Pierced Once, and Then Recognized

Climb now to the E string, the highest — and higher still, to where the finger no longer presses the string but only just touches it, and the tone comes loose from the earth: a harmonic, an overtone — the thin, whistling note that arises when you only touch the string instead of pressing it — pure and almost not of this world. For this is the third day.

This whole book hung on one line from a broken prophet with an unfaithful wife: "After two days He will revive us; on the third day He will raise us up, and we shall live in His sight" (Hosea 6:2). For two days Israel lay as dead. Two thousand years. And the third day is no metaphor hanging somewhere in the mist — it is a morning with a date that God knows, on which a people that lay two thousand years in the ground rises up.

How does it happen? Not with an army. Not with a clever move. It happens with a glance. Here is the sentence toward which this whole book, without saying so over and over, has crept: "I will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem the Spirit of grace and supplication. Then they will look on Me whom they pierced. Yes, they will mourn for Him as one mourns for an only son" (Zechariah 12:10).

See who is speaking. "They will look on Me whom they pierced." It is God who speaks, and He says: Me, pierced. The pierced God. And after two thousand years — after the stiff neck, after the first time, after the cross they did not recognize — the blindfold is pulled away, not by an argument but by the Spirit of grace, and Israel sees at last Who it was that hung there all that time. Not a blasphemer. Not a failed messiah. Him. The Pierced One. The only child.

Do you recognize the pattern now that it is being fulfilled for the last time? It ran through all of Part I. Joseph, rejected and sold by his brothers — and only the second time, when he stands before them with power over their lives, recognized: "I am Joseph, your brother." Moses, mocked away the first time — "who made you a ruler over us?" — and only the second time accepted as deliverer. It was Stephen who, with the stones already about his ears, pointed it out: this is how you always do it, the first time you reject the savior, only the second time do you see who he was. The first time they pierced Him. The second time they cry out for Him. And He — this is the wonder no man gets over — He comes.

"And so all Israel will be saved, as it is written: The Deliverer will come out of Zion, and He will turn away ungodliness from Jacob. For this is My covenant with them, when I take away their sins" (Romans 11:26–27). Hear what Paul does there, after eleven chapters wrestling with the question whether God has cast away His people. He almost cries it out. The hardening — which Part I named so honestly and so harshly, the stiff neck, the veiled eyes — that hardening was never a death sentence. It was an "until." "Hardening in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in" (11:25). An until has an end. And here, on the third day, the end has come. The scales fall from the eyes. The olive tree that stood two thousand years with broken-off branches gets its natural branches back, grafted into their own, old, own stock (11:24). The wanderer is home.

Name the years one more time, and then lay down the violin to listen to what sings beneath the numbers. Thirty-eight jubilee years in the wilderness of the nations. Forty in all, from the closing of the window — that is what this book calls that span; it is not carried by it. The name is an image, and the image is enough, for the image sings. Two thousand years of "next year in Jerusalem," said in ghettos, on escape routes, in barracks, by a people that had every reason to lose the longing and yet did not lose it. And now, on the third day, it is no longer "next year." It is this year. It is today. The wandering Aramean, who set out by faith and never owned a stone of the land that was promised him, sees his farthest grandchildren arrive at the gate — and the Messiah stands there, with the scars still in His hands, and does not say "too late," but "welcome home."

This is the highest point of the whole series. Here the voice on the strings may rejoice until it breaks over with joy. For if God does this — if He raises up a people with the stiffest neck in history, after two days of being dead and forty jubilee years of wandering, on the third day, and gathers them into His arms — then there is no stiff neck, no second time, no wasted life, no heart strayed too far that He cannot get over. The homecoming of Israel is the guarantee for the homecoming of everyone who thought he was too late.

In Depth — The second time (Zechariah 12, Romans 11, and the pattern of Stephen)

Three lines come together here, and they are each well documented. Zechariah 12:10 foretells a future day on which God pours out the "Spirit of grace and supplications" over Jerusalem and the people mourns over "Me, whom they pierced" — a text that the New Testament expressly relates to the pierced Christ (John 19:37) and to a still future looking (Revelation 1:7). (Well documented.) Romans 11:25–27 speaks of a hardening "in part" and "until," followed by the salvation of "all Israel" and a Deliverer out of Zion — an order (first the fullness of the Gentiles, then all Israel) that most naturally reads as a future turning for the people as a whole. (A weighed reading; about the exact nature of "all Israel" there has been dispute through the centuries, but the future, national thrust has strong papers.)

And the third line is the pattern that Stephen himself laid bare in his last sermon (Acts 7): Joseph recognized the second time (7:13), Moses accepted the second time (7:35) — "this Moses whom they had denied." Stephen drew the line onward to his own generation: the Righteous One too is rejected the first time. The model of this series draws it one step further: as with Joseph and Moses, after the first rejection follows a second, recognizing meeting — and that second meeting is the third day. (A weighed reading: the "second time" pattern is textually real and named by Stephen himself; the application to the return is a responsible extension, not a proof.)