The flying scroll
I looked again—and there before me was a flying scroll! 2 He asked me, “What do you see?”
I answered, “I see a flying scroll, thirty feet long and fifteen feet wide.”
3 And he said to me, “This is the curse that is going out over the whole land; for according to what it says on one side, every thief will be banished, and according to what it says on the other, everyone who swears falsely will be banished. 4 The LORD Almighty declares, ‘I will send it out, and it will enter the house of the thief and the house of him who swears falsely by my name. It will remain in his house and destroy it, both its timbers and its stones.’”
The picture of the flying scroll is not unlike that which comes to mind when a person at the county fair sees an airplane towing a message along behind it. Everyone looks up. Everyone sees it. It is a real eye-catcher.
The flying scroll that Zechariah saw also had odd proportions for a scroll. It was half as wide as it was long. The dimensions of two copper scrolls found at Qumran in the Holy Land were 12 inches wide by about 90 inches long. This seems to have been fairly representative of the dimensions of most scrolls (The Dead Sea Scrolls, William Sanford LaSor, 1956).
Another thing about the scroll that Zechariah saw, which we notice immediately, is that the scroll was huge! It was meant to be seen. And it was a curse, a preachment of law to two types of people—thieves and those who had sworn falsely.
The Lord God takes the offenses of the thieves and perjurers personally. As all of the commandments in one way or another do, the Seventh Commandment, which says not to steal, is directly connected with the First Commandment. People steal because they have not learned to trust the Lord their God above all things. Stealing is a sin of taking things into our own hands, literally and figuratively. The Lord is the one who distributes possessions, and he does this according to his love and wisdom. People steal presumably because they are dissatisfied with what they have. This is a serious matter that the scroll talked about. Stealing is telling God he has made a mistake in the distribution of possessions.
Perjury is also a serious crime, so serious that it merited inclusion on the flying scroll. In perjury God is implicated again; his good name is involved. “I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.” The Second Commandment comes especially into play here: “You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God” (Exodus 20:7).
Human beings of the 21st century should not lose sight of the flying scroll of Zechariah. There still is a God in heaven who is very jealous of his name. He hears the senseless expletives. He knows each flippant misuse.
The punishment for the thief and perjurer will be like acid spending a night in a house, eating wood and stone alike. The word translated “it will remain” is really the word that means to spend the night or to sojourn. Dissatisfaction (stealing) and dishonesty (swearing falsely) are cancers that eat away at the person who traffics in them. They affect everything he has.