Between Darkness and Light

There is a story about a man who stopped by the local Little League baseball field one Saturday afternoon and became interested in the game.

Standing by the dugout for one of the teams, he leaned over to one of the players and asked, “Hey, what’s the score?”

“18-0, sir, and we’re losing,” came the young boy’s reply.

“Oh my,” the man said. “That must be very discouraging.”

“What do you mean?” the boy replied. “Why would we be discouraged? We haven’t even been up to bat yet!”

Now there’s a young lad who had a handle on hope.

You may recall that we talked a bit about hope last week. What we learned was that God’s faithfulness provides a foundation for sure faith and unwavering hope and that those things should drive us to thoughtful love within the church.

For Christians, our faith has God’s faithfulness as its foundation, and our faith expresses itself in hope. Hope, too, is rooted in God’s faithfulness. It is built upon the righteousness of His Son, Jesus Christ, and upon His death on a cross to save sinners like you and me.

"My hope is built on nothing less/than Jesus’ blood and righteousness./I dare not trust the sweetest frame/But wholly lean on Jesus’ name!”

If you are standing on the sold Rock of Jesus Christ, you have hope, no matter how much it may seem as if the world is falling apart around you.

Friends, I’ve got news for you, the world IS falling apart around you. It has been doing so since Adam and Eve rebelled against God in the Garden of Eden. From that day forward, everything has been broken.

Relationships are broken, and even the good ones are never as good as they were meant to be. We hurt the people we love without even intending to do so.

Society is broken, and no matter how we try to fix it, it just winds up more broken. We are defined to a greater and greater extent by our differences, rather than our similarities. And as we focus on the differences, animosities grow and society falls further into the abyss.

The earth itself is broken, cursed by God at the Fall in the Garden, and our best solutions to fix it look like they will cause even greater problems for us.

And those are just the First-World problems.

Take a look at Haiti. Take a look at Africa. Take a look at North Korea, and parts of China and the Middle East, and it’s hard to come away with hope. The problems in those places seem to be intractable. Sometimes it seems there are no solutions to the suffering we see in the world.

We were made in the image of God. We were made to display His Kingdom across the earth, but we have failed to do so.

Adam and Eve failed. The nation of Israel — God’s chosen people — failed in the Old Testament times. The church fails more often than we would like to admit. After all, the church is made up of people who are struggling against the sins of their flesh — the same selfishness and the self-directedness, the same self-righteousness that plagued Israel.

And the world just keeps falling further into the pit.

But Jesus is coming. And just as the people of Israel were waiting for the appearance of the Messiah in that first Advent, we now wait for His return.

They were waiting for a mighty Savior who would come and redeem His people, a conquering King who would establish His Kingdom in Jerusalem.

They expected Him to

What they did not expect was for this King to come in the humble flesh of a baby born to a young virgin who placed Him in a manger, where He was worshiped by lowly shepherds.

What they did not expect was for this King to come as a servant. What they did not expect was for this King to give His life as a sacrifice for the sins of all mankind.

And now, we wait, much as they did more than 2,000 years ago.

We wait for the risen Jesus — He who conquered the grave and ascended back into Heaven to be with the Father — we wait for this Jesus to return.

And this time, we know that He WILL come in all His power and glory. This time, we know that He will come with the sound of a trumpet to take home with Him those who have followed Him in faith.

We wait with the knowledge that the next time our risen Savior sets foot on earth, He will finally build His perfectly righteous Kingdom here, and He will rule in all righteousness.

We wait, knowing that at the end of that thousand-year reign, Jesus will finally and completely wipe the slate clean. We wait, knowing that one fine day, He will create new heavens and a new earth, and all who have believed in Him will live with Him and the Father there in eternity.

Right now, it looks like we’re losing, and losing badly. But we can have hope, just like that young lad on the Little League baseball field, because we know that when Jesus steps onto the field, everything will change.

We can have this unwavering hope, because it is anchored in the promises of the God who is always faithful. We can have this unwavering hope, because we have been given a sure faith by this same faithful God, the Father who gives good gifts to His children.

Even in our darkest hours, He is there for us, reminding us through His Holy Spirit of the promises He has made.

And when we remember HIS faithfulness, we can find light in those dark times.

We’re going to be looking at a passage from the first chapter of the Book of Luke today, and while you are turning there, let me talk a bit about the darkness that the Jewish people were facing at the time of the birth of Jesus Christ.

At this time in history, Rome was a powerful empire, and the Jewish people were its subjects. Their nation had been cut up into administrative districts under the rule of Roman proconsuls.

Herod the Great was a puppet king of the Roman Empire, and he had embarked upon a series of huge construction projects that helped drive taxation as high as 50 percent for the people who lived in the land.

He was an evil and cruel man who ensured loyalty through beatings and murder, executing even members of his own family whom he thought might represent a threat to his rule.

Revolutionary zealots from among the Jewish people rose up occasionally to try to force the Romans out of the land, and each time they failed, things got worse for everybody else.

This was truly a dark time for the Jewish people.

But it is often in our darkest times that God makes His presence known most clearly. He uses our sufferings and troubles to show us that He is our only source of strength.

And right in the darkest hour, God had made Himself known to one of the priests in Israel. This man, Zechariah, was old, and so was his wife, Elizabeth. She had been barren, so they never had children.

But an angel had come to Zechariah while he was serving in the temple and had told him that Elizabeth would become pregnant and they would have a son who would be filled with the Holy Spirit, even before his birth and who would prepare the people for the coming of the Lord.

And when that son, John the Baptist, was born, it was clear to all that he was special.

“What will this child turn out to be?” they asked.

And now, picking up in Verse 67 of chapter 1 (I’m reading from the New Living Translation today, because the text there is a bit more accessible):

READ 67-80

Now, Zechariah had been skeptical when the angel had told him he would have a son at his advanced age. And because of his skepticism, Zechariah had been struck dumb, and he wasn’t able to speak a word until the son had been born and they had taken him to the temple for his circumcision.

Contrast that with what happens here in today’s text. Whereas Zechariah couldn’t even speak his own words previously, here he is speaking the divinely inspired words of God. Here, he is revealing God’s divine purpose.

The difference is that here he is filled with the Holy Spirit, and I think there’s a lesson for us in that. When Zechariah lacked faith, God would not use him. But when he had surrendered to God’s plan — when he finally put his faith fully in the God who keeps all His promises — then God filled him with His Spirit and used Zechariah in a mighty way.

68

Luke 1:68 NLT

68 “Praise the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has visited and redeemed his people.

And Zechariah starts where we should all start. He starts by praising God.

But note what He is praising God for. “He has visited and redeemed His people.”

Now we don’t know when Zechariah made this prophecy. It was sometime after the birth of John the Baptist, and the context of the passage suggests that John probably was no longer a baby. But we do know that he was still a child, which means that Jesus, who was John’s second cousin and six months younger than John, was also a child.

And yet, Zechariah says here that God has redeemed His people. The sense of the verb tense here is that this redemption, though it has not yet been manifested, has already been accomplished.

Luke

Luke 1:69–70 NLT

69 He has sent us a mighty Savior from the royal line of his servant David, 70 just as he promised through his holy prophets long ago.

Zechariah had surely heard of the angel’s visit to Mary, of the virgin birth of Jesus and of the promise that He would reign over Israel as the Son of God. But Jesus was still a boy. How could he be spoken of as a mighty Savior?

What we see here is Zechariah’s faith in the promises of God. What we see is an absolute confidence that God had ALREADY accomplished salvation for His people, even if the Son through whom that salvation would come was still a boy.

Jesus’ public ministry was still years away. His crucifixion and death and resurrection were even further in the future.

But Zechariah would stand on the promises of God, knowing that God is faithful and knowing that nothing is too hard for God.

71

Luke 1:71 NLT

71 Now we will be saved from our enemies and from all who hate us.

72

Luke 1:72–73 NLT

72 He has been merciful to our ancestors by remembering his sacred covenant— 73 the covenant he swore with an oath to our ancestor Abraham.

God had promised Abraham a land. He had promised Abraham a great nation. But most important, God had promised Abraham that “in you, all the families of the earth will be blessed.”

Through this last promise, God would make Abraham the source of redemption for all mankind.

And God would keep that promise through His Son, Jesus Christ.

John 3:16 NASB95

16 “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

It seems unlikely that Abraham fully understood the promise, but when he heard it, he acted in faith. He left his country, and he went out to the land that God showed him, and God gave Abraham and his barren wife, Sarah, a son through whom the promise of a nation would also be kept.

And then, more than 2,000 years later, another Son would be given, this one God’s own Son. He was sent from heaven to be born to the virgin Mary so that those who put their faith in Him as the Messiah and the Son of God could be saved from their sins and have eternal life in the Kingdom of God.

But what does that mean? Zechariah, filled with the Holy Spirit, understood.

Luke 1:74–75 NLT

74 We have been rescued from our enemies so we can serve God without fear, 75 in holiness and righteousness for as long as we live.

Serving God without fear, in holiness and righteousness, was the very thing that Adam and Eve had failed to do. It was the very thing that the nation of Israel had failed to do. And it is the very thing that the church so often fails to do today.

But it is the very thing that we who have placed our faith in Jesus Christ will do in His eternal Kingdom.

This is the confident hope that we have as followers of Jesus Christ — that when He makes all things new the earth will be as it was always supposed to be, that we will be the people we were always supposed to be, that our relationships will have the fullness they were always supposed to have and that our hearts will be turned completely to Him.

It’s not clear that Zechariah understood all this as he was prophesying, but he did understand that God is faithful and that God keeps His promises, and because he understood this, he now had an unwavering hope for the future.

And part of that hope was directed toward his own son, John, who would become John the Baptist.

Up to this point, the prophecy here has been about God’s Son, but now Zechariah prophesies about John.

Luke 1:76 NLT

76 “And you, my little son, will be called the prophet of the Most High, because you will prepare the way for the Lord.

Luke 1:77 NLT

77 You will tell his people how to find salvation through forgiveness of their sins.

This boy who had been born to an old and barren couple through the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit would point the people of his time to the Savior who could forgive their sins.

Jesus will one day reign from His throne in Jerusalem, and He will destroy the enemies of Israel, but the greater work was what He would accomplish on the cross, where He took on the sins of mankind. His greater power would be demonstrated in His resurrection from the grave on the third day. His greater promise is that we who follow Him have been forgiven for our sins and will also be raised and taken into heaven with Him.

And this young son of Zechariah and Elizabeth would prepare the way for Him. He would be the one to baptize Jesus. He would be the first to say, “I myself have seen, and have testified that this is the Son of God.”

But at this point in Judea, where Roman centurions walked the streets and tax collectors kept the people poor, Jesus was still a boy, and things still looked dark. But Zechariah had hope. Jesus had come, and things would change.

78

Luke 1:78–79 NLT

78 Because of God’s tender mercy, the morning light from heaven is about to break upon us, 79 to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, and to guide us to the path of peace.”

"The morning light from heaven,” the Sunshine as the NASB translates it, “is about to break upon us.”

What a beautiful picture of hope this is.

Throughout the Bible we see darkness coming before light.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep.”

And then God said, “Let there be light; and there was light .... And there was evening and there was morning, one day.”

At the cross, there was judgment for sin before there was salvation. In the end times, the Day of the Lord, the Tribulation will come before Jesus Christ’s millennial reign here on earth.

And the world sat in darkness and the shadow of death until the morning light from heaven came.

What makes the difference between darkness and light is the sunrise.

What makes the difference between darkness and light is the

Psalm 30:5 NASB95

5 For His anger is but for a moment, His favor is for a lifetime; Weeping may last for the night, But a shout of joy comes in the morning.

Weeping may endure for a night, but a shout of joy comes in the morning.

Hold onto your hope. The Son is coming.

That’s the thing about hope. Hope brings joy. Hope brings peace.