Obedience—The Great Uncovering

Luke 1: 18 NIV

 Zechariah asked the angel, “How can I be sure of this?  I am an old man and my wife is well along in years.”

Have You Considered What Is Below Your Surface?

When I was in high school I made a decision that was not completely conscious but had long lasting ramifications for me.  Somewhere around my sophomore year I started playing basketball at gradually increasing degrees of priority.  It reached a point where I was playing basketball every evening after school for three to four hours and on weekends ten hours a day.  I wanted to increase my jumping ability and so I began wearing five pound ankle weights around and using them to jump rope.  I lifted weights to increase my upper body strength and ran to improve my endurance.  It became obsessive for me, this drive to become a great basketball player.  I did not have confidence in my ability though to make the high school team until my senior year when I finally tried out for the varsity.  What I did not realize though as I chased “my dream” was how little concern I had for what my parents wanted for me.  I did not care that by playing basketball all the time I wasn’t doing any schoolwork and I was rebelling against them and their wishes.  I was going against the direction of my school counselor who tried to get me to work harder at school and at a certain level, which I did not yet understand, I was rejecting the plan God had for me.  I was not made by Him to be a world class athlete.  He had shaped me for academia and I didn’t want what He wanted for me.  There was something deeply buried in me that drove my need to prove my worth on a basketball court day after day rather than fit in with what my parents as well as my God wanted for me.

We rarely think of “doing what we are told” as uncovering hidden secrets about ourselves.  We usually don’t like being bossed around by our parents, by our teachers, by police officers, by our supervisors at work or by the IRS.  And whether we are “good Christians” or not, we certainly aren’t usually happy to have even God tell us what to do.  But there is a fascinating side to our reactions to being bossed around that might be of great value to consider and that is the depths of insight we gain about ourselves when someone…even God, tells us what to do.  Today we will begin to explore this consideration and see if there might be much we can learn about ourselves when it comes to obedience.

There is within the birth narrative of Christ a most interesting study in human personality.  We find in it the strange and wonderful account of Zechariah, a Jewish priest who was old and had a wife named Elizabeth who was barren.  He was in the Temple of Jerusalem, having been chosen by lot to light the incense there.  It was a great honor for him to do this and so it was a big day for Zechariah to be alone at the altar doing this highly esteemed priestly duty.  But there was something not quite right with Zechariah; as his encounter with the angel Gabriel uncovered.

Without warning, the angel Gabriel suddenly appeared at the right side of the incense altar.  Zechariah’s visceral reaction to the angel standing before him tells us much of the supernatural quality of this visit.  When Zechariah saw him, he was startled and was gripped with fear. (Luke 1:12 NIV) Zechariah might have been startled by a fellow priest showing up out of nowhere in the eerie splendor of the Temple but his reaction was much more like that of one who had seen a ghost. Whatever followed from this encounter would certainly be significant perhaps even life-changing.  In a split second of awareness Zechariah must have come to this conclusion that he was “in for it”.  The angel though was not there to wreck Zechariah.  Quite the opposite!  His declaration though was one Zechariah, clearly was not prepared to hear.  "Do not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to give him the name John.” (Luke 1:13 NIV) 

The immensity of the angel’s proclamation cannot be overstated.  It was after all an angel who said it and his presence alone terrified the old priest.  Perhaps more importantly, at least for our discussion here, Zechariah and his wife were old, childless and as far as the couple knew, Elizabeth was barren and for her it was disgraceful to not be able to have children.  Later, when she found out she was indeed pregnant, her reaction makes it clear how devastated she had been by her inability to have children.  “The Lord has done this for me," she said. "In these days he has shown his favor and taken away my disgrace among the people." (Luke 1:25 NIV)  After announcing the shocking news of a coming son, Gabriel, the scary angel then gave Zechariah a clear command about raising the child.  He is never to take wine or other fermented drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from birth. (Luke 1:15 NIV)

But before all the angel promised Zechariah came to pass, Zechariah had no experience with God giving him such monumental gifts.  We know he had been praying for a child…most likely for decades.  The angel even said the coming child was an answer to his praying so most likely he had been praying faithfully for a long time.  He was a priest and he knew all the mechanics of praying for what he wanted…he had to have understood the scriptures promoting prayer and asking for what you want and need.  Perhaps he even did quite a bit of teaching on prayer but at some point it seems, Zechariah quit believing God would answer his most important prayer of all.  How do we know this?  Consider Zechariah’s reaction to the declaration that he would have a son!  Zechariah asked the angel, "How can I be sure of this? I am an old man and my wife is well along in years." (Luke 1:18 NIV)  The angel Gabriel was not at all pleased with Zechariah’s response.  The angel answered, "I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to tell you this good news.  And now you will be silent and not able to speak until the day this happens, because you did not believe my words, which will come true at their proper time." (Luke 1:19-20 NIV) 

Clearly the angel knew, and was not guessing, that what may have seemed a quite natural reaction to being told that as an old man with a wife who was an old woman who never before had been able to have children that they as a couple would have a child was not a good reaction at all…it in fact revealed something very wrong with Zechariah.

At first it seems a bit harsh of the angel to take away like this Zechariah’s ability to speak.  Of course he did regain his speech after the baby was born so it wasn’t permanent, the Lord’s disabling of Zechariah but it certainly was a strong message sent by God.  There was something very wrong about Zechariah and the command of God to raise the child he was about to receive in a certain way helped uncover what was perhaps hidden to everyone but God Himself.  Remember that the angel Gabriel did not need to come to Zechariah to tell him he was going to father a child; that would become all too obvious in a few months.  What he did need to know in advance was how this child would fit into God’s overall plan and how he was to raise the child.  The mother, if the baby was to be alcohol free, would need to be alcohol free herself even while she carried the baby.  That command required immediate attention.  So when the command of how to raise the coming child within God’s plan for him came, it was uncovered that Zechariah had lost his faith in God to answer his prayer.  “How could this be” he asked.  Indeed, how could it be if God does not answer our big prayers?  Zechariah was deeply wounded by what he had faced for so many years and he had buried that hurt for so long that it was not easy to be done with it. 

Consider just how far Zechariah had fallen from being a praying man.  Despite the fact that Gabriel clearly was supernatural and Zechariah knew Gabriel was an angel sent by God, he still could not accept the possibility that God suddenly would do for him what he had for so long been asking God to do.  Not even an angel, who brought him great fear by simply being before him, could shake the deeply rooted unbelief in God to be able to answer his prayer.  Many of us would say that if an angel spoke to us in person, we would believe everything there is to believe in God.  But maybe we wouldn’t.  Maybe we have such buried brokenness that we have for years hidden from view that not even an angel could shake us of it.  But, maybe, God with a simple command can uncover what is broken inside of us and through our obedience heal that place of brokenness.

Zechariah was bound up in doubt and disappointment that maybe no one but his wife guessed existed.  Perhaps this is reading too much into the matter but maybe it isn’t. As we will see, it seems to be a spiritual principle.  Elizabeth had to follow a command and she did it.  She had to raise her child free of alcohol.  This would have meant her abstaining from it too.  There is a slight detail in the account of the son’s birth that is subtle but of great value to us.  Pay careful attention to what is said.  When it was time for Elizabeth to have her baby, she gave birth to a son.  Her neighbors and relatives heard that the Lord had shown her great mercy, and they shared her joy. (Luke 1:57-58 NIV)  Notice that the neighbors and relatives shared in the joy Elizabeth had.  No mention is made of Zechariah’s joy.  Is it possible that Elizabeth was the only one of the two who was happy to finally be a parent?  Was not Zechariah also happy to be a father?  Of course he was.  But the expression of that joy needed a simple act of obedience to completely heal the pain of his buried loss of faith in God.  There was controversy among family and friends of the elderly couple.  Elizabeth and Zechariah knew that God wanted the child to be named John but that seemed preposterous to everyone else.  But then Zechariah asked for a writing tablet, and to everyone's astonishment he wrote, "His name is John."  Immediately his mouth was opened and his tongue was loosed, and he began to speak, praising God. (Luke 1:63-64 NIV)  It was only after Zechariah obeyed God in what many of us would say was a small matter but for Zechariah it was a tremendous moment of victory because in the act of declaring the name of the child to be the name the angel told him to give the son, he revealed his complete belief in God’s work of giving the child to them.  It was in that one bit of obedience that Zechariah’s joy was unlocked and his unbelief and broken feelings about God healed.

Could it be that like Zechariah, there is a command of God that is revealing buried brokenness of soul?  Is it possible that if you in faith did what God says to do in the matter you might be healed of that brokenness and it would be replaced by joy?  We will give this fuller attention later but for now, consider the possibility that there is something God has told you to do and you have been stopped dead in your tracks by some past hurt or wound that you have buried and by rejecting out of hand God’s command to you, the wound is just festering within you and keeping you from bubbling joy.  What great joy might we all have if we did what God tells us to do?  May it be that in our disobedience to some simple matter, we have been our own worst enemy?  Could it be so?