“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,

77 to give his people the knowledge of salvation

    through the forgiveness of their sins,

78 because of the tender mercy of our God,

    by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven

79 to shine on those living in darkness

    and in the shadow of death,

to guide our feet into the path of peace.’

80 And the child grew and became strong in spirit; and he lived in the wilderness until he appeared publicly to Israel.”

         •        Introduction

Are you ‘special’?

We may well be heading into another Christmas where we find someone nursing their disappointment with how ‘the big day’ works out with a comment like ‘well, it’s not about us is it? It’s all about the children really’ … something of that sort.

Focusing on trying to make it ‘special’ for the children, because we know the way we are running our Christmas may well not make US feel special … may well in some material way disappoint us, leaving us feeling we’ve missed out in some way, or whatever.

In general do you feel special, would you say you are ‘special’?

I should be more specific.

Do you live in the light of the awareness that the Sovereign God has a purpose and a destiny for you that is specific and peculiar to you?

And if you do or if you did come to think like that … what sort of difference do you think that would make to you?

Because the sort of ‘special’ John was going to be, and that MOST of us are going to be, is the sort of special that adorns the person who SERVES the really special One.

We’re going to observe that in Luke 1:76 … and a very challenging sort of experience it must have proved to be!

Now, being in that position in the first place, it brought John the Baptist a very heavy burden of expectation … but to a dangerous and subservient role.

Can we BEAR such a thing for ourselves?

‘It’s all about … someone else … really’.

That’s not to say John wasn’t very special as humanity goes … but it wasn’t all about him.

That’s the thing.

Yet there was still a huge burden of expectation around him …

         •        The burden of expectation, vv. 57-66

Luke goes to some length to demonstrate the huge expectation there was around the events of John’s birth, and the theme of expectation is probably even more prominent than that of preparation across the passage as a whole … although the expectation is what’s to be prepared for by John himself.

Here’s how it reads:

“When it was time for Elizabeth to have her baby, she gave birth to a son. 58 Her neighbours and relatives heard that the Lord had shown her great mercy, and they shared her joy.

59 On the eighth day they came to circumcise the child, and they were going to name him after his father Zechariah, 60 but his mother spoke up and said, ‘No! He is to be called John.’

61 They said to her, ‘There is no one among your relatives who has that name.’

62 Then they made signs to his father, to find out what he would like to name the child. 63 He asked for a writing tablet, and to everyone’s astonishment he wrote, ‘His name is John.’ 

64 Immediately his mouth was opened and his tongue set free, and he began to speak, praising God. 65 All the neighbours were filled with awe, and throughout the hill country of Judea people were talking about all these things. 66 Everyone who heard this wondered about it, asking, ‘What then is this child going to be?’ For the Lord’s hand was with him.”

Luke 1:57-66

Luke’s gospel … bear in mind Luke was a medical doctor … is very focused on the ‘beyond natural’, the supernatural, in the incoming Kingdom of God.

Bear in mind, it’s Luke who writes Acts where the Spirit is poured out at Pentecost as the Kingdom of God on earth is inaugurated.

And CERTAINLY, Luke highlights here in this passage that there’s something far beyond the everyday going on, with God clearly and miraculously at work.

Since Luke 1:20, John’s father Zechariah the priest has been dumb.

He’s dumb because he did not believe the angel Gabriel who appeared while Zechariah was serving out his duties at the Temple and said: “Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to call him John. 14 He will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice because of his birth, 15 for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He is never to take wine or other fermented drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even before he is born. 16 He will bring back many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. 17 And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous – to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.’”

THAT is a heavy burden of expectation on a new-born!

No wonder Zechariah … who’d been praying for a son for a long time and whose wife Elizabeth was now beyond child-bearing age … couldn’t believe it.

So now Zechariah was struck dumb as a sign to him this would really happen.

It all builds anticipation and the sense that after such a long period for God’s people living under a time of God’s punitive withdrawal from them, something quite unusual is about to kick off.

So, v. 66 “Everyone who heard this wondered about it, asking, ‘What then is this child going to be?’ For the Lord’s hand was with him.”

Zechariah is about tell us the precise answer to that … as Zechariah SINGS of the gracious purposes of God which are about to be LITERALLY fleshed out before their eyes.

         •        The gracious purpose of God, vv. 67-75

“His father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied:

So why did I say Zechariah started singing?

He’s been unable to communicate and therefore he’s only been signing for weeks and months after meeting Gabriel in the Temple, but now he’s no longing signing but singing … where does it say that?

You may have an older translation, or an ESV which goes: “And his father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied, saying …”

And you may therefore think ‘how can he be singing when it says here old Zechariah was ‘saying’?’!

Well, the original says that Zechariah ἐπλήσθη πνεύματος ἁγίου 

(Was filled with the Holy Spirit)

καὶ ἐπροφήτευσεν λέγων …

And he prophesied, saying …

The thing is, that verb to say, to speak covers a lot of voiced forms of communication … not just speaking.

It also covers a pretty broad spectrum of speaking up and speaking out … it’s more to do with letting something be said or made known rather than only saying as opposed to singing.

Now, of course, there is a reference to prophecy there, which reflects that Zechariah is enabled by the Spirit to speak God’s will. 

But he does so in this case through a praise psalm, which calls for praise and then gives the reason why God should be praised.

We said Luke is pretty much into miracles, but he seems to be a little bit into singing as well at the moment.

Earlier in this first chapter Mary meets the angel who tells her she is going to have a baby by the Holy Spirit and what with one thing and another he says that Elizabeth, well past child-bearing age, is well advanced in her pregnancy with John the Baptist which is a bit of a confirming sign of what’s going to be happening with Mary.

So Mary trots off to meet Elizabeth, go to the baby shower or whatever, and when she realises the reality of it all bursts into song … (v. 46 ff.) “And Mary said:

‘My soul glorifies the Lord

47     and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,

48 for he has been mindful

    of the humble state of his servant.

From now on all generations will call me blessed,

49     for the Mighty One has done great things for me –

    holy is his name.”

Now, it doesn’t use the word for a song about this song either … but 

passage has been typeset as poetry because many scholars regard this passage as poetic or hymnic. These terms are used broadly to refer to the genre of writing, not to the content. 

In his commentary on Philippians, P. T. O’Brien wrote that there are two broad criteria for determining if a passage is poetic or hymnic: 

“(a) stylistic: a certain rhythmical lilt when the passages are read aloud, the presence of parallelismus membrorum (i.e., an arrangement into couplets), the semblance of some metre, and the presence of rhetorical devices such as alliteration, chiasmus, and antithesis; and 

(b) linguistic: an unusual vocabulary, particularly the presence of theological terms, which is different from the surrounding context” (P. T. O’Brien, Philippians [NIGTC], 188-89). 

Classifying a passage as hymnic or poetic is important because understanding this genre can provide keys to interpretation. 

Mary hears the news, sees the corroborating evidence, quite possibly has a profound moment of realisation and sings praise to God for her unplanned pregnancy … as, unplanned by her, she now realises something of the big plan of God in it all and has utterly surrendered her own will to God’s.

It’s a big deal.

And now as John the Baptist is named and Zechariah recognises God is truly at work in John to bring the salvation long-prophesied, Zechariah also sings of HIS moment of evidenced understanding and realisation …

68 ‘Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel,

    because he has come to his people and redeemed them.

69 He has raised up a horn of salvation for us

    in the house of his servant David

70 (as he said through his holy prophets of long ago),

71 salvation from our enemies

    and from the hand of all who hate us –

72 to show mercy to our ancestors

    and to remember his holy covenant,

73     the oath he swore to our father Abraham:

74 to rescue us from the hand of our enemies,

    and to enable us to serve him without fear

75     in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.’”

So … so far Zechariah’s song’s going well.

There’s a good bit in here about God.

There’s a great (long) bit in here about the horn that God will raise from the house of David …

But John … like his father Zechariah … is from the House of Levi!

The BULK of what Zechariah rejoices over, when he might be expected to focus on his son … making it all about the child … is actually about the child Joseph is going to raise.

Here’s the thing.

It’s not about you.

Christmas is NOT about us!

We talk and think sometime about making the most of OUR Christmas, or not letting it (x, y, or Z) spoil OUR Christmas …

There’s a lesson here to learn from John’s Dad Zechariah.

He didn’t make it all about himself, nor even about this AMAZING son he’d just had.

Nor did Zechariah fall foul of overweening ambition for HIS child, over someone else’s.

After a fulsome nine verses about the significance of someone else’s Son in these astonishing things that had been happening, Zechariah turns aside to spend three verses (perhaps less, depending how you reckon it) on his own longed-for, now granted, son … and describes the subservient and specific purpose of his new son’s life.

         •        The specific purpose of John’s life, vv. 76-79

Luke 1:76-79: :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,

77 to give his people the knowledge of salvation

    through the forgiveness of their sins,

78 because of the tender mercy of our God,

    by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven

79 to shine on those living in darkness

    and in the shadow of death,

to guide our feet into the path of peace.’”

Wow!

Hang on.

In those three verses, how many are actually about John and what he will do?

Arguably, just one.

The first one.

Then it’s back to what Jesus got on to do, not about John’s message and ministry.

John is to PREPARE for the coming of Christ minister in the ways described in vv. 77-79.

So what IS the specific purpose of John’s life?

            •          Called the prophet of the Most High

V. 76 “And you, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High …”

You will not be called the Most High.

You are NOT the Most High.

You will not even be called a prophet in your own right.

Your rule will be derived from another’s insight, knowledge, wisdom and truthfulness.

You will be called a prophet of the Most High.

Now, of course, Jesus goes on to tell His followers thirty years on from this about John, that John had been a very big deal:

“As John’s disciples were leaving, Jesus began to speak to the crowd about John: ‘What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed swayed by the wind? 8 If not, what did you go out to see? A man dressed in fine clothes? No, those who wear fine clothes are in kings’ palaces. 9 Then what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. 10 This is the one about whom it is written:

‘“I will send my messenger ahead of you,

    who will prepare your way before you.”

11 Truly I tell you, among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet whoever is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”

Now, in Greek the definite article is often assumed not expressed, and as Jesus identify John not as ‘A’ prophet but as ‘THE’ prophet, and since in context this is a reference to the eschatological forerunner of the Messiah (cf. John 1:17), the concept is better conveyed to the English reader by the use of the definite article “the.”

He will be called THE prophet of the Most High, the one foretold and expected, the one like Elijah …

But all that having ben said, it’s as a messenger … a prophet not the priest that his lineage dictated … that John was born to be.

Priests tended to be provided for and catered for, but prophets? 

… they had all the job security of a pub pianist and no-one to stop the bad boys who were receiving the hard news from shooting the piano player!

It was a HARD life being a prophet of the Most High.

With hindsight we know very well how it turned out for John … beheaded at the will of a scheming seductress of the client king of the Roman Empire, who felt her position threatened by John’s pertinent and very faithful preaching ministry and decided she wanted to be rid of him.

That was the sort of life prospects that a prophet of the Most High could often expect.

But, oh, they were the most faithful of despised, rejected men.

After 400 years of silence from Heaven and at the end of a long while that God’s faithful remnant had spent in longing … “you will be called a prophet of the Most High.”

More.

You, John, will fill a role appointed for special mention amongst the prophets of the Old Covenant … bear that in mind.

John will fit into a known role, it’s a role that enables him to acceptably bring the message to the people that he does, in a way that they can hear it … and that’s important. 

More on that later.

            •          Go on before the Lord

“for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him”

As Jesus pointed out later (Matthew 11:13-15)

“all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John. 14 And if you are willing to accept it, he is the Elijah who was to come. 15 Whoever has ears, let them hear.”

What did Zechariah say John’s role was to be?

To go on before the Lord to prepare the way for Him.

On the phrase prepare his ways see Isa 40:3-5 and Luke 3:1-6.

This term is often translated in the singular, looking specifically to the forerunner role, but the plural suggests the many elements in that salvation.

            •          To give His people the knowledge of salvation

Mark 1:4 tells us 

“And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”

Luke 3:3 tells us

“He went into all the country around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”

Preaching in the synagogue at Pisidian Antioch in Acts 13:24 ff. Paul says:

“Before the coming of Jesus, John preached repentance and baptism to all the people of Israel. 25 As John was completing his work, he said: “Who do you suppose I am? I am not the one you are looking for. But there is one coming after me whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.”

26 ‘Fellow children of Abraham and you God-fearing Gentiles, it is to us that this message of salvation has been sent.”

Then in Ephesus in Acts 19 Paul comes across a bunch of men who seem to be disciples but Paul must have thought something was wrong because he asked them if they’d received the Holy Spirit when they believed … but they had to say they’d never even heard of Him, so Paul explained things to them …

“Paul said, ‘John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance. He told the people to believe in the one coming after him, that is, in Jesus.’ 5 On hearing this, they were baptised in the name of the Lord Jesus. 6 When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied. 7 There were about twelve men in all.”

Why are we running through this?

It’s because whilst John came calling people to repentance for the forgiveness of their sins, that was really just the preparation message, the preparation for the fuller knowledge of the atonement for sin brought about by Christ’s substitution death on the Cross, resurrection to life having paid the price of sin and ascension to Glory to send the Spirit of Prophecy Joel had spoken of to take up residence in the Temple of His people’s hearts.

That was the specific, servant purpose of John’s life.

To call people to repentance to prepare them to hear the Gospel of grace … leading them towards a coming Gospel that would take them from repentance to salvation from sin.

And THAT’s what it meant … and means … to prepare the way for the Lord into lost sinners hearts and lives by proclamation of the incoming Kingdom of God and the need to repent and seek Him out, our coming King.

And then Zechariah goes back to talking about Jesus again.

You know, for followers of Jesus, we don’t half spend a lot of time talking about other stuff.

         •        Conclusion, v. 80

Well, Luke concludes his introduction to the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy about the coming Messiah in this chapter but painting a picture of John as a prototypical Old Covenant prophet, bridging the two covenants between his authentic Old Testament lifestyle and radical New Covenant message of the imminent incoming of the Kingdom of God.

V. 80 “And the child grew and became strong in spirit; 

and he lived in the wilderness until he appeared publicly to Israel.”

How do you prepare for Christmas, Christmas that has the coming of Christ in it?

You bridge the Old Covenant … the Law, commands, conscience and huge distance from God that exists currently in most people’s experience … and the New Covenant with its’ call to repentance for the forgiveness of sins by the merits and mercy of Christ.

You prepare His ways … His infinitely various ways in … into the hearts and lives of the people who will become His new temple, the place where He takes up residence and comes to live by the Holy Spirit.

And that may well mean ensuring that you are the person the people can accept this message from (v. 80’s description of John puts John into a ‘box’, a frame of understanding that the people already have, that of an Old Testament prophet calling for repentance), and that you are putting that message in a way they can identify with.

To be a prophet is to be a bridge between God’s voice and people’s ears … but you put that message in a way they can hear it.

John was out there in the desert, dressing and eating and forming his life doing that ... SERVING the God he was there for.

And for us as for John, Christmas becomes only peripherally about us … about us only in so far as it concerns what He has done for us exemplar sinners saved by His wonderful grace, which has brought even us to repentance and new life in Christ.

Like John, the Christian’s purpose is NOT to live my best life, have my best Christmas nor anything of the sort.

It is to prepare the way of the Lord.

It is to make straight paths for Him right across the desert of the lost humanity we travel amongst.

And to shake off all contrary expectation of this life.

I am not here to serve myself, my interests at all.

I am most free when I’m freely serving His, in sheer gratitude for His great grace to me, and having the joy of bringing the call to repentance and faith to the people whose hearts are being prepared to walk with the King.