PT-1 The Human Conqueror (Zech. 9:1)

SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/20/2016 9:09 PM

My Worship Time                                                                  Focus:  PT-1 The Human Conqueror

Bible Reading & Meditation                                     Reference:  Zechariah 9:1

            Message of the verses:  “1 The burden of the word of the LORD is against the land of Hadrach, with Damascus as its resting place (for the eyes of men, especially of all the tribes of Israel, are toward the LORD),

            Let us begin by looking at the word “burden” which is the Hebrew word massa.  This word means to lift up as a burden, a heavy burden.  We see that it is the burden of the word of LORD.  This word also has been used as a great burden on that is on the back of a prophet, “And he would literally take up a cause and he would un-bear his heart, he would un-bear his burden, he would declare a woe, or a heavy judgment,” writes John MacArthur.  This word came to mean that a prophet was going to make a prediction or a threading act of judgment, or at times we see it used when we see the word “oracle” as we have seen in other OT prophets we have looked at. 

            Now as we go back to the burden we see in verse one it is against the land of Hadrach.  “A city of Syria (mod Lebanon),” as seen in the Heb. /English Dictionary.  MacArthur gives us another option on the meaning of this word:  “If you take two terms, had and rach, had means sharp and rach means soft.  And so it is the sharp soft.  You say, ‘What does that have to do with anything?’  Well, one of the finest Old Testament scholars Lupold says this is no doubt a reference to the dual kingdom that existed in that day which was the kingdom of the Medes and what?  The Persians.”  These two nations or should we say one combined nation did not start a war when Zechariah pronounces this prophecy.  These are speculative answer as to who this country was.  I believe that it meaning is from Syria as we see in the later part of verse one where we see “with Damascus as its resting place.”  Damascus is the oldest populated city in the world and there is a lot of stuff going on there today, which probably does not have anything to do with this prophecy, but there are other prophecies about Damascus in the OT prophets. 

            Syria was Israel’s worst enemy and much has not changed today.  So we see the resting place or we could say the target of this judgment is in Damascus and this judgment will hit Damascus and then it will spread.

            We see that this is where Alexander the Great comes into the picture.  MacArthur writes “At the battle of Isis, incidentally, the battle of Isis is a very, very famous battle, 333 BC.”  In this battle Alexander defeated Darius.  Now we could go back to a couple of places in the book of Daniel who predicted all of this would happen.  In the 2^nd chapter we see the statute of a great big man, and as we look at that statute we see that Nebuchadnezzar saw it in a dream and wondered what it meant.  Daniel explained that the head of gold was Babylon and then the silver part was the Medes and Persians, and the next part was the Grecian empire, followed by the Roman empire and the ten toes depict the empire headed up by the Antichrist in the end times.  So by reading Daniel we know that it would be Alexander the Great that would conquer the Medes and Persians.  We will look more closely at this in our next SD.

8/20/2016 9:37 PM