At the best it would have been a heavy task, but for that weak remnant it was overpowering. They had been bondsmen all their days, and the yoke had crushed them. Their spirit was broken, and their poor souls fainted in face of an ordeal which demanded not only a strong hand but, even more, a stout heart. It was a perilous crisis, and their supreme need, if ever they would be a nation again, was a brave leader who should rally them, inspire them with faith and hope, and nerve them to the work. And he appeared. In the providence of God the time always brings the man ; and the man at that crisis was the prophet Zechariah.
His message was a call to faith in God and to courageous endeavour. Expect great things from God : attempt great things
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for God. And it did not fail. The people's hearts leaped to the challenge, and they girded themselves to the work. Their purpose was to rebuild and restore Jerusalem; but the prophet had a larger ideal. The work was begun. A surveyor had gone forth with his measuring line to map out the ancient site — the circle of the walls, the lie of the streets, and the position of the houses — that the city might be rebuilt on the old scale and the old design. That was their ideal reconstruction ; but it was not Zechariah's.
He saw the surveyor at work, and a message came to him from the Lord. By the prophet's side there stood an angel- interpreter, just as Virgil or Beatrice stood beside Dante in his visions ; and when another angel appeared upon the scene, the interpreter bade him run and stop the young man with the measuring line, and for this reason : the Jerusalem of the future was not to be rebuilt on the same lines as the Jerusalem of the past ; no measurements would be needed ; for the new city was to be built upon a larger scale, to make room for the large increase of its citizens ; it was to lie open like an unwalled town, capable of indefinite expansion ; and as for defences, stone walls would not be needed, for Jehovah Himself would be a wall of fire round about, and His glorious Presence would dwell within the city. Observe the fine mingling of the outward and the inward. The material fabric is not to be dissolved into a mere symbol or picture; there is to be a city and it is to be inhabited by a multitude of men and cattle; but the material fabric is to be spiritualized, the circumference a wall of fire, the centre Jehovah's Presence in glory ; matter and spirit, human and Divine, welded into one corporate whole. As we follow the track of the prophet's thought, we catch already a glimpse of the shining climax to which it leads.
The prophet's vision serves to bring into prominence two great ideas regarding the City of God — I. Its Expansion. II. Its Security.
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I.
The Expansion of the City.
"Jerusalem shall be inhabited as villages without walls."
Surely there is great boldness of faith underlying this promise. A city without a wall was unknown in the prophet's time, and it is only in recent times that by the creation of large countries with common sentiments and interests it has become an actual fact. For many centuries the very idea of a city was that of a walled space, the centre of a district, where men could flee for refuge when the enemy scoured the open country. Within these walls were found the sanctuary where men worshipped their God and the fortresses where they resisted the last attack of their foes. For a man to believe that God would be present with His people in such a living sense that the common material defences would be superseded was a supreme act of faith. There is splendid audacity in the thought, but we are not strong enough even now to accept it in all its fulness. It is an ideal which worldly common sense regards with scorn as the mere play of religious fancy.
Tj Faith realizes the city that is not yet built, grasps coming events as though they were already present, finds strong bulwarks, stately palaces, and the very city of God where other eyes see very little except ruins. It is the grand secret of Faith, her prerogative, that the better things which are going to be, the glories which are only promised, the Divine creations still afar off, are to her as real and solid as the ground under her feet or the fact of God Himself.1
1. The young man with the measuring line represents the narrow and mechanical interpretation of prophecy which led to sad disappointments and grievous loss in the history of Judaism, and is by no means extinct among us now. For it is a tendency in human nature to imagine that we can apply our human measurements to God's plan and purpose. Those Jewish exiles imagined that the future was simply to reproduce the past ; the Jerusalem they had in their minds was the strong fortress which 1 J. G. Greenhough, The Cross in Modem Life, 160.