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Zechariah, Prophet of God's remembrance, part 30

Zechariah 11:10, 11 says,

¹⁰ I took my staff Favor and cut it in pieces to break my covenant which I had made with all the peoples. ¹¹ So it was broken on that day, and thus the afflicted of the flock who were watching me realized that it was the word of the Lord.

The staff called Favor was broken, representing the breaking of the Old Covenant that God had made with the people in Exodus 19:8. That covenant was conditional upon the obedience of the people who had sworn to obey the laws of God, yet they failed to do so. This was affirmed in Jeremiah 31:31, 32, where God spoke of a New Covenant, based on God’s vow alone:

³¹ “behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, ³² not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke…”

Hence, that covenant at Mount Horeb became “obsolete” (Hebrews 8:13). If one party breaks the terms of a conditional covenant, the other party is no longer obligated to keep it either. So Zechariah prophesied the breaking of this covenant and illustrated it by breaking a staff in the presence of witnesses who understood the significance of this event.

Betrayal

Zechariah 11:12, 13 continues,

¹² I said to them, “If it is good in your sight, give me my wages, but if not, never mind!” So they weighed out thirty shekels of silver as my wages. ¹³ Then the Lord said to me, “Throw it to the potter, that magnificent price at which I was valued by them.” So I took the thirty shekels of silver and threw them to the potter in the house of the Lord.

The prophet, acting as a prophetic type of Christ, asked the people to place a value on the work that he had done (tending the flock). Zechariah’s labor was valued at 30 shekels of silver, the price of a gored slave. Exodus 21:32 says,

³² If the ox gores a male or female slave, the owner shall give his or her master thirty shekels of silver, and the ox shall be stoned.

Zechariah’s actions prophesied of Jesus Christ and Judas, who also betrayed Him for 30 shekels of silver. Matthew 26:14, 15 says,

¹⁴ Then one of the twelve, named Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests ¹⁵ and said, “What are you willing to give me to betray Him to you?” And they weighed out thirty pieces of silver to him.

The chief priests wanted to “gore” Jesus, as it were, so they paid Judas the price of a gored slave. Yet the result of the crucifixion was the final breaking of the Old Covenant that represented the favor of God toward the people of Judah. Judah was favored in that Jesus came from that tribe and went to them first. Their rejection of His “good shepherd” ministry (John 10:11) caused them to greatly undervalue His work.

At the same time, by breaking the Old Covenant, they created the need for the New Covenant that had been prophesied. Yet the chief priests did not understand their own violations of the covenant, nor did they realize that by their rejection of Christ they had created the need for the New Covenant.

As for Judas, he represents the disciples of Jesus who disagree with the Kingdom model, especially its financial model. In Matthew 26:6-9 we read how Judas became disillusioned.

⁶ Now when Jesus was in Bethany, at the home of Simon the leper, ⁷ a woman came to Him with an alabaster vial of very costly perfume, and she poured it on His head as He reclined at the table. ⁸ But the disciples were indignant when they saw this, and said, “Why this waste? ⁹ For this perfume might have been sold for a high price and the money given to the poor.”

After Jesus corrected their faulty economics, Judas went to the chief priests to betray Jesus (Matthew 26:14, 15). The rest of the disciples received Jesus’ correction with humility. It should be noted that enemies may kill, but only a friend can betray.

Later, when Judas discovered that Jesus was not going to use His power to save Himself from crucifixion, he was filled with remorse, saying, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood” (Matthew 27:4). He then “threw the pieces of silver into the temple sanctuary” and then hanged himself (Matthew 27:5).

The Potter’s Field

In Zechariah 11:13 the prophet, “threw them to the potter in the house of the Lord.” Matthew tells us that the chief priests took the money and “bought the Potter’s Field as a burial place for strangers” (Matthew 27:7). It appears that this was a property just outside of Jerusalem that a potter had recently put up for sale. This cemetery came to be called Hakeldama, “Field of Blood” (Acts 1:19).

This field seems to be identified as the “Tophet” in Jeremiah 19:11, where the prophet broke the potter’s earthen jar, declaring it to be Jerusalem’s burial ground. So we read in Matthew 27:9, 10,

⁸ For this reason that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day. ⁹ Then that which was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled: “And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of the one whose price had been set by the sons of Israel; ¹⁰ and they gave them for the Potter’s Field, as the Lord directed me.”

Neither Jeremiah nor Zechariah wrote this prophecy. It was “spoken through Jeremiah.” It must have been an unwritten prophecy that was part of the revelation in Jeremiah 19, giving further details about the potter’s vessel that represented Jerusalem. This indicates that the Field of Blood was part of the prophecy of Jerusalem’s destruction, both in 70 A.D. and in our time as well. Further, considering Zechariah’s prophecy, it appears that this destruction is caused by the fact that they gave the good Shepherd’s work so little value. Divine judgment, then, treats Jerusalem as having the same low value—that of a gored slave.

It is clear, then, that the consequence of breaking the staff called Favor was that Jerusalem would ultimately be destroyed so completely, as Jeremiah tells us, that it “cannot again be repaired” (Jeremiah 19:11). While many Bible teachers apply the wet clay of the Potter (Jeremiah 18:1-1) to Jerusalem, they fail to understand that the city (and modern state) is actually represented by the old Potter’s vessel in Jeremiah 19.

This misunderstanding can only be explained by blindness in the church today. In fact, the belief that age to come will be a Jewish Kingdom, wherein animal sacrifices will be resumed in a temple in Jerusalem by priests of Levi assumes also that Zechariah’s Old Covenant staff will be pieced back together. Such Bible teachers in today’s Laodicean church need some spiritual eye salve, as John instructs in Revelation 3:18.