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He Has Redeemed His People
He Has Redeemed His People Luke 1:26-38, 67-80 Key Verse 1:68 “Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come to his people and redeemed them.” Last week we began our month-long study of the real meaning of Christmas by looking at the first 14 verses of the gospel of John. In particular, we looked carefully at verse 14, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” and learned three important Christian truths about the true meaning of Christmas. First, the Word of God became flesh and made his dwelling among us. That is the infinite God took on the very finite and weak form of man and lived among us teaching us to live for God. Second, we can see the glory of God through Jesus by looking at His life of wisdom and miraculous healing power. Third, He came full of grace and truth. The grace of God was poured out on all men who choose to believe Jesus’ death on the cross completely pays off the price of our sins and His resurrection from the dead opens the way for us to live eternally with Him in heaven. The truth of God is that now we must leave our life of sin and listen to and obey the word of God, living to serve Him rather than ourselves. Today we are going to look the announcement of the birth of Jesus by the angel Gabriel and Zechariah’s wonderful prophecy about the meaning of the coming of Jesus. First, the announcement of the birth of the Son of the Most High (26-38). Verses 36 and 37 tell us that six months after the angel was sent to Zechariah in Jerusalem to announce the birth of John the Baptist, Gabriel was sent to a small village in Galilee called Nazareth. The first time Gabriel was sent to Jerusalem, the capital city to deliver a message to an older, highly respected priest who was serving before God for the entire nation of Israel. Gabriel delivered the message, but Zechariah thought that it was too good to be true, so he was punished with muteness for 9 months. This time Gabriel was to take a message to a young teenage girl not known or respected by many people and who was engaged to marry an ordinary country carpenter. It would be hard to imagine that such a lowly girl would receive a message that was even greater than the message given to Zechariah, an elder priest and a highly respected man in Israel. But this message was even greater and later we will see how this little girl responded to this message. Look at verse 28. “The angel went to her and said, ‘Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.’” The angel greeted Marry in a way that she never expected. The angel said that Mary was “highly favored,” but he didn’t say by who. After that he added five small words that had a profound meaning especially for a young Jewish girl of that time; “The Lord is with you.” The Jewish people had a great pride in being God’s chosen people, but they didn’t have the sense that God was “with” any person in particular. Corporately, as a nation, God was their God, but a personal one-to-one relationship with God was unthinkable. Think back to the time when the nation of Israel heard the voice of God. They begged Moses to go up the mountain and listen to God by himself because they were too terrified to stand in the presence of the Lord and listen to His voice. They worked hard to obey the Law of God, but to have the Lord with you was too terrifying for them to think about. Yet here was the angel of God telling Mary that the Lord was with her. This was why Mary was so troubled at the words of the angel. She was probably trembling with fear at the thought of this. Today, I think many people have lost this fear of the Lord. Yes, we all need to have a personal relationship with Jesus and we need Him to be with us every day, but we also must remember who Jesus is. He is the almighty creator God with absolute sovereignty over everything including our life. In fact, He is the one Jesus tells us we must fear. Matthew 10:28 says, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” The Bible makes it clear that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge and it is through this healthy fear that we can struggle to obey God. In verse 30 the angel tells Mary not to fear because she had found favor with God. This also must have concerned Mary or at least made her wonder what it was that she had done to find favor in God’s eyes. We actually don’t know what she did because the Bible tells us nothing about Mary’s life before this event. One thing that we can safely assume though is that she must have lived a God-fearing life, because without this she certainly wouldn’t have found favor with God. Look at verses 31-33. “ You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.” The man that Gabriel was announcing coming into the world is the man we should be thinking about and celebrating at Christmas time. We shouldn’t be thinking about anything else at all, so let’s look and see who this man is. First of all, he was to have a special name, Jesus. This name is closely related to the name Joshua which means rescuer or deliverer – think of Joshua in the Old Testament. The meaning of Jesus in the Jewish tradition is “YHWH saves.” It means that this man who was to come into the wolrd was God’s salvation for mankind. He was also going to be called the Son of the Most High – that is simply another was of saying the son of God which Gabriel says in verse 35. After saying this, Gabriel then goes on to tell us that this man would be a king, but no ordinary king. He was to be a king who will reign forever over a kingdom that will never end. He is unlike any king that has ever come or any other king that will ever come. Don’t you want to be one of this King’s subjects? If you are, you get to live in a kingdom unlike any other – one that will never end. If you are not a subject of this King, you are living in a kingdom that is perishing and fading away. Mary was a little bit confused by this, because she was not yet married and she had lived a pure life up to that point, so she asked Gabriel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” This King was not to be conceived by a human, but by God Himself – the power of God Almighty would conceive this one of a kind King. To show Marry that the power of God was capable of doing this Gabriel told Marry about her cousin Elizabeth who was too old to conceive children, but who was already in her sixth month of pregnancy. Gabriel was telling Mary to simply believe him about this because “no word from God will ever fail.” Earlier we thought briefly about how that highly respected older priest responded to Gabriel’s message for him. To Zechariah, the message was just too good to be believed so he questioned Gabriel about it and was struck mute for 9 months. Marry had also asked Gabriel how this was going to happen because she was still a virgin, but this didn’t necessarily mean that she was questioning whether or not the message was going to come true, she just wanted to know how God was going to make it happen. Let’s look at Mary’s response after Gabriel’s explanation. Look at verse 38. “’I am the Lord’s servant,’ Mary answered. ‘May your word to me be fulfilled.’” Marry had a right attitude toward the word of God. Second, Zechariah’s wonderful prophecy about the work of God (67-80). After the birth of his son, Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and he began to prophesy about the great work of God. I think that Zachariah’s punishment given to him by Gabriel was to help Zachariah to prayerfully meditate on God’s message to him. I believed Zachariah did that very quietly and prayerfully for 9 months. During that time God opened his eyes to the Old Testament scriptures that he and the other priests knew so well, but simply couldn’t understand what they were pointing to. God opened Zachariah’s mind so that he could understand, and when God opened his mouth Zachariah proclaimed the great work of God to anyone who would listen. Let’s look at are key verse. “Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come to his people and redeemed them.’ This is a very short version of the gospel message – God came to His people to redeem them. God could have redeemed His people anyway He wanted, or He didn’t have to redeem them at all. God chose to redeem His people in a very special way. “The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us.” In this way, God showed His people how to live, God revealed His glory and He showed us His grace and truth in the clearest and most intimate way possible. If we think about it just for a moment, there is really nothing greater to think about this, or any other Christmas. We don’t need to think about Christmas trees, the right decorations for our house or apartment, the right gifts to get our family and friends or anything else. Like Zachariah, we should give our whole heart, mind and soul to thinking about what God has done for us through sending us His son. Like Zachariah, we should be singing the praises of God this Christmas for what He has done for us. Look at verses 69-73. “He has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David (as he 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 ancestors and to remember his holy covenant, the oath he swore to our father Abraham:” Clearly Zechariah had spent much of the past 9 months thinking about the scriptures and what God had promised in them. God promised that He was going to raise up a horn of salvation for Israel. A horn represented power. God’s power for salvation was coming into the world. God Himself was going to bring salvation to His people from their enemies. God was going to show His people mercy according to His promises in His holy covenant promised to Abraham and through Moses. God had planned this salvation from the very beginning and now was bringing it about. Zechariah could clearly see this after meditating on the word of God for nine months. This is what we should be doing always, but especially now as we prepare to celebrate the birth of this salvation into the world. Verses 74 and 75 are two of my favorite verses in the entire Bible and yet I think that many Christians today miss their true significance. The question we need to ask ourselves is, “Why did God bring this horn of salvation into the world?” Verses 74 and 75 give us the answer. “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.” God saves His people so that we can serve Him. Before God sent His horn of Salvation, Jesus, into the world, we were all slaves to our greatest enemy, Satan. We couldn’t serve God because we aren’t strong enough to fight and defeat Satan on our own. However, with Jesus, our Horn of Salvation, God has won a complete victory over our enemy. God has given us the strength in Jesus to win the victory. We need to claim that victory simply by believing in Jesus and what he accomplished through His death and resurrection. This is the grace of salvation that Jesus brought with Him. However, it doesn’t stop there. Jesus also came full of truth. The truth is that now we must repent of the way we lived in bondage to sin before we met Jesus, and die to ourselves so that we can live for God. The truth is God saved us by His great one-sided grace so that we can serve Him for the rest of our lives. Many Christians don’t want to think about this. They love to think about God’s grace in sending Jesus as our horn of salvation, but they hate to think that this means they must now change their life and beginning living for God and His purposes instead of their own interests. Unfortunately, this is the truth of the Christmas message and this is why I really hate the way Christmas is celebrated by most people these days. In fact, thinking about the birth of Jesus, our savior who came full of grace and truth, is almost completely forgotten by most people today. Christmas has become nothing more than a holiday where we buy and receive presents from our family and friends, where we get together for nice family dinner and enjoy their company. These things are not bad in themselves, but when they take the place of the savior whose birth we should be celebrating like Zechariah – by meditating of the word of God and praising him for what He has done for us, they become bad. God has given us the greatest gift we can ever hope to receive and that is what Christmas should be about. Zechariah ends his prophecy talking about his son who was just born. “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.” I want to take just a few minutes to think about John’s life. How did John live? What did Jesus say about him? The answers are that John lived a very simple life, forsaking all the worldly wealth and position that his father Zachariah work so hard to establish. He lived in the desert with just one set of clothes made of camel hair and belt of leather around his waist, eating locust and wild honey. He gave his life completely to preaching God’s word, leading people to God’s salvation and teaching them to repent. Jesus said of him, “Truly I tell you, among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist.” But Jesus did not stop there. Don’t forget the rest of the verse, “yet whoever is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” What does this tell you about the way Jesus wants us to live? Many Christians will argue that this says nothing about how Jesus wants us to live, but I disagree. Jesus said that if we love Him we will listen to him, obey Him and follow Him. How did Jesus live? Didn’t He live pretty much like John? Did Jesus have a nice home, a donkey or horse of His own, large herds and flocks, or wealth of any kind? No. Remember this, Jesus is the King of the Kingdom of Heaven, and I think that should say something about how His subjects should be living in this world. Today we thought about the announcement of Jesus coming into the world. We thought about who he is, what He did for us, and what this should mean to us. This Christmas let’s not forget who and what we are celebrating and let’s share this good news with those around us even as Zechariah did. |
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