Daily Bible Reading 18th March 2026 // Luke 1:57-80
57 Now the time came for Elizabeth to give birth, and she bore a son. 58 And her neighbours and relatives heard that the Lord had shown great mercy to her, and they rejoiced with her. 59 And on the eighth day they came to circumcise the child. And they would have called him Zechariah after his father, 60 but his mother answered, “No; he shall be called John.” 61 And they said to her, “None of your relatives is called by this name.” 62 And they made signs to his father, enquiring what he wanted him to be called. 63 And he asked for a writing tablet and wrote, “His name is John.” And they all wondered. 64 And immediately his mouth was opened and his tongue loosed, and he spoke, blessing God. 65 And fear came on all their neighbours. And all these things were talked about through all the hill country of Judea, 66 and all who heard them laid them up in their hearts, saying, “What then will this child be?” For the hand of the Lord was with him.
67 And his father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied, saying,
68 “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,
for he has visited and redeemed his people
69 and has raised up a horn of salvation for us
in the house of his servant David,
70 as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old,
71 that we should be saved from our enemies
and from the hand of all who hate us;
72 to show the mercy promised to our fathers
and to remember his holy covenant,
73 the oath that he swore to our father Abraham, to grant us
74 that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies,
might serve him without fear,
75 in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.
76 And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High;
for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,
77 to give knowledge of salvation to his people
in the forgiveness of their sins,
78 because of the tender mercy of our God,
whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high
79 to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.”
80 And the child grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the wilderness until the day of his public appearance to Israel.
Another emphasis Zechariah makes is on the fulfilment of Scripture and of prophecy and on God's covenant with His people. It is a true insight in the lovely festival of Nine Lessons and Carols that it should take us right back to Genesis 3:15, for that, human wise, is where the covenant began and was instituted. Such is the grace of God: hard upon the fall of man came the promise of God that he would rise again; as soon as the darkness fell, there was the promise of light (it can hardly be accidental that Zechariah should so emphasise this metaphor in 79, when it figures so prominently in the messianic prophecies, as for example, Isaiah 9:2). All this qualifies what he goes on to say in 71, 74, in the thought of being 'delivered out of the hand of our enemies'. This, out of context, might be taken to be purely political in conception, even nationalistic, vis-à-vis Rome. But this would be to miss the point. The references to the covenant and to the fulfilment of prophecy preclude this idea. The prophecy, the covenant, have to do with the putting away of sin. One may think in this connection of the Jewish consciousness of spiritual need, which 'threw up' the prophecies. And what were the historical sacrifices but an attempt to answer the urgent question of having to face 'an angry God', an agonising, indwelling sin, the dark powers beyond all evil? Thus, 'our enemies' (71) here are all the things that need to be settled before man's true destiny as serving God can become possible.