FBC Daily Devotional – May 25, 2021

Faith Baptist Church

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Well, a good Tuesday to you. Hope your week got off to a good start yesterday and you're plugging away through the course of your responsibilities in the work week thus far.

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Well, today we're reading in Luke chapter 1 and also verse or so in Proverbs, but I want to focus in on Luke chapter 1.

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And you know the way the Gospel of Luke starts, it gives us, it's kind of instructive as to the process that the

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Lord sometimes used in inspiring scripture. We often think of the inspiration of scripture as sort of a dictation kind of work, you know, where somebody just picked up a pen and it's like the

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Holy Spirit spoke in his ear and told him what to write and he started writing. Well, that's not the case.

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The only time there was any dictation, inspiration, if you will, was when we read, for example, in the

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Old Testament prophets, the word of the Lord came to Isaiah and said thus, and then what is written down is what the word of the

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Lord actually said. That was dictated. But usually the normal process of inspiration is that the

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Holy Spirit uses the background, the education, the experience, the vocabulary, the writing style and so forth of an individual writer as he writes and superintends what he writes so that what he writes is without error and is indeed the word of God.

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And so we see a little further insight in this in the Gospel of Luke because Luke, unlike Matthew, Mark and John, was not one of the apostles.

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He was a physician that came alongside Paul and helped Paul in his ministry.

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And it's evident from his writing of both the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts that he was somewhat of a historian as well.

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And he tells us how he did some investigating. He's writing to this recipient of his gospel record,

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Theophilus, and explains that he wanted to write a fuller account himself, even though he knew the other gospel records were written.

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And so what apparently Luke did was he interviewed people and investigated and checked out stories and got further elaboration on some of them and so forth.

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And then he compiled what he had discovered and recorded and he presented it in an orderly way in the way that he intended to present it.

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And the Holy Spirit superintended it all so that when all was said and done, what

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Luke wrote is God's word. It is the inspired, infallible word of God.

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So that's how the gospel begins. And then it moves right away, Luke's gospel does, it moves right away into this account of Zechariah and Elizabeth having the baby boy,

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John, who would be John the baptizer. And what's interesting here is we often think because most of the gospels are beyond the childhood of Jesus and of course,

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John the Baptist, and get right into his public ministry. And Mark is an excellent example of that, that Mark doesn't deal with the childhood and growing up years at all.

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He just gets right into the ministry. And all through Jesus' ministry, he had nothing but conflict with the

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Pharisees and the religious leaders. So it's easy for us to kind of have the default prejudice, if you will, that all of them were bad guys.

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You know, they wouldn't accept Jesus and they were just, you know, spiritual hypocrites or whatever. Obviously many of them were.

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But Zechariah stands out in stark contrast to those who would come later and reject the ministry of John as well as the ministry of Jesus.

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We're told, Luke tells us, that Zechariah was a righteous man. He was a godly man, an upright man, and one who looked for the coming of Messiah and anticipated it and so forth.

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And so what a refreshing contrast Zechariah is from some of the later priests and the

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Pharisees and scribes who were going to give such a hard time to his son, Zechariah's son,

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John, as well as to Zechariah's nephew, Jesus.

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But then the other thing I wanted to highlight in this particular chapter is the muteness of Zechariah.

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So the angel comes to Zechariah and says, your prayer has been answered, you're going to have a son. Now, Zechariah and Elizabeth were old, beyond childbearing years,

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Elizabeth was. And so for Zechariah, this is most perplexing.

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And he says, how am I to know this is to be, because after all, we're so old.

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And the angel says, okay, here's how you're going to know, you're not going to be able to talk until the baby's born.

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And sure enough, he was mute for the next nine months. But let me ask you this, do you think that muteness was an act of chastening of Zechariah because he didn't have faith to believe the message?

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I'm not so sure about that. I've always kind of had that presupposition that this was the

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Lord chastening, but the more I thought about it, I thought maybe that's not really the case. Maybe what's really going on here is that Zechariah was carrying out the responsibility that all of us have.

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Aren't we to try the spirits? Aren't we to test the spirits to know whether they are of God?

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This angelic visit, I don't think we should perceive the visitor as being like particularly angelic in appearance, you know what

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I mean? The bright white, like the young man at the tomb who was shrouded in white, or like Jesus in the

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Mount of Transfiguration when he was just overwhelmed with this brightness. I don't think that's the way this angel appeared to him.

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Typically, the angelic visits were in the form of just a person.

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Remember the account of Abraham meeting the angelic visitors in the Old Testament, in the angel of the

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Lord. He thought he was entertaining just regular guys, regular men.

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He couldn't tell just by looking at them that these were angelic creatures.

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I'm supposing that that's probably the same situation here. How is Zechariah to know that this announcement from this individual who's in front of him is a divine announcement, or is he being hoodwinked, is he being deceived by something or somebody?

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He's trying the spirits. He says, how shall I know that this is the word of God?

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The angel says, okay, here's how you're going to know. You're not going to be able to speak until the baby's born.

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Sure enough, he wasn't able to speak. I guarantee you he knew, he knew that what he heard was the word of the

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Lord. He could go home to his wife in confidence knowing that it's not going to be long before she's going to say, you know what,

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I think I'm going to have a baby, and indeed she did. I hope that the rest of your day goes well for you today.

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I trust that you'll take confidence in the word of the Lord that he has given to us, this inspired word, as we have it in the

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Gospel of Luke, and then rejoice that God has his godly people in every age, in every situation, regardless of how dark the times may be.

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There are Zechariahs out there. Then let's just thank the Lord for the way he graciously confirms his word to his people.

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Thank you, Father, for all that you do for your people. We thank you for the hope and promise that we have that your word is true and is reliable and can be counted on.

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We praise you today for that. Now, I pray that you would give us a good day the rest of this day, and may we serve you in it.

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We ask it in Jesus' name, amen. All right, have a good day. God bless.