.  Along the way of hardships, they began to neglect the very relationship they had returned to work on.  God noticed.  So, God reminded them that there was a way back, still and always a way back.  The return He was opening was no return to Jerusalem or Judah, no return to a Temple: it was always, had always been all along, a return to Him.  His heart was open; how had theirs become closed?

In those meager, downcast times, when hope struggled and faith flickered, God sent the late prophet Zechariah, one of the last prophets for a very long time.  Through Zechariah, a name which means “God remembers,” God says, “Listen, High Priest Joshua, you and your associates seated before you, who are men symbolic of things to come [a sign]: I am going to bring my servant, the Branch” (3:8).  These associates of the high priest would also be priests, and elders, advisers raised up in, grounded in Scripture.  Their responsibility was the nurture and instruction of the people of God.  Responsibility for God’s people meant responsibility to God.

God tells those with this responsibility to people and God that they were “symbolic of things to come.”  In the high priest and his counselors, the people could see something of what God was going to do for His own.  Through a small, beleaguered and dedicated core, God was going to nurture and instruct His faithful remnant; He was going to lead them in the way of faith.  God would provide this leadership through men, and God was going to be the cause, making possible dedicated leadership, committed nurturing.  This nurturing and instruction, this leading in the faith, would be from and by God Himself, in His servant, The Branch.  The Branch would show the way.  The Branch would make the way.  Though mysterious and hidden at that time, the Branch also, somehow, would be the way.

Branch—yes, a very odd name for one with such a glorious, blessed calling: to nurture and instruct the people of God, to lead them and bless them, to bring them back and build them up.  An odd name, Branch.  Remember the situation: a ruined city, a ruined wall, a ruined Temple.  Rubble and debris, brokenness everywhere.  No wall to protect.  Barely an intact home in which to try to live.  The blasted remains of a Temple at which to gather to worship the God the people had defied and rejected within the memory of some still living.  The remnant had returned in trembling hope to find what felt like insurmountable obstacles on every side.  The work of rebuilding left them exhausted, depleted, dejected.  They had returned weeping tears of joy; now their tears came from dismay, confusion, and disappointment.  From elation to deflation didn’t take long.

They were in a fragile, a delicate situation, like a bruised reed or a smoldering wick.

The wonderful thing about ruins, whether in ancient lands or the abandoned places in our own town, is that nature soon takes over.  The wonderful thing about God’s handiwork is that, much as we maul it, mar it, it continues to assert itself.  Just down the street towards the river are some sycamore trees.  For reasons that seemed good at the time, a few seasons ago, men cut those sycamores down to amputated, truncated trunks.  The trees began to grow again.  Samson—bull-headed, lusty Samson, had his eyes gouged out after his head was shaved.  In his self-confidence and appetite for physical gratification, he had willingly sacrificed his special dedication to God, but remember, Scripture takes great care to tell us: his hair began to grow again.  God wasn’t done with Samson; God isn’t through with His people.  He knows the plans He has for us.

God made the trees to regrow; God made us to heal.  One day we walk up to the charred, broken remains of the Temple and find there at the shattered altar a branch, a sapling with green leaves, dancing in the breeze: new life, hope, promise, God.

The people returned to rebuild: homes, city, temple, rebuild their lives, rebuild their relationship with God.  The rebuilding must begin somewhere, upon something, with some material.  Through Zechariah, God speaks to those called to nurture, teach, and guide: “‘See, the stone I have set in front of Joshua!  There are seven eyes on that one stone, and I will engrave an inscription on it,’ says the Lord Almighty, ‘and I will remove the sin of this land in a single day’” (11:9).  A stone with seven eyes?  Other translations make out the uncertain Hebrew as a jewel with seven facets.  Well, a jewel has value; a jewel is costly.  A stone has great value for rebuilding—it isn’t just some little, glittering rock to which God is pointing.  It’s a focal point, a beginning, maybe, also a finishing stone—cornerstone and capstone.  What could be both beginning and conclusion, Alpha and Omega?

Common to both translations of the uncertain Hebrew is this number seven: a biblical number for completion, completeness, nothing lacking, fulfillment.  Seven eyes see all there is to see, see over, around, under, and through.  God says He will write an inscription upon that all-seeing stone of fulfillment.  His Word will be upon the stone, in the stone, the priceless stone for rebuilding.  Word and stone will be one.  The Word is not for testimony only but also for action: God’s Word acts; God’s Word accomplishes.

What will this Word-inscribed stone, this precious, costly stone accomplish?  God says, “I will remove the sin of this land in a single day” (11:9).  The law was clear: sin and guilt could be removed by one thing only: sacrifice.  That meant blood, life in atonement for sin.  The maddening problem under the Law was that the offerings were ongoing, endless.  Can you imagine the quantity of blood poured out on a daily basis, there at the Temple?  It was supposed to be a place of holy prayer in the presence of the Holy God of steadfast love and covenant promise.  The dominant impression must have been that this was a monumental slaughterhouse.  If the sin of the land—of the people, that is—was going to be removed in a single day, this would need to be something permanent, and perfectly effective—the sacrifice to end all sacrifice, the blood of perfect atonement.  What could that be?  Priests, prophets, and people may well have wondered.  It had something to do with this Branch, moving in, dancing with the breeze.

Of that day of perfect atonement, that new time of reconciliation, God says, “In that day each of you will invite your neighbor to sit under your vine and fig tree” (11:10).  Vine and fig are symbols not only of prosperity, but of cultivated peace, tending the garden in contentment, dwelling in enjoyment of the Lord who provides, who fulfills, who satisifes.  Grace cultivates us, cultivates our hearts, so that, with those blessed ones described for us in the prophecy, we, too, invite neighbors to enjoy the gift of peace with us, enjoy grace with us, enjoy the Savior with us, enjoy God together with us.  Sometimes, you’ve got such a good thing that you just want to, just have to share your joy: “Hey, will you come and take a look at this!”  “Hey, come and celebrate with me!”  “My joy just won’t be complete until you share it with me, too.”  Yes, God knows.  That’s just what He is telling us, in Jesus Christ.

To the God of all grace, who calls you to share God’s eternal glory in union with Christ, be the power forever!