Rejoice greatly, daughter of Zion; shout, daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, thy King cometh to thee he is just, and having salvation; lowly and riding upon an ass, even upon a colt the foal of an ass.
Commentary for this verse has not been generated yet.
And I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem; and the battle-bow shall be cut off. And he shall speak peace unto the nations; and his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth.
This verse follows straight on from the King's lowly entry into Jerusalem. It turns from a donkey's colt to a disarmed world under one peaceful rule. Two questions press. When does this happen? And how does a King who comes in humility end up ruling the whole earth?
Verse 9 and verse 10 sit side by side, but the events they describe do not. Commentators read the pair as covering both of Christ's arrivals.
Verses 9 and 10 answer this question, for these two verses set before us the two comings of the Lord Jesus. The coming of the King will settle everything. But we can imagine a reader in Zechariah's day pausing at this ninth verse in amazement. With powerful enemies outside and open unfaithfulness among the Jews, he would feel that they needed some great and powerful Deliverer. And the King is announced as lowly in His person and in His approach.
The prophet never mentions what falls between these two verses.
In his prophecy Zechariah usually joins Christ's first coming on earth to His future appearing for Israel with no transition at all. He passes over the whole in-between period of the Church in silence. That period never falls inside the frame of Old Testament prophecy anyway... Chapter 9 mentions the King entering Zion exactly as the Gospels record it happening. Straight after this the Lord is rejected, yet Zechariah leaves no trace of it.
The King begins by taking weapons from His own people. The reason lies in what those weapons stood for.
First, the Messiah will remove all the false confidences of His people. He says, "I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off." All of these were symbols of human strength. They were what people leaned on in battle... In that day His people will have to learn that God alone is their refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Even Christians are slow to take that lesson in.
The two names in the verse cover the whole of a divided nation.
Ephraim headed the ten tribes as separated from Judah and Benjamin, and of course Jerusalem was the center of Judah's worship... In Jerusalem Solomon had 40,000 stalls of horses and 12,000 horsemen... The battle bow shall be cut off. How wonderful will be the day when armaments are no more!
The name Ephraim stands for the ten tribes who split away from Judah. Why does the prophet name it here?
The mention of Ephraim in this chapter, in verse 10 and again in verse 13, deserves close notice. It shows that the prophet moves from the coming of the King to the restoration of all Israel. Judah and Jerusalem are his subject, but the moment he names Ephraim he implies the restoration of the ten tribes to their own land. This will not happen until after the deliverance and blessing of Judah and Jerusalem.
Peace here comes by a word. One commentator hears an echo of a moment in the Gospels, and then maps the borders.
"He shall speak peace to the nations." This is the King of verse 9. When His voice speaks, it will be as He spoke to the raging sea, "Peace, be still" (Mark 4:39), and at once there was a great calm... "From sea to sea" means the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. The river is the Euphrates on the northeast border.
Israel's most glorious king never reached this far, which is why the words still wait.
Even more: "his rule shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth." That never happened, even under the glorious reign of Solomon. So the part of the prophecy already fulfilled is a pointer to the future glory of Christ.
David wrote the same thing centuries earlier, and it left him with nothing more to ask for.
The way this verse states His worldwide kingship matches exactly what God said through David centuries earlier in Psalm 72:8. David saw this by the Spirit, and it satisfied every desire of his heart. He had nothing left to pray for, as the last verse of that psalm tells us.
The peace promised to the nations here is not only future. Believers today hold it already.
For the Gentiles, see Zechariah 9:9-10. The One who enters Jerusalem as her King, righteous and having salvation, "shall speak peace to the nations"... He has made peace by the blood of His cross for the Jew, the Gentile, and the Church of God. So the One who will speak peace to the nations in a day still to come has already spoken it to us.
- Two comings. Verse 9 came true at the entry into Jerusalem. Verse 10 still waits, and the prophet joins the two without a word about the long gap between.
- Disarmed first. Chariot, war horse and battle bow are cut off. Every human prop is taken away, so that God alone is the refuge.
- All Israel. The prophet names Ephraim beside Jerusalem, and so points to all Israel restored, not Judah alone.
- Peace by a word. The King speaks peace to the nations the way He once spoke calm to a storm.
- Peace now. The One who will speak peace to the nations then has already spoken it to believers through the blood of His cross.