I. Here is, first, a remarkable national repentance remarkable on account of its supposed exciting cause. It presents, indeed, a direct inversion of the state of things generally depicted in the Old Testament Scriptures; for while, generally, we are shown a people subdued to repentance under the pressure of misery and suffering, and then raised, as the result, to heights of prosperity, our seer gives us the spectacle of a people whose repentance is produced by prosperity, who, being delivered from their straits and hardships, and brought forth into a large place, are thereby awakened to a sense of fault, and laid low in the dust of contrition. Sorrow and disaster, whether by inducing a humbler temper and self-estimate, or by giving an impression of wrath and punishment, or by desolating the external scene and driving the heart in upon itself, is often the means of rousing men to a recognition and conviction of their sins. Is it not, however, a finer thing, and the sign of a finer nature, when good fortune provokes earnest thoughts with regard to duty and our imperfect discharge of it; when, the more life smiles for us and brings up of pleasantness and beautiful possession, the more we yearn to be deserving? And such was the nobler disposition which Zechariah dreamt of being manifested in his countrymen.
II. Observe, secondly, our prophet's vision of the results of the repentance which he pictures. He beheld it prevailing to expiate the transgressions that had been committed prevailing to secure absolution and forgiveness. "In that day" that day of general and profound mourning "there shall be a fountain opened," etc. You will remember Cowper's once oft-sung hymn, "There is a fountain filled with blood." Cowper's hymn war professedly based upon this passage; it was from this passage that he got his idea of the guilt-cleansing fountain of Christ's blood; yet, instead of a fountain filled with the blood of an atoning victim, what the Jewish writer had evidently in his mind was a fountain filled with the tears of the people's genuine and deep contrition. He saw Heaven's pardon granted at once to repentance, without need of any slaughtered victim to assist in procuring it. "The blood of Jesus Christ cleanses from all sin" by quickening to repentance.
III. Our prophet beheld, further, issuing from that day of great mourning, a diffused spirit of consecration to the worship and service of Jehovah. Before that spirit idolatry quietly disappeared, like winter before the growing breath of spring, or mists before the climbing sun, with all inclination towards it, all hankering after it the names of the idols remembered no more.
IV. The prophet seems to trace the gradually completed purification of the country to the spirit cherished and reigning in its homes. It is to the family we must always look for the saving of society; from thence comes its regeneration, or its corruption and decay.
S. A. Tipple, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxiii., p. 237.