Zachariah: Living Into the Promise
Video: https://youtu.be/22r-CSL_Qzg
Today is the first day of Advent, where we enter into a time of waiting. We take time to relive Israel’s waiting for the Messiah and at the same time recognize that we are waiting for Jesus to come again and bring His kingdom in all of its glory. To do that, this season we are going to look at the Christmas family. Those four people that through their lives made room for God to become powerfully present and fulfill the promises so many hoped for.
Today we look at Zachariah. Who is Zachariah? We hear that he is a priest. Someone who dedicated his life to serving the presence of God at the temple. He is someone who has remained faithful and obedient to God’s commands. He is someone who has prayed fervently and is happy to rejoice in God’s good work. He is also someone that has been waiting. He is old. He is struggling because he and his wife have been unable to bear a child.
To best understand much of the New Testament it is important to know and understand the Old Testament. There are many reasons for this:
God has made a lot of beautiful and profound promises in the Old Testament and as he lives into those promises we can see His promises for us as well.
God is a faithful and consistent God. God does not change and so understanding His character and purpose, will help us to understand how and why He works in every situation.
God often uses prior stories to help us understand our story, to see how God is working in our midst.
This also goes visa-versa, as we understand God’s revelation of Himself in our lives and in the New Testament, we can better see how He is working in the past. We see all of these realities in the story of Zachariah.
Zachariah is a priest of God. Like Aaron, the very first priest who is referenced in the passage, Zachariah has dedicated his life to being a conduite for God, as he serves God in the temple and serves others outside. We hear that he and his wife Elizabeth were righteous before the eyes of God, but that they remained childless because they were unable to conceive. This would have reminded every Jewish person of one of the most famous stories in the Old Testament. That of Abraham and Sarah. Abraham was righteous in the sight of God and they were quite old and unable to bear a child.
You can imagine the struggle that both of these couples went through. Years of trying. They probably went through mourning and hardship because of it. I can’t say if they had children that never came to term, but it wouldn’t be surprising. It would seem like after so long that these couples slowly were giving up on hope as Sarah laughs at God and Zachariah questions the angel. Yet in both stories, beyond all likelihood and expectation God answers their prayers and their forgotten hope and brings about a child. We see Zachariah and Elizabeth as this new Abraham and Sarah whose seed, John, will become a great blessing - ultimately realized in his preparing the way for Jesus. The blessing and promise of long ago, once again gets lived out.
There is a difficult thing to note here, because we don’t usually like this reality. God becomes most visible and known to Zachariah and all those around him, not because God answered their prayer, but because after all of the struggle and faithfulness, God works through their weakness to show that He is strong and faithful. Would Abraham and Sarah or Zachariah and Elizabeth be as much of a story or a prospect of hope if God just answered their prayer the first time? Probably not. This is not because God wants us to suffer and struggle, but it is because that is often the only time we recognize him. Often the only way we see God’s strength is when we realize we can’t do it. If God could just walk with us contentedly through the garden, He would, He did.
Next, we hear that Zachariah has been chosen “By Chance” to serve God’s presence.
A small note here, “seeming chance” can often play a bigger part in God’s work than we realize and we can see this often throughout the Old Testament and our lives. When we try to take as much control over our life as we can, we may be cutting out God’s opportunity to work through the unexpected situations in our lives. I recently presided at a funeral where the perfectness of chance kept pointing us to God’s hand in the process. When we look at Zachariah, his story begins with his being chosen by chance and the perfect consequence of God using that chance to fulfill promises and answer prayer.
Zachariah being chosen is a great honour, very few ever get to enter into God’s presence, but it is also very scary. God’s presence is powerful, they know it can change you forever if not kill you. Zachariah has remained faithful, but he knows that no one is without sin, so when he sees the angel of God he does not know what that means for him. Zachariah does come out marked by the encounter, but he also comes out with a great promise.
Once again Zachariah’s being rendered mute becomes a great realization for all those present that there was an encounter with God, that something special had happened. Later, when Zachariah first speaks once again it becomes a great witness to who this child will be. And people begin to ask that very question. Even though John will prepare the way for Jesus, this is God preparing the way for John.
There are plenty of other Old Testament stories that get lived out or replayed in this moment. Ezekiel the prophet was rendered mute, because people refused to listen to God and when he spoke it was so that people would repent and turn back to God. This vision tells us who John will be. We hear that John will have the spirit and power of Elijah, a great old testament prophet who challenged an unjust, idolatrous and rebellious Israel to turn back to God and his righteousness. In John’s being born in such a way to such a priestly family, we see that John will be a priest and prophet, not unlike Samuel who anointed David as King. John himself anointed Jesus as King at His baptism. We see in John a new kind of Jonathan who gave up his kingship, his honour and authority so that someone greater could fill the gap. Again and again, we are meant to live into the stories of old, not just to witness God’s miracles and faithfulness, but to show ours as we build upon the faithfulness of those that have come before us.
God has such plans and authority that he orders all of these things just to prepare the way as Isaiah once foretold. God is so faithful in even the little things, that he orders them for good. The hardest thing for us is that often we have to wait, sometimes we have to struggle. We don’t like this, we especially don’t like that we might be the cause of this but most of the time this wait and struggle is for our good. We might not want to face it, but if we are willing to open our eyes, pray, remain faithful and obedient through whatever comes. God’s faithfulness does meet us there. And through our faithfulness God will give us such opportunity to live out and be an instrument of His grace that one day people might look at our story and say you are like a new Abraham or Sarah, a new Isaiah, a new Jonathan, a new Ezekiel as you have prepare the way for God and made space for His blessings to flow into this world. AMEN
