Cole Dixon's sermon, titled "The Sacramental Crown of the Temple Building King," explores themes from Zechariah chapter 6, focusing on God’s active involvement in the world and His promises to His people. The sermon begins by contrasting the negative aspects of the world and personal life with the hope provided by biblical prophecy and God’s enduring work.
Dixon interprets the directive in Zechariah 6:9-15, where the prophet Zechariah is instructed to make a crown from silver and gold and place it on Joshua, the high priest, symbolizing the intertwining of royal and priestly duties. This crown represents God’s promises and is to remind the people of the forthcoming temple that the "Branch" will build. This Branch is a figure of Christ, who is depicted as both a king and a high priest, destined to establish a spiritual temple not made with hands but built through the unity and faith of God’s people.
The sermon further explores the historical and emotional context of the Jews in Babylon, emphasizing the struggles and eventual divine redemption they experience. Dixon points out that the real significance of the narrative isn’t found in the immediate return and rebuilding efforts but in the future work of Christ, the ultimate temple builder.
The crown made for Joshua is more than an artifact; it's a sacramental symbol of the deeper covenant between God and His people, indicating the dual roles of Christ as both monarch and mediator. Dixon elaborates that this figure, the Branch, fulfills God’s promises through a new covenant, not merely through physical construction but through the spiritual building of a community of believers.
The sermon closes with a call to recognize Christ's ongoing work in the world and in individual lives, urging believers to see beyond the temporal and perceive the eternal purposes of God’s kingdom, thus finding hope and motivation to live in accordance with God’s will, contributing to the building of the spiritual temple through faith and obedience.
Cole Dixon's sermon, titled "The Sacramental Crown of the Temple Building King," explores themes from Zechariah chapter 6, focusing on God’s active involvement in the world and His promises to His people. The sermon begins by contrasting the negative aspects of the world and personal life with the hope provided by biblical prophecy and God’s enduring work.
Dixon interprets the directive in Zechariah 6:9-15, where the prophet Zechariah is instructed to make a crown from silver and gold and place it on Joshua, the high priest, symbolizing the intertwining of royal and priestly duties. This crown represents God’s promises and is to remind the people of the forthcoming temple that the "Branch" will build. This Branch is a figure of Christ, who is depicted as both a king and a high priest, destined to establish a spiritual temple not made with hands but built through the unity and faith of God’s people.
The sermon further explores the historical and emotional context of the Jews in Babylon, emphasizing the struggles and eventual divine redemption they experience. Dixon points out that the real significance of the narrative isn’t found in the immediate return and rebuilding efforts but in the future work of Christ, the ultimate temple builder.
The crown made for Joshua is more than an artifact; it's a sacramental symbol of the deeper covenant between God and His people, indicating the dual roles of Christ as both monarch and mediator. Dixon elaborates that this figure, the Branch, fulfills God’s promises through a new covenant, not merely through physical construction but through the spiritual building of a community of believers.
The sermon closes with a call to recognize Christ's ongoing work in the world and in individual lives, urging believers to see beyond the temporal and perceive the eternal purposes of God’s kingdom, thus finding hope and motivation to live in accordance with God’s will, contributing to the building of the spiritual temple through faith and obedience.
Zechariah chapter 6 starting in verse 9 says this And the word of the Lord came to me, Take from the exiles Heldai, Tabijah, and Jadiah, who have arrived from Babylon, and go the same day to the house of Josiah the son of Zephaniah. Take from them silver and gold, and make a crown, and set it on the head of Joshua the son of Jehoshadak, the high priest. And say to him, Thus says the Lord of hosts. Behold, the man whose name is the branch. For he shall branch out from his place, and he shall build the temple of the Lord. It is he who shall build the temple of the Lord, and shall bear royal honor, and shall sit and rule on his throne. And there shall be a priest on his throne, and the council of peace shall be between them both. And the crown shall be in the temple of the Lord as a reminder to Helim, Tabijah, Jadiah, and him the son of Zephaniah. And those who are far off shall come and help build the temple of the Lord. And you shall know that the Lord of hosts sent me to you. And this shall come to pass if you will diligently obey the voice of the Lord your God. You turn your eyes to the world, and you look at the things of the world, and you could probably describe the world with one word, "bad." You look at your own life for a second, maybe your job. Some of you who have worked Monday, Tuesday, today, you're off tomorrow, work again Friday, you can describe it as one word, "bad." You look back on your past, things that have happened to you, but also things that you have done to other people, to other people's lives. You could say, "bad." Stop looking at yourself, you start looking at our country, you turn the TV on last Thursday, thankfully I was on a plane, you watch the presidential debate, and you can describe it with one word, "bad." Then you look back in the whole history of America, much of it not to go down that road, and you describe it as bad. You look out from America, you look at other countries, other countries even right now in our time period, and you can describe it as bad. You start to look at a particular country. Like this past week, two weeks ago, I flew into Seoul, Korea, and I looked to the north there knowing what's north of where I was, North Korea. And it's not just bad, it is terrible, awful. And I don't know if it affects you the same way that it affects me, but when I see just the high volume of bad in our world, it easily could discourage me, could easily give me a bit of melancholy. You start to look at things in life, and you apply the church to the situation, and you have a good theology of the church, you know God's promises, but if you're being honest, sometimes you look at all the badness in the world, and you think that the church is not this active organism, but this passive organism. Wrongly so, and you know that, but you're like, "It's hard to think otherwise." There's all this bad that is happening to the church. And if you let yourself ruminate over that too much, you think of even more wrong things, incorrect things, and you say, "Well, if the church is passive, at least in the big things, in the spiritual things, in the country-wide things, maybe even God is passive." If he's not, at least I haven't seen him actively do a mighty work in a while, but I want to preach Zechariah chapter 6 to you to encourage you that in a world full of bad, God's people are not passive, and God's people are not passive because the God that God's people serve is not passive. But he not only is not passive, he has promised to not be passive, and he has promised us specific ways of how he will be and is active in our world. And when we look at Zechariah chapter 6, the way that he is active should cause us not to just look at ourselves to have this selfish worldview, but to take joy in the things that God is doing for his community, for his people, and not just me, but for his people around the globe. As we see in this text to show my cards up front, what he is doing is a good work. He is building a house. The first section of this text comes from the first few verses, which is the setting. As we see in verse 9, the word of the Lord comes to Zechariah, and it comes with a commandment that Zechariah is to do, and that he is to give to other men. And these are the men that we see their names, Heldai, Tobijah, Jadiah, men who have arrived from Babylon, and on the very same day that they arrived from Babylon, however long it took for them to get to where they were going, they are supposed to go to a house owned by the man named Josiah, the son of Zephaniah. And then it says in the first part of verse 11, "Take from them silver and gold." The fact that it says take from them silver and gold, we can see the book of Ezra and realize why these men have come from Babylon to this place. They've come because God is already beginning to do a mighty work of sending tribute through the hands of pagans, of Persian governors. God is changing the hearts of kings, He is stirring it however He wishes as the proverb says, and He has started with King Cyrus all the way to King Darius. And these Persian kings are sending gold and silver through men like these four that we just read about to help fund the building of the temple. With that being said, when it says the house of Josiah, we're probably not talking about a two bed, one bath apartment that this man owned, but probably something to do with the temple. Maybe a store house of the temple or something like that. So the setting has to do with the temple. Really the setting of the full book of Zechariah has to do with the temple. It has not just a book about the doctrine of justification here and there found in chapter three that we so often like to quote, but it is about God's temple, God's house, literally three times use the house of God, the house of God, or the house of the Lord, the house of the Lord, the house of the Lord. When we say the house of the Lord, we understand the temple of the Lord. I want you to think for a few moments about what these men and their fathers had to go through. I don't want to speak too much of it because I don't want to miss the point of the text. These men did not live in a vacuum. They were real human beings. They faced real problems. I want you to imagine, let's take a country like just throwing a hypothetical out there. Canada decides they're going to come in and re disperse the population of America. The top people coming with us. The rest will just leave y'all here. Here are men who were uprooted. If not them, their fathers, their generation before them uprooted, moved to a different land with a different language, with a different culture that had different idols. Yes, they've probably gotten acclimated to life in Babylon. Some commentators talk about how easy life has gotten for them at this point. They've gotten incorporated. If you give them the choice, they're not going to choose to move back to Jerusalem. They want to stay in Babylon. Yes, that may be right. Again, missing the point doesn't do away with historical fact of what they faced. We don't have to really infer or guess about their emotions, how they interpret their recent history of their people, how they interpret why they live in Babylon. You could just look in Daniel chapter 9. I won't ask you to turn to Daniel chapter 9, but Daniel speaks about the divinely authoritative interpretation of what has happened to the people of Israel in the land of Babylon. Doesn't talk about how comfortable it is. He thinks about his past and he thinks about his past with shame."Oh God, you have punished us for our rebellion. You have punished us for our treachery. We have committed spiritual adultery against you. We are here. We are in this land. However good it may be now, we are here because we turned away from you, lived against you to our shame in the present day. Men who are used in a mighty way now, but men who have a recent history of shame that they still deal with. Again, I don't want to belabor the point of how hard it must be for these men to have to reconstitute their lives according to Babylon. They have to go to Babylon, they have to get their new ID cards, all that good stuff. They are learning the language and then all of a sudden the Medo-Persian Empire takes over. They have to do it all over again. Whatever comes with that. So if you are looking at your life, you are looking at your past and you are saying bad. How about these men? These are the kind of guys that if a modern day, just to paint the picture for you, if a modern day psychiatrist were to get a hold of them, they would love to put all sorts of labels upon them. Chronic depression, chronic anxiety, shame, lethargy. Here they need these worldly treatments. They need this sort of stuff. But instead of God shaming them going on and on about the past, we see in this text, he starts to look at the future. We see in the second section, the sacrament. In the sacrament that is in this text, again loosely speaking of the terms, is the crown. Verse 11, "Take from them silver and gold and make a crown and set it on the head of Joshua the son of Jehozadak the high priest." If you have the KJV, it may be take the gold and silver and make crowns plural. It is kind of a complicated thing. But if you look later on in verse 14 and the crown again, ESV singular, I believe in the KJV it is still crowns plural. The verb there shall be is a singular verb in the Hebrew which is why most of your translations are going to have crown. If you have the New King James Version, it has the term elaborate crown. What we have going on here, it could be one crown somehow mixed of silver and gold, I don't know how. Or it could be two crowns that are interwoven together, whatever it is. I do like the New King James Version of calling it an elaborate crown. And the crown made of gold and silver, I would say, is to represent the two offices of the priestly office and the royal office. But this sacrament that I am referring to, this tangible thing that these people can look to, can touch, can hold to remember the promises of God, to think about God's grace that He was already doing for them now and the present for them. But promises of even future grace He was going to show them in a greater, more full way is this crown of silver and gold. What we are to see from this section that begins in verse 11 and ends in verse 14, that the idea of the crown forms what I guess I would call book covers to a book that is being given to us. Brother Jimmy would love this. The fancy word for it is a chiastic structure. So there are ends to this and the crown is at both ends. This crown in verse 14, the crown shall be in the temple of the Lord as a reminder to these men. If they wanted to, hypothetically, they could touch it. They could look at it with their eyes and be reminded of something. What is it that they are reminded of? Number one, we have the crown. Number two, we have the content of this reminder. The content of the reminder is the temple. So if the hard covers to the book are made up by the crown, then the main body, the main theme, the main thesis of the book is going to be the temple of the Lord. Why? Because it is at the center of this text. So there to make this crown, this elaborate crown, and then Zechariah is to look to Joshua, the man who kind of serves as a type here. He is the high priest. He looks to him and he says, "Thus says the Lord of hosts. Behold, the man whose name is the branch. For he shall branch out from his place and he shall build the temple of the Lord. It is he who shall build the temple of the Lord and shall bear royal honor and shall sit and rule on his throne. And there shall be a priest on his throne and the council of peace shall be between them both." So the reminder is a reminder of a promise. The promise being that there will be this figure is given the name branch who will build the temple of the Lord. And you start to see that the promise of a temple is not the second temple that would be concluded within just a few years of this chapter here, if not already completed, almost completed in this text, because they are to take the crown and it shall be in the second temple in their day and it shall be a reminder of a future greater temple. A little bit more proof that we're not speaking about this second temple that will that comprise second temple Judaism is the fact that Herod a couple centuries later would end up completing this temple. So the glory of this temple is not going to be completed by an unbeliever. Furthermore we're told who is going to build this temple. And it wasn't anybody in the present day. So we got the crown, we got the content, and then we got number three, the constructor, the builder. Who is the builder? The builder is the king. The builder of this temple is not a governor, so it's not Zerubbabel. We see earlier in Zechariah, I believe chapter three or chapter four, the promise that Zerubbabel, oh yeah chapter four verse eight, the hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house. This house, this present second temple going on in verse nine, his hands shall also complete it. But we have in chapter six something far greater because it's not the governor of the people who would build this temple. It's not the governor neither is it the high priest Josiah, excuse me Joshua. But it's a king. It's a king who goes by the name of Branch. This tells us that is not Joshua. That is not somehow that Joshua the priest later on became a king and it just was not recorded in the Old Testament or something. Joshua never became a king. Never became a king. Let me let me just stop there. Let's go ahead and flip to Jeremiah. I would ask that you turn to Jeremiah chapter 23 with me. God does not leave this criteria and obscurity. He tells us the name of the man who shall build the house elsewhere as we see in Jeremiah 23 verse five who this man is. Behold, the days are coming declares the Lord when I will raise up for David a righteous branch and he shall reign as king and do wisely and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days, Judah will be saved and Israel will dwell securely and this is the name by which he will be called. The Lord is our righteousness. So he's the branch. He's the branch and he is the king. He's the king. The fact that he comes from David the king. Well to prove that Joshua is not somebody who later on became a king that Joshua is not from the line of David. So this is not fulfilled by Joshua or else God is not good at keeping his promises. Well we all know what the connection there is with that. God is maintaining his promises. This is not about Joshua. And I want to point out something to you in this text, a small little detail. The beginning it says say to him that is say to Joshua not just to the man that are there but say to Joshua. So these are promises that Joshua is also to be reminded of. They're looking for someone that is not in the setting there. They were hoping for someone. They were called to hope for someone that was not in the room and someone who would do far greater than what they would see in their day with the second temple being completed. Please hear me out I'm not degrading the fact that the second temple was completed in their day historical facts that are mighty works of God. But we can't stop there. Not only is he a king but in the fact that Joshua is a type of this person Joshua being a high priest the fulfillment the greater Joshua is also to be a high priest but he is the great high priest. He is to be the priest king. He builds the temple bears royal honor sits and rules on his throne and there shall be a priest on his throne and the council of peace shall be between them both. Now when it says between them both I would say that it is not two different individuals but it is two different offices being brought together perfectly united into one person. This branch the king the priest. Don't want to have my cards we see that the person who anybody would be waiting on to build the temple is not Benjamin Netanyahu not Donald Trump. We're not looking for another temple. We're not looking for another person. We're looking for the explicit description given in this text and that is Christ Jesus our Lord. He is the builder of this temple. He is the righteous king. He is the one that rules on the throne. He is the one that has the council of peace upon him. He is the one that is the great high priest. Psalm 110 I'd ask you to open your Bibles of Psalm 110. The Lord says to my Lord this is David speaking this sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool. The Lord sends forth from Zion your mighty scepter rule in the midst of your enemies. He's the king. Your people will offer themselves freely on the day of your power and holy garments. He's the priest from the womb of the morning. The do of your youth will be yours. The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind. You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek. He is the one who has come from the land of David. He is the temple builder and the crown that they were to pick up place on Joshua's head later on tape and put in the temple is the tangible thing that they can look and must believe in must believe in in order to be saved. They were not saved by some other method. They were not saved by obedience to the Mosaic law and honor to the second temple. They were saved by faith in Christ who would come to build the great temple. They were saved by that alone. And I understand and I'm speaking with love speaking very sensitively, but I want to show you I want to show you the clarity of Zechariah chapter 6 the clarity of what it says about the work of salvation the clarity of what it says about Christ and what he has to do with with the temple and whether or not there's a future temple that's going to come later on because later in this text we're going to talk about how the temple is built. But just to show you the clarity, we are not looking for a sign of any red heifers coming into Israel. We're not looking for a sign of some red cows being imported into a physical geopolitical land. What you should look for if you have not yet is the red blood that is imputed to you who believe in Christ. That is why he is the one who builds the temple. This has to do with eschatology and again, good brothers in here that would disagree with me on eschatology say with all love full of. But if we start to look for another temple, we start to miss the temple that Christ is building. You look over at the news in Israel and you say that's bad. I guess the temple is not going to be built in our day. Wrong. Christ the temple builder. He is the temple builder. He builds it with his blood. He uses his blood, but to be more specific, he builds it in the way that we see in verse 15. We see the setting. We have the sacrament. Now we have the structural ingenuity. And those who are far off shall come and help to build the temple of the Lord. You start to see the cohesion of the text. Not only with the bookends of the crown, it forms a book. We see the heart of the book. God shows us what's the heart of the text is the temple, but you see the fact that the phrase house of the Lord is repeated. You can say the house or the temple. Same thing. Temple of the Lord is used three times. It's used twice in reference to who is building the temple. That is Christ. It's used this third time here in reference to the helpers of the builder. The helpers of the builder are those who are far off. Again, these guys held eye to Bayhjah Jadiah. They've come a long way. But we see that we're speaking of something far greater than just what is happening in this setting. Those who are far off shall come and help to build the temple of the Lord. I remember reading this text a few months ago. Take a little bit more time reading in our say to myself, wait a minute. That phrase you who are far off those who are far off is some familiar phrase. We heard a preach to us maybe a year or two ago. We see it in Ephesians chapter two. Ephesians chapter two. In verse 17. We see that we're not left to ourselves to interpret this text, but we have apostolic authority to interpret it for us. And he came that is Christ came and preached peace to you who were far off. Those who are far off. Okay, yeah, those who are far off heard a message, but it doesn't say anything about temples. It doesn't say anything about them helping or anything like that. We'll just keep reading on and those who were near for through him. We both have access in one spirit to the father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens. You who were far off, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets. Jesus himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole structure being joined together grows into a holy temple in the Lord and him you also you who you who are far off are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the spirit. The structural ingenuity is not that this branch, this man has come or someone else will come and put one stone on top of the other in a beautiful way. But the fact that he is putting one believer with another in a beautiful way that he is building his temple not with stones, but with soul. The cornerstone was laid on the earth to build a house using stones from the corners of the earth. How beautiful how unspeakably beautiful. I get chills thinking of it. I do. You can ask my wife. I come home from a trip. Yes, it's a little bit to do with the jet lag, but I get in the car. I think of our brothers and I cry like a baby thinking of the beauty of God's church. What God has joined together. Let not man separate. It's Christ who is building his church. It's not a charlatan. It's not methodologies. It's not music. It's Christ everywhere. We could also see it in first Peter chapter 2 verse 5. For time's sake, I won't turn there. You shall know that the Lord of hosts has sent me. The new King James says, then you shall know the Lord of hosts has sent me. But that would imply that after a second temple is built, then you can see that Isaac, Aria and a prophet of God. But I would say that it should be and you shall know the Lord of hosts has sent me because again, we're not speaking of things that are finished in their day. There's not something that's going to be finished in their day to prove that Zachariah has been sent from God. After all, they have this promise, this tangible promise of a crown set in the temple. So this is just a commandment. You must know that I'm sent from God. You shall know kind of like the 10 commandments is a future tense, but it's kind of like a present commandment. You must know you shall know that the Lord of hosts has sent me and the name of God. I speak these things to you. You don't need any other promises. You don't need to find anything on the news to give you encouragement. You don't need whatever it is that makes you feel better to make you feel better. You name, you need this. This says the Lord, he has promised that he is saving people and he is saving people. He is. It shall come to pass. You shall know the Lord of hosts has sent me to you and this shall come to pass. If you will diligently obey the voice of the Lord your God. That verse deserves a sermon on its own right. Much that I must leave out on this, but this is not to say that the promises depend upon you. The promise does not depend and just hope that grace Bible Church can do this. Please not. We see this earlier to Joshua the high priest you as I priest if you do this then you will have this temple that the temple the house will be inherited. We see it spoken to Solomon. If you build the house if you will diligently obey me then the house and the courts will be built. We see it with kings. We see it with representatives. So again just a fast forward that through this. And I know I'm preaching to the choir here. I trust. I hope that you see the need for Christ to represent you that you cannot stand before God on your own. If you stand before God on your own ask yourself this if he were to hypothetically ask you I don't think you will. I know we won't. But if he were let's say ask you why should you be allowed into heaven. If you say well I did this I did that I did this hell hell for eternity. But if you can stand before God and not point and say I obeyed I diligently obeyed not even halfway you should look and say this has come to pass because Christ the son has diligently obeyed the commandments of the father stood in my place used his blood to wash me used his sovereign hand to gather me called me into fellowship with himself saved me by his spirit I'm united to him. I stand before you because of Christ. He has saved me. He would hypothetically say that is exactly how my temple is built. That is exactly how my dwelling place is built. Christ has diligently obeyed the voice of the father our King humbled himself as a servant to obey all of the law actively and passively for us and is either interceding for us as King the branch was planted into the tomb of death sprouted on the third day that we may be branches grafted into the tree of life by his work. Told you I would close with an example an illustration of this. One of the men that I referred to earlier is a pastor has been for a long time by the grace of God his mother his grandfather and his brother were killed in the killing fields in Cambodia in the 70s. I talk about making history come to life for you think about the evils of Pol Pot in the Khmer Rouge man who doesn't know of somebody who was affected by it. He was affected by it. He could easily do one of two things. Oh, I'm going to look on my past and recognize my past as something that debilitates me. I'm a victim of bad things that have happened to me. I can't go on I can't do this. But instead he holds to the promises of God. He looks to the reminders. He trusts and thus says the Lord. And when you hear him talk you don't hear him talk over and over about the loss of his family. I couldn't imagine I truly could not imagine. We think of fact just I'm with my family this week and one of our favorite things to do is family is talk about the good old days. My grandmother just came up from Mississippi. She talked about to me about her good old days. We're talking about a long time ago. It's good. What a gift family is a man who does not have that. It's the things in his country. And this man is going on to plant and be a part of 10 church plants. 10. It could be easing into spiritual retirement but he's pray. He asked us to pray recently for an 11th. Look I want to do an 11th and then beyond that I'm already kind of envisioning a 12th in this other area. Please pray for laborers. I pray for so and so they're put in the spot. They're going to be ordained. They're about to be pastors on and on and on about the work of God and how he is building his house. I truly hope I hope this encourages you. I hope this encourages you that you can look not just to your own life that you can look to the world and not say bad. Say good. And glory to Christ the branch is reigning as our king and interceding for us as our priest. Let's pray. Oh God glory to Christ. Glory to Christ. We I just preached an hour long sermon. Oh God and can't even think of the half of the glory of Christ. How glorious your son is. Holy holy holy of the Lord is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of your glory. We have family members gone that we would love to see you use as living stones brought to the cornerstone. Save their souls. Please save their souls. Save their souls not so that they would have just an easy life. God save their souls so that Christ would be even more glorified as the merciful one. The gracious one whose blood is perfect. Cleanse us from our sins. Give us a greater love for you. And in light of this text God give us a spirit brought unity. Christ and that we pray. Amen.
