Zechariah 14:3-5 in Context

ZECHARIAH 14:3-5

3 Then shall the Lord go forth, and fight against those nations, as when he fought in the day of battle.

4 And his feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east, and the mount of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof toward the east and toward the west, and there shall be a very great valley; and half of the mountain shall remove toward the north, and half of it toward the south. 

5 And ye shall flee to the valley of the mountains; for the valley of the mountains shall reach unto Azal: yea, ye shall flee, like as ye fled from before the earthquake in the days of Uzziah king of Judah: and the Lord my God shall come, and all the saints with thee.

Dramatic imagery, isn't it!

The prophecy goes on to describe what was to happen next:

Many of the survivors of this judgment would begin a habit of going up to Jerusalem to the Lord's house (the Temple) to keep the feast of tabernacles, bringing sacrifices and using the pots in the Temple in which to boil their sacrifices (verses 20,21);

And a curse was to come on any individual, family and nation who failed to take that trek to Jerusalem annually to keep the feast (verses 16-20).

So those parts of the prophecy at least must have found fulfilment already - seeing it describes Old Covenant distinctives, and God isn't into returning to shadows.

It puts the fulfilment of much of the wider prophecy squarely into the context of Zechariah's own dispensation. And history shows that to be the case.

Not to say all of the prophecy is necessarily now in the past. Maybe some statements in it might still be future.

And not to say we can't apply lessons from it to our own circumstances. Of course we always can.

But "rightly dividing" the word - and one way to do that is by appropriately distinguishing between its fulfilled and unfulfilled aspects - helps avoid a lot of fanciful and failed predictions about current affairs.

And rather than portraying Moses' Law or modern Judaism as again being at the centre of God's plans for the future, rightly identifying fulfilled prophecy shows that Jesus Christ and His Gospel of grace was and is the fulfilment of God's promises - for Israel, for all of us - for all time.