Zechariah 1:6

my statutes or decrees. The word may be used here, as it is in Zephaniah 2:2; Psalms 2:7 (in both which places it is rendered decreein A. V.), of some punishment, which God had purposed or decreed, and threatened by His prophets to send upon them unless they repented. But it may also be taken to refer, as it commonly does in the O. T., to the "statutes" of the Law, sanctioned by rewards and punishments, which it was the office of the prophet to repeat and enforce.

take hold of Marg. and R.V. overtake. Comp. Deuteronomy 28:15; Deuteronomy 28:45, where the same word is used. Pusey quotes the well-known words of Horace, "Rarely hath punishment with limping tread parted with the forerunning miscreant."

returned Rather turned, as the word is rendered in Zechariah 1:3-4. They were brought at last to do, what before they had refused to do, Zechariah 1:4, and what you are now intreated to be wise in time to do, Zechariah 1:3, to turn from sin and turn to God.

thought to do Comp. Lamentations 2:17, where the penitent confession is uttered by Jeremiah, as the representative of the people, almost in the words here recorded: "The Lord hath done that which he had devised (the same word as is here rendered, "thought"); he hath fulfilled his word that he had commanded in the days of old."

dealt with us Lit. done with us. As He thought, or purposed, to do, so hath He done.

The Visions. Zechariah 1:7 to Zechariah 6:15. Exactly five months had now elapsed since the building of the Temple was resumed, as the fruit of Haggai's earnest expostulation (Haggai 1:14-15). It was three months since Zechariah had uttered the call to repentance with which his Book opens (Zechariah 1:1); and in the mean time Haggai had again spoken in the name of the Lord, in his concluding prophecies (Haggai 2:10-23). On the basis of the repentance, of which the people were giving practical proof in their honest endeavours to rebuild the Temple, and as an encouragement to them to persevere in the work, Zechariah now unfolds to them God's purposes of mercy, as they had been unfolded to him in a series of eight visions, all of which had been vouchsafed to him, as it would seem, in a single night.