Zechariah
Chapter 1
1 In the eighth month, during Darius’s second year as king, God sent a message to Zechariah, Berechiah’s son and the grandson of Iddo the prophet.
2 God was very unhappy with your ancestors.
3 Tell them this: ‘God of all commands: Come back to me, and I will come back to you,’ says God of all.
4 Do not be like your ancestors. Before, prophets told them, “God says, ‘Now stop your evil ways and actions.’ But they did not listen or pay attention to me,” says God.
5 Where are your ancestors now? And do prophets live forever?
6 But my words and my laws, which I gave to my prophets, didn’t your ancestors take them to heart? When they did, they turned back and realized, just as God planned to treat us based on our actions and behavior, so he has done to us.
7 On the twenty-fourth day of the eleventh month, called Sebat, in the second year of Darius, God spoke to Zechariah, Berechiah’s son, Iddo’s grandson, the prophet.
8 At night, I saw a man on a red horse standing among the myrtle trees in the valley, with red, speckled, and white horses behind him.
9 I said, “Oh sir, what are these?” And the angel speaking with me replied, “I will show you what they are.”
10 The man standing among the myrtle trees replied, “These are the ones God has sent to walk back and forth across the earth.”
11 They replied to the angel of God standing among the myrtle trees, “We have walked back and forth across the earth, and see, the whole earth is quiet and at peace.”
12 Then the angel from God replied and said, “God of all, how long will you not show kindness to Jerusalem and the towns of Judah, which you have been angry with for seventy years?”
13 God answered the angel who was speaking to me with kind and comforting words.
14 The angel talking to me told me to shout this message: “God says, ‘I have a strong love for Jerusalem and Zion.’”
15 I am very upset with the nations that are calm: because I was only a little upset, but they made the trouble worse.
16 So God says, “I have come back to Jerusalem with kindness. My house will be built there,” says God, “and Jerusalem will be marked out for building.”
17 Say again, God of all says: My cities will grow with success; God will comfort Zion and choose Jerusalem again.
18 I looked up and saw four horns.
19 I asked the angel who was speaking with me, “What are these?” And he replied, “These are the horns that have spread out Judah, Israel, and Jerusalem.”
20 God showed me four carpenters.
21 I asked, “What are these coming to do?” He answered, “These horns scattered Judah so no one could raise their head. But these have come to frighten them and to throw out the horns of the nations that raised their horn against the land of Judah to scatter it.”