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The section Zec 13:7-9 (the smiting of the shepherd) does not refer to the crucifixion of Christ, because this did not lead to the consequences indicated in Zec 13:8, so far as the whole earth was concerned, but to the “cutting off of the Messiah” predicted in Dan 9:26, the great apostasy which forms the beginning of the end, according to Luk 17:25; 2Th 2:3; 1Ti 4:1, and 1Ti 4:2 Time. Zec 3:1, and through which Christ in His church is, according to the description in Rev 13:17, so cut off from historical life, that it cannot be anything on earth. Lastly, ch. 14 treats of the end of the world and the general judgment.
Of these two views, we cannot look upon either as well founded. For, in the first place, the assumption common to the two, and with which they set out, is erroneous and untenable, - namely, that the prophecy in ch. 12ff. strikes in where the previous one in ch. 9-11 terminated, and therefore that ch. 12-14 is a direct continuation of ch. 9-11. This assumption is at variance not only with the relation in which the two prophecies stand to one another, as indicated by the correspondence in their headings, and as unfolded in Zec 12:1, Zec 12:2, but also with the essence of the prophecy, inasmuch as it is not a historical prediction of the future according to its successive development, but simply a spiritual intuition effected by inspiration, in which only the leading features of the form which the kingdom of God would hereafter assume are set forth, and that in figures drawn from the circumstances of the present and the past. Again, the two views can only be carried out by forcing the text. If the prophecy in Zec 12:1-14 started with the period when Israel came into power of the Roman empire after the rejection of the Messiah, it could not