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Zechariah 5

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1 Then again lifting up my eyes I saw a roll in flight through the air.

2 And he said to me, What do you see? And I said, A roll going through the air; it is twenty cubits long and ten cubits wide.

3 Then he said to me, This is the curse which goes out over the face of all the land: for long enough has every thief gone without punishment, and long enough has every taker of false oaths gone without punishment.

4 And I will send it out, says the Lord of armies, and it will go into the house of the thief and into the house of him who takes a false oath by my name: and it will be in his house, causing its complete destruction, with its woodwork and its stones.

5 And the angel who was talking to me went out and said to me, Let your eyes be lifted up now, and see the ephah which is going out.

6 And I said, What is it? And he said, This is an ephah which is going out. And he said further, This is their evil-doing in all the land.

7 And I saw a round cover of lead lifted up; and a woman was seated in the middle of the ephah.

8 And he said, This is Sin; and pushing her down into the ephah, he put the weight of lead on the mouth of it.

9 And lifting up my eyes I saw two women coming out, and the wind was in their wings; and they had wings like the wings of a stork: and they took the ephah, lifting it up between earth and heaven.

10 And I said to the angel who was talking to me, Where are they taking the ephah?

11 And he said to me, To make a house for her in the land of Shinar: and they will make a place ready, and put her there in the place which is hers.

   

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Ten

  

In most places in the Word, "ten" represents "all," or in some cases "many" or "much." The Ten Commandments represent all the guidance we get from the Lord in life; the ten horns on the beast of Revelation represent all power of falsity; the ten virgins with lamps in Matthew 25 represent all people of the church.

Yet in other places, ten, or especially a "tenth," signifies representing remnants, or tiny scraps of goodness preserved for the future. These can be the remnants of a church -- a few good people that can be built up into a new church. Or they can be tiny subconscious memories of love and joy which the Lord stores in each of us in early childhood, feelings He can use later to draw us toward a life of goodness and affection.

These two meanings seem nearly opposite, but they're actually not. Love is whole and indivisible, so that the tiniest feeling buried inside someone contains all the elements of the love it can become. In a similar way, a remnant of a church that has preserved that church's knowledge has everything it needs to grow into a new church. In a sense, then, those remnants are indeed "all," they're just a version of "all" that is still in a state of potential.