Zechariah 12:9–10

When that hour arrives, God's dealings with Jerusalem will reach their high point, as the opening of Zechariah 14 shows. Here the point is that the nations will come under judgment. When they lay siege to it, they will find it a cup of 'trembling', or 'bewilderment'. Nothing will go the way they imagine. It will also be a 'burdensome' stone, far too heavy for them to lift or carry. At last God will act for His people and with them, and that changes everything. Verse 3 begins, 'And in that day … ' Another 'day' is going to dawn. The phrase 'in that day' comes again in verses 4, 6, 8, 9 and 11. It is the 'day of the Lord' that other prophets have spoken about.

The next verse simply states the fact, which chapter 14 later expands: in that day the Lord will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem. Here the point is not so much that He carries out His judgment, but that He declares His purpose to carry it out. He announces that when all nations come against Jerusalem, they come for their own entire and total destruction. In the prophetic picture they are certainly destroyed. But the words "I will seek to destroy" speak of the purpose in God's mind more than of the act itself.

Verse 6 tells us that the Lord uses the leaders of Judah as His burning flame against the nations that have tried to destroy His people. He promises that people will live in Jerusalem again, as they did before. So that there is no rivalry between the people of Judah and the people of Jerusalem, the Lord steps in to save "the tents of Judah" first (verse 7). But He also comes to defend the people of Jerusalem. He gives them extraordinary strength and uses them in their own deliverance (verse 8). Whatever instruments He uses, it is the Lord Himself who has stepped in, for He says, "I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem" (verse 9).

God will judge the power of man, but He will raise up His people in sovereign grace. He will destroy the nations that had come up against Jerusalem. His own power delivers His people first. This is sovereign grace to the worst of sinners — weak but beloved Judah. To all her rebellion against God she had added the scorn and rejection of her own King and Saviour.

Here the destruction — God seeking to destroy all nations that come against Jerusalem — is what brings about the conversion of the Jews. They come to recognise the One they had pierced. In short, this is the cutting off of the nations … described in the special circumstances that follow for the Jews. Suppose Jerusalem here means the church. Even then, what falls on the nations is destruction, not conversion. And if Jerusalem must in that case be the true church, why all this mourning as a fresh result of the destruction of their enemies?

The rejected Messiah is the Lord who delivers them. They look on Him whom they have pierced. There is great mourning in the land, as there once was in the valley of Megiddo. This reference to 2 Chronicles 35:22 is deeply moving. There, in the last days of their earlier history, their faithful king Josiah had fallen, and the nation mourned and wept loudly over their slain king. Here they learn to mourn in the dust, when they see that the king their nation crucified is the Lord of hosts Himself.

It was in Jerusalem that our Lord was rejected and condemned to be crucified. It was in Jerusalem that the gospel was first preached. And it is in Jerusalem that Jehovah will first begin the work of grace when He returns to Zion. Nothing could more magnify His grace and unchanging love. And nothing could more fully reveal the helpless condition of man than the fact recorded here: it is Jehovah who will pour out on His people the spirit of grace and pleas for mercy — the same Jehovah they had rejected in the person of Jesus. All things truly are of God; and so, as the apostle writes, "by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God."

Zechariah wrote this 500 years before the crucifixion. He speaks of a future time of trouble. The Gentiles will gather around Jerusalem, and God will appear on their behalf when all seems lost. They will then recognise in their deliverer God the One whom they pierced. The "I" of the passage is certainly God, Jehovah of Israel. Yet if they had once "pierced" Him, He must have taken a body and come in humiliation. In whom can all this meet but in Jesus of Nazareth, the Lord God of Israel?

Through John, the Spirit records in chapter 19 about Jesus, "one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear... These things took place that the Scripture might be fulfilled... They will look on him whom they have pierced." Here we have God's own divinely given answer to our earlier question! And when Thomas (a picture of the favoured remnant of Israel in a future day) saw the wounds — looking on the Pierced One, risen from among the dead — he exclaimed, "My Lord and my God!"

God seeks to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem. That destruction is given here as the occasion of the conversion of the Jews — when they come to recognise Him whom they had pierced.

This grief has no equal. To deepen the sense of the sorrow, it is called bitterness for Him, like the bitterness of one grieving for a firstborn. Blessed grief, we may add. It shares in that sorrow according to God, which produces a repentance no one regrets, and its end will prove to be light, blessing, and joy. Such weeping may last for the night, but joy will come in the morning.

Their fathers' guilt and the nation's sin, which they are tied to, will become plain to them. Looking on Him whom they as part of Israel pierced, they will mourn. What an awakening there will be! Centuries of national unbelief judged in a moment... Their mourning is not the bitterness of despair, as if they had learned there is no hope. It is the sorrow of broken hearts at discovering the love He had shown them, and their rejection of it.

What a day it will be when the Spirit of grace and supplication comes on the remnant of His people, and they see Him appear in the clouds of heaven and know Him by the pierced side! The great vision Saul had on the road to Damascus will then be repeated. The young Pharisee saw Him as one "untimely born." In his own experience he was the pledge that the remnant of the nation Paul belonged to would one day pass through the same experience.

Revelation announces that all the tribes of the earth will wail because of Him — not in repentance, but because it seals their doom, and they realise it.