Zechariah 12-13 Q&A with Carl Matthei

Firstly, we've got a question from Naomi.

Thanks, Naomi.

Thinking about Zachariah as a whole, Is Zachariah's sampling from the past, from different events of the Bible, is that unique to him compared to other prophets? Is it more than just kind of understood imagery that was known at the time? What are your thoughts, Carl?

Yeah, thanks.

It's a helpful question, isn't it? Because we saw this week during the Bible talk that Zechariah is doing it a lot.

He's reaching back into past history to quote events and to quote from the former prophets.

So in a way, he's teaching us how to understand the earlier part of the Bible, which is really helpful, isn't it? So if we understand Zechariah well, we'll understand the earlier prophets and the history books of the Old Testament.

So is it just something that all the prophets do? Well, in a sense, I think the latter prophets, the ones towards the end of the Old Testament, there's 12 of them there, I think they're often doing this.

They're using the imagery of the earlier prophets and the national imagery of the Exodus and things like that project forward another great rescue that God's going to bring about that will be fulfilled by the Lord Jesus.

So it's not unique to Zechariah, but Zechariah, I think, does it perhaps more obviously than nearly any other latter prophet.

And Zechariah obviously does it well because he's just so quoted in the gospels and so the gospel writers obviously think zachariah is the way to understand what jesus is