God’s Word for You

Zechariah 9:1-4 The punishment of the wicked

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Monday, August 8, 2022

The Book of Zechariah changes with chapter 9. To begin with, the prophet calls this chapter “An Oracle,” a special kind of prophecy that is a burden as well as a joy to hear. A terrible destruction was coming; two destructions, in fact, on the lands surrounding Israel. But these would be followed by the coming of the Messiah, and from this point to the end of the book, Zechariah will turn our attention more and more to Christ, but not only to his arrival, as many prophets do, but to his work. These are prophecies of the Passion of Christ.

9 An Oracle
  The word of the LORD is against the land of Hadrach.
  It will rest upon Damascus.
  For the eye of the Lord is on mankind,
  and all the tribes of Israel,
2 and also Hamath, which borders on it,
  Tyre and Sidon, though they are very wise.

The word “Hadrach” is a long-standing puzzle in Zechariah. It only occurs here in the Bible, and even though studies in the history of the Assyrian people suggest a land called Hatarikka, Luther was wise to simply and brilliantly identify the word with the name that follows, which is Damascus. This is the way parallelism works in Biblical Hebrew, so that if one term falls out of use, the parallel word is still known and understood by everyone.

The Lord’s eye is on mankind. This is partly in the way that he judges and sees the sins of all people, but more than that is meant. The Lord will soon give his eye, his consideration, his light—his holy Son—to all mankind. The powers at the moment were Damascus in the far north, Hamath to the northeast, Tyre and Sidon to the northwest. All of these kingdoms will fall, but another kingdom will rise, the kingdom of the Son of God.

3 Tyre has built for herself a stronghold
  and heaped up silver like dust,
  and gold like the clay of the streets.
4 But behold, the Lord will strip away her possessions
  and strike her power into the sea,
  and she will be consumed by fire.

The story of Tyre is one of many, but here the prophet shows that the Lord has control over all things, all of history, and every queen, king, and kingdom fall into his holy purpose. Tyre had been conquered by Babylon in the recent past; one of the places that fell as Jerusalem was falling to Nebuchadnezzar’s golden crown, drinking the cup of defeat (Jeremiah 25:22,28). Again Tyre fell, after Zechariah’s time, to Alexander the Great “who plundered many nations until the earth became quiet before him” (1 Maccabees 1:3). When the people of the city withdrew to their island fortress a mile from the shores of Lebanon, he broke apart the buildings of their former city and threw the rubble into the sea until his army could walk across the causeway, which is still there today, and breach the fortress’s walls. No amount of treasure in the streets could keep their stronghold from falling to that one determined man.

It was the Lord, not Alexander, who stripped away the possessions of that city, tossing her power into the sea like tea into Boston harbor. It was the wrath of God that burned the buildings. It was a warning of the coming conflagration that will come when Christ returns: “I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke” (Joel 2:30). And Isaiah said: “Behold, the name of the Lord is coming from far away, burning with anger, in a column of thick smoke. His lips are full of anger, and his tongue is a consuming fire” (Isaiah 30:27). In this way, every raging, destroying fire is a little glimpse of Judgment Day, a warning to be clutched close to the heart.

The licking of flames is sometimes used along with screams and darkness and cobwebs by those who want to frighten people with images of hell. What artists and movie directors do not know and have failed to realize is that ancient art depicted those things, along with such trivialities as gargoyles in architecture, not to frighten people, but to frighten the devil himself. Those things belong to his torment, his everlasting dungeon. Our place in heaven has none of that; nothing frightening at all. But his place of torment is the “pit” of hell. “The angel opened the pit of the abyss, and smoke came up out of the pit like the smoke from a huge furnace” (Revelation 9:2).

Bible scholars have been divided for a long time as to whether or not the fire of hell, together with Isaiah’s “worm” (Isaiah 66:24), are physical or spiritual. Will the devil and his angels, together with the wicked, be burned with physical fire, or will it be supernatural, modified by God to be an instrument of continuous torture?

The first view has strong support. First, when interpreting Scripture, we must not depart from the literal sense of the words unless the words themselves tell us that we are reading a parable, a vision, a dream, etc. Second, the descriptions of hell mention sulfur (Revelation 9:17; Ezekiel 38:22), smoke (Joel 2:30; Isaiah 34:10), flames (Isaiah 66:15-16; Psalm 140:10), and fuel for hellfire (Jeremiah 51:58; Habakkuk 2:13), and therefore it would be a physical fire. Also, fire burns the physical bodies of humans, and therefore it will be a physical fire in hell.

The second view, that this will not be a physical fire but a supernatural one, also has strong support. First, the Scriptures say that the elements themselves will be burned up in the final judgment (2 Peter 3:10). Second, Jesus describes hellfire as eternal in Matthew 25:41. But material fire is not eternal. Also, Hellfire will affect demons and souls in hell, but material fire cannot affect spirits

A third opinion is that the fire will not be fire “in the proper sense” but in order “to signify the very severe torments and sorrows of the damned.”

A fourth opinion, that of Johann Gerhard and regarded by many to be the most secure one, is that we would prefer to suspend our judgment rather than say anything certain. “We do not doubt,” says Gerhard, “that divine power can cause physical fire to torment demons and disembodied souls. But whether that fire will be really physical, material, and visible, or nonphysical, invisible, and immaterial, we leave undecided… and we earnestly pray that God may not give us any knowledge of this through experience.”

Why concern ourselves with these things? There are false teachers both ancient and modern who reject the Bible’s warning of eternal punishment (Matthew 25:41, 25:46; 2 Thessalonians 1:9; Jude 1:7,13). They imagine that there will be a restoration of all. Origen speculated that “sin will no longer rule in anyone when the devil and his angels will be handed over to eternal fire.” Some Catholics and many other modern theologians have embraced this as well. For them, hell is only a hypothetical punishment, or a relative one, where people will suffer until they improve. It is virtually the identical position as that of purgatory.

But the Bible does not teach the restoration of the damned, nor does it teach the annihilation of the damned. 1 Corinthians 15:25 says that Christ will reign “until he has put all his enemies under his feet.” If this means that Christ’s enemies are subjected to him in a good sense, that is to say, brought to faith in him, then what does verse 26 mean when it says that “the last enemy to be destroyed is death”? Will death be restored to be a part of our eternal existence as well? Will death sit at the table with us in heaven and be a part of our existence, until not one person remains, because death takes all in the end because it is never satisfied (Proverbs 27:20)? These things embrace the impossible and the unscriptural. The wicked are punished because of unbelief, and their punishment endures forever.

Just as punishment for sin is an eternal punishment, so also rescue from hell and the grave is eternal. We are saved by faith in Christ alone (Ephesians 2:8; John 3:16), for Christ was sent into the world to save it (John 3:17). There are many things we learn to trust in without thinking about them very much. We trust that gravity will work while our feet are on the ground. We trust that a car in good repair will take us where we want to go. We trust that a clock will continue to keep the time. But when we think of trusting in Christ, we trust him because of what he has done. We trust him because he bore our pain, our guilt, our shame, in his innocent flesh as he suffered and died. We trust him because he rose from the dead, the first of all who will rise later, when he calls us on the Last Day. We trust him because the Father tells us to trust him and listen to him. This trust is faith, faith that rests on the hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before the beginning of time. This is the faith that God gave to you.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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