JOHN031 - Zechariah Couldn't Talk, Which Made His Job Incredibly Difficult

John 1:6-8

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And I've done it again. I got carried away. I was just going to go and do this little thing where we went and looked at the quick version of the birth account of John the Baptist, but it's such a good Bible. We're working on the prologue in John 1. And the John the Evangelist keeps talking about John the Baptist. I'm like, ah, we got to flesh this out a little bit. And I've fallen for it again. Now I'm all excited about another part of the Bible. And now we're working our way all the way through Luke 1 and the birth prologue of John the Baptist and who he is. And well, these things happen from time to time. So yesterday we were talking about how Zechariah got dumbstruck by his encounter with the angel Gabriel. Maybe he's fumbling his follow-up with the angel Gabriel. The angel Gabriel says a bunch of awesome stuff. And Zechariah, now it's your turn to talk. And well, he didn't nail it. We've all been there. But the result is dumbstruckedness. He's not going to be able to talk for a while. And so we'll pick up with the story here in Luke chapter one after my friend Jeffrey plays us some music. And God's presence is manifest for the first time in half a millennium. And the first thing you're going to say after he makes you all these promises that are backed up by supernatural demonstrations is like, I don't know. It's just that when you got Zechariah's response on this page, and then I look over to the opposite page over here, and you get Mary's response. It's like, dang, one of these really pops. One of these, I think you mishandled it. Well, once again, Zechariah's question is, How can I be sure of this? I'm an old man and my wife is well along in years. And the angel answered, I'm gonna add an uh here for dramatic effect. Uh I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God and have been sent to speak to you and tell you this good news. Yeah, that's pretty good. How can I know this is true? Uh, I live with God. So you remember God, right? Like from your religion and stuff and the Bible and everything, and from the sacrifices you were performing here in his temple. That you God? Okay, cool. So we have that. Okay, okay, good deal. So I work for him. That's why I glow and stuff. I I was just with him in, you know, but heaven in his throne room, and he specifically told me to meet you here and tell you these things. I mean, you couldn't tell from the glowing. I just thought I just thought that would kind of be enough, Zechariah. But okay. We've all got blind spots, we've all got growing to do. So uh the paraphrase is now over, and I'm gonna pick back up with the text in Luke 120. Gabriel proceeds with how we're gonna move forward now. So I'm Gabriel, I stand in the presence of God, and I've been sent to speak to you and tell you this good news. And now you will be silent and not able to speak until the day this happens, because you did not believe my words, which will come true at their proper time. Literally, dumbstruck. Zechariah, uh he I mean, that's the way the rest of the story is going to play out. He it it comes true. He can't talk. Now, this guy's a priest, a pastor, a minister. He likes to talk. He is the kind of person who would say, Oh, I hold out the promise of having a 10-minute podcast, and then get all excited about things, and it turns out to be like twice that long, oftentimes. It kind of goes with the territory. Also, you know, it is fun to you know jab at people like me a little bit about this in my defense and in Zechariah's defense. Sometimes people who do this are around the Bible want to talk about a lot because it's awesome. You get pumped up about it, and you just it's hard to shut up about. The point is, I can totally relate to why Zechariah would be the kind of person who would like to talk a lot and know how to talk a lot and be into that because you know he's around exciting material a lot. But now, worst nightmare for somebody like me is somebody like him. You just can't talk. You're done, man. And it's gonna be nine months of silence. Whew. Let me pull back the curtain just a little bit. I do you hear the cough drop again? Right there. Uh-huh. This isn't a little cough I'm dealing with. I'm in bad shape and I'm not like dying or anything, but I've been going through some stuff over here. It has been very hard to make this podcast for the last three or four weeks. It's environmental things in part. It's probably some kind of long COVID or bronchitis or who knows, maybe like a walking pneumonia thing. I've been to the doctor a bunch. I've been on all kinds of medicines. A lot of the medicines I'm taking right now are just to get through these conversations every day. I like that we do this every day. I don't want you to go find some other podcast to go and listen to every day if I have to take a couple of weeks off to get healthy. I like that my friends are here and we do this together all the time. So I'm getting it out. And what usually takes much less time is right now, every episode is taking me practically a whole workday. It's really difficult. I feel pretty well right now as we're talking. I got some new medicine and maybe I'm rounding the corner. But I've basically had some kind of weird, asthmatic, perfect storm issue going on with an extremely early spring and everything waking up and every allergen and the world being in the air, including probably allergens that have been in hibernation since the last time we had a winter like this 100 years ago. And my body just can't handle it, and I'm sick. And so what happens is if you remember the Star Wars prequels, there was a character named General Grievous, who's like this big robot monster thing, but also he's like part humanoid, and he has like this horrible crippling asthma where he'll talk General Kenobi and he just doubles over. I shouldn't have done that. Now I brought it on. He doubles over and he hacks and he can't finish thoughts. Bro, that is how my life has been. I have lost the power of speech for the last three or four weeks. And yeah, I'm just gonna tell you this. Yesterday, like while recording, uh, I kind of lost my temper and I've got a very long fuse. I am not a temper loser, but I was trying to just talk about John the Baptist for hours, one sentence at a time. I'm not even making Jeff edit all of it. I'm trimming it all down so it won't ruin his life and all of his time. And finally, I just had to do this like a little bit of rage. Just kind of pound my desk here and be like, oh, what the heck? I can't talk. So there you go. Truth to be told. Hang on a second. My son is here and he brought me a drink because he knows I'm having trouble with my voice. Come on in. Dude, did you bring me that just to be nice to me? Because you know I'm dying in here.

unknown 6:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:55

What is it? Uh cherry limeade. You are the absolute best. I don't know if cherry limeades are therapeutic for what's wrong with me. But I'm gonna drink it anyway. Alright, love you, pal. Thank you. Be right out. What a great kid. What a great cherry limeade. Thanks for indulging this aside here. Point being, I've had trouble with speech lately, and I've also been working my way up to this passage that I know kind of culminates with Zechariah losing that capacity even more than I have lost it. And so to me, it's kind of no laughing matter right now. I really feel for this guy. He couldn't do his job during this time, not properly. I mean, you don't need me to explain it to you. Think about all the things that you give up if you were to lose the power of speech. And yet, that's what happens here for Zechariah. His character needed rounding out, which kind of sports the idea that though he was, how does it say, observed all the Lord's commands and regulations blamelessly? This is upright. He was a good dude. Also, even the upright are flawed, and he was not a complete product. And it's interesting that somebody who specializes in faith and nourishing the faith of others wobbled in his faith in a moment of opportunity and testing. I can relate to that. Cool. Alright, I'm gonna view Zechariah as a kindred spirit, not somebody for me to look down on. It goes on, verse 21. Meanwhile, the people were waiting for Zechariah and wondering why he stayed so long in the temple. When he came out, he couldn't speak to them. They realized he'd seen a vision in the temple, for he kept making signs to them, but remained unable to speak. Can you imagine being in that job, in this tradition, for five hundred years? The better part of it at least. Silence. We've been waiting for the presence of God to reappear since the dedication of the second temple. Heck, we've been waiting for the physical manifestation of God since Ezekiel's vision in the early 500s BC. We're going on six hundred years of not seeing God. Will it ever happen again? Everybody in this profession was yearning for this. Everybody waiting outside, worried about Zechariah. To them, it's a normal Tuesday or whatever, they're just doing their job. And out comes Zechariah, and he's just seen the thing that everybody has been waiting on. It answers all the glaring questions. Is God still in? Is the redemptive plan still on? We keep doing this thing faithfully. We don't really know what to do, but where is God? Zechariah just saw the first fruits, the beginning of the thing. He just heard the words of the promise drawn straight from older promises of God from the Bible. He just heard it and he just saw it. This is the most exciting thing, not only that has ever happened to him, but that has ever happened to probably anyone living at that moment in history. And he can't tell a soul. He's got to walk. I mean, it's not like, oh, my team won the Super Bowl. Well, that happens every year. It's not like, ah, my kid graduated from high school. Okay, that's really, really cool. But a lot of people graduate from high school. This is, and you know, imagine how much you would want to celebrate that with people and explain it and talk about it and break it down and everything. This is the constellation of Israel. This is the hope that the entire story of history and time has been pointing toward. This is the vindication of what all of these people have been faithfully preserving and investing in. Just bajillions of dollars and man hours and lifetimes that came and went all focused on this. And it finally happened. And you, a professional talker, can't talk about it. Sometimes the only right response to a thing is to shut your mouth. And if you can't shut your mouth, maybe the next best thing is to have it miraculously shut for you because there's just nothing else to be said. And we'll see how all of that works out in the uh ensuing conversations. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.