Zechariah 12:10
10 And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplication. They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and grieve bitterly for him as one grieves for a firstborn son.

400 years before Jesus was born, this Scripture was written, which seems to foretell the Crucifixion. Reading this Scripture literally gives me chills, thinking about how this mirrors what we read about the actual Crucifixion in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).

Here, Zechariah is retelling an oracle he’s received from the Lord, saying that God will pour out “a spirit of grace and supplication” on both “the house of David” and those who live in Jerusalem on the day that the Messiah is sacrificed. When the Messiah is crucified (“pierced”), that spirit, which we can take to mean the Holy Spirit, will descend over the onlooking crowd, and they will see the Messiah as one of great faith, a faith which they only realized after His death. I hear echoes of Mark 15:39 here (“And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, heard him cry and saw how he died, he said, ‘Surely this man was the Son of God!'”).

This is just one of the prophecies concerning the Messiah, for whom the Israelites and their descendants waited four centuries…and the way it connects up with the New Testament is amazing. Though the Old and New Testament sometimes seem to be greatly divergent in tone and in subject matter, sections like these foreshadow Jesus and connect the Old Testament’s laws and messages directly with His ministry.