Zechariah 6

The last of the night-visions opens with motion and noise: there came four chariots out from between two mountains; and the mountains were mountains of brass (v. 1). Each chariot is drawn by horses of a distinct color - red… black… white… grisled and bay (vv. 2-3) - and the whole company comes charging out from a gateway of two bronze mountains. The picture deliberately echoes the very first vision of the book, the riders among the myrtle trees who patrolled the earth (Zech. 1:8-11); the night that began with horsemen now ends with chariots, and the long sequence is being drawn to a close. The two mountains of brass - an unyielding, gleaming metal - suggest a fixed gateway out of the very presence of God, the place from which His purposes are launched into the world. We should not press each color into a rigid code; Scripture itself does not decode them here. What the scene communicates is force and dispatch: chariots, the war-machines of the ancient world, surging out under orders. The God whose presence these come from is not a distant idea but a sovereign who sends. The reader is meant to feel the energy of heaven mobilized and moving.³

When Zechariah asks the plain question - What are these, my lord? (v. 4) - the angel gives the key that unlocks the vision: These are the four spirits of the heavens, which go forth from standing before the Lord of all the earth (v. 5). Two things in that answer carry the weight. First, these chariots are heaven's agents, sent out to do God's bidding across the world; they are not loose forces of nature but servants under command. Second, and more arresting, is where they come from: from standing before the Lord of all the earth. Before they ride out, they stand in attendance, like servants awaiting orders in a throne room. They move only on dispatch. And the title given to God here is the controlling note of the whole passage - the Lord of all the earth. Not the LORD of Judah only, not a local deity hemmed in by borders, but the One whose authority covers every country these chariots will visit. The directions confirm it: the horses go into the north country and toward the south country and to and fro through the earth (vv. 6-7), reaching the lands where the great empires sat. Wherever they ride, they ride as the servants of the One who owns the ground beneath every throne.

The vision lands on a single, striking sentence. After the chariots sent toward the north return, the angel cries out: Behold, these that go toward the north country have quieted my spirit in the north country (v. 8). The north was, for Judah, the direction of dread - the road every conquering army took as it came down upon Jerusalem, and the way to Babylon, the empire that had burned the temple and carried the people off. To say the LORD's spirit is quieted in the north is to say that the matter is settled: the unrest, the threat, the unfinished reckoning with the power that humbled His people is now under His control. The word translated quieted carries the sense of a stirred-up agitation finally brought to rest, like a sea that has stopped heaving. This is the reassurance the whole battered community most needed. They were a small, exposed remnant, freshly home from captivity, ringed by powers far stronger than they. The vision tells them that the God of all the earth has already dealt with the great threat from the north - His patrols have gone out, His purpose is accomplished, and His spirit is at rest. They can build in peace.

With verse 9 the chapter shifts gears entirely. The visions are over; now comes a plain command - the word of the LORD came unto me, saying - and Zechariah is told to perform an act in the waking world. The instructions are concrete and dated, the way real history is: go that same day to the house of Josiah, and take silver and gold of three men which are come from Babylon - Heldai, Tobijah, and Jedaiah (v. 10). These are returned exiles, men of the captivity who have made the long road home and brought with them an offering of precious metal, perhaps gathered from those still in Babylon for the work of God's house. The detail matters. What is about to become a towering messianic sign is built out of the ordinary generosity of ordinary people just back from exile. The LORD does not send to heaven for gold; He sends to the gift of three named men who carried it from Babylon. There is something quietly fitting in it: the sign of the coming King-Priest is fashioned from the freewill offering of the restored remnant, the very people whose hope it is meant to anchor.

Then comes the deliberately startling instruction: Then take silver and gold, and make crowns, and set them upon the head of Joshua the son of Josedech, the high priest (v. 11). Every part of this would have stopped a faithful Israelite in his tracks. A crown - the Hebrew word here is the ornate, royal crown - belonged on the head of a king, and Judah's kings came from the house of David, the tribe of Judah. But the crowns are set on Joshua the high priest, a man of the tribe of Levi and the line of Aaron, who by every rule of the Law could never sit on David's throne. The offices were kept strictly apart for good reason; when King Uzziah once dared to take up a priest's duty he was struck with leprosy (2 Chron. 26:16-21). To crown a priest, then, is to stage something that ought not to be - and that is precisely the point. The act is a living parable, designed to provoke the question, How can a priest wear a crown? Joshua himself is not being made king; he is made, for a moment, a walking sign. The crown on the priest's head is a finger pointing forward to One in whom the impossible joining will be no violation at all but the very glory of His person. The sign hangs in the air, waiting for the word that will explain it.³

Now the word arrives that explains the crown, and it does not stay on Joshua. Zechariah is told to speak unto him a message from the LORD of hosts, and the message points past the man standing there to Another: Behold the man whose name is The BRANCH; and he shall grow up out of his place, and he shall build the temple of the LORD (v. 12). Behold the man - the eye is lifted from Joshua to a figure on the horizon. The title The BRANCH is no fresh invention; Zechariah has used it once already of God's servant (Zech. 3:8), and the prophets before him had made it a settled name for the promised son of David - a Branch shall grow out of his roots (Isa. 11:1), a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign (Jer. 23:5). So the crowned priest becomes a sign of the coming King from David's line. And note the verb: he shall grow up out of his place. The BRANCH does not seize his office by force or arrive as an import from outside; he grows, springing up organically, in his own appointed place and time, as a living shoot rises from a root. There is a quiet inevitability in the image - not the clatter of conquest but the unstoppable, patient force of something planted by God breaking into leaf.

Verse 13 gathers everything the sign promised into one dense and astonishing sentence. The BRANCH shall build the temple of the LORD - said twice for emphasis, Even he shall build the temple of the LORD - and then four things are laid on Him in a row: He shall bear the glory, He shall sit and rule upon his throne, He shall be a priest upon his throne, and the counsel of peace shall be between them both. The first three pile royal and priestly honors together on one head. He bears the glory - the royal majesty; He sits and rules on a throne - the king's seat; and yet He is a priest while He reigns - holding, in His own person, the office Israel kept utterly distinct from the crown. The last clause is the tender resolution: the counsel of peace shall be between them both. The phrase has been understood in more than one way - harmony between the two offices of king and priest now united in Him, or the peaceful accord between the LORD and His Anointed who carries them. Either way the note struck is peace. Where in Israel's history the throne and the altar could stand in tension, in the BRANCH they meet in perfect concord, and the fruit of that union is peace - a settled rightness between God and His people, secured by the One who is at once their King and their Priest.

The sign closes with the crowns themselves and a promise that opens outward. The crowns are not left on Joshua's head; they are laid up for a memorial in the temple of the LORD (v. 14), entrusted to the men who gave the silver and gold - so that the prophecy hangs in God's house as a standing witness, a kept token of the King-Priest still to come. Then the horizon widens: they that are far off shall come and build in the temple of the LORD (v. 15). The temple this BRANCH raises will not be built by the returned remnant alone; those far off - distant peoples beyond Judah's borders - will come and have a hand in it. It is a quiet anticipation of a house of God built from far more than one nation. And the chapter ends, as so much of Zechariah does, by binding promise to response: all this shall come to pass, if ye will diligently obey the voice of the LORD your God. The glorious future is sure on God's side; the call on the hearer's side is steady, attentive obedience - to diligently obey, to keep listening and keep building, trusting the word that has been given.