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Luke 1:5-7 (ESV)

5 In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, of the division of Abijah. And he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. 6 And they were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the Lord. 7 But they had no child, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were advanced in years.

            Luke’s gospel begins with a note of sadness.  Herod is reigning.  He was a wicked king.  He was godless and cruel.  Yet the Jews were under his authority.  They were under the yoke of roman oppression.  It is around 6 BC.

            During this sad time, we meet a sad family, Zechariah and Elizabeth.  Both were righteous people.  They were not perfect as in completely sinless, but certainly upright before God and men.  However, these two had a problem:  Elizabeth was barren.

            In those days, people would have considered Zechariah and Elizabeth to be cursed.  To have children is to be blessed by God.

Psalm 127:3-4 (ESV)

3 Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord,

the fruit of the womb a reward.

4 Like arrows in the hand of a warrior

are the children of one’s youth.

But Zechariah and Elizabeth had no children. 

            What can we learn here?  Don’t over-interpret your circumstances. We need to be careful not to let our circumstances determine what we think about ourselves or God.  It would have been easy for Zechariah to be bitter, or to fear he had sinned in some way.  But he had not sinned to cause his childlessness.  Instead, God had a plan that Zechariah could not see yet.  Who knows that the same is not true for you?  Maybe your circumstances are hard.  Maybe life is a dull gray.  But be careful when you ask the “Why me?” question.  If you are God’s child, know that he has a plan for you.  He will use you for his glory.  He will do so in his own timing.  Don’t let your present circumstances get the better of you.

2 Samuel 6:22 (ESV)

“I will make myself yet more contemptible than this, and I will be abased in your eyes. But by the female servants of whom you have spoken, by them I shall be held in honor.”

            When David danced in celebration before the Lord as Israel brought the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem, his wife despised him for taking off his royal robes and partying like a commoner. In response, David reminded Michal that he had been anointed king over Israel, that he was celebrating the glory of the Lord with joy, and that those who loved God would respect him even more for his abandon that day.

            This scene with David takes me in two different directions. On the one hand, this passage does for me what I think God most wants us to see when we read it. David celebrated before God, and he was not at all afraid of the social consequences of rejoicing in his Savior. This is good. WE all could use a little less fear of man in our lives. Generally we could do with less thinking of how others will perceive our worship and more simple joy that God receives our worship. There is room for me to have more outbursts of joy in my life that God would save me and allow me to praise him.

            On the other hand, I think this passage has been taken further than it intended to go. I think of the song “Undignified,” which plays on this verse and recounts the authors willingness to be “mad” for his king. It also has several “na-na-na, hey” type lines in it. Sometimes we can take a concept so far out of its context that we miss its original meaning and any other balancing texts. David’s dancing before God was not to call us to immodest dress—David did not dress immodestly, but simply not in a kingly fashion. David’s dancing before God was not to call us to be silly in formal worship. David’s dancing was to call us to celebration of the grace of God that is not concerned by losing social status.

            Maybe I’m just getting old. Maybe I’m just not the kind of celebrant that others are. I simply know that, when it comes to this passage. I want it to call me to joy in my walk with God. I know it calls me to not fear looking “dorky” for simply believing in God and his word. At the same time, this passage is not calling me to do silly things for the sake of being silly in order to prove that I worship my King. God has also called us, in his word, to sobriety, to reverence, and to awe. All of these and expressive celebration have their right and proper place in the life of the believer.

            Which do you need more in your life? Do you need more willingness to let your guard down and celebrate Jesus? Do you need more reverence and awe? Following God includes both sides of this coin.

Ephesians 3:6

This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.

            Sometimes we become so familiar with the story of Christianity that we fail to see the “mystery” of the gospel. Because of our understanding of the basics of the good news, we, if we are not careful, will miss the absolutely amazing truth that salvation is available to people of all nationalities in the world. So, stop for a moment and think about the thing that Paul calls a mystery.

            For centuries, the way to be made right with God was to trust in him enough to become a part of the nation of Israel. A person who wanted salvation by grace through faith had to express that faith by performing sacrifices, obeying the Jewish law, and even by being circumcised. For centuries, not just a small time, people who wanted their sins forgiven by God took a trip to Jerusalem to make their sacrifice of an unblemished animal at the temple of God. For centuries, those who wanted grace took part in appointed feasts and observed appropriate holy days and events.

            But the old system was not the end. No, the old system was merely a pointer to something more perfect, something complete. God planned to fulfill all righteousness on behalf of his children, because none of his followers, even those with bloody sacrifices at the temple, could ever fulfill all righteousness on their own. God came to earth himself. God sent his Son. Jesus fulfilled and completed the law. The mystery, the amazing secret hidden for centuries, is that Jesus was coming to do what the law, if left to itself, could never do. Jesus came to fully and completely save people from all over the world. People who would never enter Jerusalem or make a sacrifice of an animal, people who would never celebrate a Passover, people who would never think of being circumcised, Jesus would save them. He would not save them through their performance of religious ritual. He would not save them through their obedience to any rule. He would not save them because they outwardly obeyed any law. No, Jesus would save them by God’s grace through faith—a faith which is the gift of God according to Ephesians 2:8. Jesus would save them to the uttermost, regardless of their ethnicity, and write on their hearts the true law of God.

            Ponder the mystery. God’s plan was different than any plan man had ever dreamed of. Every world religion makes salvation about being good, fulfilling rituals, and obeying rules. Not God’s mysterious plan. The mystery of God tells us that none of us is good, none of us can obey the rules, no ritual will suffice, no people group has the inside track, but God will do it all for us and has done it all for us in Jesus. This is an amazing secret that God kept to himself from before the dawn of time until he revealed it in Christ. Praise God for a gospel that is beyond anything we could ever dream of. Do not allow your familiarity with “God, Man, Christ, Response” to keep you from realizing that such a plan of salvation is a sweet secret that is beyond anything the world has ever known.

Psalm 106:32-33 (ESV)

32 They angered him at the waters of Meribah,

and it went ill with Moses on their account,

33 for they made his spirit bitter,

and he spoke rashly with his lips.

            Whose fault was it that Moses sinned and did not enter the Promised Land? Of course we know that it was Moses’ fault. Moses is the one who did not treat God as holy, who spoke rashly, and who suffered the disappointment of not making it to the land.

            But notice the verses above. God, in the psalm, lays the guilt for Moses’ sin not only on Moses, but also on the people who opposed and provoked Moses. The nation of Israel was murmuring against God and against Moses, God’s chosen leader for them. Eventually, the words of the people, their constant complaining and second-guessing, worked against Moses’ spirit until he was vulnerable to the sin which Moses himself committed.

            Quick application: How do you speak of and to your pastor? Do you constantly tear him down? Do you constantly grumble against him? Do you have a desire to put him in his place? Do you enjoy it when you can find him making an error? Do you like to be right and him wrong? If so, watch yourself. You might be a tool in his hurt. You might do your pastor, God’s chosen leader for your church ,harm. If he gets frustrated and sins, it is totally his responsibility. He is responsible for himself. However, as we see in this psalm, God also sees that the people of God can crush the spirits of their leaders, and they are very much guilty for that sin.

            I thank God that I am serving in a church where I know that our people love their pastors. But that does not mean that all who read this are in such churches. Perhaps you are not. Maybe you are the attacked leader. If so, examine yourself, take the legitimate concerns of others seriously, and remember that you are responsible for your behavior and attitude before God. If you are one of the ones who like to criticize, even if you think you are helping, be careful. You could be a tool in the hand of the enemy to put a crack in the resolve of God’s chosen leader for you and your people.

            How about this? Today, why not take a moment to tell your pastors that you are praying for them. Offer encouragement to those who serve God by serving you. Be the ones who hold up your leaders, showing them love and grace and mercy. Do not assume they know that you are really on their side; make it clear. God holds us all responsible for the parts we play whether we are leaders or followers.

1 Samuel 8:17-20 (ESV)

“He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”

But the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel. And they said, “No! But there shall be a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.”

            Have you ever noticed that people do not often respond to warnings? In the passage above, God, through Samuel, told the people of Israel that, if they chose for themselves a king to reign over them in place of simply following the Lord, they would be sorry. The king would enslave the people and make them miserable. The king would take the property and family members of the people for his own benefit. Despite these dire warnings, the people of Israel demanded a king, saying that they wanted to be just like all the other nations around them.

            Wouldn’t you love to be able to say that you and I are brighter than those folks? God has told us in his word what we need for everlasting joy. He has told us that pleasures for us are at the Lord’s right hand forever (Psalm 16:11). God has told us that sin leads to misery, hardship, guilt, shame, and death. But we do not often listen any better than did the people of Israel. Instead, like the people of Israel, we want what we want. We desire to live just like the lost world around us, or at least to share in their autonomy. We desire what we think will make our lives more comfortable, even if that comfort will, according to God, lead us to death.

            Why do you think God puts a passage like this in Scripture? Why do you think he let Israel do this? God is fully in control. He could have put a stop to these events. But God chose to let us see what the human heart will do when faced with a choice between following God and following its own desires. God gave us this story to remind us that, without his mercy and grace, we would walk right up to the cliff of eternal destruction and leap off.

            Thanks be to God for Jesus Christ. The Lord Jesus came to earth and suffered for God’s children’s rebellious and self-indulgent hearts. Jesus knew our rebellious nature, and he still chose to come and pay the penalty for our sin. Jesus chose to reach out and draw us to himself so that we might live, not in a stupor of self-made misery only to fall under God’s wrath, but instead in the sweet joy of beholding the glory of our God that will satisfy our souls forever.

            So, when you see accounts like the one above, be careful not to put yourself on the moral high ground. We all rebel in the face of God’s commands. What Christians have in our favor is not our goodness, but the grace of God in Christ.

1 Samuel 4:5-10 (ESV)

As soon as the ark of the covenant of the Lord came into the camp, all Israel gave a mighty shout, so that the earth resounded. And when the Philistines heard the noise of the shouting, they said, “What does this great shouting in the camp of the Hebrews mean?” And when they learned that the ark of the Lord had come to the camp, the Philistines were afraid, for they said, “A god has come into the camp.” And they said, “Woe to us! For nothing like this has happened before. Woe to us! Who can deliver us from the power of these mighty gods? These are the gods who struck the Egyptians with every sort of plague in the wilderness. Take courage, and be men, O Philistines, lest you become slaves to the Hebrews as they have been to you; be men and fight.”

So the Philistines fought, and Israel was defeated, and they fled, every man to his home. And there was a very great slaughter, for there fell of Israel thirty thousand foot soldiers.

            Context matters. Rules of biblical interpretation matter. These thoughts came home to me for some strange reason this morning as I read through the above passage. I did not think about hermeneutics (biblical interpretation) because of the story. Rather, I thought about how to interpret the Bible because of how I could imagine the passage preached.

            Let’s remove the passage from any context and just limit ourselves to the paragraph or so above. What is the story? Israel brought the Ark of God into the camp and were greatly encouraged. The Philistines wrongly interpreted the presence of the Ark as the presence of multiple gods who would give Israel great power. The enemy of Israel then rallied, summoning their courage and putting Israel to a great defeat.

            If we ignored context and rules of biblical interpretation, especially allowing other passages to shed light on this one, we might conclude that the best way to win a victory is to so misunderstand who God is and how he works as to somehow find strength by opposing him. Clearly this pattern worked for the Philistines.

            Of course, this passage is not at all about the Philistines and what they believed. They could not see behind the scenes. They could not see that God was using them as tools in his hand to accomplish his plan of chastising Israel for her unfaithfulness. They did not know that, in the surrounding context, God had revealed that he was about to take the priesthood away from one family and raise up Samuel. The passage shows us that God is in control and will accomplish his will. The passage glorifies our Lord, but it only does so when it is interpreted properly, in its context.

            I suppose the reason this grabs my attention is that I have to be very careful when I interpret passages. I need to be thoughtful as I help others to interpret Scripture as well. If we miss the big picture, failing to allow Scripture to illumine Scripture, we will become myopic. If we are not careful, we will rip paragraphs out of their context and completely miss the biblical picture. We must strive to read the Bible as God’s story, God’s revelation of himself to us. We must let it all shine the light of God’s glory into our lives. We must not pick it apart, but hold it together in order to see the God it reveals.

            Of course, I am not discouraging in-depth study of a single passage or verse or even word. Such study is important for developing our theology and settling difficult issues. What I am reminding us to do is to interpret wisely, with the whole biblical picture in view. May our handling of God’s word be careful and reverent as God’s word deserves.