I wonder if you have pictures, photos around your house. And if you do, whose pictures do you have? Do you have pictures of yourself, pictures of family members, group photos, pictures of friends or family members who live far away? If so, you have to decide which picture is the one you want to put up. Are you going to put up a picture from a beach holiday a couple of years ago, or a picture from a few Christmases back, a graduation photo? Which is your favourite photograph that you’re going to display for each person you want to have around? So, here’s the question for you: do you have a favourite photo of your favourite person?
Well, I’m sure it will change before many more weeks, but as of this week, I have a new favourite portrait of Jesus, and I’m going to introduce you to that portrait this morning.
The Bible contains sixty-six books, and you could think of that as a little bit like a house. So thirty-nine books are in the Old Testament — maybe the ground floor of a large house is the Old Testament, thirty-nine rooms. The upstairs is the New Testament: another twenty-seven rooms, twenty-seven books of the New Testament. If you go to the upstairs, you will find the most beautiful, vivid colour portraits of Jesus up there. As you read the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Jesus just walks off the page. So go into those rooms, and the portraits are three-dimensional. But if you go around the ground floor, you’ll also find many portraits of Jesus there as well. In fact, you’ll find them in every single room. There are some remarkably detailed portraits of Jesus on the ground floor, although almost always just taken from one angle, just to show one side of him. Deuteronomy 18: God will raise up a prophet just like Moses. 2 Samuel 7: a son of David will rule over the nations of the world forever. Isaiah 53: the Lord’s servant will suffer and carry away the sin of his people. Very varied portraits, just showing different views of different bits of Jesus. But then you get to the New Testament and you discover that all those different pictures are speaking of the same person. They’re all portraits of the Lord Jesus. And you then get to see the whole thing, and see how they all were different aspects of one person. Turns out you have to wait for the New Testament, though, to see that.
When we get to Zechariah chapter 6, we have probably one of the most complete portraits of Jesus in the Old Testament. It’s obviously not 100% complete — you have to wait another 550 years before we get to the events of the four Gospels — but nevertheless, for the Old Testament, this is a breathtaking and astonishingly complete picture of Jesus.
Why is this about Jesus?
Now, before I show you what we can learn about Jesus from this, I had better pause and justify what I’m saying, because you’re probably looking at Zechariah 6 that we’ve just had read, and you’re thinking, “How is this Jesus?” So let me just show you how I get there.
Let’s recap where we are. The people of Israel had rebelled against their God and been deported to the foreign country of Babylonia. They’d been allowed to return to their home city of Jerusalem to rebuild God’s temple. But they had met opposition and difficulty, and the building project had been completely paused for about fifteen years. So God sent the prophet Zechariah to preach to the people, to encourage their despondent hearts and to get the building project moving again. And so far in Zechariah we’ve had a whole string of visions, visions that are deeply encouraging, designed to get everything going once again. And what happens in today’s passage is a fresh cohort of exiles come back from Babylonia, bringing with them some silver and gold that is for the temple project. Zechariah is told to go to the house where these people can be found, to take some of that silver and gold, to make a crown out of it, and to place it on the head of Joshua.
Here’s the question: why is Joshua having a crown placed on his head? The simple and most obvious answer would be, he is being crowned a king. This is his coronation. God had begun to unwind the exile — you see, they’re back in the land, the temple is being built stone by stone, but they don’t yet have their own king. Perhaps now it’s time for them to have a king, and Joshua is the one. That’s the kind of obvious thing you would naturally think of. But that is not what is going on here. And I want to show you, from the text, three reasons why that is not what is happening.
So the first is that we’ve met so far in Zechariah two particular key characters. There’s Joshua the priest, who we get in this chapter, and there’s a man called Zerubbabel, who is the governor — so, the man appointed by the kings of Persia to oversee the affairs in this part of the Persian Empire. Zerubbabel was directly descended from the line of kings that ran all the way from David himself down to the last kings at the time of the exile. So if they were about to crown a king, it would have been Zerubbabel and not Joshua. So this isn’t a coronation. It’s the wrong bloke.
The second reason why this can’t be a coronation is that Joshua doesn’t get to keep the crown. If King Charles wants to wear his coronation crown again for any reason, he may do so. It is stored safely for him in the Tower of London, but he can wear it at any point. It is his crown. Not so with Joshua’s crown. When we get down to verse 14, we discover that after he’s been crowned, the crown is taken away and it’s placed in the temple that they’re building. We might think of it — it probably wasn’t — in a display cabinet somewhere in the temple, locked away on view, a museum exhibit. That doesn’t sound like what you would do after a coronation.
The third reason why is that Joshua himself is a symbolic figure. He symbolises something beyond just himself. So we need to go back to chapter 3 verse 8, where we met him before, and God says this: “Listen, high priest Joshua, you and your associates seated before you, who are men symbolic of things to come: I am going to bring my servant, the Branch.” So we already know that Joshua is a symbol, a symbol for what God will do in the future. And the thing God will do in the future is send somebody called his servant and the Branch. Now, both of those are loaded terms. Pastor Lee expanded this for us a few weeks ago. The servant of the Lord is a label from the prophet Isaiah, and the Branch of the Lord is a label from the prophet Jeremiah — both speak of a promised king from the line of David. So, therefore, when Joshua has the crown placed on his head and they say here, “Here is the man whose name is the Branch,” they’re not saying, “Joshua is the Messiah, Joshua is the Branch.” It’s saying, this is the symbolism: here is the man who represents this Branch figure that God will send in the future. It’s a piece of acting, acting out some things about the Branch.
All of which means what’s happening here is a picture of the Lord Jesus himself. It’s a symbolic act, and, as I say, is a beautifully rich portrait. So let me give you four things that we learn in this passage about Jesus.
1. Jesus is priest-king
Number one: Jesus is both priest and king. In the Old Testament, those two offices of priest and king were kept separate. You could be one or the other. You couldn’t be both. And one reason was, priests had to come from the tribe of Levi; kings had to come from the tribe of Judah. You were one or the other. You weren’t both. But now those two come together, as we see the crown placed not on Zerubbabel’s head but on Joshua’s: the priest is crowned.
The passage doesn’t hide the fact that this rather odd thing is happening. It actually draws attention to it. So, verse 11: “Take the silver and gold, make a crown, and set it on the head of the high priest Joshua.” Not just “the head of Joshua — (and I’m hoping you’ve forgotten of that, because he was the high priest).” No, it’s there. Verse 13: “He will build the temple of the Lord, be clothed with majesty. He will sit and rule on his throne, and he will be a priest on his throne.” Old Testament priests: the one thing they didn’t have was a seat, because their work was never done. They were always stood up. But this will be a priest on a seat, and the seat will be the throne.
So Jesus is our high priest. His work is to bring people to God. He does that work by sacrificing himself for our sins. Jesus is also our king. He rules heaven and earth. He’s gloriously risen from the dead, and he’s coming back one day to be our judge. He’s both.
Notice the order, though. They take the priest Joshua and they add the crown. They don’t take the king and add some priestly garments. He is the priest who rules. The priest who rules, not the king who deals with our sin. Jesus had to die on the cross as our priest to deal with our sin, before later being raised to glory. And this is the kind of king that we have. We do not have a king who is harsh, who is unsympathetic. We have a priest-king who represents us, who restores us, who brings us into the presence of God.
In this country there is a system of jury service. If you are tried for a serious crime, the decision as to whether you’re guilty is not made by the judge, but by twelve of your fellow human beings, your fellow citizens, chosen at random. So you could get a letter saying that on a certain date you are to report to a certain court for two weeks, and you will do your duty. When the trial is about to begin, they give you some of the details of who is going to be there, and you are asked, do you know any of the individuals involved? Because if you do, then they need to pick somebody else. You cannot serve on the jury if you know the accused. Turn it round. And if you’re unfortunate enough to be in the dock you will not be allowed to have twelve of your mates making the decision as to whether you’re guilty or not. It’s just not allowed. You will still have mates. I hope they’re good mates. They will still be there for you, whatever the verdict. But the people making the decision about your future will be twelve strangers.
Jesus is both at once. He is priest and he is king. He doesn’t have to decide for himself, which hat am I going to wear today? Am I going to be the priest who mediates and helps, or am I going to be the king who rules on matters of right and wrong? Which shall I be today? No, he is both at once. What a beautiful combination. He is gentle and strong. He is compassionate and victorious. He is forgiving and sovereign priest.
2. Jesus builds the true temple
Second: Jesus builds the true temple.
So this comes in verse 13, where it says, “It is he who will build the temple of the Lord.” There’s a bit of a puzzle in these chapters of Zechariah as to who builds the temple. So, back in chapter 4:9, it says, “The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this temple; his hands will also complete it.” It would seem Zerubbabel will build the temple. A bit further down in our passage, we’re told that those who are far away will come and do some building. But now, here, it looks like it’s Joshua who will build the temple — or, who is it who builds it? We’ll come back to the people far away a bit later on. But it looks here like it’s Joshua. And indeed, it’s emphasised. So in verse 13, not just “he will build”: “It is he who will build.” It’s underlined.
But it’s not actually Joshua who will build the temple. It’s the Branch that Joshua symbolises who will build the temple. “Here is the man whose name is the Branch. He will branch out in this place and build the temple of the Lord. It is he who will build the temple of the Lord.”
So Zerubbabel will build a temple in Jerusalem, and after him Jesus will come and will build another temple. And there are lots of ways in which Jesus builds the true temple. It’s a rich theme in the New Testament. We just heard Hebrews, that language of Jesus in the true sanctuary built by the Lord. Here are four others. (i) Jesus’s resurrected body is a temple. We can meet with God by addressing the risen Jesus — John chapter 2. (ii) The Christian church is a temple built out of us, the people who come, built and made out of living stones — 1 Peter chapter 2. (iii) If you are a Christian, God’s Spirit lives within you, and that means your body is a temple for the Holy Spirit — 1 Corinthians 6. (iv) And when Jesus returns, God will live on the earth with us. There will be no temple, because the entire world will be where the presence of God can be found — Revelation 21.
Imagine you’ve got a friend who lives in London, and occasionally you like to meet up. So you take a day trip to London. You get the first train out of Scarborough at 5-whatever-it-is. Eventually you end up at King’s Cross, meet with your friends, spend some time with them, do some nice things, and get back to Scarborough at 11:00 at night. A lovely day out, but it’s exhausting. Imagine that every time you meet them, you always go to London. They say it’s too cold on the Yorkshire coast. I’m not. You come, you come. You say, “All right, train it is — you don’t mind, because what a joy to see them.” And then one day, though, wouldn’t it be lovely if they say, “I’ll come to you. It’s all right. We’ll meet up in Peasholm Park.” You said, “That’s nice. I can get there. Enjoy! What a treat!” With Jesus the Branch, God says to us, “I’ll come to you. You don’t have to make the trip. I’ll come to you.”
Now, even with the Old Testament temple, actually, that was God saying, “I’ll come to you.” God doesn’t live in a temple. God lives in heaven. And the fact there is anywhere on earth that we can meet with God is God condescending. It’s God saying, “I’ll come down to you.” But we don’t have to make the trip to Jerusalem anymore. You can meet with God anywhere. You can pray to the risen Jesus wherever you are. Wherever you are on the planet, you can find your local church and go. That’s the living temple. God’s Spirit in your heart, wherever you are, at any time of day or night. God says, “I will come to you.” Jesus builds the true temple.
3. Jesus brings peace
Number three: Jesus brings peace. Let’s have a look at verse 13 again. “It is he who will build the temple of the Lord. He will be clothed with majesty. He will sit and rule on his throne, and he will be a priest on his throne, and there will be harmony between the two.” Because of Jesus’s reign as priest, there will be harmony, shalom, between the two. Between which two? Not, I think, between priest and king — true that is — I dish harmony between heaven and earth.
Political leaders come, political leaders go. Some countries have elections, others have coups, some have dictators who eventually die. Royal families succeed, royal families change. Leaders come and go. It’s very, very rare that the arrival of a new leader genuinely brings peace, because some people will be in favour of this new leader and some will not. And so divisions are highlighted, nations are at war, people in European cities riot on the streets, you have quarrels at home. Peace is the thing we long for in our hearts. War and disruption are everywhere, until the Branch comes. And when this Branch comes, there will be harmony, peace, true peace between the two, between whichever two need to be brought together.
Let me read you a few verses, familiar verses to many of us, of Scripture. Isaiah 9:6: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he’ll be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the greatness of his government and of peace there will be no end. He will reign on David’s throne over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever. The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this.”
Micah chapter 5: “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from old, from ancient times. He will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God. And they will live securely, for then his greatness will reach to the ends of the earth, and he will be our peace.”
Romans 5:1: “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Ephesians 2: “For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one” (there it is) “and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to those who were far away” (remember that) “and peace to those who were near; for through him we both had access to the Father by one Spirit.”
Or Colossians 1: “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”
So: Jesus is our priest-king. Jesus builds the true temple. Jesus brings true and lasting peace.
4. Jesus gathers the nations
Four: Jesus gathers the nations. Verse 15: “Those who are far away will come and help to build the temple of the Lord.” “Help to build” is trying to capture the idea of — literally, they are building in the temple. So these people are not building the temple; that’s been done for them. They’re building in the temple. Hence, “help to build.”
So Zerubbabel built the temple in Jerusalem. Jesus comes, builds the true temple, and then those who are far away will come to join in doing their own building, on the foundation of the Lord Jesus himself, building in his temple. Those who are far away: that’s the Gentiles, the nations of the world. We just heard from Ephesians chapter 2. This is the natural outworking of the peace that Jesus began to bring. Instead of nations fighting each other, Jesus gathers us. He brings us together. It’s not as an end in itself. He gathers us together so that we can join in the building of the temple.
This is an astonishingly complete picture of Jesus given in the Old Testament: the priest-king builds the true temple, brings the peace, gathers the nations, all in this one little correlation. My instinctive reaction as I read this description of Jesus: it leads me to worship him; it leads me to say, “This is a wonderful portrait of Jesus, and I love him”. This is a good reaction. But there are also some clues in this passage as to how God wants the people of Zechariah’s day to respond to this in some specific ways, and wants us to respond. Therefore, let’s not miss the way that Jesus himself would like us to respond.
(a) Gaze
Firstly, he wants us to gaze. I love this bit. Verse 12: “This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘Here is the man whose name is the Branch.’” Literally, “Behold the man, the Branch his name.” So Zechariah here is like the MC, the master of ceremonies. So he brings out Joshua. He places the crown on his head. He gestures towards him and he says, “Behold the man, the Branch is his name,” and all the people erupt in cheers.
Now, this might remind you of a story later in the Bible, in John’s Gospel chapter 19. Let me read for you, verse 4: “Pilate came out and said to the Jews gathered there, ‘Look, I am bringing him out to you to let you know that I find no basis for a charge against him.’ When Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe, Pilate said to them, ‘Here is the man’” — literally, “Behold the man.” “As soon as the chief priests and their officials saw it, they shouted, ‘Crucify! Crucify!’”
What a macabre twist. This time, it’s not Zechariah, it’s Pilate. Gesturing to Jesus with the crown on his head: “Behold the man.” And the crowd erupts into cheers. The crown is not a crown of silver and gold. It’s a crown of thorns. And the cheers are not cheers of admiration, but a call for his death.
Zechariah and Joshua act out what happens as the Branch is crowned with silver and gold. When it happens for real, it’s with thorns. It’s a very twisted fulfilment of this scene. It’s one that you would not guess was coming if you read Zechariah chapter 6. You’d never see it coming. But what actually happens in John 19 is not less glorious than this. It is more glorious. Here is the one crowned priest. Pilate thinks the crown is a joke. It’s not. Here is the one who is our sacrifice for him. Let’s see.
Of course, he’s not wearing the crown of thorns now. One weird little grammatical thing about this passage: the word for crown is plural. So, literally, “make silver and gold crowns and put it (singular) on him.” It doesn’t make grammatical sense, but it does make sense. One of the songs we sing in church sometimes: “Crown him with many crowns.” One crown on his head is not enough. Where did that song get that from? Well, maybe from Revelation 19. Revelation 19 verse 11: “I saw heaven standing open. There before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and wages war. His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns.” And so Zechariah says: behold the man. Stop, gaze, admire.
(b) Celebrate
Second response: celebrate. Let’s go back to the four people who contributed to this crown. “Take silver and gold from the exiles Heldai, Tobijah and Jedaiah, who have arrived from Babylon, and go the same day to the house of Josiah son of Zephaniah.” These are the people who have just brought this gift of silver and gold. Maybe they coordinated the gift back in Babylon. Maybe even a sizeable chunk of this donation is their personal gift. We don’t know. What happens when the crown — and the drama is finally finished? Verse 14: “The crown will be given to Heldai, Tobijah, Jedaiah and Hen son of Zephaniah as a memorial in the temple of the Lord.” The same four people (Hen was probably just a nickname for Josiah, reflecting his character – he was a kind and gracious man). The same four people.
Let me just rearrange the words of the sentence slightly in verse 14. You’ll see what’s going on. “The crown will be in the temple of the Lord as a memorial to Heldai, to Tobijah, Jedaiah and Hen.” So the crown will go in the temple as a memorial. We’ll come back to that. But it’s a memorial for the people who made it happen. So every time they go to the temple, they get to be encouraged. They get to see the crown that their gift made possible. There it is. And they get to be reminded and reassured that their investment in God’s plan, their generosity, was worthwhile.
It’s like the plaque that goes on a building, maybe a church like ours, we decide to build ourselves a church building, and one person, someone really generous, donates over half the cost to make that possible. We want to honour them. So as you go into the entrance, there on the wall is a plaque saying, “This building was made possible by the generosity of many people, but particularly of …” — and you put the person’s name. As you go in, you see the plaque, and you remember that this was how it came to be. Every time those four walk into the temple, they go, “There’s the crown, we do that,” and it puts a smile on their faces.
People in this church give so generously for the kingdom of God. People give their time, their money, their talents and abilities. Such generosity. It’s a wonderful thing. God is to be encouraged. Everything you give for God’s kingdom is worthwhile. It’s to build … this.
(c) Remember
Gaze. Celebrate. Remember. It’s from time to come back to that idea of the crown and the temple being a memorial.
God stages this little drama just once, and from then on the blessings that the Branch will bring are all in the future. But the main prop from the drama, the crown itself, is there to remind them this scene really did happen, and the Branch really will.
We easily forget, too. And I’m not just talking about where you left your car keys. I’m talking about the fact that life is tough. And as you go through a really tough life, it’s so easy to lose sight of God’s grand plan. So, we can look back. We can look back to this vision in Zechariah 6. It’s acted out for us to see. We can look back to the crown of thorns and Pilate. We can look back the death of Jesus, and how he gave us a meal of bread and wine and said, “Do this in remembrance of me.” This is an emblem for us to look back. Look back so that we can see it did all happen, so that we can be reassured that everything that Jesus accomplished will come true.
Conclusion
So, this is my new favourite portrait of Jesus. I’m sure in a few weeks I’ll explain another passage of Scripture, another one. But for now, this is my favourite, because it’s a beautiful picture. It’s all in the Old Testament: Joshua the priest, crowned king as a symbol of Jesus.
The morning, if you’re not yet a Christian, don’t you just wish that all of this is actually true? That there really could be a Jesus who really was all these things. It’s not make believe. It is real. It’s the truth.
Which means that all of us are invited — invited to behold, invited to be encouraged, and to celebrate. Your work of building in his house is worthwhile. The full enjoyment of all these things is still future. Look long and hard, and remember.