God's Servants: Channels Of Golden Oil (Zechariah 4:1-14) Series

Today, we have the privilege of entering into perhaps the most mysterious of all of Zechariah's visions. It's a passage where I feel like God opened it up to me in stages, and at each stage, I felt these bursts of pleasure and happiness. This is also a passage with rich symbolism-- but it's a symbolism that's often understood in directions that, quite frankly, seem impossible. What the passage seems to teach is troublesome theologically. People (=scholars) are bothered by it, and they tend to push back on it in a subtle, sophisticated way. The end result of their work tends to be something that we feel like we can accept, but it also perhaps feels just a little off. Or like something is missing.

This vision is loaded with symbolism, and I think the key to unlocking it, is to let the vision play out at its own pace, and not jump ahead, or jump around. Basically, we won't understand large parts of the vision until the very last verse, Zechariah 4:14. So I'm going to teach this vision in a way that some people find incredibly annoying, and I apologize in advance for that. I'm going to teach it in a way that leaves things unexplained, and then I'm going to try to pull it all together and simplify it at the end. As we read, we will be like patient detectives, looking for clues. Along the way, we will find one red herring, but we will resist the urge to zero in on the wrong thing.

Let's dive in. Zechariah 4:1:

(1) and the angel speaking with me returned,

and he roused me, like a man who is roused from his sleep,

Our friendly interpreting angel reenters Zechariah's life. The angel "rouses" him, and Zechariah compares this rousing, to that experience you get when someone shakes you awake. Like, you have a teen girl who seemingly can sleep until 10 am every day, but stuff actually has to get done. So you "rouse them."

What Zechariah is saying here, isn't that he was asleep, and the angel woke him up, so he could enter into a vision. And we aren't even told here that this happens at night (with *Meyers and Meyers). But when Zechariah struggles to find words to talk about what the angel did, that's the closest example he can give. What the angel did, is "like" what a parent does to his teenage daughter. The experience is similar. So I picture Zechariah going through his day, happily minding his own business, when an angel rouses him from a normal, earth-centered life, and shifts him back into the realm of spiritual realities. He's entered back in to the vision world. And so we find ourselves having to make this same journey. It's no longer an ordinary Sunday, seeing ordinary things. We prepare ourselves for a very different reality.

Verse 2-3:

(2) and he said to me,

"What [are] you seeing,"

and I said,

"I saw,

and LOOK! A lampstand of solid gold!,

and a bowl upon its top,

and seven lamps upon it-- seven--

and seven channels/pipes to the lamps that are on its top,

(3) and two olive trees over it, [Exodus 27:20!]--

one on the right side of the bowl, and one on its left--

What Zechariah sees, basically, are three things: (1) there's a really complicated lamp, and (2) there are olive trees on each side of the lamp that feed it. In ancient times, olive oil wasn't just something you'd use in food. It was also a fuel source. And this particular lamp resembles the lamp that was found in the tabernacle-- the tent-- where God could be found among his people. Let's read from Exodus 27:20:

"You shall command the children of Israel,

and/that they shall take to you olive oil, pure and beaten, for the light, to burn/light the lamp continually."

So in the tabernacle there was this one lamp, and this lamp was a symbol of God's presence, and God's help. It was to be constantly lit, because God was always there, and always awake, and always ready to help.

Now, the thing with old-fashioned oil-burning lamps, is that they have to be constantly refilled. It's not like electricity, where power is magically supplied as long as the switch stays on, through some really hard working people that we never think about until something bad happens. Oil lamps need a steady supply of oil, and they need someone to pour that oil.

The lamp that Zechariah sees is different. We have this sense that it's a lamp you'd find in God's temple, or tabernacle. It's pure gold, like those lamps are. Which means the lamp is indoors, inside the temple. But this lamp has mature, fruitful olive trees on either side of the lamp, and through a complicated system of bowl and pipes, oil constantly flows from the trees to the lamp. [Ideally, I'd use props here-- two indoor tree plants, with cardboard wrapping paper tubes taped to a lamp in the middle. Something really classy.]