The Dumb Believer:

A Faithful Promise to a Faithless Priest

Luke 1:18-25

When God chooses, He can speak and act in massive ways.  When He chooses, He can create the universe in six days.  When He chooses, He can flood the entire globe, drowning the entire human race except for eight souls.  When God chooses, He can send a shower of fire and brimstone and bury the city of Sodom, the city of Gomorrah, and the cities of the plain at the south end of the Dead Sea.  When God chooses, He can part a sea so that two million people can walk through on dry land and a following army be instantaneously drowned as the sea which was parted closes on them.  When God chooses, He can with His own finger write His law in stone on a mountain that is shaking with fire and brimstone.  When God chooses, He can feed an entire population of people with food that He creates on the spot as He did the Israelites in the wilderness.  When God chooses, He can make water come pouring out of solid rock. When God chooses, He can cause the formidable walls of an ancient city named Jericho to fall flat to the ground.  When God chooses, He can open the ground and swallow people up.  God can do astonishing, powerful, massive things.

Going through the book of Revelation with all those tremendous final judgments that God will bring upon the world, I am reminded of the fact that God is not through doing massive things.  There will come a time in the future when God destroys a third of the oceans of the world, when He destroys a third of the fresh water of the world, when He destroys a third of the vegetation of the world.  A time when this earth is devastated as a third of its population will die, a fourth of it already having perished under the holocaust of the time of tribulation to come.  There's coming a time when the heavens will roll up like a scroll, when the sun goes dark and the moon, of course, therefore cannot shine.  A time when the earth experiences meteoric showers the likes of which even the doomsday prophets can't anticipate.  There comes a time, according to the apostle Peter, when God will cause the elements to melt with fervent heat.  It's an act of uncreation as God implodes the entire universe and replaces it with a new heaven and a new earth.  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.  And when it was time for the birth of Jesus, it all started with a humble, ordinary couple named Zacharias and Elisabeth.

This isn't unusual for God.  Abraham was a man who was a common wanderer, an old man.  He and his wife had no children.  He was nomadic.  God picked him out of all of humankind and made him the father of the Jewish nation, through which would come the Scripture and the Messiah, the Savior of the world.  And there was Isaac after him and there was Jacob and there was Joseph, the patriarchs we call them, with all their idiosyncrasies and all their sins and all their failures and all their weaknesses.  Their lives, frankly, were void of the miraculous.  Their lives were just filled with the common stuff, the common struggles of life in a sinful world and yet redemptive history worked its way through them.

Then there was Moses, who was a cast-off baby, floating down the river in a basket, rescued by an Egyptian princess.  There was Moses, impulsive, impatient, stuttering, lacking confidence, proud, disobedient.  Yet to him was given the privilege of being the recipient of the divine law of God, where God established His law forever, giving to mankind the righteous standard for all people of all times.  Then there was David, a simple shepherd, a poet, a singer, a song writer; David, who became a soldier, David who became a murderer, David who became an adulterer; David, a poor father who had a rebellious son.  David who was both strong and weak, who was both confident and failing, who at times was proud and other times was humiliated by his sin.  And there were the prophets, common men, simple men, herdsmen, and farmers.  God used them to speak His profound divine truth.

And then there were the apostles. And the apostles themselves were the commonest of men, farmers and fishermen and a despised tax collector.  They were weak. They were doubting.  They were ignorant.  They were struggling with selfish greed and wrong motivation.  They were uneducated. They came from Galilee which was considered the place of the uneducated.  And yet they were the mighty force that God used to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ and from them it went until it reached the world, including us.  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.

And that's precisely how Luke begins his story.  It's the story of the most uncommon event the world ever knew, the coming of the Messiah and Savior of the world.  But it has such a common beginning with such a common couple.  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 and Elisabeth are the main characters.

The angel appears and gives him the great news.  How does he respond?

v. 18        How can this be?  I’m old and my wife is…I won’t call her old, but, you know, well stricken in years.  “Youth challenged.”

He could have said, "I'm overwhelmed, sir.  I...why would you...why me?  Would you pass my thanks on to God?  But he didn't.  He was a skeptic. He doesn’t believe.  Why?  In the first place, angels don't just 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?  It reminds me of the people praying for Peter in Acts 12.  They're having a prayer meeting because Peter's in prison.  "Oh God, get Peter out of prison."  Well the Lord lets him out and he comes to the house to tell them he's out.  He knocks on the door and the girl goes to the door and it's Peter and she goes back and says it's Peter.  And they say, "Can't be, he's in prison."  Not exactly great faith, huh?

That's a serious problem: to disbelieve the Word of God.  And the angel's response is appropriate in v. 19. [read]

Now there are myriads of angels, ten thousand times ten thousand and thousands of thousands is the way the Bible in the book of Revelation describes them.  Now we don't know the exact number of angels, but there are numerous angels, uncountable numbers of angels that God created and that are holy and in His presence.  Only two of them are named in the Bible, only two holy angels are named: 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.  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 the 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.  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.

This isn't a message of judgment.  I know you are afraid, but 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.

Those words "good news" translate the Greek word euaggelizō or euaggelion, from which we get the “gospel,” which is the old English word for good news.  Luke loves this word, he uses it about ten times and it's never in the other gospels except once in Matthew 11.  Luke loves the word "good news."  It's the best news.  What is the good news?  God is sending a Savior to die for your sins so that you can spend forever in heaven. That's the good news. 

Well as good as the news was Zacharias couldn't believe it. 

v. 20

If you had never been able to have a child and you were in your 70s, 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.  He can't even hear the questions that are asked because he's deaf.

Over in verse 62 they made signs to him.  They were asking about the newborn son’s name…why not Jr.?  He couldn't speak so he had to write down on the tablet, "His name is to be John." 

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."

Wouldn't it be good if God did that to people who didn't believe His Word?  Then we'd know who they were.  The problem is, we would go in and out of being mute most of our lives, I'd think.  I wouldn’t be preaching right now!

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 these things take place.  When the child is born, I'll reverse this. 

In verse 63 he writes the name on the tablet, and verse 64, bang! At once his mouth was open, his tongue loosed and he began to speak.  And the first thing he did was what? Praise God.

And I think that's the point.  He was a true believer.  The first time his tongue got loosed, all that pent up praise over nine months long came gushing out. 

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. 

Well, meanwhile back outside.  Verse 21, 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 out there [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.  I mean, he can't resist a peek, and poof, he's gone.  Or maybe he did something he shouldn't have done, you know, maybe he was doing something that wasn't prescribed.  Remember Leviticus 10, there was Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, priests.  They 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.  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 there in an inebriated situation or you'll die," he said in every condition, Leviticus 10:1 to 9.  It's fatal.

I always think about poor Uzzah.  Uzzah was just this plain old guy and they were moving the Ark of the Covenant.  And God said, "Put it on poles, don't touch it, and carry it on shoulders."  Poles going through the rings on the sides, and just carry it that way.  They thought they had a better idea and they put it on a cart and they shouldn't have done that.  God wants things done His way and He was trying to teach them a lesson.

Well, they were clunking along with this cart on the road, it hit a pothole and the ark kind of jumped off the cart, started to fall off.  And Uzzah wanting to protect it from hitting the ground touched it and instantly died.  Poor Uzzah.  It wasn't his plan.  But God was sending a message.  I want reverence and holiness.  And He gave them some external ways to illustrate what He wanted out of a heart attitude.

So you know, 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?"

Verse 22, 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."

But he just came out...nothing, he couldn't speak.  Somehow they realized because of his countenance that he had seen a vision in the temple.  I think he had a shocked look on his face, to put it mildly.  He was probably so awestruck in his countenance, perhaps feeling guilty and crushed, he might have had some weird sort of body language since he had just been devastated by being made deaf and dumb.  And he 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.  He tried to tell them what happened the best way he could.

Verse 23, 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.  The whole drama unfolds and it doesn't tell us that. 

v. 24        Evidently their relationship is strong and restored.  Perhaps it was more peaceful for both!  Luke is making it clear that she didn’t get pregnant by any other man in her husband’s absence.

That's the launch miracle of the saga of salvation.  That's the beginning of the unfolding of the age of miracles that surrounded Jesus and the apostles.  A miracle happens to this old couple and she becomes pregnant.

She kept herself in seclusion for five months?  Why?  Well, they knew she was barren, 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.  Then the message becomes believable.  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. 

She knew it was a miracle because when she did speak of it she said this, in verse 25…

She knew God had done this miracle. 

This couple was like us…people of faith, but often doubting, yet God continues His work in us, through us, and even despite us.  God is the God of humble beginnings.