What Child Is This? Zechariah and Elizabeth’s Son, John the Baptist

Passage: Luke 1:5-25

We turn this morning from the OT to the NT, and specifically to the Gospel of Jesus Christ as it is told by Dr. Luke. Luke sets out to tell us the story of Jesus. But he does it in a unique way among the four Gospels. He doesn’t start with Jesus’ baptism the way Mark does (and for the most part John). He doesn’t start with Jesus’ birth the way Matthew does. He backs up and starts with the foretelling of the birth of John the Baptist. Why does Luke back up to get a running start at his subject? To understand that you have to understand something about the times. Up to this point there had been 400 years of silence when the voice of God had not been heard in the land. The oldest person alive at this time could not remember a time even in his earliest childhood when a prophet had spoken the Word of God. There had not been proclaimed, “Thus saith the Lord” in four centuries. For a people who had an old book that recorded a thousand years’ worth of prophetic proclamations and words from the Lord, this famine for the Word of God was exceedingly long and exceedingly painful. When heaven is silent people languish and despair.