GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
LUKE 1:18-20
18 Zechariah asked the angel, “How can I be sure of this, since I am an old man, and my wife is well along in years?”
Abraham asked just about the same questions after being given a similar promise (Genesis 15:1-8), but God’s response was very different. Why? Abraham believed God (Gen. 15:6; Rom 4:3; James 2:23), but Zechariah doubted (verse 20).
We can look at Zechariah’s doubt in its context. Childlessness was considered a curse (Jeremiah 18:21) or a mark of God’s displeasure and judgment (Ezekiel 5:17). To have many children was a great blessing and was a mark of God’s favor and blessing: “Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them” (Psalm 127:4-5). So to Zechariah, even the promise of a special son seemed bitter since he could see no way that this could happen. Surely it was God’s fault for waiting until he and his wife were too old to conceive a child or raise such a son! But Zechariah was a priest of God. He knew the story of Abraham and his special miracle baby, Isaac. He knew the story of Manoah and his barren wife and their miracle baby, Samson (Judges 13:3). Did he think that God could do something two thousand years ago that he wouldn’t be able to do today?
19 The angel answered, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God and was sent to speak to you in order to tell you this good news. 20 Now listen! You will be silent and unable to speak until the day these things happen because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled at just the right time.”
Now Gabriel spoke his name. Recalling another moment in Israel’s history, this angel of God let Zechariah know that he was the very same angel who spoke with Daniel in Babylon (Daniel 8:16)! The angels are deathless, and so the same angels who spoke with Abraham and Daniel are around us still, a testimony to the historical truth of the Bible. This is why Gabriel shared his name with Zechariah, as a judgment on the priest because he did not trust that the events of the past were truly the work of God. In this way, Zechariah was like many modern Biblical scholars who know what the Bible says but don’t believe that it’s true. The editor of the magazine Biblical Archaeology Review recently praised a Muslim author of a biography of Jesus Christ (!) for, as he said, “educating the lay public that the New Testament, like the Hebrew Bible, is not always literally accurate” (BAR November-December 2013, p. 18). God will judge that remark and that bias. That’s a man who would shake the hand of the devil for telling us what to believe about Jesus and what not to believe. Instead, we will put our faith in Christ and in everything—everything—the Holy Scriptures say about him.
Zechariah was struck speechless for his unbelief. Was he also struck deaf? Later the people “made signs” to him about the baby’s name, and some think that deafness may have struck him, too. But the text only says “unable to speak,” and so the reason that folks “made signs” to him (1:62) was that they mistakenly assumed that if he couldn’t speak, he couldn’t hear.
In this case, the speechlessness was an act of chastisement and a sign for those who would see his wife during her pregnancy and the birth of the child. It was a punishment that would pass, and it was not an act that Zechariah resented. It would give him time to craft his first words carefully. He would have more than forty weeks to compose the song that would illustrate his newly strengthened faith and his love for God his Savior. We call those words the Benedictus, and we’ll hear them at the end of this chapter (1:67-79).
What would you or I say after being struck dumb for nine months? Zechariah would have nothing to say except thanks to God. That’s a lesson for us all. Praise God for everything he does, whether it’s a chastisement, a phenomenal blessing, or even if it just seems to be a nuisance. It’s God’s plan, and God’s creation. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.
I can’t help but think of the Young Rascals’ song How Can I Be Sure from 1967. It’s a doubtful love song: “How can I be sure in a world that’s constantly changing? How can I be sure where I stand with you?” The singer doubts the love of his love because he thinks the world’s standards (“constantly changing”) are hers, too. God wants us to take him at his word. “Test me and see,” he says, “if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven” (Malachi 3:10). He only wants us to trust him, which means putting our faith in him and his word, and not to be drawn away by a world that’s constantly changing or a devil who constantly lies (John 8:44).
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Archives by Wisconsin Lutheran Chapel: http://www.wlchapel.org/worship/daily-devotion/
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota