Silence Broken

2/28/25 Bible Thought (Luke 1)

We serve a God who might seem to tarry at times but One who doesn’t forget. He might seem silent or inactive, but He’s never taken His hands off the wheel. He will accomplish His plans in His time, according to the purposes that He has decreed. We see a beautiful picture of this in the introduction to Luke’s Gospel.

Luke, contrary to the other Gospel writers, shares not only of the birth of the Christ, but includes the birth of John the Baptist, the forerunner. Now why’s that important? Well, for a few hundred years (known as the intertestamental period) God had effectively been silent. Surely, He was active during that time. The miraculous revolt by the Maccabees testifies to His hand at work. Yet, there was no prophetic guidance from God since the days of Malachi approximately 400 years earlier.

Then, on an entirely random day according to human estimations, the angel Gabriel visits an ordinary priest to tell him how God is about to act. His barren wife, Elizabeth, will have a child in her old age. This child will be the expected fulfillment of Malachi 4:5-6,

“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. ⁶ And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction” (see also Luke 1:17).

The time for silence is over. God is on the move in His creation. He’s sending the forerunner to the Messiah, and as such the next thing we would logically see is the coming of the Messiah Himself! Mary, a young virgin girl dwelling in Nazareth, also experiences angelic visitation. She hears words that tell her the laws of nature are irrelevant to the God who made them. She didn’t need to know a man to have a child, for the Holy Spirit would cause her to become pregnant. Hard to believe? Well, just look at Elizabeth who has miraculously conceived in her old age (Lk. 1:36). Gabriel powerfully concludes, “For nothing will be impossible with God” (Lk. 1:37). The whole nature of miracles is that they are outside of the earthly norm, but nothing is outside the norm with an all-powerful God.

This child is the One who will be the final ruler in the line of David. For Gabriel declares,

“He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, ³³ and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end” (Lk. 1:32-33).

Later, the chapter ends beautifully as Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, prophesies and praises God, concluding that God has, “visited and redeemed his people” (Lk. 1:68) and He likewise has come to remember His covenant and to fulfill His oath to Abraham (Lk. 1:72-73).

On the surface, nothing had been happening for years. Like the time when Israel found themselves as slaves in Egypt before the exodus, hundreds of years were passing. Surely, some Jews lived their entire lives with questions. Where is God? What is He doing? Will He fulfill His promises? They never got to see the fulfillment. They lived during a time of questions without answers, but the faithfulness of God doesn’t depend on human experience but on His upholding of His word. At just the right time, the God of heaven broke powerfully onto the scene with two miraculous births in fulfillment of His divine promise. Despite delay, He was faithful.

In our day, we await the second coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Countless people in the last 2,000 years have lived their entire lives with questions. Will He come? What is God doing in the present? But the Scripture shows us that despite God’s delays, He is always right on time. Truly, Christ was born at the fullness of time (see Gal. 4:4). According to God’s perfect plan, He came into the world, born of a virgin. He lived a perfect and sinless life and ransomed us by the blood of His cross. Then He was raised from the dead and seated on high, at the right hand of the Father. All according to plan. Now, we’re entrusted to wait and to trust.

God’s silence isn’t indifference. His delays aren’t denials. His seeming absence doesn’t mean there’s an absence of His divine care. He’s there, all along. He’s working, all along. He cares, all along. We just might not understand how or why He is doing what He’s doing, so we have to trust Him. At the right time, He’ll act.

When the Lord spoke to the prophet Habakkuk a message of divine judgment upon their Babylonian enemies, Habakkuk was told, “For still the vision awaits its appointed time; it hastens to the end—it will not lie. If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay” (Hab. 2:3).