Hope in the Dark | Living Waters

“Long lay the world in sin and error pining…”

This week as I was working on my message for Sunday, I took a moment to let these words from “O Holy Night” land on my soul. As we walked through the season of lament, the reality that sin has permeated our world, cutting us off from the fellowship and intimacy that the Father always wanted with us, took on a deeper context.

Thousands of years have passed since that first sin in the Garden of Eden, and with it the first of HUNDREDS of prophecies in the Old Testament was given promising the coming of the Messiah. As time has passed the history of God’s people, and the world surrounding them, time and time again have demonstrated the reach, the potency, and the devastating impact sin had on humanity. Over time, each prophetic word spoken pointed to the hope that God had a redemptive plan in place, and that he had not abandoned His people to ruin and destruction. As the writings of the Old Testament came to a close, the prophet Malachi uttered these words to a nation struggling to remain faithful to the God in who they placed their hope:

“But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its rays. And you will go out and frolic like well-fed calves. Then you will trample on the wicked; they will be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day when I act,” says the Lord Almighty.

“Remember the law of my servant Moses, the decrees and laws I gave him at Horeb for all Israel. See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction.”

Malachi 4:2-6

This last promise given to a world “in sin and error pining”, and then silence… for 400 years.

This 400 years of silence, called by theologians the “intertestamental period”, radically changed and shaped the world that Jesus would be born into. Israel was conquered multiple times, sometimes by more friendly occupiers, sometimes by tyrannical kingdoms that did everything they could to silence, kill, demoralize, and pollute God’s people. Yet in the dark of that period, and in the absence of any spoken word by His Spirit to the prophets, God was still moving.

He is always faithful to His promises.

“A thrill of hope, a weary world rejoices…”

The silence was broken seemingly out of nowhere, speaking hope to what appeared to be a hopeless situation. Enter the priest Zechariah, whose story opens the Gospel of Luke:

Once when Zechariah’s division was on duty and he was serving as priest before God, he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to go into the temple of the Lord and burn incense. And when the time for the burning of incense came, all the assembled worshipers were praying outside.

Then an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. When Zechariah saw him, he was startled and was gripped with fear. But the angel said to him: “Do not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to call him John. He will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice because of his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He is never to take wine or other fermented drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even before he is born. He will bring back many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”

Luke 1:8-17

400 years from the promise given through Malachi, to the announcement that this promise was happening NOW by the Archangel Gabriel. And then, Zechariah is silenced, leaving the only knowledge of this promise being fulfilled to a now muted priest, His aged and pregnant wife, and her young cousin, a virgin, who Gabriel also visits to announce to her that she is carrying the promised Messiah in her womb. He ends his announcement to her with these words, that speak to us across thousands of years: