Daily Bible Reading 1st March 2026 // Luke 1:5-17
5 In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, of the division of Abijah. And he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. 6 And they were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the Lord. 7 But they had no child, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were advanced in years.
8 Now while he was serving as priest before God when his division was on duty, 9 according to the custom of the priesthood, he was chosen by lot to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense. 10 And the whole multitude of the people were praying outside at the hour of incense. 11 And there appeared to him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense. 12 And Zechariah was troubled when he saw him, and fear fell upon him. 13 But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John. 14 And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, 15 for he will be great before the Lord. And he must not drink wine or strong drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother's womb. 16 And he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God, 17 and he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared.”
The Christian gospel, as we have said, represents a breakthrough from the other world. There is a great need for the reassertion of this in a materialistic, rationalistic world. Amidst the immense technological advances science has made, and which we have accepted as part of our lives, we have also accepted a scientific philosophy of life which declares that miracles do not happen, and which refuses to accept anything as valid that cannot be measured by slide rule or examined under a microscope. You cannot thus measure an angelic visitation, and so, for all practical purposes, angels - and the supernatural - are 'out'; and the everlasting gospel is systematically stripped of everything that could really make it a gospel, and is reduced to little more than an ethical system, a code of behaviour, a way of life. It is little wonder that the churches are becoming emptier and emptier; for what is there, in what is left, to attract people to them?
The consequences of the loss of the supernatural are several. One is that concern for social, philanthropic or humanitarian issues, and matters of social justice have replaced concern for the eternal dimension. To be true, these are issues that Christians should he concerned with: the compassion that Jesus showed in real, human situations is not an optional extra for His people, to be adopted or discarded at will. But when these things become a man's Christianity, and become Christianity for him, it needs to be said very firmly that this represents a radical departure from the New Testament gospel. If social, philanthropic, 'this-worldly' concerns are the only grounds on which men are prepared to take Christianity seriously, it must be recognized that they have abandoned anything distinctively Christian in their thinking. And such an attitude is subject to the law of diminishing returns: there will soon be less and less inspiration for social and compassionate action when the eternal dimension is lost.