TUESDAY 12/3/13 Daily Readings for Advent...Advent is for adoring Jesus

Daily Readings for Advent...Advent is for adoring Jesus.

THE LONG-AWAITED VISITATION

“Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people and has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, that we should be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us…” —Luke 1:68–71

Notice two remarkable things from these words of Zechariah in Luke 1.

First, nine months earlier, 

Zechariah could not believe 

his wife would have a child. 

Now, filled with the Holy 

Spirit, 

he is so confident of God’s redeeming work in the 

coming Messiah that he puts it in the past tense.  

For the 

mind of faith, a promised act of God is as good as done. 

Zechariah has learned to take God at his word and so has 

a remarkable assurance: “God has visited and redeemed!”  

Second, the coming of Jesus the Messiah is a visitation 

of God to our world: “The God of Israel has visited and 

redeemed.” 

For centuries, the Jewish people had lan

guished under the conviction that God had withdrawn: 

the spirit of prophecy had ceased, Israel had fallen into the 

hands of Rome. 

And all the godly in Israel were awaiting 

the visitation of God. Luke tells us in 2:25 that the devout 

Simeon was 

“looking for the consolation of Israel.” And 

in Luke 2:38  the prayerful Anna was “looking for the 

redemption of Jerusalem.”

These were days of great expectation. Now the long 

awaited visitation of God was about to happen—indeed, he was about to come in a way no one expected.