A City Without Walls

A young man walks out into the night with a measuring line coiled over his shoulder. He has a job to do. He is going to find out exactly how big Jerusalem should be. But heaven has other plans.

The prophet Zechariah lived in Jerusalem at the same time as Haggai, in the reign of Darius, king of Persia. The exiles had come back from Babylon to a broken city. Its great walls lay in heaps. Houses were few. The rebuilding of the temple had only just started again. To this small, tired community, God gave Zechariah a series of visions, all in one night. Strange pictures full of horses and horns and lamps and angels, each one carrying a message of hope. This is the third of them.

Zechariah looks up, and there is a man with a measuring line in his hand. So Zechariah asks him, “Whither goest thou?” Where are you going? And the man answers, “To measure Jerusalem, to see what is the breadth thereof, and what is the length thereof.” It seems sensible. Before you build walls, you need to know where they go. You mark out the edges, so you know what is inside and what is out. Then the angel who has been talking with Zechariah goes out, and another angel comes hurrying to meet him.

The second angel says: run. “Run, speak to this young man, saying, Jerusalem shall be inhabited as towns without walls for the multitude of men and cattle therein.” Put your line away, young man. You cannot measure this city. There will be so many people, and so many animals, that no wall could hold them. The city will spill out into the countryside like a village with open edges. And who will keep them safe without walls? God answers that himself. “For I, saith the Lord, will be unto her a wall of fire round about, and will be the glory in the midst of her.” A ring of fire around the outside. God's own shining presence at the centre.

Then the vision becomes a call. God speaks to the exiles still living far away in Babylon: come home. He tells his people how precious they are to him. Anyone who harms them, he says, is touching the apple of his eye, the most tender part of the eye that you protect without even thinking. And then a song. “Sing and rejoice, O daughter of Zion: for, lo, I come, and I will dwell in the midst of thee.” And it is not only for Israel. Many nations, God says, will join themselves to the Lord in that day, and will be his people. The chapter ends with a hush. “Be silent, O all flesh, before the Lord: for he is raised up out of his holy habitation.”

Walls mattered in the ancient world. A city without them was an easy target. And Jerusalem's walls stayed broken for a long time after Zechariah's vision. About seventy-five years later, in the twentieth year of the Persian king Artaxerxes, a man named Nehemiah heard that the wall of Jerusalem was still broken down and its gates burned with fire. He wept, prayed, and went to rebuild it. For all that time, the people of Jerusalem had to trust God's promise to be their wall.

A city without walls. You'll find this in the book of Zechariah, chapter two. A young man with a measuring line, and a God whose plans were too big to measure. A wall of fire around the edge, and his glory in the middle. So here is a question to carry with you. Where in your life are you trying to measure what God can do?