God has promised blessings to Israel, but we have seen that His blessings are always covenantal. This means that we may never walk away from our obligation to live in the way that God commands, knowing always that He gives His beloved what He commands. Grace enables us to walk rightly; it does not waive the obligation to love and obey Him. God always deals with wickedness.
Zechariah lifts his eyes again, and sees an ephah, which is a unit of dry measure approximately the size of a bushel. From the fact that a woman was in the basket we may surmise that the basket was oversized, in the same way the scroll in the previous vision was. The woman in the basket represents Israel, and wickedness is thrown into the basket with her. A lead cover is heavy, and was placed there to imprison the woman. Two women with wings like storks, and the wind in their wings, take the basket and fly it to the land of Shinar. There a permanent house will be built for it, and it will be set up on its own base.
Two basic meanings may be gleaned from this vision. The first is that God contains and controls sin and evil. It remains bounded by Him. The woman is restricted according to the will of God. However the situation may appear to us, God always maintains and retains His authority. Secondly, a judgment was going to fall upon ethnic Israel, despite the comfort given to Israel in Zechariah’s visions. From the event, we know that this judgment came in 70 AD, after Israel after the flesh rejected the Messiah.
Consider the second of the two meanings first. “Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers’ guilt” (Matt. 23:32). Notice the language of measurement in this warning from Christ. In this chapter he is rebuking the Jews, and just a few verses after this expression he charges the Jews with how they treated the prophets. So the New Testament teaches us that the judgment in 70 AD is a filling of accumulated judgment. Those who resisted the Messiah were filling up wrath to the uttermost. “forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they may be saved, so as always to fill up the measure of their sins; but wrath has come upon them to the uttermost” (1 Thess. 2:16). Not only had the Jewish leadership rejected the Messiah, they were guilty of persecuting those who did receive him. In this way, they were filling up the measure.
In the vision, the woman was carried off to the land of Shinar. This is the ancient name for the region where Babylon was built, and Babylon has been a name associated with wickedness for millennia. In the first century, following Zechariah, the early Christians applied it to ethnic Israel. “And on her forehead a name was written: MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. I saw the woman, drunk with the blood of the saints and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. And when I saw her, I marveled with great amazement” (Rev. 17:5-6). Babylon, the wicked woman, was Israel rejected. Israel rejected was taken away from the City of God, and became identified with the city of man, which was Babylon.
We know that God controls evil, and so now we may consider the other meaning mentioned earlier. The wicked woman in the basket is truly evil, but she does not control anything. This is the essential arrogance of sin: the belief that your own hand can control the course of your life.
The applications to our situation are encouraged by the apostle Paul, who warned the Gentiles not to fall into the sin of covenantal presumption, as the Jews had. In Rom. 11, he tells the Gentiles not to do what the Jews had done. The thing must have been possible, and the warnings therefore apply to us. But as we take the warnings to heart, we need to remember that God’s clock is not the same as ours. “But in the fourth generation they shall return here, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete” (Gen. 15:16). This is the way that God works. “But in accordance with your hardness and your impenitent heart you are treasuring up for yourself wrath in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God, who ‘will render to each one according to his deeds'” (Rom 2:5-6). Never confuse the delay of judgment with mercy.