JOHN028 - A Good Couple Going Through a Hard Thing

John 1:6-8

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast, and this is John the Baptist week. And I gotta say, boy, did we not make the progress I had hoped to make yesterday. I was gonna cover like 10 verses about John the Baptist's background and birth story, and we got one verse, which is on brand for this program. That's okay. But really, this week, we gotta get a sense of who John the Baptist is, because John the Evangelist, who wrote the Gospel of John, thinks John the Baptist is a real big deal. He's the first named human character in the Gospel of John. And John the Baptist's story is interwoven with the background prologue, all of the big setup for the significance of Jesus. You know, we get four movements in the opening prologue. Jesus is God, Jesus is the creator, Jesus is the light, the revelation of God, Jesus is God in the flesh. But there's almost kind of a fifth movement in that prologue that is John the Baptist's role in pointing to all of these big truths about Jesus. So the goal for this week is to try to get a better sense of who John the Baptist is. And in some ways, Luke, the previous book of the Bible from John, gives us a pinch-zoomed-in look at who John the Baptist is. So yesterday we went and started working on that in Luke 1, starting in verse 5. And we only covered that one verse, but it was a lot there. I mean, this took us deep into the Old Testament. I'll read that again. In the time of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah who belonged to the priestly division of Abijah. His wife Elizabeth was also a descendant of Aaron. Okay, rapid fire. Yesterday we went back and we looked at who Zechariah is descended from. And it turns out uh he's pretty legendary. He's descended from one of the 24 priestly patriarchs, whatever we want to call them, contemporaries of King David from a thousand years before the time of Jesus. There were these 24 dudes who were all descended from the tribe of Levi, descended from the household of Aaron, who got picked by David to be the forefathers of this whole lineage of priests. And then these 24 priestly division families for all of time were to take a couple weeks a year to run all the activities at the temple. These two were living life well. Luke 1.8 characterizes them like this. Both of them were upright in the sight of God, observing all of the Lord's commandments and regulations blamelessly. That's a fantastic review. In the Old Testament, you get more language like this, where people will be called blameless or upright. Like Job, right at the beginning of Job, Job is described just like that. He's blameless and upright. In fact, I don't think it's crazy to think the original audience, the very attentive original audience, might have heard this description here in Luke of Zechariah and Elizabeth and been like, oh, so they're like Job. Oh no, I wonder what's wrong with them, they might have thought next. We'll get to that in a minute. Noah was described as blameless in his generation. There are psalms, including Psalm 15, that suggests that there are people who walk blamelessly with the Lord. Now, in the Old Testament, this usually means somebody who's trying to get it right and doesn't do big, scandalous, dumb stuff, doesn't willfully and wantonly sin. They fear the Lord. And it often also has connotations of not just obeying God's moral law, but being attentive to God's civil law, how you treat other people, how you function in society, and most especially God's sacrificial and ceremonial law. Upright and blameless people were careful to adhere to what God had laid out in their time in terms of what it meant to commune with Him religiously. Well, that certainly fits with what we're getting from Zechariah and Elizabeth here. These are a husband and wife who are part of a priestly lineage and they take it seriously, and they're getting it right. That's awesome. What the concept of blameless and upright in the Old Testament does not mean is that they were sinless and had behaved so well that they did not need the grace of God. Even the best characters in the Old Testament still sinned and fell short of the glory of God. But you know, here at the beginning of the New Testament, it's interesting to me that right on the seam between the Old Testament and the New Testament, that Luke is tapping into this language, this Old Testament imagery of being blameless and upright. These are good people who want to obey God. They are still sinners in need of the forgiveness of God. The Old Testament makes the distinction. The New Testament spells it out even more explicitly that there's no one righteous, not even one. In Matthew 19, Jesus is talking with a rich young ruler, and the kid comes up and he's like, Hey, what good things do I have to do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus fires back with some stuff from Leviticus and is like, well, only God is good, but you know, keep the commandments, and the kid's like, Oh, I did all these things, and then Jesus pushes him and it exposes that, oh, he's not actually good to the standards of God, even if his behavior has been, you know, pretty good by outward measurements. And then one of the most important passages in the whole New Testament, in terms of just explaining, everyone, even those who behave very well and overwhelmingly keep the commands of God, everyone has sin. Everyone is in need of the forgiveness of God. That happens in Romans, hang on, three, uh, starting right here in verse nine. What shall we conclude then? Are we any better? Not at all. We've already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin, as it is written, there is no one righteous, not even one. There is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away. They have together become worthless. There's no one who does what is good, not even one. And he goes on, I mean, this passage is a lumping together here of Paul quoting a whole bunch of stuff from the Old Testament to make it clear that even those who are the most upright and most righteous by Old Testament standards are not truly upright in comparison to God. And he spells it out explicitly a few verses later in Romans 3 23, where he says, For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Then the hope comes in the next verse, 24, where it says, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. So the idea here with Zechariah and Elizabeth, then is we've got great people by human comparisons, the kind of people who you would look at and you would expect, you know, man, if karma is real, those are people who have great things coming. Now, again, over there in Romans chapter three, Paul is talking about both individuals and people groups. He's saying, Jews, Gentiles, any people like everyone has sinned and falls short of the glory of God. Every individual has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. If there's any hope for people, it's because we're justified, we're made right before God by the work of Christ. So Paul spelled that out, the Bible spells that out. It's a central message of the New Testament. But conventional wisdom for the original audience would say if Elizabeth and Zechariah are blameless and upright, on the one hand, we'd kind of expect things to work out well for them. On the other hand, ah, that language, it does sound a little bit Job-like, and that's ominous because things didn't go the way you would figure for Job. They went pretty bad. Well, at least initially, as we read the next verse here in Luke, it looks like things are going a little bit more Job-like. So they were both upright in the sight of God, observing the Lord's commandments and regulations blamelessly, but they had no children because Elizabeth was barren and they were both well along in years. Well, now their story has echoes of Job. They lived right, but bad things happened. And it has echoes of Abraham and his wife Sarah. They didn't have kids. We get the story in Genesis, basically chapter 16 through 21, of them getting on in years. And, you know, Abraham wasn't perfectly blameless, but he believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness. I mean, this is somebody who walked tightly with God, and he even had a promise that he would have descendants, so many of them that they couldn't even be numbered, that he would be a great nation, but yet they don't have any kids and they're getting old. In the end, God shows up, and miraculously, in their old age, they do have kids, and God keeps his promise to them. And so the attentive reader here in the beginning of the story of John the Baptist in the New Testament is gonna hear those Job undertones, they're gonna hear those Abraham and Sarah undertones, and they're gonna be waiting with bated breath to see what happens to these people. So that tension just sits there, and then we get on with the story. Once when Zechariah's division was on duty, he was serving as priest before God. Oh, okay. So it's the line of Abijah, it's one of their two weeks of the year. Zechariah's up. So he was chosen by Lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to go into the temple of the Lord and burn incense. Oh, so this is an even bigger deal. Like there were a lot of people descended from Abijah, whose week it was. There's like a whole family squad that would go and run the temple for a week, but only a select few, when chosen, would ever get to go into the Holy of Holies, the place where God theoretically lived with the people. I mean, this was a very big deal. And something amazing happens when Zechariah goes into the temple of the Lord to burn incense. When the time for the burning of incense came, all the assembled worshippers were praying outside. People are gathered together, they're praying, somebody's in the Holy of Holies. Will God be there? Well, it turns out, kinda, yeah, at least a representative of God. Verse 11. Then the angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. What? This is the this is huge. Remember all that stuff that we did when we were looking at the the bit from John 1 and the prologue? We did this a couple weeks ago. We talked about the whole history of God with us, God's presence manifesting among his people, manifesting in the tabernacle, manifesting in the temple. And then in John 1, the idea is that now God is really with us. The word took on flesh and made his dwelling among us. The word took on flesh and tabernacled among us. Remember all of that stuff? I mean, this is a huge saga, the presence of the Lord in the temple. There has been nothing, no physical evidence of the presence of the Lord recorded in the Bible, in the temple, that is, going all the way back to the early 500s BC when the prophet Ezekiel had that vision of the presence of God coming up out of the first temple, the temple of Solomon, and going out of the temple. You'll remember that shortly after that, in 586 BC, Solomon's temple is destroyed by Babylon. But then 70 years later, they build and dedicate a second temple and they do another big dedication ceremony, but there isn't a physical manifestation of God that shows up. Then from that time in 516, 518 BC, all the way up to right now at the beginning of the New Testament, there is no recorded supernatural visible presence of God in the temple. Yet there are hints from the prophets that there will be again, that God will dwell among his people. And now, for the first time in 580 years, the presence of God, in a way at least, a messenger of God, is here in the temple. I cannot possibly overstate how big a deal this is and how much this would have jumped off the page to the original reader. Wait, wait, Linda, slow down for a minute. Read that again for me? A manifestation of the presence of God through a messenger in the Holy of Holies in the temple? It's been so long. How long? Uh, like going back to before Columbus discovered America for you and me, like that kind of long is how long people had been waiting. People like Zechariah, people from the priestly divisions, faithful, upright, blameless people who had been waiting for God to visibly be among his people again in the temple, and now something happens. Then it says, Then an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. When Zechariah saw him, he was startled and was gripped with fear. Well, of course he was. Theoretically, this is where God lives, but he hasn't been there in forever, in a visible way, and now he's there. What does this mean? Zechariah is a guy who knows the story like the back of his hand. He understands that this is exciting, but also terrifying. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. This guy has the fear of the Lord, but also he's not perfect, as we're going to see when we pick up the story tomorrow and move forward with this birth prologue story of John the Baptist, the first named human character in the opening chapter of John. Grace and peace to all of you wherever you are and whatever you're going through. See you tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.