Daily Bible Reading 7th April 2026 // Luke 3:1-6
1 In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, 2 during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness. 3 And he went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 4 As it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet,
“The voice of one crying in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.
5 Every valley shall be filled,
and every mountain and hill shall be made low,
and the crooked shall become straight,
and the rough places shall become level ways,
6 and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’”
Luke 'dates' the 'Baptist' movement very effectively in these verses, using one emperor, one governor, three tetrarchs and two high priests to do so! It is as if he were saying, 'This thing was not done in a corner'. It was something for the world and of worldwide significance. But more: he sets the Baptist revival against the background of the reign of Tiberias Caesar, against the grim, relentless, debauched, degenerate life of the Roman empire - as if to suggest that here was the only hope for the seriousness of the world-situation and for the moral and spiritual bankruptcy of his - or any age. This is an eloquent reminder to us that there is nothing too hard for the Lord, and that it is so often in such dark and formidable circumstances that God does speak again to men. One thinks of the national situation in Israel in the days following the time of the Judges, when 'every man did that which was right in his own eyes', and how in such a situation the word of the Lord came to Samuel; and of how, when the book of the law was discovered in the temple in Josiah's day, a work of national reformation and renewal followed. Since this is so, it is not open to the people of God, in a time of declension and lawlessness, simply to bemoan the awfulness of the time, in a defeatist spirit. They must hope in God. That is the message that should surely emerge from these verses for our own time. Man's extremity is ever God's opportunity, and in days when the outlook is very bleak and forbidding, we should - such is His grace - expect God to make bare His holy arm. As the Psalmist once said, 'It is time for Thee, Lord, to work: for they have made void Thy law' (Psalm 119:126).