Luke 1:5-7

Transcript

00:00:00:34 – 00:00:23:11
Clint Loveall
Hey, everybody. Welcome back. Wednesday, as we make our way through Luke and we are still pretty fresh. Just kind of getting into the narrative part of the story. We had the dedication yesterday, and while the dedication is not essential for the flow of the gospel, if you didn’t get a chance to listen to that, I really think it is a unique feature of Luke.

00:00:23:11 – 00:00:45:03
Clint Loveall
And there is some I think there are some things there worth knowing. If you get a chance to go back and listen. But today, find yourself in verse five of chapter one and you know, you know, Michael, I think any time someone undertakes to tell a story, if they do so thoughtfully, the question of where you begin right.

00:00:45:14 – 00:01:26:49
Clint Loveall
Is really interesting. You know, Matthew jumps right in with the genealogy. Mark just goes just full on and kind of John the Baptist. John does his all his own sort of cosmic creation story. Where Luke begins is is on one hand, similar to Mark, but much more expanded Mark is the simplest the shortest gospel. Luke really adds some layers to this, but he essentially lands on the forerunner on John the Baptist.

00:01:26:51 – 00:01:59:38
Clint Loveall
And you know, if that seems like an odd place to start Jesus story, it does tell us something about how completely interwoven in the early church John the Baptist and Jesus were as characters in in this narrative, we learn that they were likely even family members. But we we may underestimate the what the ways in which those two stories are connected, particularly in the beginning of the gospel.

00:01:59:38 – 00:02:10:15
Clint Loveall
That gets less true. But John the Baptist, though this is not a book about him, he is a major, major character in the early part of the story.

00:02:10:35 – 00:02:40:03
Michael Gewecke
I think you’re right to point that out, because, you know, Christians, when they turn to the Gospels, are not turning to read about John the Baptist. They’re coming to read about Jesus. And I think that there’s a really interesting moment that is available to us as we study a book like this to slow down and to not rush ahead to the quote unquote good stuff, because there has been a substantial amount of text delegated given to John the Baptist.

00:02:40:03 – 00:03:03:39
Michael Gewecke
And as a reader, as we study this together, we should ask ourselves the question why? What is behind that? Why is there so much time and attention given to it? Some of it just because John the Baptist in his representation in form provides a bridge from the Old Testament? We’ll talk about that. Some of that is because John the Baptist himself as a family member is significant for some particular reason.

00:03:03:39 – 00:03:49:01
Michael Gewecke
Some of it is because that the simple narrative of birth was essential in the Old Testament God giving children to those whose wounds were closed. And here we begin with that covenantal type narrative at the very beginning of Jesus’s story, which is going to lead into the story of Jesus himself and his own family and God’s provision. In that case, I just think that for those who grow up without some of that Old Testament story being foundational, possibly because we emphasize so much Jesus’s miracles, his teachings of course, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, we look to the Pauline letters and to the later books of the New Testament for that teaching aspect.

00:03:49:15 – 00:04:02:11
Michael Gewecke
I think one could make an argument that John does get, you know, flushed a little bit in the midst of that conversation. But the truth is the early church saw John as being essential, and he does have a prime place in the Book of Luke as we turn.

00:04:02:11 – 00:04:26:34
Clint Loveall
To it and certainly reflected if you if you just look at volume, there is nearly as much given to the birth of John the Baptist as there is to the birth of Jesus. Now, again, that’s going to change as they kind of shift storylines. But John is such an and an important figure, the idea of the prophet and the idea of his back story, which is where we start today.

00:04:26:34 – 00:04:49:53
Clint Loveall
So I’ll read a couple of verses and then we’ll start to unpack them. In the days of King Herod of Judea, there was a priest named Zachariah who belonged to the priestly order of Abigail. His wife was a descendant of Aaron and her name was Elizabeth. Both of them were righteous before God, living blameless according to all the commandments and the regulations of the Lord.

00:04:49:53 – 00:05:16:30
Clint Loveall
But they had no children because Elizabeth was Baron and both were getting on in years. So I think that’s a good place to stop initially. Michael, as we get the kind of little bit of back story here, what we learn is there is this couple he’s a priest, She is a descendant of priests, Elizabeth Zachariah. And we get this language here.

00:05:16:30 – 00:05:44:07
Clint Loveall
Both were righteous before the Lord, living blameless according to the commandments. Now we have to kind of work to be careful of what we understand this means here. This is not yet referring to the idea of sinfulness. This is referring to the idea of faithfulness to Jewish law, faithfulness to the Judaic system so blameless, certainly following the commandments and regulations.

00:05:44:07 – 00:06:23:47
Clint Loveall
This is not advocating somehow that they’re not sinful or that they don’t have sin, but they are devout, they are faithful. And Luke goes so far as to use the word righteous, which is a very important word in the gospels. And then we see this thing that we have seen many times before, Michael, as we made our way through Genesis, this idea of barrenness, the fundamental struggle of the human condition being to produce and Aaron and Zach or excuse me, Elizabeth and Zachariah have not been able to have children at this point.

00:06:24:05 – 00:06:46:44
Clint Loveall
And we get told that they’re both getting on in years. And if if you know your Bible and if you’ve been through Genesis and this rings a bell along the lines of Abraham and all the rest, that’s good. It should. I think that’s intentional. That’s a way in which this story is connected to those stories.

00:06:46:44 – 00:07:10:31
Michael Gewecke
That connection is even deeper than that. And the commentary writers point out, I’ll just sort of look at this together, that even in our English, where it’s harder to see, they point out that the syntax, the grammar, the pacing, the language here, how this is written is different in verses one through four, which we looked at yesterday with a very sort of fluent language.

00:07:10:36 – 00:07:40:21
Michael Gewecke
The Greek is very much reflected in other Hellenistic type writings. Then you move here to verse five and suddenly in the days of King Herod, even in our English Bibles, we can pick out that that’s a kind of phrase that gets used in the Old Testament. But Luke’s syntax, vocabulary language, the actual way that he constructs the narrative shifts in verse five to reflect what would have been the Bible given the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures.

00:07:40:21 – 00:08:03:16
Michael Gewecke
And so as scholars do the textual stuff, when they look at the actual sources that we have and they look at this movement, they they point out there’s actually something fundamentally different here. And that’s not just because he’s now using sources and copy pasting them. That’s because he’s trying to make a real point to connect us to the texts that came before that.

00:08:03:16 – 00:08:34:08
Michael Gewecke
For Luke, this is a continuing nation story based upon all those promises that came before, and that may not seem significant. Clint That may seem like a just an interesting historical factoid, but it reminds us that the earliest Christians, even with their diversity, even with Luke and the emphasis we’ve already talked about upon a non-Jewish faith, the way that he goes out of his way to try to invite people into that, it still matters to Luke that we see that this is a continuance of God’s plan, not a break.

00:08:34:08 – 00:08:53:25
Michael Gewecke
It’s not a new thing that stands unto its own genre. This is God continuing to work and make that revelation of Christ something that transforms what we saw doesn’t do away with it. And we see that in what may seem like the small thing of the language, vocabulary syntax. We see it already happening in verse five.

00:08:53:49 – 00:09:32:16
Clint Loveall
Yeah, and I think that’s the right framework here. Michael You know, the closest analogs to this are the stories of the prophets. We are in the pre Jesus part of the text, really working on a bridge between the Old Testament and what we would call the New Testament. And if you read that phrase in the days of King Herod, you’ll you’ll remember that in the days of the Pharaoh, in the days of King, you Zaya, in the days of the King, whenever, not whenever, but often when we get told of a prophet’s back story, there is a ruler that dates that for us.

00:09:32:16 – 00:09:53:38
Clint Loveall
And so, yes, on one hand, this is practical for Luke. We now know as we read this first line when this happened, we know where it happened because Zachariah is a priest and he’s working at the temple. So we know we’re in Judea. We know we’re specifically in Jerusalem. We know we’re in the days of King Herod, though that’s not amazingly precise.

00:09:53:38 – 00:10:18:00
Clint Loveall
It does give us a framework, but it’s more than that. Luke is doing more than telling us those details with this phrase. In the days of King Herod, Luke is using a pre-established pattern of the writings of the Hebrew Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament. And he’s connecting this story to those stories. And, you know, he does it amazingly well.

00:10:18:00 – 00:10:34:31
Clint Loveall
In just a couple of versus here, we we kind of gushed a little bit yesterday about how well Luke writes, and I think you begin to get a sense of it here because just in these couple of verses, we have really learned a great deal. Luke has done a wonderful job of setting this story up.

00:10:34:53 – 00:11:00:54
Michael Gewecke
I think that you mentioned and not to repeat, but I think that there should just be a little bit of time spent with this idea of Elizabeth was barren. That is a theme that we’ve seen, certainly as we studied through Genesis, this idea that each stop and start each generation is a moment in which the reader is to question, Is this the end of God’s covenant?

00:11:00:54 – 00:11:42:59
Michael Gewecke
Is this the end of what God promised Abraham in the very earliest parts of that book? And here the idea of barrenness comes again. And this is both a physical reality, which I think we understand and has touched many of our lives, but it also has in mind a kind of spiritual nature that there’s not only a barrenness of child here, but you have to factor the the history that is preceding this that Luke has in mind the prophets that were connecting to with John the Baptist are existing in a time of Israel light of captivity when when they’ve been deported, a massive moment of national breakdown.

00:11:42:59 – 00:12:04:53
Michael Gewecke
Families separated, people removed from the homes where they just we can barely imagine the kind of disruption that’s happened over the course of hundreds of years. And so barrenness is not just the physical condition that she’s experiencing, though. It is that it’s also an awareness that the brokenness goes all the way down. The people have experienced hunger and famine.

00:12:04:53 – 00:12:32:11
Michael Gewecke
They’ve been separated from one another, that here we have a devout family, but it’s touched their house too. There’s barrenness, there’s brokenness. There is a kind of separation here from the life and life giving ness that God provides. And so what we’re going to discover is the God of life is going to make a way where there is no way not to, you know, spoil the story, but God’s going to make a way miraculously here, and it’s going to go above and beyond this child.

00:12:32:27 – 00:12:35:36
Michael Gewecke
It’s going to go even to the son of the creator.

00:12:36:05 – 00:13:06:25
Clint Loveall
One of the interesting things that’s happening here, I think, Michael, is that as Luke tells the John the Baptist story and then the Jesus story, they correspond to one another almost point for point. But whereas in the John the Baptist story, we have a family in the Jesus story, the idea is that Jesus comes to a people. Yes, he has parents, but He is the fulfillment of the gift to Israel.

00:13:06:48 – 00:13:33:12
Clint Loveall
And I don’t know it would take a real an actual Bible scholar, I think, to weigh in on this and tell us if there’s something here. But it is fascinating that in the era that Elizabeth and Zachariah live, Luke goes out of his way to tell us that they are both righteous and barren because that would not be the expectation of that time and place.

00:13:33:37 – 00:13:59:11
Clint Loveall
The ideal would be if you were righteous, then you were blessed, and the primary blessing of that would be family particularly would be sons. So the idea not only that, that these people have not been able to have children, but that they are right. Yes. And blameless and pleasing to God and yet still find themselves in this position of struggle.

00:13:59:38 – 00:14:20:47
Clint Loveall
That’s a very interesting connector and I think has overtones that we see in other parts of the gospel. You know, you maybe see it most clearly in a gospel like the Gospel of John, but I think it matters to Luke, and I think it’s a very interesting thing that he’s done here by making sure that we know both of those things simultaneously right.

00:14:20:47 – 00:14:46:53
Michael Gewecke
And not only that, but the explicit mention that we have here about their connection to the priestly order. That is even another sort of notch in that belt for turn of phrase. I think that ultimately we’re to see here that we have people who are heroes of the story already. These are these are characteristics of people who are living the upright kind of life.

00:14:46:53 – 00:15:07:13
Michael Gewecke
It connects them to. That story of the people of the Old Testament, connects them to the story and promise of God’s faithful covenant. And yet, even in the midst of that, they are broken, they are bare, and they yet wait and and desire for God to step in and to break in. And that’s, you know, the setting of the story.

00:15:07:13 – 00:15:36:09
Michael Gewecke
I think what Luke has done is turn from that initial first four verses in which he tells us, I’m going to lay out an account, a narrative, and it will be an encouragement, it will be a foundation for those who are God lovers, for those who seek to know Jesus Christ. And then immediately Luke turns to give us a kind of connective tissue, a kind of language bridge between the Old Testament and the New Testament.

00:15:36:09 – 00:16:00:43
Michael Gewecke
He’s already suggesting that those themes, those flavors, that the stuff that has happened before, now something is going to happen, which is going to connect to them, but move them forward. And so in doing so, Luke has not just told us the time and place. We get that when we read the text, but Luke is already it with just an amazing brevity of words.

00:16:01:12 – 00:16:11:45
Michael Gewecke
He’s laying out the path for us so that we can see that Jesus is connected to God’s work and not in some way, you know, dropped in as a outside factor.

00:16:12:10 – 00:16:42:45
Clint Loveall
One one last thing. Just in the way of Luke’s gospel, his style. We mentioned some attribute parts of the way Luke writes in, the way that he tells a story yesterday, but one of them was that Luke is it? To some extent Luke is sensitive to the role of women. We’ll see that in a moment. It well, it’ll be a moment in the text.

00:16:42:45 – 00:17:21:09
Clint Loveall
It’ll be a while before we get there. We’ll see that in the genealogies. But you can imagine that some men of that day and age would have mentioned that Zachariah was righteous. And again, the fact that Luke goes out of his way to point out that Elizabeth is also righteous, both of them are righteous before God, that that doesn’t seem unusual to us, Michael, but it is telling that Luke has a sensitivity to some of the characters that in others circumstances may get pushed to the side a little bit.

00:17:21:09 – 00:17:45:23
Clint Loveall
And I think, you know, we want to try and highlight those when we see them. And he makes it very clear not only is Zachariah the priest righteous and blameless, his wife is right there with him. And and I think, you know, that is characteristic of Luke. That’s part of what we were trying to say yesterday. And I think this is a this is small, but I think nevertheless, a real example of it.

00:17:46:05 – 00:18:06:25
Michael Gewecke
Makes me smile, reflecting there were 18 minutes in here, you tuned in to listen to a couple of pastors because we made it a grand total of three verses. Yeah, and I think the point I want to make in that is to say it may come across to some as if we are really pulling big things out of a small text.

00:18:06:25 – 00:18:27:10
Michael Gewecke
But I want to make the case that it may seem that way when we’ve only made it seven verses in total. But when we get chapters in and you see this over and over and over again, then come back to this study, then come back to this text and look again, because I promise that we’re not making mountains out of molehills.

00:18:27:10 – 00:18:54:37
Michael Gewecke
There are distinct lives here. These small details do point to real substantial content in the Book of Luke, an emphasis in the Book of Luke and that’s one of the amazing things of biblical study, is you can read the text and it can be an interesting narrative that you got through in less than 30 seconds, or it can be this amazing mash of themes and ideas and revelation and call and even in some ways a challenge.

00:18:54:57 – 00:19:19:37
Michael Gewecke
And if you slow down enough to see how that entire works with within the biblical text, I think it makes it come to life, it makes it nuanced. It shows us it’s more than just a history book you read when you’re in second grade and put down on the shelf that this is so much more than that and that, you know, if it seems like we were reading a lot into it, stick with us because I think you’ll see that there’s more merit to it than it may seem at first blush.

00:19:19:44 – 00:19:55:22
Clint Loveall
Yeah. One of the benefits of this format is that we can take these verses, take these sections, we can look at them, we can turn them around, we can explore the nooks and crannies of them and we can, you know, try to put them back together piece by piece. And I think, you know, if you’ll allow yourself to slow down and learn to try and listen in that fashion, there are some real benefits, some treasures in all of the gospels, but certainly in the Gospel of Luke for that kind of approach.

00:19:55:22 – 00:20:10:39
Michael Gewecke
Well, friends, thanks for spending time with us. Today is a joy that we would get to spend this time. I definitely like the video. It helps other people find it. If you’re watching it here on YouTube, subscribe for more of this series and we look forward to seeing you as we continue on with verse eight tomorrow.

00:20:10:40 – 00:20:19:21
Clint Loveall
Thanks, everybody.