Be sure of this! The Lord who commands armies has decreed: The nations’ efforts will go up in smoke; their exhausting work will be for nothing.

You march out to deliver your people, to deliver your special servant. You strike the leader of the wicked nation, laying him open from the lower body to the neck. Selah.

Their wealth will be stolen and their houses ruined! They will not live in the houses they have built, nor will they drink the wine from the vineyards they have planted.

Seek the Lord’s favor, all you humble people of the land who have obeyed his commands! Strive to do what is right! Strive to be humble! Maybe you will be protected on the day of the Lord’s angry judgment.

“I have heard Moab’s taunts and the Ammonites’ insults. They taunted my people and verbally harassed those living in Judah.

The Lord will terrify them, for he will weaken all the gods of the earth. All the distant nations will worship the Lord in their own lands.

I thought, ‘Certainly you will respect me! Now you will accept correction!’ If she had done so, her home would not be destroyed by all the punishments I have threatened. But they eagerly sinned in everything they did.

The riders then agreed with the angel of the Lord, who was standing among the myrtle trees, “We have been walking about on the earth, and now everything is at rest and quiet.”

I asked, “Where are you going?” He replied, “To measure Jerusalem in order to determine its width and its length.”

“You there! Flee from the northland!” says the Lord, “for like the four winds of heaven I have scattered you,” says the Lord.

“I am about to punish them in such a way,” he says, “that they will be looted by their own slaves.” Then you will know that the Lord who rules over all has sent me.

Next I saw Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord, with Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him.

“What are you, you great mountain? Because of Zerubbabel you will become a level plain! And he will bring forth the temple capstone with shoutings of ‘Grace! Grace!’ because of this.”

Then he cried out to me, “Look! The ones going to the northland have brought me peace about the northland.”

Then say to him, ‘The Lord who rules over all says, “Look – here is the man whose name is Branch, who will sprout up from his place and build the temple of the Lord.

Should you not have obeyed the words that the Lord cried out through the former prophets when Jerusalem was peacefully inhabited and her surrounding cities, the Negev, and the Shephelah were also populated?

“The Lord who rules over all asserts, ‘I am about to save my people from the lands of the east and the west.

And I will bring them to settle within Jerusalem. They will be my people, and I will be their God, in truth and righteousness.’

And it will come about that just as you (both Judah and Israel) were a curse to the nations, so I will save you and you will be a blessing. Do not be afraid! Instead, be strong!’

“For the Lord who rules over all says, ‘As I had planned to hurt you when your fathers made me angry,’ says the Lord who rules over all, ‘and I was not sorry,