Sermon On Zechariah

When The King Comes Riding

There is something almost jarring about the way the prophet Zechariah writes. He is not a quiet, measured voice. He sees visions. He speaks of chariots and horses, of plumb lines and flying scrolls, of a priest standing before the heavenly court. The book carries the weight of a people who have come home from exile in Babylon, who have rebuilt the temple walls, and who are now asking the oldest and most honest question a returned exile can ask: Is God really going to finish what he started? They are home, but the kingdom has not come. The Persian Empire still rules. The great promises of the prophets still hang in the air, unfulfilled.

And then Zechariah speaks. And what he says is not a comfort for the faint of heart. It is a declaration. It is a claim about the future that only God could make and only God could keep.

So let us open the book together, because what Zechariah announces is not merely ancient history. It is the hinge on which all of redemptive history turns.

The Central Claim

Here is what the book of Zechariah is ultimately about: God is not finished with his people, and the King he promised is coming. Not a king like the ones they had known, who taxed them and failed them and led them into idolatry. A different kind of King. And when that King arrives, everything changes.

That is the thread we are following today through two passages that belong together. Zechariah 9:9-17 and Zechariah 12:10. Let us look at them carefully.

The King Who Comes In Humility

Zechariah 9:9 opens with a command: "Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout in triumph, Daughter Jerusalem! Look, your King is coming to you; he is righteous and victorious, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey."

Now stop right there, because this verse is doing something that would have sounded strange to any ancient hearer. Kings do not ride donkeys. Kings ride warhorses. Kings ride in chariots. A donkey is a working animal, a humble animal, the animal of a farmer or a traveler. For a king to arrive on a donkey is to arrive in a posture that no one expected and almost no one would have chosen.

But notice what the text does not strip away. It does not say he is weak. It says he is righteous. It says he is victorious. The word translated victorious here carries the idea of one who has been saved or delivered, one who comes having already won the decisive battle. And yet he comes in humility. The combination is deliberate. This is not a king who has to perform his power by riding something impressive. His power is already established. His victory is already secured. The donkey is not a sign of defeat. It is a sign of character.

The verses that follow in chapter 9 describe what this King will do. He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the warhorse from Jerusalem. He will speak peace to the nations. His rule will extend from sea to sea, from the River to the ends of the earth. This is not a local king managing a small territory. This is a King whose dominion is universal and whose peace is not the peace of exhausted armies but the peace of a covenant kept.

And then verse 11 says something that ties all of this to the oldest promises God ever made: "As for you, because of the blood of your covenant, I will release your prisoners from the waterless cistern." The blood of the covenant. That language reaches all the way back to Sinai, to the sacrifices Moses offered when God bound himself to his people in promise. Zechariah is saying that the coming of this King is not a new idea. It is the fulfillment of everything God swore he would do.

Now here is where we have to be honest about what we are reading. The original hearers of this prophecy were people who had survived exile. They knew what a waterless cistern felt like. They knew what it was to be prisoners with no hope. And Zechariah is telling them that the King who comes will not leave them there. He will release them. He will restore them. He will give them double for their trouble.

The question is: when? And how?

The Wound That Opens Everything

Turn to Zechariah 12:10. The scene has shifted. God is speaking directly: "Then I will pour out a spirit of grace and prayer on the house of David and the residents of Jerusalem, and they will look at me whom they pierced. They will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child and weep bitterly for him as one weeps for a firstborn."

This verse is startling in ways that are easy to miss if we read too quickly. God is speaking, and God says they will look at me whom they pierced. The one who is pierced is God himself. And the response is not celebration. It is mourning. Deep mourning. The mourning of a parent who has lost a firstborn child.

What is happening here? Zechariah is describing a moment of recognition. A moment when the people see what has actually taken place, and the weight of it breaks them open. They have not simply witnessed an event. They have been part of it. And when they see it clearly, they grieve.

The grief described here is not the grief of despair. Look at the beginning of the verse again. God pours out a spirit of grace and prayer before the mourning begins. The mourning is made possible by grace. It is not the grief of people who have no hope. It is the grief of people who finally understand what their sin cost, and who are being held by the God who paid that cost.

This is what genuine repentance looks like in the Bible. It is not guilt management. It is not performing sorrow in order to earn forgiveness. It is looking at the one who was pierced and being broken by what you see, while at the same time being held by the grace that was poured out before you even began to mourn.

The Gospel In Plain Sight

Now let us step back and see what we are actually holding in our hands.

The New Testament does not leave us to guess at the meaning of these passages. When Jesus entered Jerusalem on the Sunday before his crucifixion, Matthew records that he rode on a donkey, and he quotes Zechariah 9:9 directly. This was not a coincidence. This was not a symbolic gesture that the disciples invented after the fact. Jesus chose this moment. He chose this animal. He was declaring, in the clearest possible terms, that he was the King Zechariah had announced.

And when the soldiers drove nails through his hands and feet, and when the Roman soldier pierced his side with a spear, John records in his Gospel that this fulfilled the word of the prophet: "They will look at the one they pierced." The one who was pierced was not merely a good man who died unjustly. He was the one Zechariah had seen from six centuries away.

The King who came in humility, who came victorious and righteous, who came to release prisoners and establish a peace that reaches to the ends of the earth, came by way of a cross. His victory was not the victory of a general who never loses a battle. It was the victory of the one who absorbed the full weight of human sin and death and came out the other side alive.

This is the gospel. Not a program for self-improvement. Not a strategy for national restoration. The King came. He was pierced. He rose. And now, as Zechariah promised, he pours out a spirit of grace and prayer on all who look to him.

What This Means For Us

So what does a faithful response to this look like? Zechariah gives us two things worth holding onto.

First, it looks like honest mourning. The people in Zechariah 12 did not respond to the pierced one with a quick apology and a move forward. They mourned deeply. They sat with the weight of what their sin had cost. And this is not morbid. It is healthy. It is the kind of honest reckoning with our own condition that produces real change rather than surface adjustment. If you have never truly mourned over what your sin cost the Son of God, Zechariah is an invitation to do that. Not to punish yourself. Not to earn forgiveness. But because grace is not cheap, and looking at the cross honestly will break something open in you that nothing else can reach.

Second, it looks like genuine hope. The prisoners in the waterless cistern were told to return to a stronghold. Zechariah 9:12 calls them prisoners of hope. That phrase is worth carrying with you. A prisoner of hope is someone who cannot escape the conviction that God is going to finish what he started. Not because circumstances look promising. Not because the empire has fallen or the economy has turned. But because the King has come, and he does not abandon his covenant, and the blood that was shed is the blood of a promise that cannot be broken.

For those of you who are following Jesus today, this is your inheritance. You are prisoners of hope. The same King who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and was lifted up on a cross is the one who rose from the dead and who is coming again. His dominion will extend from sea to sea. His peace will cover the earth. And the spirit of grace and prayer that Zechariah promised is not a future hope only. It has been poured out. It is available now. It is what makes repentance possible and worship real.

And for those of you who are still deciding what you make of Jesus, Zechariah asks you to do one thing: look at the one who was pierced. Look honestly. Let the weight of it settle. And when it does, you will find that the mourning and the grace arrive together, because the God who was pierced is the God who pours out grace, and he does not turn away anyone who comes to him in honest need.

The King has come. The covenant holds. The prisoners are being released. That is the word of the Lord.

Sources Consulted

The Holy Bible, Christian Standard Bible. Holman Bible Publishers, 2017.

Baldwin, Joyce G. Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi: An Introduction and Commentary. Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries. InterVarsity Press, 1972.

McComiskey, Thomas Edward, editor. The Minor Prophets: An Exegetical and Expository Commentary. Volume 3. Baker Academic, 1998.

Motyer, J. Alec. "Zechariah." In New Bible Commentary, 21st Century Edition. InterVarsity Press, 1994.

Beale, G. K., and D. A. Carson, editors. Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament. Baker Academic, 2007.