What a happy man! He sees the immediate future. God is moving among His people and everything will soon change. Salvation is coming.
Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come and has redeemed his people.
He has raised up a horn of salvation for us… 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.
What a happy father! He understands his son’s part in preparing for Jesus’ coming. Forgiveness of sins! Heaven’s mercy and Peace!
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 to Israel.
Notice the tense of Zecaraiah's praise:
ReplyDeletePraise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come and has redeemed his people.
He has raised up a horn of salvation for us… to rescue us from the hand of our enemies
He HAS come
He HAS redeemed
He HAS raised up a horn of salvation.
ohn the Baptist, who was merely an infant, would prepare the way for the Lord.
Zecharaiah is so cetain of what God is doing, he praises in past tense while John the Baptist is mere minutes (ok, maybe hours) old!
Do we have that kind of certainty about the promises God has made for us?
Listen to what Paul writes in Ephesians 2:4-6
But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in our transgressions - it is by grace you have ben saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus,
The same tense, he's already raised us up with Christ in the heavenly realms.
He speaks as if it has already happened.
"I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life." 1 John 5:13
We can have the same confidence and certainty when we speak of our salvation that Zecharaiah had of Israel's. Not because of ourselves, but because of the awesome and faithful God we serve!
Ed McMann recently died. I used to have a carboard life-sized cut-out of him next to my room - I made a sign to cover the promo poster he was holding that said, "Don't settle for second best!"
ReplyDeleteI wonder if John ever felt that way - he was just the set up guy. He was to come and prepare the way. We don't talk much about him - Peter and Paul seem to get more attention.
Yet John's coming was prophesied about. And he had a task given by God to accomplish.
I imagine he never quite thought of himself as only the set up man - but more so as the first servant to the King!
What is our attitude toward serving in the kingdom?