Week 32 Zechariah
There are eight visions in a row at the start of Zechariah’s book. Eight visions seemed like quite a few to me and I wondered where Zechariah would rank on the Total Number of Prophetic Visions Scale. Pretty high I’d guess.
As I read-through I was also wondering exactly what-all benefit Zechariah got from his visions. You’d tend to think that when a prophet had a vision-experience he’d gain some insight & understanding. But as I was reading I realized that these visions were pretty heavy on the perplexity side of things. And not just for me but for Zechariah because he asked a bunch of questions about what the visions meant. Even after re-reading them and – I think – figuring out a couple of things I still ended up mostly in the dark.
For now I’m just jotting down a couple of ideas about visions that I think are fairly accurate:
Visions are meant to be helpful & illuminating
But…some elements of visions aren’t too illuminating
The not-totally-illuminating visions – even when they do give me a bit of illumination –leave me with knowledge gaps
I’m guessing that some of these knowledge gaps might be permanent mental dead-spaces that I’ll have to live with
Some knowledge gaps might shrink as I gain more information or skill or smarts
Others gaps might only shrink over – maybe – long stretches of time as more events unfold & history moves along.
Which means I’ll have to be cautious not to speculate on visions.