Thus saith Jehovah my God; Feed the flock of slaughter; Their possessors slay them and are not guilty: And they that sell them say, Blessed be Jehovah, for I am getting rich; Their own shepherds pity them not. I will no more pity the inhabitants of the land, saith Jehovah; I will deliver the men every one into his neighbor's hands, And into the hand of his king: And they shall smite the land, And out of their hand I will not deliver them. What a dreadful condition of the sheep of His pasture, the lost sheep of the house of Israel, God's flock! Even so it was, strangers ruled over them, and they were their prey, getting rich on them and not guilty. Still worse their own shepherds, the civil and ecclesiastical rulers of the nation, spared them not. God had indeed given them up. Well may we stop and think for a moment of the apostacy of Christendom and its final overthrow and judgment so clearly seen in the book of Revelation. Even now the flock of slaughter is seen and all getting ripe for the day of wrath! The action of Zechariah by divine command, like the crowning of the high priest in the sixth chapter, is a typical one. Zechariah is a type of the good Shepherd of Israel, the Messiah. The disobedient nation, the flock of slaughter, had taken God's servants and beat one and killed another and stoned another. When He sent servants more than the first, they did unto them in like manner (Matt. xxi: 35). After this came the last attempt of divine love. God sent His Son as a Shepherd to seek and feed the lost sheep. He was not accepted, but they rejected Him. We will consider this now in the second section. _II. The Shepherd set aside and rejected (verses 7-14)._ "So I fed the flock of slaughter, verily the most miserable sheep. And I took to myself two staves; the one I called Beauty, the other I called Bands; and I fed the flock. And I cut off the three shepherds in one month; for my soul became impatient with them, and their soul also abhorred me. And I said, I will not feed you: the dying, let it die; and the cut off, let it be cut off; and the left over, let them devour each the flesh of the other. And I took my staff, Beauty, and cut it asunder, that I might break my covenant which I had made with all the peoples. And it was broken in that day, and thus the wretched of the flock who gave heed to me knew that this was the word of Jehovah. And I said unto them, If ye think good, give me my wages; and if not, forbear. So they weighed as my wages thirty pieces of silver. And Jehovah said to me, Throw it unto the potter; the goodly price at which I am valued of them. And I took the thirty pieces of silver, and threw them into the house of Jehovah, to the potter, Then I broke my second staff, Bands, that I break the brotherhood between Judah and Israel."