JOHN033 - Zechariah Has Had Nine Months to Work on This, Let's Hear What He Has to Say

John 1:6-8

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

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Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And this little arc that we've been working on, which is now almost two weeks long, comes to an end today on the advent of John the Baptist, who this guy is, where he came from, the miraculous events surrounding his story, and particularly the excitement that is easily lost on us as modern viewers. But this arc that we've been on setting John the Baptist gets us back in touch with the excitement that the original audience would have felt to the idea that God was with them again. Or maybe God never left, but now we're seeing him again. The physical manifestation, the physical presence of God is back. Aha! I knew he was real. I knew this thing was always meant to be timeless. I knew he would show back up. I knew it. And Zechariah got so excited that he didn't handle everything perfectly, and he hasn't even been able to talk about it for months. Mary has been able to talk about it. She nails it. Elizabeth's able to talk about it. She nails it. But on the whole, this arc that we've been exploring in Luke chapter one, this little subquest for our series on John, if I could put it in a word, it is exuberant. I'm going to put it in another word now. Celebratory. This is good news, the best news, not just for the people at this time, not just for the people Luke was immediately writing to, John was immediately writing to. This is good news for us. This applies to us. And I thank you in advance of this last conversation on John the Baptist for being willing to make the effort to put ourselves in the shoes of the original audience and experience this exuberance and this joy and this awe and this completion of this giant historical arc together with them. All right, we got to wrap this thing up today. So I'm going to have Jeff play some music and we're going to get after it. Now, finally, Zechariah gets to talk. The first thing he said was his name's John. The second thing that's recorded that he said is this Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come and redeemed his people. He's raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, as he has said through his holy prophets of long ago, salvation from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us, to show mercy to our fathers and to remember his holy covenant, the oath he swore to our father Abraham, to rescue us from the hand of our enemies, and to enable us to serve him without fear in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. And you, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High, for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him, to give his people the knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven, to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace. And the child grew and became strong in spirit, and he lived in the desert until he appeared publicly in Israel. How about that speech? Did you catch some of the stuff that echoes back to what we're seeing in John 1 about the light? Because of the tender mercy of our God by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death. Of course I want to go and break down the Magnificat. I want to go and break down everything in this prayer from Zechariah and show you every single Old Testament reference that these are built from. Just kind of zipping through it and considering whether I would do such an episode. I counted easily 20 that I recognize in terms of references. And if that's just what I caught, there's got to be so many more allusions to other chunks of the Bible that's so theologically rich. It's so theologically powerful. But also, look at, I mean, it's connective tissue between Old Testament and New Testament. It's connective tissue between the role of it's clarifying tissue, I should say. That's a mixed metaphor between John the Baptist and Jesus and their two roles. It squares tightly with the themes over here in John about light and truth and the light shining into the darkness and the theme of God with us. And that's before we even get into Luke 2 and the actual story of the actual birth of Christ, Emmanuel, God with us. Believe it or not, we still haven't actually covered everything we need to cover about John the Baptist. And we've been on this for what, a week and a half. So here's the game plan moving forward. This is what we're gonna do. Game plan number one. Be excited with me because this oft-overlooked story is something that we just got to spend time on. And it's beautiful and it's enthralling. And the hope that they felt back then is supposed to inspire hope in us now, and it certainly does that for me. Uh, thing number two that is part of the plan. Be energized and amazed at how incredibly tightly the whole story of the Bible holds together. What level of connectedness do you feel from writings from 450 or 500 years ago? Stuff written at the time of Shakespeare or Columbus. Not much. I mean, you had to read a few things from back then in school to pass class or whatever. But it's not like it informs you now and informs what you look forward to in life and how you think about the world. But dang it, all of this, it mattered. It all connected together, and these stories were not finished. The stuff from the Old Testament was still shaping the New Testament. John the Baptist and Jesus, they're not just some new startup. You know, a couple of kids who came along at the right time, made a plan, high-fived, and cooked up a brand new religion. Everything about history was pointing to these two guys, and people who knew the story best could see it instantly. People who would have a lot to risk if they got caught making stuff up could see it instantly and did not waver in this regard. So, yeah, game plan moving forward is an emotional response from us, a cognizant intellectual response from us of appreciation for what we've just seen spelled out in the early going of the New Testament here. But the next part of the plan moving forward for us is that we're going to jump back over to John now and move forward in the following days into what John is up to now, because that's what we get in John 1:15. The prologue kind of rounds out at the beginning of the Gospel of John with John doing his ministry stuff. John testifies concerning him, testifies concerning the law, gosh, Jesus. He cries out saying, This was he of whom I said, he who comes after me has surpassed me, because he was before me. From the fullness of his grace, we have all received one blessing after another. For the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. That's the first time we hear that name in the Gospel of John. No one has ever seen God, but God, the one and only, who is at the Father's side, has made him known. There you go. That's the whole prologue of John. I just read you the last little bit there that connects back to John the Baptist. So we're going to go break down that passage next time around and get a better sense of what does it look like when somebody who has that birth prologue grows up and does what it is that he's supposed to do and plays his role and how does it tie together with Jesus? So there's a lot of John 1 left to go and a whole lot more of John the Baptist stuff left to go in that regard. I will say once more, in defense of Zechariah, that dumbstruck is a completely understandable response, even if it hadn't been miraculous. I I bet when it was all over, Zechariah was like, that's the best thing that ever could have happened to me. I got my mouth shut miraculously because dumbstruck is the only right response to what I just encountered. There's there are no words. There is nothing left to be said. And I bet a whole lot of what Zechariah processed through during that time probably put a look on his face that was reminiscent of the look on the face of that guy from that movie I was telling you about the other day, who was just so overwhelmed by all the competing, conflicting, heavy emotions of a grand span of history passing by before his eyes. That how do you even act that? What do you even do with it? Dumbstruck is the only thing that made sense. But on top of that, there's a miraculous element to the thing. And so he didn't even have the option to talk. And instead, he sat and reflected, not with bitterness, but with hope, with nine months to ponder all these things up in his heart. And when it's all done, Zechariah serves as kind of our guiding light to what the legacy of John the Baptist's birth story is, and the hope that it provides not just for him and his wife, but not just the hope that it provides for Israel in the first century A.D., but the hope that it provides for all of humankind because of the role that God has set aside for John the Baptist in the unfolding of this grand redemptive plan. And I say again, we'll get on to more about what that plan actually looked like, what that role actually looked like next time around. Quickly on the way out the door, I want to say thank you to everybody who's taken the time to order that book, The Lightning Fast Field Guide to the Bible that I've been working on. I've I've heard a lot back from a lot of you on it, and none of you even have a copy yet as I'm recording this, but the encouragement has meant so much. It's been a giant part of my life for the last year, and it's been all quiet behind the scenes. You know, there wasn't really a lot to talk about with you. I just got to write the book, got to edit it, got to try to make it good. And now here we are in the home stretch, and the thing's about to come out. And I got the numbers the other day from the publishers as to um what pre-orders are looking like. And I was a little bit dumbstruck by that. You all, you know, I hope you're not buying this as a favor to me. I hope you're buying it because you think it's gonna be good and it's gonna make your life better. I wrote it for you to be helpful. This is the farthest thing from a vanity project. But yeah, I was a little dumbstruck when I got the note about how many of you have gone and ordered this. That uh is not lost on me. It means a tremendous amount. Thank you for the encouragement and thank you for indulging me this last little note on the way out the door. All right, that's plenty. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.