GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
ZECHARIAH 13:4-6
4 “On that day every prophet will be ashamed of his vision when he prophesies. In order to deceive, he will not put on a hairy robe. 5 Instead, he will say, ‘I am no prophet, I have worked the soil since my youth, when a man bought me.’
“On that day.” We need to identify this day before we can begin to understand anything about the rest of the text. Zechariah has been talking about the coming of Christ, sometimes the first coming (especially Holy Week) and, less often, about the return to judgment on the Last Day. Here it seems best to let the general Holy Week idea stand, along with the end of the temple sacrifices, since that is the meaning we draw from Chapter 12 and the first verses of this chapter. So the prophets are false prophets who have been deceiving God’s people and anyone who was listening to them. Now, in a new deception, they will realize that punishment is coming, and that even his own parents might chastise him (13:1-3). So he lies about being a prophet at all. He takes off the usual uniform of a prophet, the rough camel hair cloak, “in order to deceive.” He used to put that cloak on to deceive, but now he removes it; no longer to trick people by saying “I am a prophet,” but to say, “I am not!” He is dressed now like an ordinary worker, and he pretends to make a living by working the land. He even adds a touch of “back story” for himself by claiming to be a slave, so that anything he has done, if it could be proved by witnesses, could be brushed off with the claim that his master forced him to do such things, like the slave girl of Philippi (Acts 16:16).
6 And if someone asks him, ‘What are these wounds on your back?’ he will reply, ‘These are wounds I received in the house of my friends.’”
How shall we take verse 6? Either we have more lies, or a more profound truth. If this is another lie to mask a false prophet’s occupation, then the lies run very deep. It was the practice of prophets of false gods to hurt themselves, even cut themselves, to produce an ecstatic vision. We see the prophets of Baal doing this on Mount Carmel: “They slashed themselves with swords and spears, as was their custom, until their blood flowed” (1 Kings 18:28). But the false prophet says: “I got into a fight at my friends’ house.” What kind of a fight would make his flesh look like it was scarred all over from swords and spears? But such is the panic of a man who wants to cover up the truth with a lie. The lie has more holes than a screen door. In fact, if we look carefully at the word “friends” here, we see that ma’ahabi means more basically “my lovers,” and it is used only of illicit lovers (Hosea 2:7,13) or allies, associates in idolatry (Jeremiah 22:20,22; Lamentations 1:19). Here the false prophet is trying to distance himself from his false prophesying, and so it’s unlikely that he would merely mean “friends” in the sense of associates who believe in a false god or a false god itself. It’s far more likely that (although I have used the generic translation “friends”) he means “lovers.” Then he would be saying, “I got all these scars at the whore house.” Why would he talk like that? Remember that he is lying. He would rather be seen as a fool whose private games with prostitutes give him a back full of scars than to be seen as a man who cuts himself to try to get visions from false gods.
On the other hand, if we remember verse 3 and the correction a false teacher should receive even from his own family, then this passage might be a way of saying that the false prophet’s friends have corrected him with many spiritual wounds. Luther says, “They are friendly (wounds) because the church strikes with its voice. It does not rage with violence or arms but acts to call back hearts from error and to gain many more souls for Christ” (LW 20:148). The trouble with this second view is that, although a wonderful application of the gospel, it doesn’t easily fit with the piel participle ma’ahabi and its usual meaning of “illicit lovers” and, in this case, either a house of “loved ones” (the shrines of false gods) or a house of prostitutes.
A false prophet cannot stand up to the teaching of Christ. He becomes something else when faced with the gospel. In Zechariah’s (orthodox) prophecy, the false prophet lies and says he’s a farmer, or a slave, or far worse. In the actual experience of Christ, the false prophets and teachers of Israel who rejected him became nothing but conniving lawyers, the kind of slimy legalists who would rather lie their way or deceive their way into a legal victory than to stand on the side of truth and righteousness. Solomon warns: “Mockers stir up a city… If a wise man goes to court with a fool, the fool rages and scoffs, and there is no peace. Bloodthirsty men hate a man of integrity and seek to kill the upright” (Proverbs 29:8, 9-10). Jerusalem became a vast courtroom where Jesus was always on trial, always under scrutiny, always blamed for what he taught; always plotted against.
Here Zechariah ends his oracle against the false prophets. He will turn next to the one true prophet of the last days, the time of the New Testament. From here everything will point to Christ. He is the true shepherd (13:7), the victor (14:1), the one who will stand on the Mount of Olives (14:4), the Lord who comes with his holy ones (14:5), the living water (14:8), the King (14:16). The Feast of Tabernacles will be celebrated at last not as a memorial of Moses bringing Israel out of their bondage in Egypt, but as a vision of Christ rescuing all mankind from the bondage of sin (14:16-21). What a joy it is to turn at last from this point to the closing sentences of the book!
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
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Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota
God’s Word for You – Zechariah 13:4-6 I am no prophet