Then the angel that talked with me went forth, and said unto me, Lift up now thine eyes, and see what is this that goeth forth. And I said, What is it? And he said, This is an ephah that goeth forth. He said moreover, This is their resemblance through all the earth. And, behold, there was lifted up a talent of lead: and this is a woman that sitteth in the midst of the ephah. And he said, This is wickedness. And he cast it into the midst of the ephah; and he cast the weight of lead upon the mouth thereof. Then lifted I up mine eyes, and looked, and, behold, there came out two women, and the wind was in their wings; for they had wings like the wings of a stork: and they lifted up the ephah between the earth and the heaven. Then said I to the angel that talked with me, Whither do these bear the ephah? And he said unto me, To build it an house in the land of Shinar: and it shall be established, and set there upon her own base.(Zechariah 5:5-11)
The Prophet Zechariah has been given visions of the restoration and consolation of Judea,Israel and of Jerusalem. Like a fragrant Haddaseh tree,(Myrtle), The lowly nation sits in a ravine, in water,isolated and despised among then nations. But the Angel of the LORD stands among them,and speaks comfortable Words to her.
Jerusalem will grow and expand, the gentile nations that scattered her over the centuries will be “frayed”, and the People of Israel shall once again shine out as God’s candle-stick, constantly being anointed by God’s King and Priest. A Priest named Joshua (Jeshua) will bear the iniquity and reproach of the nation until the wrath of God is satisfied, as a result of this, the iniquity of the nation will be removed in one day.
But first a time of universal Judgment must come, a flying Scroll embodying the breakage of two of the ten commandments “goes forth” into all of the earth, entering every household bringing judgment to all. The two commandments , one from each of the two tables of the Law, represent the breaking of all of the commandments of God by the entire world.
Towards God, most of the the World is engaged in a sort of perjury, a misuse of God’s name, having a form of godliness but denying the very power of it.Towards one another, theft is the representative sin, as men engage in mass covetousness, hating , envying and even confiscating the goods of one another. Consider the mass political movements which appeal to envy, Communism, Socialism, Fascism, all of which have swept most of the world into their covetous web.
People have learned to appeal to Government to “even the score” of those more successful than they, they support leaders of whom it could only be described as thieves in a sane and honest world.
The scroll goes everywhere, and everywhere it goes, it destroys the house thereof. For example look at the utter destruction of leftism in the world today! Most of it is couched in a kind of deceptive self righteous altruism, but it is envy and theft, plain and simple.
In the next , related vision, the Prophet sees an ephah, which is a basket, as well as a measurement. Like the scroll, the Ephah goes forth, from the land of Israel, out into the wider world. The Ephah which goes out, is said to be the “resemblance throughout the earth”.
He sees also a round cover of lead, weighing one talent, over the Ephah. When the cover is lifted up the prophet can see a woman, who is reffered to as “Wickedness” by the Angel.”Wickendess ” is cast into the Ephah and covered with lead.
Next the Prophet sees two winged women(The only winged women in all of scripture), each having the wings of a stork. Each of them take one of the handles of the Ephah and bear it up. “Where are they taking the Ephah?”, asked the Prophet of the interpreting Angel.
“To build it an house in the land of Shinar, it shall be established to set it on her base”.
It would be helpful to survey each of the ingredients of this mysterious vision, in order to get an idea as to what this vision is telling us.
- The Ephah is a symbol of commerce-Just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin, shall ye have: I am the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt.(Leviticus 19:13)
- So also is lead, which was used as a weight for the measuring of Grain or even silver and gold.
- Lead is an unholy metal, not used in the temple of the LORD. The Holy metals are gold, silver and bronze.
- The Woman who is wickedness- one of the constantly recurring motifs in all of scripture. The true congregation of the LORD is the Bride of Christ, the “Daughter of Zion” etc. But the faithless, false church or congregation of any false religion is the harlot, the parody of the Bride, who ensnares the simple, and seduces them away from God.And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication:And upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon The Great, The Mother Of Harlots And Abominations Of The Earth. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration.(Revelation 17:4-6)
- The wings of a stork- The Stork is unclean.And these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the ospray, And the vulture, and the kite after his kind;… And the stork, the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat.(Leviticus 11:13-19)
- And after these things I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power; and the earth was lightened with his glory. And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.(Revelation 18:1-2)
Unclean birds in the Bible, Old and New testament, are types of the Demonic realm.The Stork is one of the largest of these birds in the Holy Land.
Finally we have Shinar, which is another name for Babylon. The Word Shinar means “Cast down with violence”,and it is where the Tower of Babel incident occurred.
To put the picture together, Before Israel is finally restored a particular kind of iniquity must be removed from he soul and from the Land. The Babylonian captivity actually cured Israel from crass idolatry forever. But her experience in Babylon, led Israel into an entirely different kind of iniquity every bit as defiling and corrupting as Baal , Moloch and Ashtoroth ever proved to be.
In captivity, Israel entered into a system of Babylonian commerce. It was there that the Jews became a people of merchants and traders, speculators and investors, lenders and usurers, (none of which by themselves were particularly evil). But the godlessness, commercialism, avarice and love of Mammon which infused such a system eventually leavened much of the nation, corrupting much of the character of the nation to this day.
Zechariah saw that the Ephah would “go forth” until this would be the “resemblance of the entire world. The world wide economic and commercial system would be the very embodiment of “wickedness” itself, and would be powered and hastened on by “Stork winged women” , i.e. powerful, but seductive demonic entities.
Think of our current world situation, in which when States pass laws to protect their citizens from the depredations of the gay rights movement, such as small business owners being sued by homosexuals for not catering to their wedding, huge corporations step in to force and bully those states to rescind such laws or face financial recriminations!
We have a system where the “powers that be” merely inflate currency , thus skimming billions from the powerless, in a deceptive ‘hidden tax’ inflation.
In the USA, the National Football League is currently threatening the State of Texas, to withhold the Superbowl and its profits, because Texas passed a strict law against the imposition of the public of Multi-sexual bathrooms. The NFL seems to want to be perceived as the champion of the degenerates!
For commercial interests, Sundays have become the same as any other day, pornography laws have collapsed, gays have been catered to, degrading television programming has been spewed out on us, there seems to be no resistance to the relentless onslaught. Even religion has become highly commercialized.
We are getting to the point where, all tradition, religion, sanctity, indeed everything we regard as Holy is being forced to step aside for the sake of corporate interests; sales, profits, dividends. The Ephah has spread throughout the entire earth, but Israel will be the first to be delivered from this power.
Where is it all heading? To Shinar again, to Babel.Soon the Mark of the Beast will come as our greatest moral and spiritual test.
Pastor Bill Randles Blog 
For what it’s worth, and please understand this is just food for thought, there is one teacher who says that the translation of the “two women” carrying the container (basket, or ephah), is actually a mistranslation from the Hebrew and should be “two fires” — they are very similar Hebrew words. From Strong’s:
784 ‘esh aysh a primitive word; fire (literally or figuratively):– burning, fiery, fire, flaming, hot.
799 ‘eshdath esh-dawth’ from 784 and 1881; a fire-law:–fiery law.
800 ‘eshshah esh-shaw’ feminine of 784; fire:–fire.
“woman”:
‘ishshah ish-shaw’ feminine of 376 or 582; irregular plural, nashiym {naw-sheem’}; a woman (used in the same wide sense as 582):–(adulter)ess, each, every, female, X many, + none, one, + together, wife, woman. Often unexpressed in English.
In Zechariah’s day, he says, there are no “vowel points”; you only know the vowel points from the context. This teacher, who is a former U.S. Marine, believes the “ephah”, the container with the lid made out of lead that the “stork” is carrying could be describing a bomber carrying scud missiles and calls these two fires a fire offering, an “unholy” fire. He worked with scud missiles while he was in the Marines. And note how the storks fly:
“and the wind was in their wings; for they had wings like the wings of a stork: and they lifted up the ephah between the earth and the heaven.” The bomber carrying the missiles also “lifts off”, and “fire” comes out its rear. Also, storks don’t flap their wings when they fly; they soar in circles. A plane doesn’t flap its wings, either. The prophets, of course, would not have had the modern words to describe what they saw. They could only write that something was “like” something else.
“I see a flying roll (megillah, i.e., scroll); the length thereof is twenty cubits, and the breadth thereof ten cubits:” or 34.5 feet long. According to this teacher, “breadth” in the Hebrew manuscripts is “a line cast about”, as in diameter. Ten cubits is about 5 1/2 feet in diameter. 34.5′ long by 5.5′ in diameter are the exact dimension of a scud missile, according to the teacher I mentioned. They are encased in lead, which keeps the stray radiation from hurting anyone around them.
“the land of Shinar” – modern day Iran, Iraq, and Syria.
A thermonuclear war could also result in what we see in Joel 2:31: “The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come.” Zechariah 14:12 is striking as well: “And this shall be the plague with which the LORD will strike all the peoples that wage war against Jerusalem: their flesh will rot while they are still standing on their feet, their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths.” This is exactly what happened to the Japanese people when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From accounts I read, their skin just peeled off. It was horrible beyond imagination.
Your are right to point out that the stork is an unclean bird. Some time back, I listened to a message on Zechariah and the “woman in the basket” by Jacob Prasch . Like you, he also noted that the stork is one of the, if not the, largest bird in the Middle East. It has very strong wings and can carry heavy loads, and it bites. So I believe these creatures are demonic.
Hope I didn’t start something controversial here! As always, thanks for letting me comment.
No apologies necessary Jeanne, I welcome such interaction, you have provoked me to more research and prayer- thanks sister!
On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 9:44 AM, Pastor Bill Randles Blog wrote:
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Bill, to clarify, the SCUD is launched from the ground. However, my husband (who is retired from the Navy), said all nuclear missiles are encased in lead. But I think the passages in Zechariah are very interesting. When you watch the fighter jets take off, they really do practically lift up in the air. There is one, the Harrier, that my husband said can can raise up and then hover in the air, and then start its rocket engine and take off. Fascinating, IMO! 🙂 Here’s a video of the Harriet ; at about the 3:00 minute mark, and right before the 4:00 minute mark it hovers. My husband said that when the landing gear is down, it can’t go full speed.
“the land of Shinar” – modern day Iran, Iraq, and Syria.”
The Russians are in Syria now and in the last month have boasted that they have nuclear warheads in scud missiles that would level an area the size of Texas.
“and shall consume it with the timber thereof and the stones thereof.” Zech. 5:4
Are these the “devices” that will cause the atmosphere to be darkened as we read in Joel 2? “31 The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come.”
Could be a play on words? As the church goes with Lady Iniquity, so good the world to war…
Thank you for this teaching on Zechariah.