Welcome to the 10 Minute Bible Hour podcast. Right now, we're going through the entire Bible

to understand it is one big cohesive story. We're covering one book each day, and this

one's about Zechariah.

There's almost 30 people in the Old Testament named Zechariah, and the name means God

remembers or Yahweh remembers. And so when you think about that, it makes a perfect sense

that there'd be so many people who would have that name, because the memory of God is such a

prominent theme as you read through the Old Testament. God remembers the screwed-up stuff that

the nations do, and it might seem like there's no justice for that. But God remembers, and he's

going to straighten up accounts with them. He's going to bring justice and judgment on those

perpetrators of evil. But also, he remembers the lowly and the oppressed, and the people

have been through so much, and he remembers his own people and is covenant with his own people,

again, even when it seems like it's been a while, and maybe he's forgotten. No, that's not the case.

God remembers. And so it makes perfect sense to me that in this Old Testament prophetic book of

Zechariah, we would have a guy whose name means God remembers, because he's talking to a bunch of

people who aren't sure whether or not God remembers. This Zechariah, the prophet, is working

between 520 and 518 BC, and he is a part of this group of exiled Jews and Persia who'd been

taken there by the Babylonians, who were released by Cyrus the Great to go back and rebuild the temple.

But then they run into some oppositions, some pretty serious bureaucratic hang-ups, and the work

grinds to a halt, and we learn from Zechariah 410, the people get into the state of malaise,

and they start worrying about building their own houses, and just in general come to think that

this is not a significant time, meaningful things just aren't happening right now. That is

the situation into which Haggai and Zechariah are speaking. Here's roughly the timeline of how

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