Hope for Israel. The Wait's Almost Over.

 Psalms 33 and 130 show Jewish people putting their hope in the Lord - that God will one day redeem Israel by sending a savior.

Well it’s been a long wait, but hope is beginning to be fulfilled. The realization of this is found in Luke 1 where Zechariah gives praise saying the Lord has remembered God’s holy covenant - what God promised their ancestors. He then proclaims that his son John - later to be known as John the Baptist - will prepare the way for the mighty savior to come. He tells how he will be called the prophet of the most high and will give knowledge of salvation to his people.


Psalms 130 tells about waiting on the Lord more than those who watch for morning. Zechariah says here that the dawn will break upon us. The morning we’ve been waiting for - the time of the Messiah’s coming - is soon.


If you read the beginning of this chapter in Luke, Zechariah is not so prophetic. It says he is blameless, yet when the angel Gabriel tells him his elderly barren wife will conceive a son to be named John, he doesn’t believe him. Due to this unbelief he will be made mute until these events occur. He doesn’t get his voice back until after John is miraculously conceived and his wife gives birth to him. It is at John’s circumcision, when he follows Gabriel’s instruction of calling him John, that he gets his voice back. He is filled with the Spirit and gives his beautiful prophecy.


Advent is a time of waiting - awaiting the birth of Christ. Children wait impatiently for the time to open presents. The present for Israel was the presence of the Savior they had been waiting for - for years. God of the miraculous made a virgin conceive the child, Jesus, and a barren, old woman conceive, John the Baptist. God through the birth of Christ provided a way of salvation and brought God’s light into the darkness.


May we bask in the light of God’s love as we await Christmas day - the birth of the Messiah - the Savior of the world. 

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