’The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house;
     his hands shall also finish it.’—­ZECHARIAH iv. 9.

I am afraid that Zerubbabel is very little more than a grotesque name to most Bible-readers, so I may be allowed a word of explanation as to him and as to the original force of my text.  He was a prince of the blood royal of Israel, and the civil leader of the first detachment of returning exiles.  With Joshua, the high priest, he came, at the head of a little company, to Palestine, and there pathetically attempted, with small resources, to build up some humble house that might represent the vanished glories of Solomon’s Temple.  Political enmity on the part of the surrounding tribes stopped the work for nearly twenty years.  During all that time, the hole in the ground, where the foundations had been dug and a few courses of stones been laid, gaped desolate, a sad reminder to the feeble band of the failure of their hopes.  But with the accession of a new Persian king, new energy sprang up, and new, favourable circumstances developed themselves.  The Prophet Zechariah came to the front, although quite a young man, and became the mainspring of the renewed activity in building the Temple.  The words of my text are, of course, in their plain, original meaning, the prophetic assurance that the man, grown an old man by this time, who had been honoured to take the first spadeful of soil out of the earth should be the man ’to bring forth the headstone with shoutings of Grace, grace unto it!’

But whilst that is the original application, and whilst the words open to us a little door into long years of constrained suspension of work and discouraged hope, I think we shall not be wrong if we recognise in them something deeper than a reference to the Prince of David’s line, concerning whom they were originally spoken.  I take them to be, in the true sense of the term, a Messianic prophecy; and I take it that, just because Zerubbabel, a member of that royal house from which the Messiah was to come, was the builder of the Temple, he was a prophetic person.  What was true about him primarily is thereby shown to have a bearing upon the greater Son of David who was to come thereafter, and who was to build the Temple of the Lord.  In that aspect I desire to look at the words now:  ’His hands have laid the foundation of the house, and His hands shall also finish it.’

I. There is, then, here a large truth as to Christ, the true Temple-builder.

It is the same blessed message which was given from His own lips long centuries after, when He spoke from heaven to John in Patmos, and said, ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last.’  The first letter of the Greek alphabet, and the last letter of the Greek alphabet, and all the letters that lie between, and all the words that you can make out of the letters—­they are all from Him, and He underlies everything.