“And I said unto them, If ye think good, give me my price and if not, forbear. So they weighed for my price thirty pieces of silver. And the LORD said unto me, Cast it unto the potter: a goodly price that I was prized at of them. And I took the thirty pieces of silver, and cast them to the potter in the house of the Lord” (Zechariah 11:12,13).

This remarkable prophetic drama acted out by Zechariah m the name of Jehovah was an immediate condemnation of his own generation that had rebelled against God’s prophet, and also of a coming generation that would reject God Himself, in the person of Jesus Christ. God had the right to expect the worthy wages of a faithful shepherd for all He had done for His people. Instead, they offered Him just thirty “silverlings”-the paltry price paid a master for the death of his slave (Exodus 21:32). Therefore the prophet, for the Lord’s sake, cast the money down in the temple to be paid to a lowly potter.

But this was also a prophecy of the betrayal price paid to Judas-the “goodly price” that Israel’s leaders placed on their Messiah This also went to the potter, to buy his scraggly field as a grave for deceased aliens. “Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying, And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of Him that was valued. . . . And gave them for the potter’s field” (Matthew 27:9-10).

A century before Zechariah, the great prophet Jeremiah had evidently “spoken” (not “written”) that some day the people of Israel would judge Him to be worth only thirty pieces of silver. Zechariah later acted out Jeremiah’s prophecy and wrote it down, and Judas still later was the tragic instrument of its ultimate fulfillment.

The question now is: What is God to us-a slave worth perhaps thirty silver dollars-or is He Lord of all? HMM