The Coming Messiah Who Can Save Us from Our Greatest Threats

We started last week with an Advent sermon, that is, meaning that time in the church calendar where our thoughts are being shifted towards Christmas. And we talk particularly in this time about the promises of God's word in the Old Testament, and how those came to fruition at the arrival of Jesus. And so last week we looked at Isaiah 40, the great shift in Isaiah's writing, where he says to the people, "Comfort, comfort, my people," says your God. "Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, telling her that her warfare, her striving has ended, and that her sins have been paid for doubly." It's a wonderful illustration, a wonderful example of what Jesus would come to do ultimately in His death and resurrection.

But this morning we stay within the realm of Old Testament prophecy by going to Zechariah, who is known as a minor prophet, one of the prophets that came after Isaiah, and particularly he existed and lived in the time of the return of the exiles from Babylon. So Isaiah 40 last week was talking to exiles in Babylon, saying that there is a hope that they can look forward to, that there would be comfort for them one day. And now Zechariah, maybe some seventy odd years later, says something again to the people of Israel. We're going to look at Zechariah chapter 6, verses 9 through 15. Zechariah 6:9.

"And the word of the Lord came to me, who is Zechariah: take from the exiles Heldai, Tobijah and Jedaiah, who have arrived from Babylon. And go the same day to the house of Josiah, the son of Zephaniah. Take from them silver and gold and make a crown, and set it on the head of Joshua, the son of Jehozadak, the high priest. And say to him, thus says the Lord of hosts: behold the man whose name is the branch, for he shall branch out from his place, and he shall build the temple of the Lord. It is he who shall build the temple of the Lord and shall bear royal honour and shall sit and rule on his throne."

"And there shall be a priest on his throne and the council of peace shall be between them both. And the crown shall be in the temple of the Lord as a reminder to Heldai, Tobijah, Jedaiah, and Hen, the son of Zephaniah. And those who are far off shall come and help to build the temple of the Lord. And you shall know that the Lord of hosts has sent me to you, and this shall come to pass if you will diligently obey the voice of the Lord your God." So far the reading.

If you have no idea what's going on, that's okay. We're going to flesh that out a little bit. Just as a way of context and explanation, what we find here in Zechariah 6:9-15 is what is regarded as a sign oracle. So this is a piece of prophecy that is being made, but there is a physical sign involved with this. There was this receiving of silver and gold, of the forming of a crown, of the coronation of this priest, and then with that a prophetic statement is made about what will happen next, what this represents.

So this is called a sign oracle. Now, of the Old Testament prophets, often acted out their sermons in this sort of way. You might remember Isaiah who walked around Jerusalem naked and barefoot for three years as a sign against taking and receiving Egypt's help. Isaiah 20:2-4. The prophet Jeremiah wore a yoke around his neck to portray the submission that Judah would go into under Nebuchadnezzar.

Jeremiah 27. The prophet Ezekiel carried his baggage through a hole in the wall of Jerusalem to symbolise the capture of Jerusalem and the exile of its citizens. And so this is another one of those very visible prophetic statements that is being made. But what is being said? Well, there are, I want us to look at three points, three things.

The first is this priest king who is being crowned, particularly verses 10 through 13. Starting at that passage, verse 10, we see three names being mentioned: Heldai, Tobijah, and Jedaiah. They are seemingly Jewish exiles returning from Babylon. These are very Jewish names. They are returning from Babylon, the passage says.

They come to Jerusalem, however, with gold and silver that they want to dedicate to God. God tells Zechariah to take this gold, this silver, to make a crown out of it, and he must go and crown the high priest, Joshua, son of Jehozadak, with this crown. Now the coronation of this high priest appears to be symbolic, because at no point in the Israelite history was there ever an idea of a priest serving in the temple that was ever crowned a king. Those two offices, those two roles never crossed paths in that way.

In a legal sense, this has never happened before, that a priest would be named the new king of the Jewish people. But even this sign oracle, this prophecy made with real objects to real people, is surprising. Why? Well, because there is this idea that the two roles, king and priest, become one. And while he is anointing this priest, while he is coronating this priest, he says to this priest, he is to say to this priest, "Behold the man whose name is the branch."

That's a very curious sort of thing to say. But for Jews of that time, and certainly after this, these are two reasons that people believe that the Messiah is being talked about here. The Messiah is, again, a Hebrew word which means "anointed one," and this mysterious figure of the anointed one, the Messiah, is mentioned by other prophets as well, not just Jeremiah. He is referred to as the branch in other prophecies, because, well, he would stem up from the branch or the stump that was David's lineage, King David, the great king. For example, we see in Jeremiah 23:5, "Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely.

He shall judge and execute justice and righteousness in the land." Or Jeremiah 33:15, another passage: "In those days and at that time, I will cause a righteous branch to spring up for David, and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land." So what we see is there is this idea of a good king coming. A king who reigns with justice and righteousness, but his name is branch. And so we should take the crowning of the priest here, Joshua, the son of Jehozadak, as a metaphor which calls him the branch, but really is a reference to the Messiah.

But apart from indicating the hope of a new king, the identity of this priest king that might come, there's another element that is also being mentioned here. Not only is God indicating who this person is, but also what he will do. This king will be not like King David, nor is he a high priest like Joshua. He is truly remarkable in that he is going to take and occupy the two highest offices in Israel: priest and king. Now this has never happened before. Never in the history of Israel's kings was there ever someone that had a dual office like this.

Not even the great King David. And yet, as surprising as this prophecy is for the Jews who knew their Bibles, they might also have vaguely remembered that this great King David actually also alluded to someone that would come after him, that would have something of this nature. Psalm 110, where there is a prophetic element in his psalm, a psalm written by David himself. This is what David says. Psalm 110:4, "The Lord has sworn, the Lord has promised and will not change His mind.

You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek." In Psalm 110, King David is writing to someone that will come after him, if you read the rest of the Psalm. It honours a descendant that will come. But David says this descendant will be greater than he. In fact, he calls this descendant "my Lord."

My Lord. The great King David humbles himself before one that will come after him. But what is particularly relevant is that this great descendant is given this command by God: "You will be a priest in the order of Melchizedek." And we won't open that can of worms of Melchizedek, but Melchizedek was a priest who existed in the time of Abraham. And you can go and read the Genesis account of Melchizedek, who was a priest as well as a ruler in Jerusalem.

And he existed as a priest to Yahweh, to the God of the Jewish people, before the Jewish people existed. And there's an amazing sort of overlap here. Hebrews in the New Testament will make that connection that it's actually Jesus being talked about here. But there's this incredible connection that has already been made. So the Jewish people listening to this idea of a priest king being promised in Zechariah, they will probably remember this.

So Zechariah is symbolically crowning the high priest of his day. Meanwhile, he's saying a future priest king named the branch is coming to restore Israel. Well, then we see a second thing happening in this passage, and this is what the priest king does. He rules from a new temple, and he reigns over all people. He rules over all people from that temple.

Zechariah's prophecy says that the Messiah will build the temple of the Lord, verse 12. Again, historically, we know that these exiles returning from Babylon come to a place where there is no temple. The temple of Israel had been destroyed. When they were taken into exile seventy years before, the Babylonians destroyed it, utterly levelled it. And so these exiles are coming back, and they were promised a new temple, but the people were already building a new temple.

Again, historically, there was the king Zerubbabel, the king of the Jews, who started rebuilding a second temple. And probably in the time of Zechariah, that temple is already existing. It's already there, and yet God is saying, "I am building a new temple." Curious. What is going on at this point?

Well, we can jump to another prophet of this time, a contemporary of Zechariah. His name was Haggai, the prophet Haggai. And he says the same thing. In fact, he sort of elevates it even more and says there will come a new temple that is going to outdo all the other temples, this one that is in existence now, but certainly even the great temple of King Solomon.

Have a look at this, Haggai 2:6. If you can read that, "For thus says the Lord of hosts: yet once more, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth, and the sea and the dry land, and I will shake all nations, so that the treasures of all nations shall come in. And I will fill this house with glory, says the Lord of hosts. The silver is mine and the gold is mine, declares the Lord of hosts.

The latter glory of this temple shall be greater than the former, says the Lord of hosts. And in this place, I will give peace, declares the Lord of hosts." So here we go. Zechariah and Haggai say a new temple will come, and it will outdo not only the current temple that had been built by Zerubbabel, the king of the Jews, but also the glory of the great temple of King Solomon, which was one of the ancient wonders of the world. One that has more glory than this one. The latter glory, he says, of this temple shall be greater than the former.

Now history tells us that as the Jews came back from the exile in Babylon, and they settled again in the land, and they settled in Jerusalem, some saw the new temple that had been built by faithful people, by people that did come and give gold and silver to restore or to rebuild the temple. But they realised when they see it, it is far more insignificant, far more humble than the great temple of Solomon. So much so that the Bible says some of the old people who had been alive to see the first temple before it was destroyed by the Babylonians, seeing this new temple, they cry for days because it is a shadow of the splendour of the earlier one. God says, God promises that a priest king is coming who will build a glorious temple that will outshine anything else.

And this temple will not simply be for the Jewish people. This is the other amazing thing that's been said in this passage. Verse 15 says that all those who are far off will come and help build this temple. The Hebrew word is referring here to the nations, to the Gentiles, to the non-Jews, those who were outside traditionally of God's people Israel. And so we find another twist.

This temple will not only be for the Jews, but now for anyone in the world. In fact, God adds, when you see these Gentiles coming into the glorious temple, then you will know that Zechariah has really been speaking in My name. So after all of these great facts, these great truths are coming in, we're left with a question: okay, so how does this piece together? We're left with these two questions: who is this priest king?

And where or how does he build his temple? Well, the third point I want to propose is that Jesus was this man. That Jesus was the prophet, the priest, and the king mentioned even in Zechariah, and that he is building a living temple. There are two great truths that we learn in the Bible. Two systemic, systematic truths that we must realise.

The first is we are told who God is. Right? In the Bible, we're told who God is. And the second great truth we are told is who we are. Who God is, who we are.

And we take the collection of all the biblical accounts of the human condition, of who we are. One of the things the Bible reveals is all the problems with us. There are many good things the Bible will also say about us, but there are many terrible things. And from all the things that the Bible tells us about ourselves, you could categorise those problems into three broad categories that put us, that shows us in a perilous condition, a perilous situation. Three problems.

A problem of ignorance, a problem of guilt, and a problem of corruption. Ignorance, guilt, corruption. Our first problem, the Bible says, is that we don't know. We are ignorant. Romans 1:21 says our foolish hearts are darkened by something called sin.

Genesis 6:5 says our thoughts are continually evil. This is the human condition. Ephesians 4:17 says our minds are clouded by sin and we are ignorant of the things of God. Romans 1:25, we exchange the truth of God for a lie. Second Corinthians 4:4, our minds are blinded by the God of this age.

We are ignorant. And apart from God's intervention, humanity is like a blind man in a drunken state, groping through life, tripping over themselves and destroying themselves in that position of unwillingness to go to the light of God's revelation. So that's the first major problem with us: our ignorance. Secondly, we are guilty. Specifically, we are guilty of death.

Humanity has sent a death sentence that hangs over our heads even if we don't believe it. Not only are we stumbling around in ignorant darkness, in our rebellion against God, but the more terrifying threat is that we are doomed to an eternal death, an eternal damnation. Romans 3:23, the wages of sin is death. The payment that we pay for our sin is our life. We live under this weight of the penalty of our many breaches from the breaking of the unchanging laws of God.

The laws that, no matter how many things we tweak in our justice system today, remain unchanged. The holy law of God condemns us because we realise we have breached them. And not only are we guilty of our own violations, our own individual violations, whether that is in our thoughts, in our feelings, in our hands, we are also rendered guilty because of the sin that we have inherited from our ancestors, Adam and Eve, when they rejected God and set us on the trajectory towards this death. Because of our guilt, there is no way that we can live in the presence of a holy God. And one day, when God comes to settle accounts, when God comes to establish that justice that He talks about, to rule with righteousness, He must deal with that.

And so Psalm 130:3 expresses this situation, this threat with heartbreaking clarity, and we dealt with Psalm 130 not so long ago. "Oh Lord, if You kept a record of our sins, who could stand?" So the many messages of the Bible concerning our situation as humans says that we are not only ignorant, and that we forgo the knowledge of God, but we are truly guilty within that ignorance. Ignorance is not an excuse. And so the punishment of that guilt is completely on us.

And then the third category, the third great problem, as taken as a collective truth in Scripture, is that we are corrupted. Psalm 51:5 says that we are sinful from birth. Psalm 14:1-3 says that every faculty of our heart, our mind, our passions, our actions are tainted by sin. So much so that we can't help ourselves but sin. We are corrupted in every part of us.

It is the guilt, and it is the pollution from this sin that leads to the misery of life. Romans 3:17 says we have no peace with God or with our neighbour. Ephesians 2 says we are dead in our transgressions and sins. Dead men can't tell themselves to live. A dead heart can't tell itself to love God and honour their neighbour.

We are without hope, and we are without God in this world, Ephesians 2:12 says, because of this corruption within us. Those are the three great threats: ignorance, guilt and corruption. But here's the great news. In other parts of Scripture, we find how God is planning to rescue that, to redeem humanity. And the amazing thing, the thing that gives me goosebumps is realising how He does this in this three-fold way that we see even in Zechariah.

All throughout Scripture, we're shown humanity's greatest threats are these three things. And from the earliest times, God chose a small nation called Israel, and He raised them up as a nation to be His, as a billboard to the rest of the world saying, "I am saving the world." And He gives them these three officers: prophet, priest and king. And they correlate with these great threats of humanity. Listen to this.

Against our ignorance, God gives prophets to give revelation. Against our guilt, God sends priests to wash away sin through the sacrifice. Through the king, God defends against corruption of enemies from outside and even the enemies from within, defending and pushing back. In the three-fold office in Israel, God is redeeming people. Friends, I'm here to tell you the good news.

That what Zechariah was showing in this passage, where we see Zechariah the prophet revealing the will of God, we see the priest being crowned, and we see the king being established. This priest king in Jesus Christ, born five hundred years after this event. In Him, that three-fold ministry is found perfectly to solve our greatest problems. As prophet, Jesus comes to give the perfect teaching that is going to enlighten our world. He says, "I am the light of the world."

John 12:49, He comes and He says, "I am a prophet. I have not spoken of My own authority, but the Father who sent Me has Himself given Me a commandment, what to say and what to speak. And I know that His commandment is eternal life. What I say therefore, I say as the Father has told Me." Jesus is a prophet like Zechariah, but He is better.

He reveals the will of God for humanity, and He enables us by His Spirit to be enlightened. So He leads us out of this first problem of our ignorance. Secondly, Jesus is a priest. This case is made magnificently in the book of Hebrews, where it explains how the death of Jesus was the sacrificial act that was being portrayed in the Old Testament system. Hebrews 7:23.

"The former priests, Hebrews 7:23, the former priests were many in number because they were prevented by death from continuing in office." So in other words, they were human. They kept dying and new priests had to come. "But He who is Jesus holds His priesthood permanently because He continues forever. Consequently, He is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them.

For it was indeed fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens. He has no need like those former high priests to offer sacrifices daily, first for His own sins, and then for those of the people, since He did this once for all when He offered up Himself." Jesus is the high priest like Joshua, son of Jehozadak, but He is better. He saves to the utmost those who come to Him. And then thirdly, Jesus is king.

And like the kings of old, like David and Solomon, like those kings defended their people from the corruption of enemies within and without, they were the defenders of God's people. When Jesus appears to His disciples after His great and powerful resurrection, He says to them, "What? All authority on heaven and earth is Mine. In other words, I own everything. I rule over everything.

The apostle Paul will later write, "Christ is reigning now until every enemy is placed under His feet." The last of these enemies is sin and death. In other words, Jesus right now is in the process of destroying every enemy that has come against humanity. Every enemy that has come against His people, He is destroying, and the last of these enemies will be sin when He forgives, when He restores, and will be the resurrection, when He breaks the curse of death. So this brings us to that final question.

If Jesus is this priest king, what is the temple? And where will it be built? Well, the Bible says the temple is us. It is the people who Christ has saved. The promise in Zechariah was that the temple will be built by the Messiah. But it would be a temple not simply for the Jews any longer; it would be for all people.

That those from afar would enter it, would take possession of it. Then Jesus arrives and He says in John 12:32 before He goes to the cross, "When I am lifted up from the earth to the cross, I draw all people to Myself." Earlier, He says, "You can destroy this temple," and He points to the temple of Herod, "you can destroy this temple, but I guarantee in three days, I will raise it up again." And they say, "This has taken forty-seven years to build this temple. How can You do it in three days?"

And He's talking about His body. What He will bring into reality now through His death and His resurrection. Here we sit in Australia, not a single Jewish person here, I believe. And we belong to God through Jesus Christ. Because of this promise, people will come from afar to build this temple.

The church is the collection of Christ's saved people. Our hearts, our bodies become the dwelling place for God. Paul finally says in First Corinthians 3, "Do you not know that your body is God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?" The physical temple, in other words, the one that had been built in Zechariah's time, well, I can tell you that has been destroyed even again. Now, it does not exist.

There is no physical temple. Where is the glory of this promise? Where is the glory of this great temple that will come? Well, the glory is found in you. The glory is found in me.

Because God's Spirit dwells in us, where God's Spirit only dwelt in the Old Testament in the temple in Jerusalem, God's Spirit dwells with all of us. A small insignificant building in Zechariah's time is surpassed by a magnificently glorious living temple of millions of souls tied together in unity, professing their love of a faithful Saviour. Friends, in Jesus Christ, we find the only one, the only one who could save us from our greatest threats: ignorance, corruption, and guilt, because He is the perfect prophet, priest, and king. So as we look towards Christmas, at the arrival of that precious, precious gift, a priest king is coming, we hear, and He will build a new temple, and all the people of the world will see the glory of God when it happens. And when they see it, they will say, "God has truly spoken."

Let's pray. Thank You, Lord, for the richness of Your word. We thank You for its consistency, but more than that, for its urgency. That it has come, that it has been given to us in order to tell us of a great truth. That there is a God who loves His people and will do anything in order to rescue them.

Lord, we know the great threat in our lives. We've experienced that at one point. Or perhaps for some of us sitting here, we are experiencing it right now because we have not received Jesus Christ as our king, as our prophet, as our priest. We feel the ignorance. We stumble around not knowing.

Lord, we feel the corruption. We feel the bite of sin. We feel the heaviness of our hearts in our guilt. Oh God, but there is so much light in Jesus. Thank You for the truth.

That one night, two thousand years ago, entered God into flesh to be a prophet, a teacher of the will of God, who said, "Repent and believe the kingdom of God has come." We thank You that He was the priest who said, "When I am lifted up, when My body is broken for you, My blood is shed, it will be for the forgiveness and the payment of sin." And we thank You, Lord, after that great resurrection, the vindication that everything You said was true. You say now, "All authority belongs to Me." So Lord, we humble ourselves to that authority.

We receive the gift of Your priestly work on our behalf. And Lord, our hearts and our minds are enlightened by Your word today. Thank You for it. In Jesus' name. Amen.