June 30, 2000

• Luke 1:5-25

  

  Zacharias: The Righteous Priest

  Luke 1:5-7

  In Luke 1:78, the comment is made that "The sunrise from on High shall visit us."  That is a reference to the Jewish Messiah.  Chapter 1 covers the final hours of darkness before that sunrise arrives, before Messiah.  Not only for Israel but for the world, waiting for the Savior.  Through all of Israel's history, a history of calling that began with Abraham, a history of exile 400 years in  Egypt, of wanderings 40 years in the wilderness, of the conquest of the land of Canaan, of the occupation of the land of Canaan, of captivity, the northern kingdom taken captive in 722 B.C., the southern kingdom taken into Babylon in 586 B.C.  The northern kingdom never returning, the southern kingdom returning 70 years later.  Israel's long history of coming back out of captivity and trying to rebuild and then only to be oppressed as Greeks invaded and controlled the land, and then Romans came and further oppressed them...the long night of Israel's history of blessing and cursing mixed, the long night of Israel's history of faithfulness and apostasy.  And what sustained those who really looked toward God through all those long, long years of darkness was the hope that the sunrise would break. 

  The last book of the Old Testament, Malachi promised that the sun of righteousness would arise with healing in its beams.  And he was really saying exactly what was said in verse 78, "Sunrise is coming...sunrise is coming."  The darkness is not permanent, but it's usually true that the darkness is the deepest just before the dawn.  And for the 400 years since Malachi said that, since the last prophet said the sun of righteousness will rise, for 400 years since that God never spoke.  Israel sunk deeper and deeper into depression, oppressed by the Greeks whose ruler Antiochus Epiphanes actually had the unmitigated gall to step into the sacred Holy of Holies, the holy place of the temple, and desecrate those places, even sacrificing a pig on the altar...a time when the Gentile Greeks came in and brought their pagan gods and their pagan theology and mingled it in that sacred land with the people of Israel.  They were followed by the Romans, also with all their idolatries.  This made the depression all the greater.  And as much as the Jewish people cried out to God, God didn't speak and no prophet appeared.

  Israel not only sunk deeper into depression because of oppressing nations occupying her land, but sank deeper into sin and apostasy until by the time the gospel of Luke begins, Judaism as we know it existing in the land of Israel was apostate.  It had abandoned the true message of the Old Testament for a false one, engaging itself in works-righteousness, self-righteousness, all those things which God hates.  Israel had suffered then from sin and apostasy as well as the oppression of foreign nations desecrating its holy ground.

  It's important to realize there is a critical element of the predictions that Malachi made that can't be overlooked.  Yes he said the sun of righteousness is coming, but he also said this..."Before He comes, before the sun rises, before the Messiah, Lord Savior comes there will come a prophet to announce His arrival, a herald, an announcer."  He's often called a forerunner.  Malachi said this, "Behold, I'm going to send My messenger and he will clear the way for Me." 

  Isaiah said he will be a voice in the wilderness crying out to clear the way for the Lord, make smooth the highway for my God.  Both Isaiah and Malachi then said before the sun arises, before the Messiah comes will come a prophet pointing toward Him.  When the Messiah's forerunner arrives, when that prophet comes, the silence of heaven will be broken with the voice of God and the darkness of earth will be shattered with the light of the Savior and Redeemer.  The silence then will be broken when the forerunner arrives.  And then will come the Messiah and the saga of salvation. 

  "In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a certain priest named Zacharias, of the division of Abijah.  And he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron and her name was Elizabeth.  And they were both righteous in the sight of God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and requirements of the Lord.  And they had no child because Elizabeth was barren and they were both advanced in years.  Now it came about while he was performing his priestly service before God in the appointed order of his division, according to the custom of the priestly office, he was chosen by lot to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense.  And the whole multitude of the people were in prayer outside at the hour of the incense offering.  An angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing to the right of the altar of incense."  And with that the silence of God was broken.

  "Zacharias was troubled when he saw him and fear gripped him.  But the angel said to him, Do not be afraid, Zacharias, for your petition has been heard and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son and you will give him the name John." The story begins with the birth of John, who would be the forerunner to the Messiah.

  This connects the Old Testament with the New Testament.  The Old Testament and the New Testament do not propose two different religions.  There is not the religion of Judaism and the religion of Christianity.  Rather, the Old and the New Testament are one revelation from God with continuity telling the story of redemption, of only one religion, one faith and that is faith in the true and living God which involves His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.  It is one complete revelation from God.  And either the Old or the New is incomplete without the other.

  Secondly, Luke begins the story of salvation with John the Baptist because that links John the Baptist as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies and that shows the accuracy of Scripture's prophecies, the accuracy of Scripture's predictions.  Therefore we understand that the Old Testament which is Scripture makes predictions which the New Testament fulfills, therefore the New Testament is the Scripture as well.

  Beginning the story with John the Baptist also is important because John the Baptist's birth was the first point at which God spoke.  It is the initial appearance of angels...you saw that in verse 11.  "An angel of the Lord appeared..."  And with that the silence was broken, with that the 400 years with no word from God ended, with that the saga of salvation began. 

  The story of John the Baptist establishes that he is the prophesied forerunner of Messiah.  I'll say that again.  The story of John the Baptist, as you will see, establishes beyond argument that he is the forerunner of Messiah.  If we know that to be true, then we can therefore know who the Messiah is, it is whoever John identifies.  And there was a day, as we shall see, when Jesus came down to the Jordan River where John was baptizing and John turned toward Him and said, "Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world."  John pointed to Jesus Christ as the Messiah of which he was the forerunner.  Very important.  If you establish who the forerunner is and it's John the Baptist, then you know who the Messiah is, it's whoever he points to.

  Luke gives us history.  He begins in verse 5, "In the days of Herod, king of Judea..."  That's the setting, that's the timing.  In the days of Herod, king of Judah...he's not a fictional character, and history has left us an immense amount of information regarding this man.  Herod the Great was the first of several Herods mentioned in the New Testament.  Julius Caesar had appointed Herod's father, a man named Antipater, to be procurator, or to be governor of Judea under the Roman occupation.  What the Romans did in the development of the Great Roman Empire was they just took over all kinds of nations and when they established their control militarily of those nations they then placed someone in power there who was a representative of the Roman government so they would have control.  Antipater was selected to do that in the land of Judea under the Roman occupation.

  Antipater then managed to have his son, Herod, appointed prefect of Galilee, the northern part of Palestine is an area of Galilee and he managed to get his son the position of ruling and representing the Roman government in Galilee.  Now in that office Herod was quite successful.  He knew where he was going.  He was a smart guy.  He planned his strategy very well to achieve his goals.  One of the problems that the Romans had to deal with in the land of Palestine was terrorism.  There were all kinds of Jewish terrorists.  There were some of them known as the Sakariai(?) because that was the term for little sword.  They were dagger carriers who went around in the crowds and when they found a Roman soldier or Roman citizen, they would assassinate them.  There were terrorist activities going on in Galilee as well.  Herod was very successful in bringing those guerilla bands of terrorists to accounting, to imprisonment and really did away with them.  He was very successful in that so he garnered an awful lot of good will from the Romans toward him.

  The Parthians, another group of people, came into that area, actually invaded Palestine rather formidably while Herod was in that northern area, so he fled to Rome.  He was in Rome.  The Romans liked him because of what he was able to do.  The Romans wanted him to go back and they wanted him to fight the Parthians and get them back out of the land of Palestine, so they gave him an army.  He was declared by Octavian and Antony, with the concurrence of the Roman Senate, to be king of the Jews. That happened in Rome and they gave him an army and sent him back.

  He invaded Palestine the next year and after several years of fighting, drove out the Parthians and established himself as the king of the Jews throughout Palestine.  The year was 37 B.C. 

  Now he had a problem, he was not Jewish.  Worse than that, he was an Edomite.  And Edom had been cursed by God.  He was an Edomite, often called an Idumaean.  He worried about that.  He was very concerned about his reputation so he married a Jewish girl by the name of Mariamne, an heiress to the Jewish Hasmonaean house, a very, very well-established and noble family.  He did it in order to make himself more acceptable to the Jews that he now ruled.  He was a clever man.  He was a very capable warrior.  History tells us he was an immensely gifted orator and he was a diplomat.  In times, for example, of severe economic hardship he had a surplus from taxation.  He actually took the surplus and gave it back to the people...something that all of us are longing to experience.

  There was in 25 B.C. a great famine in the land of Palestine and Herod being the diplomat that he was melted down some of the most beautiful objects in his palace to buy food for the poor, and thus in some way endeared himself to the people.  He built theaters and he built race tracks and he built other athletic and entertainment structures in the land of Palestine, the ruins of which you can even see today if you go there.  He revived Samaria which had kind of fallen into a waste place.  He built the most beautiful port city of Caesarea which you can still visit and see elements of his buildings there.  He named it in honor of his benefactor, Caesar Augustus, which was the title of Octavian. 

  He embellished the cities of the route and Damascus and Tyre and Sidon and even the city of Rhodes.  And he even contributed to the rebuilding of the great city of Athens.  Very successful as a leader and a ruler.  He built the remarkable and frankly almost impregnable fortress of Masada down in the desert, down by the Dead Sea, elevated high up on a mountain top, Masada where in A.D. 73 nearly a thousand Jewish defenders committed suicide rather than be captured by the Roman general Flavius Silva who had besieged Masada.  It was the summer home of Herod.

  Those are his achievements, but personally he was cruel and merciless and vicious beyond description.  He was incredibly jealous, completely suspicious of everybody and afraid that someone was going to take his position and power.  He feared every potential threat and every threat that was just manufactured in his own mind. 

  He had the high priest, the Jewish high priest Aristobulus, drowned. That was bad enough, but it was his wife's brother which made it worse.  His wife wasn't happy about that...by the way, he attended the funeral of the brother-in-law he had drowned and wept in a pretense of affection.  And then to silence his wife about what had happened, he killed her.  And then knowing that mother-in-laws can be a problem, he killed her mother.  Fearing that his sons might tell the truth about him, he killed two of them.  Five days before his death, which is about a year after Jesus was born, he had a third son executed.  One of the greatest evidences of his blood-thirstiness and his insane cruelty was having the most distinguished citizens of Jerusalem all rounded up and imprisoned just before his death.  He knew he was dying.  He got all of these nobles and put them all in prison.  He knew that no one would mourn his death because everyone knew him as a slaughtering, massacring serial killer, so he ordered that at the moment of his death all of those nobles who were in prison be instantly executed so at least there would be mourning in Jerusalem when he died...even if it wasn't for him.

  That barbaric act, along with all the others, really pales in the light of the most horrifying thing that he ever did.  When he heard that a king had been born in Bethlehem, in order to kill that king he slaughtered all the male Jewish children in Bethlehem and its surroundings from two years old and under in the hope of killing someone who might some day be a threat to his throne.  How paranoid he must have been at his age to fear a child under the age of two.  That's Herod.

  "In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a certain priest named Zacharias."  Now we go from Herod to Zacharias.  From the king to the humblest of men, just a certain priest, not anything but a certain priest, common guy.  That name, Zacharias, appears on behalf of thirty different people in Scripture, a very common name, it means "God remembers" in Hebrew.  

  So now we meet the first character in the story.  Not particular notable, there were 18 thousand priests in Palestine at the time, or about 18 thousand.  He was just a certain one of them, just one priest who lived somewhere out in a village somewhere and carried on his priestly duties like his 18 thousand other priestly compatriots.  We will have seen five things about him...his personal righteousness, his priestly responsibility, his prophetic revelation, his perfidious response and his punishing reproof.

  Let's start with the first one, his personal righteousness. Let me tell you a little bit about how priests function.  The nation of Israel is a theocratic kingdom, that is it's ruled by God.  God mediated that rule for the officers of the kingdom who were priests.  And all the priests were sons of Aaron.  To be a priest was to be honored.  It was to be a representative of God.  It was to be a descendant of the one who was the originally high priest who was to be set apart by God for holy service, it was to be able to go into the temple and offer sacrifice on behalf of the people.  It was a very noble and respected position. 

  They were pronouncers of blessing also.  They were servants of the temple.  It was the priests who were the butchers who actually did all of the sacrificing of the animals for the people.  It was the priests who interpreted the scriptures.  It was the priests who taught the scriptures and who counseled people out in their villages where they lived.  Zachariah was one of them.   There were 24 orders of priests because there were so many they couldn't all serve in the temple all the time and they had to be divided down.  Any priest would serve in the temple two different weeks a year...two separate weeks a year. 

  Now all the priests came to the temple for Passover.  It wasn't uncommon to slaughter as many as a quarter of a million lambs at Passover.  If 18 thousand priests went about to slaughter a quarter of a million lambs just in a week's period, that would be a pretty great undertaking.  And remember, they were butchers.  They were covered with blood to the top of their head all the way to the toe of their feet.  They were butchers, they slaughtered all day long.  That's what they did when they were there.  But in the normal course of things they served in the temple just two different weeks a year.  And that's where we find Zacharias at this particular time.

  It also tells us about him that he had a wife.  He was a priest and that would fill his life with religion all the time.  He also had a wife who knew about that.  He had a wife, look at this, from the daughters of Aaron.  He married the daughter of a priest.  And since all male descendants of Aaron were priests, her father was a priest, her brothers were priests, her uncles were priests, her grandfather, great-grandfather, she was in a world of priests.  She grew up immersed in Jewish priestly function.  He chose the best.  I think this tells us a little bit about his devotion to the priesthood, his devotion to God, to his priestly duty.  He married a girl who was most exposed to the devout involvement in the religion of Judaism.

  And, you know, she must have come from a pretty good family, a pretty serious family of priests because they named her Elizabeth.  Elizabeth is a beautiful name but did you know that Elizabeth, according to Exodus 6:23, is the very name of Aaron's wife?  She was named after the wife of the original high priest Aaron.  That tells you something else about this family that she came from.  These are people who are serious about their religion.  These are people who are serious about priestly function.  Elizabeth means "My God is an oath," or "My God is faithful,"  

  So here is this man, just a common ordinary priest out in some village somewhere serious enough about his priesthood that he finds a woman to marry who has all her life filled with priests, who will understand his life and his love for the priesthood and for God.  And one who so comes from such a devoted family as to have been named after the wife of the original high priest, Aaron.  This is a remarkable couple.  And this certainly provided tremendous heritage for John.  In a time of Jewish apostasy and a time of Jewish defection from true worship of God, a time of hypocrisy, a time of self-righteousness, this couple was devout.  And we know that specifically because of verse 6, look at this, "And they were both righteous in the sight of God."

  God said they're righteous. That couple down there, that Zacharias and that Elizabeth, they're righteous before Me.  The only way God could declare someone righteous was if He didn't impute their sins to them.  They were right with Him.  Their sins were covered.  Now how did that happened?  The same way it happens all the time.  Same way it happened in Genesis with Abraham the first of all the Jewish line.  It says in Genesis 15:6, "And he believed God and it was counted as righteousness unto him."  God literally gives righteousness as a covering to those who believe Him.  They believed in God.  They believed in the true and living God.  They believed the Word of God.  They believed the revelation of the Old Testament.  They believed God's holy law was right and true and just and good.  They believed that they couldn't keep His law.  They knew they were sinners who fell short of the law of God and they knew that the law of God called for penitence and repentance and they also knew that God was a God of mercy and grace and loving-kindness.  They believed all that and so they saw the law of God, they saw its holy standard.  They realized they fell short of it.  They went to God with a penitent heart and they asked Him for grace and mercy.  That's what the Old Testament reveals. That was what God said....Here's My law, you can't keep it but I am a God of mercy and I am a God of compassion and I am a God of loving-kindness and grace and all you have to do is ask.   They believed that.

  I'm sure Zachariah and Elizabeth both knew Isaiah 61:10, they knew what Isaiah the prophet had said, this is what he wrote, "I will rejoice greatly in the Lord, my soul will exult in my God...and here's why...for He has clothed me with garments of salvation, He has wrapped me with a robe of righteousness."  They knew that.  They knew that even though they were sinful they could be covered with righteousness, that God would be merciful and gracious to them and cover them with a robe of righteousness so that when God looked at them He saw righteousness, not sin.  He covered up their sins. 

  The question is...how could God do that?  How could God do that and still be holy?  How can a holy God be just and the justifier of sinners?  How can God just cover up sin and still be holy?  I think Zachariah and Elizabeth both knew how.  I'll tell you, there's one other statement made by Isaiah that I'm sure they knew and it's the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah.  Isaiah said, "There's One who's coming who will be despised and forsaken by men, a man of sorrows acquainted with grief...listen to this, verses 4 through 6...surely our griefs He Himself bore, our sorrows He carried, yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted.  He was pierced through for our transgressions.  He was crushed for our iniquities.  The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him and by His scourgings we are healed.  All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way, but the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him." 

  They knew there was coming someone who would bear their sins, someone who would be bearing their griefs, carrying their sorrows, who would be pierced for their transgressions, crushed for their iniquities.  Their iniquity would fall on Him.  That's how God could cover them with righteousness, because someone else would bear their sin.  Who was that someone else?  Whoever fulfilled Isaiah 53.  And who was it to be?  The Messiah.  And that's why when John first saw Jesus, when John was down at the river in his ministry and Jesus showed up for the first time, John didn't say, "There's the Messiah, there's the King."  John said, "Behold the Lamb."  John spent his life head deep in blood in the sacrificial system over and over and over and over day after day after day all through the year these orders of priests just slaughtered animals, slaughtered animals.  And never ever did it take away sin, the people had to come back make another one, another one, another one, another one all their life long.  He was looking for the final sacrifice, the one who would bear his sin.  He was believing that God would provide a sacrifice.  Doesn't that sound like Abraham who took his son up on Mount Moriah way back in Genesis and believed that God would provide a sacrifice?

  They were believing people, this couple, they believed in God, they believed in the true and living God, they believed in His law.  They knew they fell short of it.  They were penitent in their hearts.  They cried out to God for mercy and they knew that God would have some provision for their sin.  Someone would bear their sin.  He of all people, Zacharias, and Elizabeth of all ladies would know their hopeless incompletion of the sacrificial system.  Butchering, butchering, slaughtering day after day after day after day after day...same people over and over and over and over and never was sin taken away, never was the price finally paid, never were the souls of people truly ransomed.  You can imagine the exhilaration in John the day he pointed to Jesus and said, "Behold the Lamb of God which takes away the sin of the world." 

  There would come one, Zacharias knew it, who would die the death for sin which fully satisfied the holy justice of God.  God knew that that sin would be covered so He could take care of the sinner by covering him with a robe of righteousness based upon what Christ would do.  This is justification by imputation.

  We aren't righteous but God looks at us and we're righteous in His sight because He covers us with righteousness because we believe.  And by our faith our sins are placed on Christ.  When Christ died on the cross He was bearing the sins of Zacharias and of Abraham and of Elizabeth and of Sarah and of everybody else who ever believed.  He was  the sacrifice.

  Luke tells the story later in chapter 18 about a Pharisee who went to the temple and he said, "I thank You that I'm not like other men," and he goes on parading all of his external virtue.  And there's this other guy beating his chest, he won't look up and he says, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner."  And Luke records that Jesus said, "That man went home righteous and not the Pharisee."  That's the kind of person Zacharias was, the kind of person Elizabeth was.  They were righteous because God had covered them with righteousness because they believed Him and they believed that God would provide a sacrifice for their sin.  In the mean time, they cried out for His mercy.

  They weren't just justified, justification and righteousness the same thing, they were also sancitified.  Look at the rest of verse 6.  They were walking blamelessly in all the commandments and requirements of the Lord.  When God imputes righteousness to you, He also imparts righteousness to you.  In other words, they weren't the same after they believed.  They were declared righteous based upon Christ's carry...bearing their sin.  They were covered with a robe of righteousness which God did for them.  But they also transformed.  So we always say that justification, which is being declared righteous on the merits of Christ's substitutionary death, is never separated from sanctification which is God making you different.  They were different.  They walked blamelessly in all the commandments and requirements of the Lord.  That doesn't mean they were sinless.  It doesn't mean they were perfect.  It just means they were obedient. They had a reputation for walking according to the will of God, the law of God.  They were like Job of whom essentially the very same thing is said.  Job was a faithful, obedient man.  He was blameless, upright fearing God and turning away from evil, Job 1:1.  This means that salvation is justification, being declared righteous because Christ cares for your sins, and it is also sanctification and they have to occur together.  Holiness was imputed to them, that is put to their account.  It was also imparted to them, they were regenerated.  They were converted.  They were transformed.  Psalm 19 says that, "The law of the Lord is perfect, totally transforming the whole inner man."  They were made different people so that they could live a different way.  They were able to live life as previously impossible.

  They understood the Mosaic Law.  They grasped its perfections.  They knew they fell short.  They came to God, they got His mercy and His grace.  They then loved the law of God.  They wanted to keep it, they wanted to do it.  And God gave them the capability of doing that  by changing them.  They were then able to obey Joshua 1:8, a great verse, "This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, you shall meditate on it day and night so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it, they you'll make your way prosperous, then you'll have success."  They were Psalm 119 people, Psalm 119:97, "O how I love Thy law."

  Now, you say, "John, why are you in to all this stuff?"  Because I think this is what Luke's trying to tell us and we have to have this foundation.  We'll get the speed going as we start going downhill, but you have to understand this, Luke is giving us something here that is critical to the gospel, it's critical to the whole message of the Bible.  He is showing us, listen, folks, in describing Zacharias and Elizabeth he is laying an essential foundation for the story of salvation.  What he's telling you is the gospel is not in conflict with true faith in Israel, it is in harmony with true faith in Israel.  You understand that?  These people would accept the gospel gladly because it's the next reasonable step because they're looking for their sacrifice.  Contrast that with the apostle Paul who was a Pharisee who was going around trying to establish his own righteousness and had to say about his entire life before Christ it was manure. 

  These people evidenced for Luke the fact that the New Testament message is not in conflict with true faith in Old Testament Israel.  It's not a new religion.  It's not a new way of salvation.  It's not a different way to God.  And Jesus did not come to oppose the Old Testament law or to oppose the Old Testament sacrifice, He came to affirm them and fulfill them.  Everything the Old Testament taught about salvation, being right with God, confession of sin, repentance, faith, the substitutionary death of a sacrifice for sin, obedience to God's law, that's all taught in the New Testament.  Jesus said, "I'm not going to remove one jot or tittle, not one little breathing mark and not one little tiny little mark till it's all complete."

  God's law, man's sin, faith in God, repentance for sin, justification which is imputed righteousness, sanctification which is imparted righteousness which changes you, obedience to God's law, worship of the true and living God, that's all carried from the Old into the New intact, continuity is there.

  So Zachariah and Elizabeth were, Psalm 119, one people.  It says, "How blessed are those who walk in the law of the Lord, whose way is blameless."  Two very righteous people, righteous in the sight of God.

  Probably they weren't righteous in the sight of men. "They had no child because Elizabeth was barren and they were both advanced in years."  You want to know the most severe shame that a Jewish woman would ever bear was to be...what?...childless.  You know what the conclusion of people might be?  "Well, you know what the Bible says, you know what the Scripture says...children are an inheritance from God," Psalm 127, "they are a blessing from the Lord.  And you know what Scripture says, that if you sin God can shut your womb and you will pay, Deuteronomy 28, there are curses and when God curses you it can show up in barrenness."  This dear couple, this dear woman lived, it says, into her old age, they were both advanced in years.  That puts them over 60.  And since there was no retirement age for a Jewish priest, they could be 80 or more.  All their life, and they were probably married in their teens typically, all their life...all their life they bore the stigma, no child, no child, no child.  And all the questions...I wonder what's wrong...I wonder what sin is in their life.  The rabbis used to say seven people are excommunicated from God...here's how they begin...a Jew who has no wife, or a Jew whose wife has no child.  That was a terrible burden in that society.  To be barren was grounds for divorce.  If your wife couldn't have a child, boot her out.  She's probably accursed by God.

  So here's this couple righteous in the sight of God, maybe unrighteous in the sight of men.  As godly as they were they bore the stigma.  But Luke wants us to know that her barrenness had nothing to do with sin in their life.  God had something planned for them that was so much beyond their wildest dreams.  To them was to be given the forerunner, the first prophet in 400 years, the last prophet of the Old Testament, and, listen to this, the greatest man who ever lived up until that time.  They would have only one son, he would be the greatest human who had ever walked the earth...and that is from the words of Jesus Himself.  This is not divine punishment, their barrenness, this is divine planning.

  Their situation humanly was hopeless.  And that's exactly where God often prefers it. 

  ---

   

  God Breaks His Silence: The Revelation to Zacharias

  Luke 1:8-17

  There are about twenty miracles that Luke describes in his gospel. A miracle by definition is an act or event that is entirely supernatural.  It is contrary to natural law.  It is explained only by divine intervention.  It cannot be explained by natural law or by human reason but only by divine intervention.  A miracle is when God halts the normal human processes and intervenes supernaturally.

  If there is any possibility of a human explanation, if there is any possibility of a rational explanation, or an empirical or scientific explanation, it is not a miracle.  And the reason I say that is because miracles had a purpose.  Miracles were to demonstrate that God had intervened into human life to speak and act.  Therefore they couldn't have any human explanation and be miracles.  A miracle is an event or an act which has no explanation other than that God has intervened to speak or act.  There's no way to explain it by natural law or human reason.  Miracles are inexplicable by natural law and human thought.  They reveal that God has intervened.  Never did God intervene so potently and powerfully, never did God do so many supernatural acts, never did God do so many miracles as at the time of the arrival of Jesus Christ.  The greatest miracle in human history is the miracle of the incarnation...God becoming man, God supernaturally planting a seed in a virgin woman who brought forth a child who was 100 percent man and 100 percent God at the same time...a virgin-born God/Man, the incarnation...that is the greatest miracle of all miracles.

  As you read the history of the Old Testament, you're going to come to miracles when you come to Israel and Egypt.  God miraculously brings plagues upon Egypt that causes them to allow the Israelites to leave and head for the promised land.  And then God miraculously parts the Red Sea so they can walk across and then drowns in that same sea all the pursuing armies of Pharaoh.  There are miracles that follow in the wilderness, forty years of wandering God provides manna from heaven and God provides water from a rock.  There are things that occurred there miraculously, this under the leadership of a man named Moses.  In Moses' lifetime, both in Egypt and in the wilderness, he saw the miraculous. And that was a time when God was revealing Himself, God was founding His nation, drawing them out of captivity, taking them to the land, revealing Himself to them as the true and living God.  And God attended His revelations with miracles.

  There's another period in the Old Testament in which miracles occurred and that is in the prophetic ministry of Elijah and Elisha, two very special, unique prophets of God.  And attending their ministry as they spoke the Word of God were miracles.  Apart from the time of Moses and Israel's coming out of the land and the time of Elijah and Elisha, miracles were not normal. 

  But the last miracle?  Well the last time of miracles would have been Elijah and Elisha and that is 800 years before we find ourselves in the gospel of Luke.  That's a long time and apart from what happened in the life of Daniel, there haven't been miracles.  There hasn't even been the appearance of an angel for at least 500 years.  The appearance of a heavenly visitor in the case of Zechariah, the appearance of a heavenly visitor in the fiery furnace in the case of the Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace, but that's 500 years ago.  And God hasn't spoken in at least 400 years since Malachi wrote.

  All of a sudden we come to this time in history identified in verse 5 as the days of Herod the king, which would have been 37 B.C. to 4 B.C., right up until maybe a year after Jesus was born.  And now we come into this time period 400 years since the last prophet, 500 years since the last appearance of a heavenly visitor, 500 years at least since the last miraculous act of God in the case of the friends of Daniel and 800 years since any long list of miracles occurred in the lives of the two prophets, Elijah and Elisha.  But now something dramatic happens.  All of a sudden angels start to appear.  And all of a sudden God starts to speak and reveal His Word and miracles begin to happen. And they start and they come at a rate never before even imagined in the history of the world...far more miracles than at any other time.  This is literally an explosion of the miraculous on this little piece of earth that we know as the land of Israel. And all of that miraculous surrounding the greatest miracle, the virgin birth, is to indicate that God has indeed intervened and invaded history with the supernatural message and a super natural reality, the God/Man, the Lord Jesus Christ. 

  This is THE most dramatic, THE most important, THE most special, THE most unique event in all of redemptive history and it is attended to with miracles.  So we're going to expect as we go through the gospel of Luke to be engaging ourselves in the ongoing study of God's miraculous intervention into human history.  We're not going to be able to apply scientific laws to all the things that happened.  We're not going to be able to find rational explanations for everything that goes on, for all of the amazing things that happen.  There is no reasonable or scientific explanation for the incarnation of God in Jesus.  There is no reasonable explanation for the fact that He lived a perfect life, died a substitutionary death on the cross in which He paid the penalty for the sins of all who would ever believe.  There is no way reasonably to explain a physical, bodily, literal resurrection from the dead. And no way to explain on the experimental level empirically how one could ascend into heaven without the aid of science or a rocket or anything else as Jesus did in His ascension.  And we're going to see miracle after miracle after miracle.  And all of this attests to the fact that this is God acting in human history.

  Luke then is writing the gospel of Jesus Christ, but it is really the account of divine intervention in human history.  God supernaturally acting and He does it in ways the likes of which the world has never ever seen.  Five hundred years since the last miracle, 800 years since a time of miracles, 500 years since an angel appeared, 400 years since God spoke...and now it all comes back in a volume and a quantity the likes of which it has never occurred before, nor since.  God breaks His silence.

  The first miracle occurred at the promise of the first angel to appear in 500 years.  "In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a certain priest named Zacharias of the division of Abijah and he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron and her name was Elizabeth.  And they were both righteous in the sight of God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and requirements of the Lord, but they had no child because Elizabeth was barren and they were both advanced in years.  Now it came about while he, that being Zacharias, was performing his priestly service before God in the appointed order of his division, according to the custom of the priestly office, he was chosen by Lot to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense.  And the whole multitude of the people were in prayer outside at the hour of the incense offering."  Here it comes.  "And an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing to the right of the altar of incense.  And Zacharias was troubled when he saw him and fear gripped him.  But the angel said to him, 'Do not be afraid, Zacharias, for your petition has been heard and your wife, Elizabeth, will bear you a son and you will give him the name John.  And you will have joy and gladness and many will rejoice at his birth.  For he shall be great in the sight of the Lord and he will drink no wine or liquor.  And he will be filled with the Holy Spirit while yet in his mother's womb.  And he will turn back many of the sons of Israel to the Lord their God.  And it is he who will go as a forerunner before Him in the spirit and power of Elijah to turn the hearts of the fathers back to the children and the disobedient to the attitude of the righteous so as to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.'" 

  Luke sets the timing in history for us in verse 5 by telling us it's in the days of Herod.  Herod, as I said, from 37 B.C. to about 4 B.C., when you work the calendars out, that he would die...he would die about a year after the birth of Christ which occurred by our calendar adjustments in about 3 B.C. or so.  Near the end of the reign of Herod this begins, 400 years after the last prophet.

  God is the God of small beginnings.  God is the God of small beginnings, God does things that are so understated.  In fact, as you go through the gospel of Luke you kind of wait for some trumpets to blow or some brass section to show up and do a fanfare.  But it never happens.  The miracles are just matter of fact, they're just stated in very...in very thoughtful and simple undertones.  It's just very understated.  It simply says in verse 11, "An angel of the Lord appeared to him."  It doesn't say, "And the earth shook and heaven rattled and fire came out of the sky and smoke and an angel appeared."  It doesn't say that.  It's just an angel appeared. 

  You have an angel from heaven.  You have a word from God and you have the promise of a miracle...the two people over 60, probably in their 70's, could have been in their 80's who can't have children because she's barren are going to have the miracle birth of a son.  It all happens, Luke launches it all.  Silence is broken, an angel appears and a miracle will happen.

  Now the center stage in the opening part of this gospel is taken by a man named Zacharias.  Zacharias is a common man, he's one of 18,000 or so, sons of Aaron who served as priests in the land, it says about him in verse 5, "There was a certain priest."  I suppose if you could choose any adjective to describe yourself, "certain" wouldn't be one of the most glowing you could think about.  He might have said, "A wonderful priest...a noble priest...a brilliant priest," but a certain priest?  A very undistinguished guy, to be truthful, just one of many sons of Aaron.  Undistinguished in terms of social status, although he was certainly respected.  He was just a common but faithful and devout priest who married the daughter of a priest.  It tells us that he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron.  All the men who came from Aaron were priests, they were all in the priestly line, so her father was a priest and her grandfather and perhaps her brothers if she had them.  Furthermore she was named Elizabeth, which I told you last time was the wife...the name of the wife of Aaron, so they gave her a name from the priestly family, the mother of all priests. 

  Beyond their background is their character in verse 6.  They were both righteous in the sight of God.  They walked blamelessly in all the commandments and requirements of the Lord. Righteousness can be summarized in three words: law, grace and obedience.  Righteousness is defined by law.  Righteousness is defined by law.  Righteousness is empowered by grace.  What happens is, you see the law which defines righteousness and you fall short, right?  "There's none righteous, no not one."  You fall short.  Righteousness is imputed to us by grace and then it's imparted to us by grace.  So righteousness is defined by law, we can't keep the law, we throw ourselves on the mercy of God and by His grace we're empowered to keep the law, both in our justification and our sanctification.  Righteousness then is demonstrated by obedience.  It is defined by law, it is empowered by grace, it is demonstrated by obedience.  If you want to look at that from the negative, legalism is law without grace.  Antinomianism is grace without law.  Self-righteousness is obedience to the externals of the law without the internal power of grace. 

  This couple was not legalistic and they were not antinomian and they were not self-righteous.  They revered the law for its holy morality.  They understood the righteous standard, they knew they fell short.  They received grace, they were therefore obedient in the power of that grace not only internally but externally to the depths of that law.  And Luke makes a big point of this because he wants us to know that the New Testament is not in contrast with the Old, it is the fulfillment of the Old.  It is the story of the final sacrifice that provided the righteousness that even Old Testament saints sought and received from God.

  So we could say in terms of background, everything was fine with this couple.  In terms of spiritual life, everything was fine with this couple.  But in terms of the social, it wasn't because they didn't have a child and that was something that was tragic because it bore a stigma.  Many of the Jews believed that if God cursed you, He would make you childless, and so this was some symbol of their wickedness and their sinfulness and they bore this social stigma of being barren and now they're in their 60's, 70's, 80's, whatever, they have no child and there's now no hope...no hope.  Except by the miraculous and miracles didn't happen.

  And so we saw Zacharias' personal righteousness.  Look at the second point, his priestly responsibility.  This gets fascinating...his priestly responsibility.  Now as a priest there were 18,000 of them, 24 courses of the priests so each of them got to serve down at the temple two weeks a year...one week at one time a year and another week at another time.   And they would go down and for a full week they would do their priestly duty which was mostly making sacrifices.  They were butchers.  That's what they did all day and were covered from head to toe with blood...slaughtering animal after animal after animal for those who came to make sacrifices.

  So it was his time and it says in verse 8, "It came about while he was performing his priestly service before God in the appointed order of his division.  He was of the division of Abijah," remember that was one of the grandsons of Aaron and there were 24 divisions of the priests, each named for one of the grandsons of Aaron, the sons of Ithamar and Eleazar, and his particular order was the order of Abijah and it was Abijah's order time.  And even under those orders they were divided into other orders and families.  And his group was now serving in the temple for their week and he was just doing his duty there.

  That was the common thing he was doing.  The uncommon comes in verse 9, this is very much not routine.  "According to the custom of the priestly office, he was chosen by lot to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense."  Now this...you've got to stop here again.  Luke is very understated in what he says.  You can't imagine what a thrill this was for Zacharias.  I mean, there's no way to understand it unless you create some of the background.  This is a great moment in this man's life.

  The custom of the priestly office was this.  Every day at the temple in the morning and in the evening there was a burnt incense offering given to God.  In the morning there was the sacrifice of the animal on the brazen altar, that was the sacrifice, of the spotless lamb that was sacrificed in the morning and in the evening.  At the time of the sacrifice in the morning and the evening, there was also the offering of incense to God.  So that was done in the morning and the evening.  Not every priest could do that.  The priest was chosen to do that by lot.  In other words, his name was drawn.  And it was a very, very great honor if your name was drawn because many priests would never have their name drawn, never.  No non-priest would ever be able to have this privilege and only some priests. And in order to spread it around, it could only happen once in your life.  If you had ever done this, offered the burnt incense, you couldn't do it again.  This was then Zacharias' great moment.  This is the pinnacle of his priestly service.  Many priests would never have this privilege and priests could only have it who did have it once.  This would have been the high point of his whole life. It would bring him from the outer court of the Israelites into the holy place.  Remember there was a court of the  Gentiles and the women, and then there was the inner court of the Israelites and then there was what's called the sanctuary or the temple which was divided into two parts, the first part called the holy place, then there was a curtain and behind that was the Holy of Holies where the Ark of the Covenant was which symbolized the presence of God.  And no one could go in there ever except the high priest once a year on the Day of Atonement to sprinkle blood on the Mercy Seat in atonement for the sins of the nation.

  So, the priest and the people stayed outside the temple.  Only one priest in a day could walk in there and offer that burnt incense and come right back out.   This then would take Zacharias from the normal place where he was outside butchering animals by the altar, and it would take him into the holy place.  He would be able to do this only once in his lifetime so the privilege was just supreme.

  The temple entrance faced east at the far end of the holy place, when you went in, the far west end as you went in was this incense altar.  It was golden and it was for incense.  It stood barely outside the veil between the holy place and the Holy of Holies.  To put it simply, it was as close to the presence of God as anybody could get except the high priest once a year going inside.  This was as close as one could get.  This was the supreme honor.  God to them was at a distance and this was getting as near as you could get.

  Though it stood, this golden incense altar, though it stood outside the Holy of Holies, it is associated with the Holy of Holies.  For example, in Hebrews 9 verses 3 and 4 it associates the incense altar with the Holy of Holies.  The reason for that is because on the Day of Atonement, when the high priest went into the Holy of Holies, he not only took blood from the sacrifice on the altar, the brazen altar, but he took incense from the incense altar with him and sprinkled it on the Mercy Seat.  So because the incense from this altar was sprinkled on the Mercy Seat once a year, it was associated with the Holy of Holies.  Again I say, this is the holiest place that anyone could get but the high priest once a year.

  Here's what he would have done that day, Zacharias, probably in the evening when there was a larger crowd than there would be in the morning because it tells us the whole multitude of the people were in prayer outside at the hour of the incense offering.  There was an A.M. hour and a P.M. hour.  But it's likely that the big crowd was at night and this is probably when it happened.  This would be just after the evening sacrifice was made.

  What he would do would be gather coals off of, using some utensils, gather coals off of the altar of the burnt offering, the brazen altar and he would place all these coals in a golden bowl.  And somehow he would carry that golden bowl with those hot coals and he would go inside the holy place, never have been there in his life, he would go in.  He would proceed through a place he'd never seen to the far end where he would find the golden altar of incense.  There he would dump the coals and they would be spread around with some utensil.  At that point he would put incense on top of those burning coals and immediately a huge column of smoke would rise up and it would carry both the smoke and the fragrance of that incense wafting everywhere around the temple.  That was all his duty was and then he was to leave.

  It was customary that the priest doing this didn't stay very long.  There was a tremendous fear as they got close to the curtain, close to the Holy of Holies that they might do something to dishonor God, do something trivial, do something blasphemous and it was a dangerous place to be...almost as dangerous as going inside the Holy of Holies.  And when the high priest did that, they put bells on his skirt so they could hear him moving around so they would know if God killed him in there for some blasphemy.  If the bells stopped ringing, they'd have to put something under and drag him out.

  So it was a frightening thing, in one sense.  He would then spread the coals, put down the fragrance and the incense would rise up.  The ascending aromatic cloud was symbolic of the prayers of the people, symbolic for the prayers for salvation, for repentance, prayers of confession, prayers of thanksgiving, prayers for the peace of Jerusalem, prayers for the coming of Messiah, prayers for blessing, prayers for family, prayers for the nation, prayers that the Savior would come and take away sin, prayers for the kingdom to come.  All those things would be part of the praying of the people, and that's what was going on outside in verse 10, the whole multitude of the people were in prayer outside at the hour of the incense offering.  They were actually doing what the incense symbolized.  The incense symbolized their dependence on God, it symbolized their submission to God, it symbolized His sovereignty over them, it symbolized their dependence on Him.  As it was being symbolized with the incense, it was actually being enacted with the prayers.

  The people are all praying and praying and praying and the incense is going up.  And verse 11 says, and again in such understated tones, "And an angel of the Lord appeared to him."  Now we go from his personal righteousness, his priestly responsibility to his prophetic revelation.  God has stepped in, folks.  God has invaded history.  Eight hundred years without miracles, 500 years since the fiery furnace in Daniel, 400 years since God spoke, 500 years since an angel had been there and suddenly an angel.  Zacharias was probably just about ready to leave.  He saw that angel.  He had read Old Testament accounts about angels, angels appearing to the patriarchs in the book of Genesis, angels appearing to the prophets, angels assisting Israel.  He knew about the last apparent appearance of an angel in a vision to Zechariah the prophet nearly 500 years before. But this wasn't like that. This wasn't really a vision.  This was an actual angel.  It was a vision but some visions are actually perceivable to the physical eye and some visions to the spiritual sight.  He actually saw this angel standing to the right of the altar of incense.

  Now what does that signify?  Standing to the right of the altar of incense.  Is there some great spiritual lesson about standing to the right? The point that Luke is making here is this angel was present, this angel was present in actual physical form so that he could be specifically located.  This is not an apparition, this is not some foggy thing, there was an angel there and he was standing right over there to the right side of the altar of incense between the altar of incense and the candelabra, the golden candelabra that was right over on that side.  He was simply identifying for us the reality of this appearance.  God had invaded and sent His messenger and he was there and he was really there, and I can tell you exactly where he stood.

  And what was his reaction to this incredible, unheard of event?  "He was troubled when he saw him and fear gripped him."  Listen, he was panicked.  This didn't happen.  An angel, by the way, is a perfectly holy, glorious being and this was an angel of the Lord that came right out of the presence of God.  Panic was the right response, sinful man in the midst of a holy visitor from heaven. 

  Whenever a perfectly holy visitor from the glories of heaven appears, terror is the appropriate response.  The Apostles when they saw the unveiled Christ in Matthew 17 fell into a comma.  John the apostle when he saw the vision of the glorified Christ in Revelation chapter 1, he says literally, "I fell at His feet as a dead man."  It just knocked him out with fear.  A holy visitor from the presence of God shows up.  You hear such folly, such worthless, useless pap being delivered by people today who supposedly have conversations with angels.  It is and always has been an utterly terrifying thing.

  So he had an appropriate response.  Verse 13, "The angel of the Lord said to him," no doubt in an audible actual voice, "Don't be afraid, Zacharias."  This isn't something angels had never done, they had spoken.  God has allowed angels to take on  human form and human voice in history.  That occurred in Old Testament times.  And we will note that it occurs also in New Testament times only, however, at those special times of miraculous, divine intervention.

  So here is a familiar greeting.  Angels must have learned to say this because this is their standard greeting.  "Don't be afraid," because whenever they show up, people panic.  Whether you're going back to Genesis 15 or at Revelation 1, they have to say, "Don't be afraid."  Heavenly visitors have to quell fear. 

  And why not be afraid?  This isn't a judgment visit.  Zacharias would have known what the others knew, that God is a great judge of sin.  That if the holy God, or a holy angel appears, that sin is manifest, that sin is revealed and that the presence of the holy being simply paints the picture blacker of one's own sinfulness.  

  On the contrary, this is a blessing.  "For your petition has been heard."  What's that petition? "For your petition has been heard and your wife, Elizabeth, will...what?...bear you a son."  The Greek implies that this is a long-standing petition.  It doesn't necessarily mean he was praying it that day.  He may have lost hope.  They may have been so old that maybe it was very rare for them to ask God to give them a child anymore, maybe they didn't do it at all.  But that was a common prayer for, you can imagine, days and years of their life.  The prayer which maybe you started praying long ago and is still somewhere in the back of your mind has been answered and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son.

  And again, aren't you sort of stunned by the understatement of that?  The angel doesn't say, "Now, something's going to happen that you won't even believe.  This thing is phenomenal."  I'm going to...he could, you know, give you at least twenty angelic adjectives to describe this thing.  "You old guy, you dead guy with the barren wife," he could of, you know, really built this thing....no, he doesn't do that.  He just says, "Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son." 

  They had been so deeply burdened by this barrenness, asking God...and I know they were asking God probably mostly for a son. Why? Because he wanted to pass on the priesthood.  And he comes with this very understated statement.  Isn't it remarkable, also, the lack of fanfare in the beginning of the whole of the gospel record?  Isn't it amazing that God is the God of small beginnings?  God is the God of understatement?  One man who can best be described by the adjective "certain", not notable at all, just a plain old every day average guy.  God is the God of small beginnings.  It's incredible what God has done and does through one small beginning.  And it all starts when he answers the prayer of a little couple, insignificant, a prayer for a child.  And in answering their prayer, He answers the greatest longings of the world.  It launches it all.  Never underestimate what God has intended through small beginnings, through you.

  Well, at that moment Zacharias' fear must have turned into shock, not the shock of terror but the shock of disbelief.  What?  Further, "The angel says, 'You will give him the name John.'" It means "God is gracious."  From two words, actually God and favor, God is gracious.  And the angel by giving him the name is saying God is about to explode upon the world His grace.  Better than giving him the name, "God is really upset," "God has had enough."  "God is gracious" signals the whole thing, doesn't it?

  

  The Greatness of John the Baptist

  Luke 1:15-17

   

  Zacharias didn't believe the words of the angel and his doubt cost him greatly.  He was stricken by the angel and he could neither speak nor hear and he remained that way until the child was finally born.  That was a punishment on his life for those months.  You also will remember he finished his priestly duty and went home and the miracle occurred.  His wife Elizabeth who was barren and both of them were in their late 60's, 70's or even 80's, past child-bearing capacity and yet she became pregnant with a child.  So the miracle conception occurred. And later on in the first chapter we'll see that the miracle birth as well took place at which time Zacharias received back his hearing and his speech.  We've been going through that amazing narrative.

  "For he will be great in the sight of the Lord.  And he will drink no wine or liquor.  And he will be filled with the Holy Spirit while yet in his mother's womb.  And he will turn back many of the sons of Israel to the Lord their God. And it is he who will go as a forerunner before Him in the spirit and power of Elijah to turn the hearts of the fathers back to the children and the disobedient to the attitude of the righteous so as to make ready a people prepared for the Lord."

  That astonishing message from the angel describes who this child will be.  It starts out in verse 15 with the word "He will be great in the sight of the Lord." If you look at the issue of greatness and the popular perspective on it, it could be associated with fame, in our culture the money, space in the media, press releases, societal admiration, celebrity.  A truer view of greatness, however, less popular, looks at someone's significant achievement, something beyond entertaining people.  Somehow it says the truly great are those who mark the culture, they mark the world somehow.  They mark people.  They mark society with a sense of well-being, with some improvement on life.  Whether we look at greatness from the standpoint of celebrity, or whether we look at greatness from the standpoint of human achievement, in either case it falls short of God's perspective.

  God's greatness is reserved for other than those categories of people.  Transcending all other perspectives on the human level of greatness is god's view, and the only way we can really understand God's view of greatness is to look at who Gos labels as great.  And here we meet such a person. 

  The angel from God describing John says he will be great in the sight of the Lord.  And, frankly, none of the normal trappings associated with greatness in human society are a part of John's life.  He had no royal birth.  He was born to a very, very plain and common family.  He had no prominence by virtue of his personal heritage.  He was no intellectual as far as we know.  We don't know anything about his intellectual capabilities.  He's not at all assigned any responsibility in terms of inventing anything, in terms of ideologies, or ideas or religion.  He came from a common, simple, undistinguished family living in a small village somewhere, according to verse 39, in the Judean hillsides, some non-descript place.

  He had no formal education.  He rather lived in isolation.  down in verse 80 of this chapter it says that while he grew and developed strong spirit, he lived the whole while in the deserts until the day of his public appearance to Israel.  So he grew up in isolation.  He grew up away from the social centers, away from interaction with society in general.  He certainly made no fashion statement.  According to Matthew chapter 3 and verse 4, he wore a garment of camel's hair and a leather belt about his waist.  That was his daily, every day wardrobe.  Nor did he make any comment on life style diet.  In the same verse it indicates that he ate locusts, no doubt dried out and perhaps cooked, and crunched them down, covered with wild honey.

  He had no involvement in any formal institution.  He wasn't associated with the priesthood, though he came in a priestly line.  He wasn't associated with royalty at all.  He wasn't associated with any of the official institutions of his hour, his day.  He founded no institutions.  He started no real movement.  He was responsible for no organization, no new religion.  In fact, the people in religious authority at the time resented him.  They resented him fiercely.  He resented them also and described them as a bunch of snakes.

  The ruler at the time, a man by the name of Herod in the Herodian line, imprisoned John.  He was held in prison until Herod was moved to lustful excitement one night as he watched a young girl dancing.  And in the midst of his excitement wanted to give her anything and she asked for the head of John on a platter.  John was despised by many.  In his lustful excitement, the foolish king did what she asked and had John that night decapitated and served his head on a plate to the party.  He was treated with such terrible disrespect and disdain.  He was little more than a man to be decapitated for the pleasure of a girl and a man she had excited.

  Even his ministry was brief, his fifteen minutes of fame, to borrow the common vernacular, was short.  His appearance on the world's stage didn't last long.  And he himself tried to bring it to a rapid end.  His star intentionally faded fast.

  There isn't really anything in his life of normal human features associated with greatness.  And that's why it says in verse 15, "He will be great in the sight of the Lord."  Certainly not in the sight of men, although he did garner a small following who understood that he was a true prophet of God and who believed in him and who were loyal to his message.  And they were so loyal to him that he himself had to push them away toward Christ, increasing the speed with which his own star faded from the sky.

  But as far as the general assessment of the world would be concerned, he doesn't find his way into their categories of greatness.  But in God's eyes, he was great.  The word great is megas from which we get mega.  He was a mega star as far as God was concerned.  By the way, that is also used of Jesus in verse 32 where the angel who announces the birth of Jesus in verse 26 to Mary says of Jesus, "He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High."  Notice it doesn't say "in the sight of God."  He was great not just by someone's perspective, even God's perspective, He was great in the absolute sense of greatness because He, of course, was God in human flesh.

  What is John's level of greatness?  Luke 7:28 says, "I say to you," Jesus is speaking here, Luke 7:28, "I say to you, among those born of women," and that includes everyone, obviously, "there is no one greater than John."  Now Matthew 11:11, Matthew records the same truth.  He has a few different words.  Matthew 11:11 records Jesus saying, "Truly, or verily, or amen with solemnity and emphasis I say to you, among those born of women, there has not arisen anyone greater than John."  He is not only the greatest, he is the greatest who has ever lived.  That's an amazing commendation.  His greatness is not measured by any of the normal ways in which the world measures greatness.  None of them.  In fact, from the worldly perspective he really achieved nothing of lasting value.  He was, in fact, hated, despised and decapitated.

  According to verse 15, not in the sight of men particularly, but in the sight of the Lord.  "In the sight of the Lord" or "In the sight of God" is a phrase used many times in Scripture. What it simply means is divine approval, divine favor.  He will be great as far as God is concerned.  He will have divine approval.  That's the general sense.  He will be great as far as bearing God's approval is concerned.  He may never gain the approval of men.  He will have the approval of God.  Now that's a general understanding of the term.  But inherent in that is a very specific reality that you need to understand, and that is this, no one is ever approved by God whose sin has not been covered.  Do you understand that?  So inherent in the generic statement "approved by God" is that this man will be a justified man.  He will be made righteous.  He will be a saved man. He will be a man to whom the Lord imputes righteousness.  He will be a man covered by the righteousness of God.  So you have to look at divine approval in the general sense as having a specific internal component of justification.  That's...that's the idea in Romans chapter 2 and verse 13, "Not the hearers of the law are righteous before God but the doers of the law are justified."  It's talking about God giving to a person a covering of righteousness as well as a capacity for obedience to His holy law.  That's conversion.  That's salvation. That's justification and its partner, sanctification.

  So this is a promise, a prophecy, this is a pledge from God through the mouth of a holy angel that John will be a justified man.  This is a promise of the salvation of someone not yet conceived and is a very monumental point in understanding the divine doctrine of election.  God has chosen John for justification for salvation before he was ever conceived.  That is an illustration of how God has chosen all who believe and written their names in the Lamb's Book of Life before the foundation of the world.  God was pleased with His Son because He was sinless and God is pleased with anyone who is covered with the righteousness of His Son. And God is pledging that in behalf of John.  Tremendous, tremendous statement.

  John then, the angel is telling Zacharias, has God's approval on his life.  He will be right in the sight of God.  He will be more than that, he will be great in the sight of the Lord.  He will be justified, that's reserved for those whose sins are forgiven and are covered by the righteousness of God.  He will thereby be favorable to God as his parents were by their own faith, as verse 6 indicates.  So his greatness is a greatness that's unequalled by any human up to his time, the greatest who ever lived.  That must include justification.

  So much for the statement of his greatness.  Let's look at the three demonstrations of it, the three features of his greatness. Number one, his greatness evidences itself in his personal character. "He will be great in the sight of the Lord."  Two things are said immediately about his character: "He will drink no wine or liquor," and "He will be filled with the Holy Spirit while yet in his mother's womb."  To things are noted there.  One has to do with the physical, the external life that he lives.  He will neither drink wine or liquor, the other has to do with the internal and spiritual.  He will be filled with the Holy Spirit while yet in his mother's womb.

  So the angel identifies something about his character on the outside and on the inside.  First of all, he will drink no wine or liquor.  Liquor is often translated in the New Testament and the Old...strong drink.  This demonstrates just generally a temperate life style, a moderate life style, a life style of self-denial.  One who wore camel's hair, a leather belt and ate locusts and wild honey, had already demonstrated great temperance and somewhat an indifferent attitude toward the pleasures of the world, the dietary pleasures and the wardrobe fashion pleasures of the world he had eschewed or disdained.

  This takes us even further.  He will not drink wine or liquor as a life commitment.  Now I have to talk about this for a brief moment so that you understand what this is saying.  Certainly it's saying he's going to be temperate.  Certainly it's saying he's going to disdain some of the simple pleasures of life, some of the comforts of life.  He is going to distance himself from those things.  He is going to be so preoccupied with the work of God that has been commissioned to him.

  You weren't to love drinking and you never were to be drunk. So we could say, "Well John didn't drink wine or strong drink because he was just going to take the high ground.  He was just going to take the high ground, he was going to be a model of virtue.  He was going to the top level.  He wasn't going to tamper with anything that might corrupt him.  He stayed away from the world's wardrobe.  He stayed away from the world's diet.  He stayed away from the world's beverage indulgence.  Just another indication of his being sold out to God."  That's possible there was just some general affirmation on his part along that line and that was by God's designed.

  There also is another component to throw in here.  When any priest went down to the temple to do his duty, to do his work at the temple, he could not be drunk.  In fact, if he happened to be drunk and he was doing his priestly duty, God had said he might die. Leviticus 10:8:  "The Lord spoke to Aaron, said, 'Do not drink wine or strong drink, neither you nor your sons with you...none of the priests...when you come to the tent of meeting so that you may not die.'"

  If you've gotten yourself in an inebriated situation, you could lose your life offering some kind of strange fire to the Lord because you're in drunken condition, doing something that was not appropriate to the ceremonies that were prescribed by God, treating God with such diffidence or indifference as to be inebriated when you come into His holy presence.  Those could be deadly things.  And it may well be that some priests took it beyond just rendering their service in the temple and decided the safest thing to do was never to bring such shame and dishonor to God and so they perhaps would even avow to do that permanently.  Certainly John's father Zacharias would abide by the prescription of Leviticus 10 whenever he was doing his priestly duty.  So priests had some restrictions on drinking as well.

  It also is true, according to Proverbs 31:4 that rulers and leaders were never to consume these beverages.  It says in 31:4, "It's not for kings...it's not for kings to drink wine or for rulers to desire strong drink."  Anybody who is a leader, anybody who has responsibility, anybody who has to make decisions, set examples, should not be engaging in drinking wine or strong drink.  In the New Testament elders are not to be drinkers.  Of course, elders and pastors are not to be drunk.  As Paul's injunction to Timothy, "Take a little wine for your stomach's sake," Timothy may well have been a tee-totaler and had to be told to drink some because he too took the high ground and wanted to avoid anything that could bring shame or dishonor or cloud his judgment.

  So you could say...Well, John is not officially a priest though he's in a priestly line.  He's certainly not a ruler or a king.  But maybe he wanted to take the high ground.  Maybe he just wanted to take that kind of level of life that lifts you all the way to the top and abstain from all these beverages as a part of his own personal self-denial.

  There's one other possibility.  Numbers chapter 6, this introduces a wonderful Old Testament vow into the discussion.  It was called a Nazarite vow, not meaning from Nazareth, having nothing to do with that, an old Hebrew word meaning "separated."  A  Jew could do this, decide I want to separate to God for a period of time.  I want to be totally devoted to God.  I want to walk the high road with God and so I'll take a certain period of days and I will vow this Nazarite vow of separation unto God.  The first component in it is this, verse 2, "The Nazarite to dedicate himself to the Lord shall abstain from wine and strong drink, drink no vinegar neither made from wine or strong drink, neither drink any grape juice nor fresh or dried grapes all the days of his separation."  It was only for a matter of days usually, "Not eating anything produced by the grapevine or even the seeds or the skin."  Nothing to do with the grape.  He would abstain from that which was the normal pleasure of the pleasurable beverage of life.  So it was a way to devout himself to God by self-denial.  "Then he would not take the razor to his hair, his beard, he let his hair grow, not giving any concern to how favorably he might look in the face of people, and neither would he touch a dead body so that he would bring upon himself any unceremonial uncleanness, any unceremonial uncleanness."  So this was the Nazarite vow, but it incorporated this idea of neither drinking of wine nor liquor.

  He took consecration to the highest level, to the very highest level.  Here was a man who on the outside was a consecrated, devoted, separated man.  As well as the outside, though, look at the inside, verse 15, and it's the inside that made the outside possible.  "He was filled with the Holy Spirit while yet in his mother's womb."  He will be filled with the Holy Spirit, that will be the pattern of his life.  He not only will be a man on the outside devoted to God at the highest level of devotion, but on the inside empowered by God at the highest level as well.

  The idea of being filled with the Spirit simply means that he would be under the influencing control and power of the Holy Spirit.  His life will be under Spirit control.  His life will be dominated by the will of the Spirit.  The will of the Spirit, of course, largely expressed in the Word of God, but his life will be dominated by Holy Spirit influence.  By the way, the phrase "being filled with the Spirit" Luke uses numerous times in the book of Acts.  It simply means God's Holy Spirit will be in control of his life while he's still in his mother's womb. 

  It is the Holy Spirit, the third member of the trinity who has the task of working divine power in the lives of God's people, both Old Testament and New, saving them, sanctifying them, instructing them, sending them, using them.  And that control was exhibited...to be exhibited in the case of John while he was still in his mother's womb...so special was this man's life.

  Now for most people, for those of us who are filled with the Holy Spirit, that comes after conversion.  For John it came at the time of conception.  This is not unusual in some special unfolding of God's purposes.  Jeremiah, the great prophet, chapter 1 verse 4, "The Word of the Lord came to me saying, 'Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you and before you were born, I separated you.  I have appointed you as a prophet to the nations." 

  This incontrovertibly indicates that life begins at conception and the fetus is indeed a person, capable of being under the controlling influence of the Spirit of God.  This again is the strongest possible way to express sovereign election, God's sovereign elective choice of John to salvation and to sanctification and to service.  This child wasn't even conceived yet and yet the pledge was he would be justified, covered with righteousness, pleasing to God.  He would live a consecrated life under the energizing of the Spirit of God which work of the Spirit began while he was still in his mother's womb.

  Over in verse 41 when Elizabeth who was pregnant at the time, six months pregnant, heard Mary's greeting, the babe leaped in her womb and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.  That was some kind of physical manifestation of the presence of the Holy Spirit.  Over in verse 67 his father Zacharias was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied.  Now that is a powerful family.  Everybody filled with the Holy Spirit...under Spirit power and influence.

  So the first evidence of John's greatness is manifest in his personal character.  Secondly, his privileged calling...secondly, his privileged calling.  I'm going to go through this one rapidly.  Verse 17, the first part of the verse, "And it is he who will go as a forerunner before Him."  Now we'll get in to this in detail so we don't need to cover it all now.  This is the high water mark of his greatness, this is the pinnacle of his greatness, this is what made him great.  It was his privileged calling...he will go as a forerunner before Him.  Him is Jesus Christ, Him is the Messiah, God in human flesh, identified at the end of verse 16, "The Lord their God, and it is he who will go as a forerunner before Him," antecedent of "Him" is the Lord their God.  Marvelous to realize the Messiah is God, the Messiah is the Lord.  The term Lord, kurios is used 26 times in Luke 1 and 2, three times of Jesus elsewhere and once here for a total of four.  Jesus is the Lord, Jesus is God.  And John will go before the Lord God when He comes.  John was the prophet who would identify the Messiah.  That was his task. 

  Now it says, verse 17, that he came as a forerunner before the Messiah in the spirit and power of Elijah.  That's so important because the Jews believed that before the Messiah came to set up His Kingdom, Elijah had to come.  Where did they get that?  Because the last prophet, the last book of the Old Testament, Malachi 3, the Lord said, "I'm going to send my messenger and he will clear the way for Me."  Before the Lord came into the world He would send His messenger.  Who was the messenger?  Chapter 4, the last two verses of the Old Testament, "Behold I'm going to send you Elijah the prophet."  Elijah the prophet...before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord, before the Lord comes in great glory, I'm going to send you Elijah.  So the Jews were expecting Elijah...they were expecting Elijah.  Elijah was the prototype of a prophet, faithful, powerful, miraculous, bold, uncompromising.  He was the prophet of God who proclaimed divine truth unequivocally from God, fearlessly in the face of a ruthless monarch...just like John did.  You can read about him in 1 Kings 18.

  So the question is, is John Elijah?  I mean, if he's announcing the coming of the Messiah, Malachi said Elijah would come before the Messiah comes?  And kings in the ancient near east would always send somebody to prepare the road for them and to prepare the people for the royal entry.  Malachi said the Messiah will have a forerunner, Elijah.  And the question then arose, and it was a legitimate question, John 1:21, I read it again this morning.  They said to him, "Are you Elijah?"  And John said, "I am not Elijah...I'm not Elijah."

  He very clearly said, "I am not Elijah."  How are we to understand this then?  In Matthew chapter 11 verses 13 and 14, and we'll get to this suddenly in just a moment, listen to what Jesus said.  John the Baptist has come.  He tells him that he's the greatest that's ever lived.  Then He says, verse 14, "If you care to accept it, he himself is Elijah who was to come."  What?  How are we to understand that?  Jesus says, "If you accept it," what's it?  "If you accept his message, if you accept Me as your Messiah, if you accept the Kingdom that I bring, he will have fulfilled that Elijah prophecy."  Which means that the prophecy was figurative.  It wasn't going to be an actual resurrection of the real Elijah, but one who would come, and here we're back to our text, verse 17 explains it clearly, one who would come in the spirit and power of Elijah.  That's what Malachi was talking about, an Elijah-like prophet, one who would powerfully, boldly, faithfully, uncompromisingly proclaim divine truth fearlessly to God's people and even in the face of a ruthless king.  He would be like Elijah. 

  And so the angel says there's coming one in the spirit and power of Elijah, he's the Elijah that Malachi promised.  He's coming to announce the arrival of the Messiah. And Jesus says, "If you believe the message, if you believe the gospel, if you believe Me, he will fulfill that Elijah prophecy.  He will be that Elijah-like prophet."  Now that leaves room for another thought, what if they don't believe because they didn't.  Well they didn't and therefore even though John came in the spirit and power of Elijah, there still yet must be a future fulfillment of Malachi's prophecy before the great and terrible day of the Lord.  Before Jesus comes to destroy the ungodly, to set up His earthly Kingdom, there will be in that day before He arrives another Elijah-like prophet who will announce His arrival.  Perhaps could be one of the two described in Revelation 11.

  So that's the significance of that and we'll see more of that as we go through the gospel, that he would come fulfilling the Malachi prophecy of the Elijah who arrives before the Messiah comes to set up His Kingdom if they believe.  If they didn't believe, he would just be one of two Elijah-like prophets, the first one the Second Coming before the return of Christ in the day of the Lord.  This is a privileged calling, to put it mildly, to have the honor of pointing to the Messiah, pointing to the gospel, identifying the Savior of the world.  And that was his privileged calling.

  Finally, his powerful contribution.  The impact of his ministry is defined for us and it is as great a contribution as any human could ever make.  Verse 16, it will be because of John's preaching, "That he will turn back many of the sons of Israel to the Lord their God," verse 16 says.  What higher contribution could anyone make than that.  The word "turn back" is epistrepho in the Greek.  I give you that cause it's a technical term for conversion.  There are going to be a lot of conversions under his ministry.  He's going to come preaching conversion.  By the way, epistrepho appears in the Old Testament Greek because it's a common Old Testament word for conversion.  It's the New Testament word for conversion used by Luke, used by the apostle Paul, used by Peter as well.  He's going to preach, calling people to convert, calling Israelites, sons of Israel back to the Lord their God, back from their disobedience, back from their apostasy, back from their rebellion, back from their love of iniquity, back from their self-righteousness.

  Now this really was the primary work of the all the prophets.  Go through the story of Old Testament prophets and you'll find them all calling to their people saying, "Return...return...come back...be converted to the Lord your God."  The noun form of epistrepho means conversion.  John was given a ministry of conversion.  What higher calling than that, to be the instrument by which God produces conversion?

  Down in verse 76, Zacharias said about the child, and God gave him these words to say, "You, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High," this is at his birth, the birth of John the Baptist, "you will go on before the Lord to prepare His way."  You're going to give His people the knowledge of salvation.  You're going to tell them about the forgiveness of sin because of the tender mercy of our God with which the sunrise from on high shall visit us, to shine upon those who sit in darkness in the shadow of death and to guide our feet into the way of peace.  That's the gospel, folks, you're going to talk about the Messiah, the Savior is coming.  You're going to talk about salvation, forgiveness of sin, the mercy of God, you're going to talk about the sunrise, that's the Messiah who is going to visit us and shine light into our darkness and guide us in the way of peace, that's the gospel.  He was a preacher of Messiah.  He was a preacher of salvation.  He was a preacher of conversion.  God was going to use him that way and that's the highest privilege anybody could ever have.

  He preached repentance also. "He will turn the hearts of the fathers back to the children."  And that, by the way, is a direct quote from the last verse of the Old Testament, Malachi 4:6.  He will turn the hearts of the fathers back to the children.  You know what that means, he's going to come with a message that's going to cause conversions in families.  General repentance, touching all of society, young and old and when it says "turn" that's the Old Testament word used...that is quoted from Malachi 4:6, in Malachi 4:6 the Old Testament word means repent...conversion and repentance...conversion and repentance.  What's going to happen, old and young are going to convert because they've repented of their sins and they're going to come back to God by faith in the Messiah and families are going to be reconciled, families are going to be brought together.  I think it's in the spirit of Deuteronomy, way back in Deuteronomy 5:29, "O that they had such a heart in them that would fear Me, keep all My commandments always that it may be well with them and with their sons forever."  Sons and fathers, children and adults coming back to God in repentance and conversion.

  He describes the conversion yet another way.  He's going to turn the disobedient to the attitude of the righteous.  Those who are disobedient.  That is a very interesting Greek word, apeithes, it's a great word.  It means someone who will not be persuaded...someone who will not believe...someone who's obstinate and stubborn and refuses to believe and obey.  It's going to take those people who have stubborn, obstinate, hard hearts and it's going to change their attitude, their thinking, their understanding, their mindset and they're going to turn toward righteousness.

  Wow, he's going to cause people to convert to God.  He's going to cause people to repent of sin.  He's going to cause people to turn from harden unbelief and disobedience to a love of righteousness.  That's a powerful life...powerful, powerful life.  All of this so that verse 17, the last phrase, can occur, "To make ready a people prepared for the Lord."  He's going to get people ready for Messiah's arrival. 

  He had a real ministry of Old Testament conversion...a real ministry of Old Testament conversion.  He got people to turn from their self-righteousness and their sin back to God.  He was going to bring people to the recognition of their sin and produce repentance.  He was going to bring them to the recognition of their hard hearted disobedient attitudes and God was going to use him to change their mindset so they would pursue righteousness.  Literally he was going to be used by God to bring about conversions so you would have a group of people ready for the Messiah's arrival.  I'm quite confident, of course, that those who did believe in Jesus Christ, many of those who did believe in Jesus Christ when He came, many of those who believed in Jesus Christ after He died and rose again, many of those people had been prepared hearts under the ministry of this great man.

  John's great contribution to the Kingdom of God was to bring a body of people to spiritual conversion so to be ready to receive the Messiah when He arrived.  To make ready a people.  Luke uses the word "people" sometimes for Israel, sometimes for the nations.  And here it certainly includes obviously dominating Israel because they were the area where John did his ministry, but this gospel would extend to the world.  Such was the angel that...such was the child the angel described as to personal character, privilege, calling and powerful contribution.

  I want to close with something that is really mind boggling.  Turn back over to chapter 7 verse 28, just one comment here on this verse, ends this message where it needs to end.  Luke 7:28, we're right back where we started.  I told you at the very beginning how great John was, this great.  "I say to you...Jesus said, verse 28...among those born of women there's no one greater than John."  That's the statement Jesus made.  But look at the next one.  "Yet he who is least in the Kingdom of God is greater than he."  What is that saying?  What it's saying is this, contrasting the Kingdom of God with something else...John's greatness is not spiritual, John's greatness was, in a sense, although his message certainly was a message about the Kingdom of God, John's greatness was in a task he fulfilled humanly.  John's greatness, the fact that he was the greatest person that ever lived was because he was given the greatest task that any man had ever been given and that was he literally could point to and identify the Messiah for the first time.  John's great contribution was to point to Christ, to point people to Christ.  And so he...no man had ever had that privilege, no man had ever had that honor, no man had ever been at that level of greatness in terms of human calling.

  As you think about the greatness of John I want to let you know that you're in the Kingdom and spiritually we're all great in the sight of God because we've been covered by the righteousness of Christ.  But even humanly speaking, we on this side of the cross can approximate the greatness of John.  Personal character wise we can live at the high, same high level of spiritual commitment, can't we?  We can choose to take the high ground.  We can choose to live a consecrated, separated, devoted, Christlike, God-honoring, holy life like he chose to live.  Not only that, do we not have the privilege of being filled with the Spirit of God?  Are we not promised that the Spirit of God would take up residence in us?  And are we not continually enjoined to the New Testament to be being kept filled with the Spirit?  We like John can enjoy the highest level of spiritual devotion and the greatest expression of spiritual power in the indwelling Holy Spirit. 

  We not only share his personal character, we share his privileged calling because we are in this world.  He was given the ministry of conversion, according to 2 Corinthians 5, we've been given the ministry of reconciliation.  Our job is as ambassadors to God...unto God in behalf of Christ to go into the world and to preach Christ everywhere we go, call men to be reconciled to God through the substitutionary death of Christ.  We have the same honor of pointing souls to the Savior who takes away sin.  We can say, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world."

  And in the end, we can also have a powerful contribution as John did.  God can use us for conversion.  God can use us to bring people to repentance.  God can use us to cause people to turn form obstinate, hard-hearted, disobedient unbelief to the love of righteousness and to obedience to God. And God can use us to prepare a people who will be ready when Jesus comes the second time.

  

  ---

  A Faithful Promise to a Faithless Priest

  Luke 1:18-25

  And Zacharias said to the angel, 'How shall I know this for certain?  For I'm an old man and my wife is advanced in years.'  And the angel answered and said to him, 'I am Gabriel who stands in the presence of God and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news.  And behold, you shall be silent and unable to speak until the day when these things take place because you did not believe my words which shall be fulfilled in their proper time.'  The people were waiting for Zacharias and were wondering at his delay in the temple.  But when he came out, he was unable to speak to them and they realized that he had seen a vision in the temple and he kept making signs to them and remained mute.  And it came about when the days of his priestly service were ended, that he went back home.  And after these days, Elizabeth, his wife, became pregnant and she kept herself in seclusion for five months saying, 'This is the way the Lord has dealt with me in the days when He looked with favor upon me to take away my disgrace among men.'"

  When God chooses, He can open the ground and swallow people up.  God can do astonishing, powerful, massive things.  When God wants to speak in a cataclysm, He can do it.  But mostly, God is the God of small beginnings.  He's the God who works with common people in ordinary ways in life.  You would think that the story of salvation, the saga of the Redeemer, the Messiah having come would start with some fanfare,  maybe some cataclysmic events. But the story of salvation, the saga of the arrival of the Messiah starts with a common couple named Zacharias and Elizabeth.

  God is the God of the common man.  God is the God of small beginnings.  God uses not many noble, and not many mighty but God has chosen the simple and the humble and the base things through which to effect His glorious purposes.  When Luke begins the story it has been 400 years since there was any word from God...400 years of heaven's silence. It has been 500 years since the visit of an angel.  It has been over 500 years since that isolated miracle of the fiery furnace during the time of Daniel.  And it's been 800 years since miracles came in a group and that was at the time of Elijah and Elisha.  God hasn't acted,  God hasn't spoken, God hasn't sent an angel in centuries.  Heaven has been silent for a long time. 

  "An angel of the Lord appeared."  Not only did that angel appear, but verse 13 said, "The angel spoke."  So here we have the silence of heaven broken.  An angel appears, there hasn't been one in 500 years.  God speaks, He hasn't spoken in 400 years.  Miracle happens, there hasn't been one in over 500 years, and it initiates an almost endless stream of miracles that go all the way through the life and ministry of Jesus Christ and the Apostles.  This is the launch pad for the great saga of redemption surrounding the arrival of the Messiah and Savior of the world.  And it has the simplest beginning.  Zacharias is the main character.

  We remember his personal righteousness.  He and his wife came from a priestly background. They were true believers in the living God.  They were saints of God.  They had received salvation.  They had received righteousness from God, granted to them by their faith and they were walking in faithful obedience to the law of God.  However, verse 7 says they had no child and in the Jewish culture that could look like a curse from God and they bore the stigma and the disgrace of that.  We saw the personal righteousness of Zacharias in verses 5 to 7.  We saw his priestly responsibility in verses 8 to 10.  He was in the order of Abijah, one of the twenty-four orders of the priesthood named after the grandsons of Aaron.  And those priests would serve, as I said, two different weeks a year in Jerusalem.  It was his time so he was in Jerusalem at the temple doing his priestly duty.  He was chosen by lot to a special task and that was to go inside the holy place in the temple, to the altar of incense.  They did that at the time of the morning sacrifice, at the time of the evening sacrifice, twice a day, that was a great privilege for a priest.  It was by lot that you were chosen and some priests were never chosen and a priest could only be chosen once in his life to do it so they could pass it around.  This would have been the high point of his priestly life, to go into the holy place and to have the privilege of putting the incense on the altar of incense because, you see, that was as close to the presence of God as he would ever get since the altar of incense was just outside the veil that separated the holy place from the Holy of Holies.  This was the high point of all his priestly service.  He was chosen by lot to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense.  Only special priests chosen by lot would ever do that.  No common person would ever go in there, and only the high priest could go further into the Holy of Holies and that only once a year.  So this was the pinnacle of the service.  So in he went.

  He wasn't going to stay long.  He had a little bowl full of the burning coals from off the brazen altar, the altar of burnt offering.  He took it in, he dumped the coals into the altar of incense, spread them around and then put the incense on and a great cloud of incense would arise, symbolizing the prayers of the people.  He was in there doing that, verse 10 says, the people were outside doing exactly what he was symbolizing, they were praying on the outside.

  And while he was in there, and it was only a brief visit, it didn't take very long, an angel of the Lord appeared to him.  This takes us to the third point, from his personal righteousness and his priestly responsibility, to his prophetic revelation.  Here something happens that just didn't happen...an angel appeared.  This is real.  And he tells us he was standing to the right of the altar of incense, that doesn't have any mystical value, that isn't any spiritual message, that is the way to tell us that this actually happened and that angel was locatable.  This wasn't a figment of his imagination.  This wasn't some kind of esoteric mind elevation.  An angel came, took on form and stood in a place that he could identify.  And verse 12 says Zacharias was troubled when he saw him and fear gripped him.  He was absolutely terrified.  He knew this..although this was a...in a form, the angel was in a form that he could perceive and see, he realized that he had a heavenly visitor.  This didn't happen, as I said.  If you go back in recorded history, it's been 500 years since an angel appeared to Zechariah.  Here was an angel and panic set in.

  In verse 13 the angel said to him the most unthinkable thing, "Do not be afraid, Zacharias, your petition has been heard."  They had prayed for years for a child, probably ceased praying in recent years since they were so old.  The indication that they were old, advanced in years in verse 7, means they were over 60 and since there was no retirement age for a priest, they could have been in their 70's or their 80's.  He says your petition has been heard, your wife, Elizabeth, will bear you a son and you will give him the name John, which means God is gracious, or favor from God. 

  This angel shows up, panic sets in.  The angel says the most unthinkable thing, "Your wife is going to have a baby.  Your prayer is answered."  This would have to be a miracle.  This would be the first miracle recorded in the history of God's unfolding redemption since the fiery furnace over 500 years ago.  Miracles didn't happen.  This isn't a time of miracles.  Miracles don't happen around the world.  When they do happen they happen in the narrow band of that redemptive nation called Israel.  And it happened for a long time.  What do you mean?  This would have to be a miracle and he knew that. 

  So the Lord had finally spoken.  An angel had appeared to announce a miracle.  God was intervening in human history.  "And you will have joy and gladness."  Their stigma was going to be gone.  Their disgrace was going to be gone and they were going to be a happy couple.  Furthermore, many will rejoice at his birth, the angel said.  Over in verse 58 when the child was born, it says the neighbors and relatives of Elizabeth heard the Lord had displayed His great mercy toward her and they were rejoicing with her.  So you'll rejoice and your neighbors will rejoice, but it will go way beyond that, the whole world is going to rejoice.  Israel is going to rejoice.  Why?  Verse 15, "For this child will be great in the sight of the Lord.  He will drink no wine or liquor.  Be filled with the Spirit while yet in his mother's womb.  Will turn back many of the sons of Israel to the Lord their God."  That's why many will rejoice because through John's ministry they'll turn to God.  Further, "He will be the forerunner of the Messiah," verse 17 says.  "He will be the one coming in the spirit and the power of Elijah to turn the hearts of the fathers back to the children and the disobedient to the attitude of the righteous, to make a people ready to receive the Lord, ready to receive the Messiah."

  But he tells this incredible revelation from God to Zacharias.  This child is going to come and he's going to bring you joy and he's going to bring your family and your friends joy and he's going to bring a message of rejoicing to the whole nation Israel because they're going to repent and come back to God.  And he's going to point to the Messiah that's going to be the Savior of the world. And consequently the joy is going to extend to the ends of the earth and the end of time.  He's going to be the forerunner of the Messiah.  Your son's going to be a prophet of God.  He's going to come in the same spirit and power that Elijah came.  He's going to have a powerful impact on Israel.  He's going to turn their hearts to God.  He's going to be a man filled with the Holy Spirit, even from the time he was in the womb.

  This son that they were going to have was going to so extraordinary that he would have the greatest privilege that ever could come to a Jew.   He would have the greatest privilege imaginable, the greatest privilege that any man could ever hope for, a privilege that no one had ever experienced...he would have the privilege of being the first person to identify the Messiah.

  The prophets had talked about the Messiah, but none could ever point to Him.  John would say, pointing to Jesus one day, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world."  John would have the greatest privilege any prophet could ever have, he would be the greatest of the prophets because he would be the one to point to and identify the long-awaited Messiah and Savior of the world.  Can you imagine how great a privilege that is?  Let me remind you.  You have the same privilege.  This was some announcement. 

  Now we've seen his personal righteousness, his priestly responsibility, his prophetic revelation.  Look at point four, his perfidious response.  That which doubts...that which distrusts.  Perfidy is faithlessness, doubt. Zacharias, of all the things he could have said to the angel, look what he says, "How shall I know this for certain?  For I'm an old man and I am married to an old lady," that's a sort of a free translation but that's exactly what he said. "I mean, this is ridiculous, what makes you think I'm supposed to believe this?" He could have said, "I'm overwhelmed, sir.  Why me?  Would you pass my thanks unto God?  But he didn't.  He was a skeptic.  "How shall I know this for certain?  I'm old and she's old, this can't happen."  Miracles don't happen.  I don't believe you.  In the first place, angels don't show up.  In the second place, God doesn't speak.  And in the third place miracles don't happen.  And this would require a miracle."

  He knew that.  He knew they were past child-bearing age and even when they were in the normal years of child bearing capacity, she was barren.  And isn't it amazing, he'd been praying all this time for a child and God sends an angel to announce he's going to have one and he doesn't believe it?  Not exactly great faith, huh?  Now in the long past Abraham, Genesis 15 and Gideon, Judges 6, and Hezekiah, 2 Kings 20, they also asked God for more explanation when He had spoken to them things that were hard to understand.  But none was as outright overtly unbelieving as Zacharias.  He was a good man.  He was a child of God.  But this was too much, he just couldn't believe this.  He needed stronger evidence, stronger evidence than a word from God? 

  He didn't believe the Word of God.  That's serious.  Serious to disbelieve the Word of God.  And the angel's response is appropriate, "The angel answered and said to him, 'I am Gabriel.'"  Who do you think you're talking to, buddy?  I'm not just some guy who...I am Gabriel.  "Who stands in the presence of God and I have been sent to speak to you and bring you this good news."  And by the way, the Greek on the phrase "I am Gabriel," is very emphatic.  This is not just a common visitor.  This is Gabriel.

  Only two angels are named in the Bible, first, Michael who is sort of super-angel.  He shows up when there's a battle to fight.  And Gabriel, who is God's number-one messenger with the mega messages.  When there's a massive message to deliver like the whole of redemptive history in the coming of the Messiah and the establishment of the Kingdom, he is sent to Daniel to deliver that one.  Or when Messianic story begins and is inaugurated with the birth of the forerunner, John the Baptist, he shows up to make the announcement to this humble priest.  This is important stuff.  It was Gabriel who came later in verse 26 to Mary with the announcement that she would bear the Messiah.  It was Gabriel who came to Daniel in chapter 9 and told him about the history of redemption, right on to the kingdom of Christ.  He is seen with these monumental glorious messages from God.  Gabriel means "mighty one of God."  He says, "I'm Gabriel, I'm not just your common run-of-the-mill holy angel.  I'm Gabriel."  This is a big message you're getting.

  It's interesting, why would he introduce himself as Gabriel?  Because this is a man who knew the Old Testament and Gabriel appeared in the book of Daniel and Gabriel came with these earth-shattering messages, monumental ones.  "And I stand in the presence of God, I'm coming down from the very throne room and I've been sent by God."  Angels are always sent by God.  They don't act independently.  They are perfect ambassadors for God, perfect emissaries, perfect messengers because they only do what God sends them to do and say what He sends them to say.  God is the king of the angels and He sends them with His messages.  Gabriel says," I came to bring you good news.  This is what I get from you?  I brought you good news.  This isn't a message of judgment.  I know you were afraid, as verse 12 indicates, but I came with good news.  This news is so good it's going to make you rejoice, going to make everybody around you rejoice, going to make people in Israel rejoice, going to make the world rejoice.  This is good news." Well as good as the news was, Zacharias couldn't believe it.  So we see his perfidious response.  And that turns in to his punishing reproof.  That was easy.

  "And behold, you shall be silent and unable to speak until the day when these things take place because you did not believe my words which shall be fulfilled in their proper time."  I mean, just on a human level, if you had never been able to have a child and you were in your 70's, let's say, taking mid-ground, and all of a sudden you were going to have a baby, you'd be wanting to talk about it.  He couldn't.  He wasn't even going to be able to tell the wonderful story that he was in...what a story, I mean, you go back to your little village and say, "Guys, guess what happened to me while I was down there.  I went into the holy place and an angel came to me and an angel made this promise," and so forth.  He can't tell the story.  He can't even hear the questions that are asked because he's deaf. 

  Over in verse 62 they made signs to him.  They made signs to him, talking here about Zacharias.  They were...the child was born at this time, they were going to name him, so they started making signs.  The reason they made signs to him because he couldn't hear.  And he asked for a tablet and wrote, he couldn't speak so he had to write down on the tablet, "His name is to be John."  He was deaf and mute.  This is pretty severe.  It's merciful in that it's temporary.  It's severe in itself.  If you're going to be so unbelieving as not to hear God's Word, then you're not going to be able to speak it.  If you're so faithless as not to believe, you're going to be useless in the proclamation. 

  So God shut him up and that was an every day, every moment reminder of his sin of unbelief.  And when people said, "What happened to you?"  He would have to write out, "I was made mute by an angel because I didn't believe when God spoke to me."

  God shut him up.  His normal duty was to teach the Old Testament and tell people about God and give them counsel and wisdom.  That's what a priest did during the most of his year.  He couldn't tell this wonderful story.  He couldn't do anything but bear the shame of having been made deaf and dumb by an act of judgment from God.  And it wasn't going to change, it says, until the day, verse 20, when these things take place.  When the child is born, I'll reverse this.  Go over to verse 64.  The child was born.  Verse 57, the child was born, Elizabeth brought him forth.  All the family had a great rejoicing.  They circumcised him.  They decided they'd call him Zacharias after his father, which was a common thing to do.  His mother said, "No, he's going to be called John."  And they said, "Well there's nobody in your family named John, why are you going to call him John?"  They made signs to his father trying to tell him they're going to call him Zacharias.  He grabbed a tablet, wrote: "His name is John."  They were all astonished.  Verse 64, bang! at once his mouth was open, his tongue loosed and he began to speak.  And the first thing he did was praise God. 

  And I think that's the point.  He was a true believer.  He had been told by an angel he was going to have a son.  The son was going to be the forerunner of the Messiah.  His son was going to be the greatest preacher Israel had ever known.  A father would be proud of that.  His son would turn many hearts to God.  He wanted to praise God for that but he couldn't, he was mute.  He couldn't praise God.  His tongue was stopped.  The first time it got loosed, all that pent up praise over nine months long came gushing out.  That's a punishment in itself, isn't it, not being able to praise God.

  "This is going to happen to you because you didn't believe my words," listen to this, "which shall be fulfilled in their proper time."  Mark it, God is sovereign and He will do His plan and it does not rise or fall on the faith of men.  God is sovereign.  What changes is not the plan but your part in its unfolding.  Faithless people don't change the plan, they just forfeit the blessedness of doing in it what God would want them to do.  It will come. It will happen, just the way we said it will happen.  Too bad you won't be able to be a part of the proclamation of that great reality.

  Learn to hear God's Word because, if I may say so, you will never be given the privilege of proclaiming it if you're not willing to hear it with faith.  Great redemptive acts will occur in God's time, with or without your faith.  Better you should believe God and participate and enjoy the privilege of participation as long...as well as its eternal reward.

  Well, meanwhile back outside.  Can you believe we've been in the temple all this time?  Meanwhile, back outside, verse 21, "The people were waiting for Zacharias and wondering at his delay in the temple."  Whoa, something's going on in there.  You get in there, you do that thing and you get out of there.  They were used to that.  The priest went in every day in the morning and every day in the evening, and he came back out.  How long does it take to put those coals there?  And to throw the incense on, watch the smoke go up and get out?  They're outside.  They're in the court of Israel, outside the sanctuary proper, which was made up of the holy place and the Holy of Holies.  They're outside, they're out there, as we noted in verse 10, praying.

  Now when somebody doesn't come out, when the priest doesn't come out, there's a delay, the first thought on their mind is that he's been judged by God.  You know, that would be...maybe this temptation that he gets in there and he's over at the altar of incense and he's so close to the Holy of Holies he just....I mean, he can't resist a peek, and whoof...he's gone.  Or maybe he did something he shouldn't have done, you know, maybe he was...maybe he was doing something that wasn't prescribed.  Remember Leviticus 10, there was Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, priests.  Took their respective fire pans with the coals, after putting the fire in them, placed incense on it, they were going to do the incense offering, but they offered strange fire.  It doesn't tell us what it was but it wasn't what it's supposed to be and fire came right out of the presence of God, right out from the place where God's presence was and incinerated them, Leviticus 10.  So Moses said to Aaron, "Better be careful what you're doing when you're over there by that Holy of Holies, don't uncover your heads, don't tear your clothes, don't even go out from the doorway of the tent of meeting, don't drink wine or strong drink, don't go in an inebriated situation or you'll die," he said in every condition, Leviticus 10:1 to 9.  It's fatal. 

  The first thing they would have thought, according to the Talmud, the priest was to go in and do his work and get out of there as fast as he could. The longer you stayed in there, the more potential for death there might be if you did anything offensive or blasphemous to God.  They're on the outside and they're saying, "Where is the guy?" 

  He finally comes out and he can't speak.  He was supposed to give a speech.  That's right, there's a standard benediction that he was to give when he came out.  They all gave it.  Numbers 6:24, listen to these words, this is what he said when he came out, "The Lord bless you and keep you, The Lord make His face shine on you and be gracious to you.  The Lord lift up His countenance on you and give you peace." That beautiful benediction, that's what the priest said when he came up.  But he just came out...nothing, he couldn't speak.  Somehow they realized he was unable...they realized because he was unable to speak and because of his countenance, they realized he had seen a vision in the temple.  They didn't know what it was, the vision being sort of a generic word for whatever he saw.  How would they know that?  Oh, I think he had a shocked look on his face, to put it mildly.  He was probably so awestruck in his countenance and perhaps feeling guilty and crushed, he might have had some sort of beggarly body language since he had just been devastated by being made deaf and dumb.  And he trying to communicate, the end of verse 22, kept making signs to them.  He didn't know sign language, believe me, he was new to this world of being deaf and not being able to speak.  And I don't know whether he went like......you know, how do you describe an angel, you know, I don't know what he did.  For you on tape, I was flapping my hands, you know.  He tried to tell them what happened the best way he could.

  Verse 23, "It came about when the days of his priestly service were ended," the week was over, "he went back home." That's kind of a plain ending, isn't it, to a phenomenal week?  The rest of the week he just went around doing his duty as a priest, butchering animals day after day after day after day, deaf and mute.  And the week was over and he went home.

  Now his wife would be waiting for him and he wouldn't be the same guy that left.  It doesn't say anything about the meeting. I wish there was a paragraph in there where he tries to explain to his wife what happened.  Why are you talking to me? she said.  What are you hiding?  You know how the conversation went.  You've been gone for a week, what...come on, speak up, what's going on?

  The whole drama unfolds and it doesn't tell us that.  It doesn't matter in the redemptive plan.  He just went home and he can't do any of his normal teaching.  It simply says in verse 24, here's the finale, after his punishing reproof we come to the epilogue, verse 24, "After these days, Elizabeth his wife became pregnant."  Stop right there...I just.  It just seems like it ought...there ought to be a fanfare, something here, doesn't it to you?  This is just such an understatement.  It's very important Luke wants you to know that she didn't get pregnant until he came home, less some false accusation be made against her, some assumption that maybe another man was involved in his...in this.  He came home, Luke says, and after these days she became pregnant.

  That is a miracle, folks.  That's the launch miracle of the New Testament.  That's the launch miracle of the saga of salvation.  That's the beginning of the unfolding of the age of miracles surrounded Jesus and the apostles.  A miracle happens to this old couple and she becomes pregnant.

  It says also, "She kept herself in seclusion for five months."  Everybody knew she was barren, hadn't had any children.  If she started announcing everywhere that she was pregnant, who's going to buy it?  They're going to say...Not only is she barren, but she's lost her mind.  And in those days they wore a loose-fitting robe, but five months pregnant?  Then the message becomes believable.  Rather than go out and get more disgrace, rather than go out and get more shame, rather than go out and try not to say you're pregnant when you are and not to want to tell everybody about this astounding, amazing, supernatural miracle, all I know is my husband went to work down at the temple, he came back a week later and I'm pregnant.  I don't know.  He's telling me with signs and writing down that an angel came and promised him a son and said the son would be the announcer of the Messiah.

  I mean, to tell that story when you weren't pregnant, people would say...You know, this is bizarre, we knew this woman, she seemed normal, this is outrageous.  She's a sweet lady and she's wise.  She stays in seclusion, even her relative Mary didn't know she was pregnant, the angel came and told Mary that she was in her sixth month of pregnancy.  The angel told Mary that over in verse 36.  This is the great initial miracle.  It took a miracle for this conception to take place.

  She knew it was a miracle because when she did speak of it she said this, verse 25, "This is the way the Lord has dealt with me in the days when He looked with favor upon me to take away my disgrace among men."  As I told you, barrenness was a kind of shame in the Jewish society, a disgrace.  You remember Hannah had that disgrace in 1 Samuel 1 and cried and her husband came and found her weeping and crying because she didn't have a child.  The Lord...she said...did this, the Lord has dealt with me, the Lord has looked with favor on me.  The Lord has taken away my disgrace among men.  She knew God had done this miracle.  As I said, this begins the story of salvation where the silence of heaven ends and God who at one time spoke in time past through the fathers by the prophets is now about to speak through His Son.

  Now this couple is a picture of true believers.  In, I think, every time and place they were obscure, they were humble, common, righteous, obedient, prayerful, serving...at the same time doubting, fearful and even chastened.  Sounds like us, doesn't it?  God blessed them sometimes because of themselves and sometimes in spite of themselves, God used them.  God is the God of humble beginnings.  And God is the God of humble people.  God used them and God uses us.  What a great blessing. And the profound truth about their son, I shared with you earlier and I reiterate in conclusion, is that he had the greatest privilege any Jew had ever had and that was to point to the Messiah, a privilege which every one of us have as well.  And God is still using the common people.  This is not the tie of miracles anymore.  This is not the time of cataclysmic divine intervention.  This is the time for faithful folks like us to proclaim the truth of the Savior.  Next time we'll look at John, the greatest man who ever lived up until his time.

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