Blessed be the Lord, the
God of Israel; For he hath visited and wrought redemption for his people, And
hath raised up a horn of salvation for us In the house of his servant David (As he
spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets that have been from of old), Salvation
from our enemies, and from the hand of all that hate us;… (Luke 1:68-71)
Notice two remarkable things from
these words of Zachariah in Luke 1.
First-
Nine months earlier, Zechariah could not believe his wife would have a child.
Now, filled with the Holy Spirit, he is so confident of God’s redeeming work in
the coming Messiah that he puts it in the past tense. For the mind of faith, a
promised act of God is as good as done. Zechariah has learned to take God at
His word and so has a remarkable assurance: “God has visited and redeemed!”
Second-
The coming of Jesus the Messiah is a visitation of God to our world: “The God
of Israel has visited and redeemed.” For centuries, the Jewish people had
languished under the conviction that God had withdrawn: the spirit of prophecy
had ceased, Israel had fallen into the hands of the Rome. And all the godly in
Israel were awaiting the visitation of God. Luke tells us in 2:23 that the
devout Simeon was “looking for the consolation of Israel”, and in 2:38 the
prayerful Anna was “looking for the redemption of Jerusalem”.
These
were days of great expectation. Now the long-awaited visitation of God was
about to happen indeed, he was about to come in a way no one expected.
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