The prophet is speaking to those who are emphatically called "Christ's prisoners," those for whom, by His kingly power, He has gone up on high, and given to them repentance, that He might make them spiritual captives.
I. No words could be framed more appropriate, or expressive of souls under spiritual distress, than those which the prophet here uses: "prisoners of hope." Why does the believer's soul feel so fast bound and so miserable? He was not always so; but he has felt so ever since he began to hope,ever since a nobler and a loftier feeling came into his mind. From that hour, when the love of God first awoke in his soul, he has longed to go forth into a wider field than he can ever compass, and to expatiate on the image and the work and the glory of his God. Therefore, because his desires are so large, his soul feels so imprisoned. "Hope" has made this world feel so narrow, his body so cumbersome, those sins so heavy, and that nature such a great hindrance.
II. The prisoners of hope should "turn to the stronghold," keep close to the Lord Jesus. Pass your waiting time inside the fortress of Jesus. Let Him be your tower for ever, and in that stronghold He will bury your fears and keep your joys.
III. God Himself has graciously added the reason of the confidence of those who have by His grace exchanged the prison for the stronghold. "Even today do I declare that I will render double unto thee." It appears evident that in these words God is continuing the address which He was making in the preceding verse, and that He speaks to the Lord Jesus Christ. It is part of the engagement which the Father has made to the Son. When Christ sees of the travail of His soul He is satisfied, as when one delights in a purchase, and thinks that the price was not to be compared with the value received.
J. Vaughan, Sermons,10th series, p. 149.
Fear and hope have two things in common. (1) They are both prospective. They have to do with things future. (2) They regard that future as possible. With these two points of resemblance, hope and fear are in all else opposite and contradictory to each other. Fear is the apprehension of a future possible evil; hope is the anticipation of a future possible good.
I. What is the place of hope in the Gospel? We believe that Christ makes it everything. St. Paul even says, "We are saved by hope." And if there could be stronger words than these, we find them in that brief and touching account of Christ's own life below, "For the joy which was set before Him, He endured the Cross." What is that but saying that the anticipation of a blessed future, which is the definition of hope, supported our Lord Jesus Christ in working our redemption?
II. Consider two of these future good things which God has promised, and which therefore the Christian hopes for. (1) One of these is growth, progress, at last perfection, in holiness. This is a hope peculiar to the Gospel. It is also a promise. If Christ be true, He offers us holiness. That is what makes His religion a Gospel. (2) I knit into one the hope of holiness and the hope of heaven. What is happiness, what is glory, but the being perfectly holy, like God, filled with the Spirit? The Holy Spirit is called "the earnest of our inheritance." Why? Because the inheritance itself is the Spirit; the having the Spirit at last not by measure, the being satisfied with God's likeness, the being made to drink abundantly of what the Psalmist calls "the river of His pleasures." That is heaven. And so the one hope runs up into the other, and he who is athirst for holiness is on his way to heaven.
C. J. Vaughan, Last Words at Doncaster,p. 54.
References: Zechariah 9:12. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. xxii., p. 213; Homiletic Quarterly, vol. i., p. 101; G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons,p. 175.Zechariah 9:13. Ibid.,p. 333.Zechariah 9:16; Zechariah 9:17. H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxvi., p. 388.