Daily Bible Reading 4th March 2026 // Luke 1:18-25
18 And Zechariah said to the angel, “How shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years.” 19 And the angel answered him, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I was sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. 20 And behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things take place, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time.” 21 And the people were waiting for Zechariah, and they were wondering at his delay in the temple. 22 And when he came out, he was unable to speak to them, and they realized that he had seen a vision in the temple. And he kept making signs to them and remained mute. 23 And when his time of service was ended, he went to his home.
24 After these days his wife Elizabeth conceived, and for five months she kept herself hidden, saying, 25 “Thus the Lord has done for me in the days when he looked on me, to take away my reproach among people.”
Both implicitly (as already suggested in the association of ideas with Gabriel) and explicitly in the references he makes, Luke 'identifies' the good news of the gospel as being rooted in the Old Testament, in the messianic prophecies relating to fullness of the times. He shares this conviction and insight with the other three gospel writers, who each in his own way emphasises the ministry of John the Baptist. The point about this reference is of course that John the Baptist was himself the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy. In Malachi 3:1; 4:5, we have clear references to the appearing of a divine messenger who would prepare the way of the Lord; and the mention of Elijah in Malachi 4:5 turning the hearts of the fathers to the children is taken up by Luke in 17, in reference to John the Baptist. This, then, is the point they are all making: the 'beginning of the gospel' lies in the prophetic scriptures. Luke's account simply elaborates on Mark's, when the latter says, 'The beginning of the gospel... as it is written in the prophets....' The beginning of the gospel, then, was not at Bethlehem; it traces right back through the Old Testament messianic prophecies to Genesis 3:15, to the promise that the seed of the woman would bruise the head of the serpent. Christ is the truth of all the prophecies. What they predicted, He fulfils. The whole Bible, not only the New Testament, bears witness to Christ. The history of the Bible is His story, from Genesis to Revelation, and we do not understand these chapters aright unless we see them to be the fulfilment of the divine plan of redemption announced at the beginning, in Genesis 3:15. This is the significance of Luke's account of the visitation to Zechariah and Elisabeth, and of John's birth.