Zechariah 9:9-12 Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem!  See, your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.  I will take away the chariots from Ephraim and the war-horses from Jerusalem, and the battle bow will be broken. He will proclaim peace to the nations. His rule will extend from sea to sea and from the River to the ends of the earth.  As for you, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will free your prisoners from the waterless pit.  Return to your fortress, O prisoners of hope; even now I announce that I will restore twice as much to you. 

Zechariah is speaking to the Children of Israel, the people of the Old Testament, right after they had returned from the Babylonian Captivity. God had allowed them to be imprisoned in a distant land because they had not been faithful to Him. God used a foreign power to carry out His judgment on His disobedient and faithless people. They were prisoners for 70 years in that distant land. But now they were free.

People today are prisoners as well. We are prisoners to our own humanity. By nature we are opposed to God and cannot free ourselves. But God has done everything necessary to free us as well.

As mentioned earlier, Zechariah was speaking to people who had been set free from their captivity and returned to their homeland. As for you, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will free your prisoners from the waterless pit. God had made a covenant with His chosen people at Mt. Sinai, a covenant sealed with the sprinkling of blood as a sign and symbol of forgiveness, and He would not forget it. He is a God who delivers people from pits – like Jeremiah, Daniel and Joseph – pits they could never escape by themselves. It doesn’t matter if the pit is your own doing or that of someone else, whether it is spiritual or physical. God is the one who is able to free you, and that is what He did for His chosen people. He promised that even as He delivered them from Babylon, He would send the Messiah, a humble king, riding on a donkey.

The deliverance that came to them is ours, too. It came in the person of Jesus Christ, when God Himself put on our flesh and stepped into this world as one of us. The triumphant and  tragic events in His life from Palm Sunday to Easter are the heart and soul of our freedom. Jesus rode into Jerusalem just as Zechariah had prophesied, humble and riding on a donkey. He taught the people about the kingdom, urging them to believe in God’s promise and put away the deeds of darkness. The Jewish leaders were afraid of Him, fearing they would lose their power and influence. They plotted against Him. He was betrayed, beaten, crucified and buried. An innocent man put to death for the sins of the people. But it was all part of God’s plan. The blood of His covenant found its fulfillment in the blood of Jesus Christ poured out as the last sacrifice that would ever be needed for sinful mankind. As authentication that His death was full payment for the sins of all people, God the Father raised Him from the dead on the third day, promising freedom to all who will believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Savior of the world. Just as God had earlier freed his people from the Babylonian Captivity of hopelessness and despair, in Jesus He came to free us from captivity to our sinful human nature, promising eternal life instead.