Bulletin Articles
“A Wall of Fire”
Categories: Iron sharpens iron“Jerusalem shall be inhabited as villages without walls, because of the multitude of people and livestock in it. And I will be to her a wall of fire all around, declares the Lord, and I will be the glory in her midst.” (Zechariah 2.4-5)
When Zechariah prophesied, the people of Judah had already endured a 70-year period of enforced exile from their homeland, due to the Babylonian conquest beginning in the late 7th century BC. Those exiled due to the Assyrian conquest of Israel, nearly a century and a half before, had been away far longer. When Cyrus conquered the empire in 539 BC, he allowed them all to return home, but this promise came more than 20 years later, in “the second year of Darius” (Zec 1.1), 520 BC. It was a risky and expensive trip, and it meant leaving behind homes, businesses, friends and family, and the relatively comfortable and stable lives they’d built for themselves over time. Most of them didn’t go back to take up the task of rebuilding a nation from scratch, including Jerusalem and the Temple. The Babylonians had destroyed the city’s walls, and it would be the greater part of another century before Nehemiah would come along and speed up the process of rebuilding them. This large city clearly needed to be fortified against raiding and plundering, and yet for that work to be done, people would have to move there and build. But they didn’t want to move to Jerusalem, because it had no walls! This Catch-22 scenario meant that the work on both the walls and the Temple dragged to a halt, and the great City of David remained a depressing collection of mostly empty ruins.
When God gave them this promise, he was deliberately invoking well-known events from Israel’s history. God appeared in a “pillar of fire and of cloud” (Ex 14.24) that stood “between the host of Egypt and the host of Israel” (v20) while the waters of the Red Sea parted before them to provide their escape. Later, the psalmist described God’s relationship with this city:
As the mountains surround Jerusalem,
so the Lord surrounds his people,
from this time forth and forevermore. (Psalm 125.2)
What about God’s glory in Israel’s midst? There are several options for this one, but the most appropriate comparison would be the dedication of Solomon’s Temple, when
a cloud filled the house of the Lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord. (1 Kings 8.10-11)
But this last one introduces a bit of a problem to our interpretation. It’s not that we’ve been reading it wrong; God did, in fact, bless and protect the Jews and Jerusalem. He thus enabled them to build a majestic Temple complete with implements of immense value in gold—in a city with no wall to protect its inhabitants! Even after the walls were rebuilt by Nehemiah much later, the city continued to expand in size, just as God said it would do, to the point that it overflowed its walls repeatedly. At various times over the next few centuries, most of its inhabitants were outside of them, and might as well have been living in “villages without walls” until another wall could eventually be built to protect a larger and larger area. The nation did indeed re-establish itself and regain some degree of respect from its neighbors.
But it was never like the good old days, when David was king and no other power could challenge his might. But the greatest discrepancy comes when we consider the last in this string of promises—that God’s glory would again be seen in Jerusalem. In the metaphorical sense, perhaps we could say that Jerusalem recaptured its former glory, but that’s really not what God promised. The primary audience for Zechariah’s prophecy expected the cloud of the Presence to reside in the Temple again. And that never happened.
Did God fail to keep his promise, then? No. It’s not that we’ve been reading it wrong, but the fulfillment, at least in Jerusalem’s growth and renewed prosperity, was a bit underwhelming, considering the way God presented it. That’s because what God really meant was bigger and better than they could have imagined. This promise involves us. A few verses later, we find this:
And many nations shall join themselves to the Lord in that day, and shall be my people. And I will dwell in your midst, and you shall know that the Lord of hosts has sent me to you. (Zechariah 2.11)
Who’s the “me” of this verse? The prophet Zechariah? Zechariah will dwell in their midst? Whoop-tee-doo. Is it, instead, the angel who was introduced earlier in the chapter? We’re closer here, and can understand why the Jews of the late 6th century BC might interpreting it this way, but one would hope they at least furrowed their brow when they said it. In fact, it’s ultimately about Christ. The whole thing was about Christ. His kingdom grows constantly, starting at Jerusalem. It has no borders to confine it. He is himself her protector, and an ever-expanding wall about her, guarding her against predators with a fiery fury. And not only did he walk the streets of Jerusalem and in that city die and rise again, but now, in the New Jerusalem—the church—he dwells in our midst.
The promises meant something to the returned exiles and their near future, but in the greatest sense it was always about Christ. The exile is the world; Jerusalem is his kingdom, tasked with building his house and glorifying him. What are we to do about all of this? Zechariah tells us: “Up! Escape to Zion, you who dwell with the daughter of Babylon” (Zec 2.7).
Jeremy Nettles
