Today in God's Word—December 2024
East Tallassee Church of Christ
December 22, Zechariah 5
Again I lifted up my eyes and saw, and behold, a flying scroll! - Zechariah 5:1
We might expect to find this description of Zechariah's fifth and sixth visions in Ezekiel or maybe in Revelation. Zechariah 5 is very much like the other apocalyptic literature of the Bible. An angel guide showed the prophets something that was not before his physical eyes. These images Zechariah saw in visions were symbolic. The questions and answers between the prophet and his angel guide show us that the mysterious part of the experience was much more about what the object symbolized than the object itself. The flying scroll and the woman in the basket were strange, yet identifiable enough. But what did they mean? What was the message?
Respected scholars hold different opinions about the meaning of these symbols. In this brief essay, I will suggest a possible meaning of the flying scroll and the woman in the basket. But instead of being dogmatic about the particulars, I want to stress the general principles we can take away from this strange little chapter and apply to our lives.
The flying scroll was big. It must have been unrolled for Zechariah to see that it was 30 feet long and fifteen feet wide. It was covered in writing on both sides with what the angel guide called the curse. Does the scroll represent the law with its two tablets, one of laws about our relationship with God and the other about our relationship with our fellow human beings? More specifically, is it about the curse God has pronounced on those who are guilty of breaking the laws on the two sides?
From the Garden of Eden to Mount Sinai and all the examples in between, God always promised blessings to the obedient and curses to those who disobeyed. The scroll went out over the whole land, or maybe the whole earth. The angel identified a single law on each side: stealing from a fellow human on one side, and dishonoring God by invoking his name falsely in an oath on the other. The scroll warned that the disobedient would be cleaned out (removed from the congregation of God's people by death or deported out of the land), and their houses would be destroyed. All those things surely happened when the Jews disregarded God and suffered the consequences.
As he had done for the previous visions, the angel called the prophet to wake up and lift up his eyes to see another strange sight. He saw a large basket with a heavy cover. Then Zechariah saw a woman within the basket when its lid came off. The angel told Zechariah that the woman represented the iniquity of all the people in the land. Then two women with wings like storks came and lifted the basket and the woman inside it and took it away to Shinar (or Babylon) where they built a house and a pedestal for the woman in the basket.
What if instead of a very small woman or a very large basket, the female figure inside the basket was an idol of a so-called goddess the people had worshiped? The idolaters and their idols were taken away to Babylon, and when God called the remnant back, they left their idolatry behind in Babylon. The people of God had no business staying in a place where idolatry was firmly established and shaped the lives of all the people around them. That seems to fit what we know about the Israelites and their idolatry, and the consequences they suffered when they disobeyed God's plain commands that forbade making or worshiping idols.
Whether you agree or not with those possible meanings of these visions, the abiding principles are clear. People in a covenant relationship with God are blessed when they obey and cursed when they disobey God's commands. God is patient, but he means what he says.
Idols of any kind (not just statues) violate God's law and betray our professed love of God. Through Christ and his perfect sacrifice for us, God offers us the way of escape from the ruin that idolatry and all other sins bring to our lives. People who say they have surrendered to Jesus as Lord must leave the idols behind in "Babylon" when they become servants of the Lord. Paul echoed Isaiah when he admonished us to "Go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the Lord."
We may not know for sure what all the symbols in apocalyptic style visions mean, but we can know that disobedience brings curses upon us, and we have no business with any idol, with anything that turns away our hearts from loving God most and serving him only.
Copyright © 2024 by Michael B. McElroy. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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