Zechariah 2:3

"And, behold, the angel that talked with me went forth, and another angel went out to meet him, and said unto him, Run, speak to this young man, saying, Jerusalem shall be inhabited as villages without walls, by reason of the multitude of men and cattle therein."

"Speak to this young man ..." It is perfectly clear that the person indicated by this is not an angel of God, a fact inherent in the indication of his age. "Young is inapplicable and unapplied to angels, who have not our human variations of age, but exist, as they were created."[2] Therefore, we understand this as a reference to Zechariah himself. After all, Zechariah is the only one who had requested information about any of these visions; and to suppose that the young man was an angel would do violence to that basic factor in all of these visions.

Seeing this young man as the prophet instead of making him into another angel also avoids another error, namely, that of supposing one of God's angels to have been ignorant of God's counsels[3] and thus desiring to measure Jerusalem but being stopped from doing so. There is no way that such an explanation is reasonable.

Failure to understand the "young man" as the prophet Zechariah leads to a multitude of unsupported "guesses," none of which has ever received universal support:

The foolish Mormon conceit which makes this young man to be Joseph Smith, the pseudo-prophet, and the angel to be Moroni, who reveals to him the golden plates of the book of Mormon.[4]

The young man is typical of the rising generation, more eager for city walls than for the Temple.[5]

The young man in the vision represents those Jews who thought only of physical Jerusalem.[6] The young man is the angel of Zechariah 2:1.[7]

"The young man" therefore represents the average opinion of that day.[8]

Take your choice; but it seems impossible to this writer that the young man could possibly be anyone except Zechariah himself. As Unger expressed it, "If the allusion is not to Zechariah, it can be to no other; for angels are ageless, and it would be pointless to describe an angel as a youth."[9]

In addition to all of the above considerations, the basic purpose of these visions was to convey information to God's people through Zechariah; and, inasmuch as "the young man" was represented in this passage as receiving that information, it is safe to conclude that he indeed is that prophet. The vision definitely is not a means of God's correcting some erring angel!

"Jerusalem shall be inhabited without walls ..." This never applied to the literal Jerusalem, except for part of a century before the people were able to rebuild the walls. The simple meaning is that God's eventual city, as realized in the Church of Jesus Christ, shall not be a fortified citadel, but a worldwide fellowship that no walls could limit or contain.