This study of Zechariah ch 2 was given by pastor Barry Forder at Calvary Portsmouth on 15th May 2022.
Zechariah was born in Israel shortly after the nation had returned from their 70 year captivity in Babylon. In the first 6 chapters we have recorded a series of 8 visions that all occured in the same night. The visions depict the future of the nation of Israel from that time to the time when the Messiah returns and establishes His kingdom on earth.
In the first 2 visions we are shown that:
1) The Messiah will come to Jerusalem.
2) His house shall be built in Jerusalem.
3) Jerusalem’s boundaries would expand
4) God will, once again, choose Jerusalem
In this study we look at the 3rd vision which expands the 3rd and 4th points.
This 3rd vision focuses on ‘The man with the measuring line’. There is clearly a picture of Nehemiah, who led the work of rebuilding following the captivity. But that is just a type of what was to come. Just as a builder uses a measuring line as he is planning to build, to prepare the foundation, so God did this with Israel, not just in Nehemiah’s day, but in recent times also.
What happens when you are about to take possession of a piece of land or a property? A survey has to be completed. Jonathan Cahn comments:
‘The land must be defined or redefined, its length, its breadth, its borders, its parameters. And if there’s no existing survey, then a survey must be made. The land must be defined, mapped out . . . measured and so the measuring line. So in the days of Zechariah, when the Jewish people were returning to the land, the man with the measuring line comes to the city in a vision. And his appearance is a sign of what is yet to take place. It happened in the ancient world. So too it would happen again in the modern. The ancient sign would again manifest in the world . . . in modern times. The man with the measuring line would again come to Jerusalem. And his appearance would be a sign of what was yet to come’.
Prophetically, the man with the measuring line was the British army officer Charles Warren. In 1867 he came to Israel at the request of Palestine Exploration Fund on a mission to survey and map out Jerusalem, to measure the Holy City.
Warren’s work would constitute the first extensive excavation of biblical Jerusalem, the first extensive measuring of the biblical foundations of the Temple Mount and of the city itself. It would usher in a new age of biblical archaeology.
Jonathan Cahn again comments:
“After nearly two thousand years of exile, the man with the measuring line reappeared in Jerusalem as a sign that God was about to bring about a restoration. A measuring line is used when one is about to build something. So then the reappearance of the man with the measuring line in the person of Charles Warren was a sign that God was about to act, to move again, to build something . . . to rebuild that which once was and had fallen . . . the nation of Israel!”
May you be blessed and encouraged by this study.
