Fathers of Christmas Shatter Doubt of Adventism | 14

Nikki and Colleen talk about the two Fathers that were central in the Christmas Story: Joseph and Zechariah, and how their stories reveal the absolute truth of Scripture and shatter the doubt in Adventism. Podcast was published December 18, 2019. Transcription by Gwen Billington.

 

Nikki:  Hi, and welcome to Former Adventist podcast.  I’m Nikki Stevenson.

Colleen:  And I’m Colleen Tinker.

Nikki:  Merry Christmas!

Colleen:  Merry Christmas!  [Laughter.]

Nikki:  [Laughter.]   We’re right in the middle of it, aren’t we?

Colleen:  We are.

Nikki:  Well, today we’re going to talk about Joseph and Zechariah, which is really cool because people don’t often spend a lot of time discussing them as they think about the Christmas story.

Colleen:  No.

Nikki:  So I’m excited about that.

Colleen:  I am too.

Nikki:  But before we do, just a few of our regular announcements.  If you have any questions or comments, you can email us at formeradventist@gmail.com, and you can like us and follow us on Instagram and Facebook.  Also, we just want to remind you, we have our conference coming up really soon.  It’s going to be a wonderful one.  It’s called, “Jesus, the New Lawgiver.”

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  And there’s just a lot of great stuff to talk about there and a lot of great fellowship to anticipate, so please consider signing up and joining us.  And then, you know, a lot of people at the end of the year start thinking about where they might send donations, and as we think about trying to meet another budget, we would love for you to consider donating to Life Assurance Ministries.  You could do that at proclamationmagazine.com.  There is a donation button there, and we’re just so grateful for your participation with us in this ministry.

Colleen:  So at Christmas, as we mentioned last week when we talked about Christmas carols, sometimes during the Christmas season, especially having left Adventism and moving into a Christian community that might not always feel as familiar yet as what we left, we can feel overlooked, underappreciated – I think a lot of women feel that when they’re decorating the house and baking and running their kids around; right?

Nikki:  [Laughter.]  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  – and not even sure where they fit in the big picture of life and eternality.  The Bible actually gives us a lot of hope because there are a couple of men that the Christmas story includes, and we almost never think of them.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  So we’re going to think about them today, and I find a great deal of hope in realizing what God did through them, what God did for them, and how He reassures us that He has the same purposes in His heart for us as He does for all of His children, we just have different jobs to do.  We’ve been reading just recently about Joseph, Mary’s husband, and Zechariah.  What have you thought about them, Nikki?

Nikki:  Well, you know, to be honest, my first thought is, “I wish we had more detail.”

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  I’m intrigued by particularly Joseph and how little we know about him and yet how faithful he was.  And Zechariah, I’m fascinated by his story.

Colleen:  Truly.

Nikki:  Yeah.  Yeah.

Colleen:  Who was he?

Nikki:  Well, he was a priest.  He was an older priest.

Colleen:  Um-hmm.

Nikki:  Our pastor just preached on him last Sunday, and it was interesting for me to learn that he was probably under 50 –

Colleen:  [Laughter.]  Yes.

Nikki:  – so when we think about him being older and without kids, I’ve always thought of him older than that, but they retired at 50, so he was still working in the temple, and he had been chosen by lot to burn incense in front of the curtain that separated the Holy of Holies, and it was there that God broke His 400 years of silence by sending Gabriel.

Colleen:  Had you ever thought of that before, that from the end of the book of Malachi, which is the last book of the Old Testament, until the stories of the Gospels begin, there were 400 years of Israelite history of which we have no word.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  And there was no word from God in the form of prophets, in the form of any intervention.  Just, they had their Law, they had their traditions, but they didn’t have any direct word from God for 400 years.  Think about that.  If you live in the United States, our country isn’t that old yet.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  And our country, the beginnings of our country, seem like distant ancient history to us.  So it was longer than that that Israel hadn’t heard from God directly.  And as our pastor also pointed out last Sunday, most priests who did this incense burning, this one week of service, they had one week, probably in their entire lifetimes, when they went in and did that.  They were selected by lot, and he had drawn the lot for this particular time of service.  What he didn’t know was that it was the fullness of time.  This was God’s choice, and Zechariah was in that temple burning incense at exactly the time God was going to break His 400 years of silence, and He had chosen Zechariah to be the medium of that silence-breaking.

Nikki:  And you know, the fact that his wife hadn’t yet given him a son and that he bore the weight of not being able to carry on the family name –

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  – and I don’t know what kind of shame that might have brought up in him as a man.

Colleen:  Um-hmm.

Nikki:  I know, we read a lot about women in the Bible who were barren –

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  – and the shame they felt from that, but it just, it seems he would have felt like such an unlikely one.

Colleen:  It does.

Nikki:  Not only to be chosen by lot, but then to be visited by Gabriel.

Colleen:  Amazing, isn’t it?

Nikki:  Yeah.

Colleen:  And who would believe it?  Because 400 years of silence means there’s no history –

Nikki:  Right.  Right.

Colleen:  – of God showing up at the temple or angels coming with divine messages for the nation.  So here he was.  Gabriel shows up while he’s burning the incense and tells him what?

Nikki:  Well, let me just read it.

Colleen:  Good.

Nikki:  So it’s in Luke chapter 1, and I’ll start in verse 13.  This is the ESV.  “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.  And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, 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.”

Colleen:  Wow.

Nikki:  “And he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God, and he will go before them 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.'”

Colleen:  Amazing.  Can you imagine being a man who was considered elderly in those days and being told that his elderly wife would not just have a child, but would have a child that had been prophesied –

Nikki:  [Laughter.]

Colleen:  – by Malachi and by Isaiah.

Nikki:  It’s incredible.  It’s incredible.  And he’s being told this by Gabriel.

Colleen:  Oh, wow.

Nikki:  I just can’t imagine the surprise and all that must have been going through his mind, and yet his response is, I don’t know –

Colleen:  He was disbelieving in a way:  “How will this be?”  [Laughter.]  And it’s interesting because we all know the story, but think about it.  He disbelieved, but the angel assured him that his wife would bear a son, but then it was a sign that he would not speak until the baby was born.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  And you know, I always thought, as an Adventist, that that was a punishment for unbelief.  Well, I suppose in a way one could think of it as a judgment, but it was more than that.  It was a divine sign so that when that baby was born, it would be very clear that this had been a divine message, the breaking of the 400 years of silence.  There would be no doubt.

Nikki:  And it’s interesting too, if you read on, it says that he was delayed in the temple and they wondered what was going on –

Colleen:  Oh, that’s true.

Nikki:  – and when he wasn’t able to speak, they realized that he’d seen a vision in the temple.  So his silence already indicated to the people who were waiting on him, something serious just happened.

Colleen:  Oh, that’s so true.  It’s so interesting, and if he was thinking about it – and it might not have hit him for a while, but he had some time during his silence – he would realize that this is the first divine message since Malachi –

Nikki:  Yes.

Colleen:  – in 400 years and that God had chosen him to receive it and that his miraculous son was the fulfillment of prophecy.  What an amazing thing –

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  – for an old priest who was basically unknown except for this.

Nikki:  And I don’t know what kind of man Zechariah was, but for me, I have to process by talking, so I don’t know [laughter] –

Colleen:  [Laughter.]

Nikki:  – I don’t know how he got through that entire pregnancy unable to talk.  [Laughter.]

Colleen:  I don’t either!  [Laughter.]  It must have been hard on Elizabeth too!

Nikki:  [Laughter.]  I’m sure.

Colleen:  We all know the story, that Elizabeth did become pregnant, but it’s interesting how Zechariah’s story interweaves with the story of another man.  We never hear that they meet each other or that they speak, but when we read the Bible, we see that these stories are not unrelated.  There’s another man who hears from Gabriel.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.  And it’s interesting because Joseph hears from him in a dream.

Colleen:  That’s true.

Nikki:  And Zechariah, didn’t he appear to him?

Colleen:  He did, in the temple.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  In the temple.  Zechariah was a priest, and you know, we might think, “Okay that would be the logical way for God to speak to Israel and give a message would be through a priest” –

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  – but who was Joseph?

Nikki:  Just a carpenter.

Colleen:  He was nobody.

Nikki:  Yeah.

Colleen:  And how would we even know him?  He was from the backwater town of Nazareth.  He was from a town that many people have said for a long time didn’t exist.  They now know that it did.  But there was very little evidence of the existence of that tiny little town in Galilee, and that was who Gabriel came to.  And we’re not going to talk about what happened with Mary prior to that in depth because we’re focusing on Joseph, but what was it that was so alarming to Joseph that Gabriel came?

Nikki:  Joseph had already known that his bride-to-be was now pregnant.

Colleen:  I mean, can you imagine?  This godly man in the backwater who was trying to serve the Lord, as he understood it as an Orthodox Jew, finds out that his fiancée is pregnant, and he knows it’s not him.

Nikki:  Yeah.  And it ends that she’s pregnant from the Holy Spirit.  I mean, he knew – it says here in verse 18 he had learned that his fiancée was pregnant.

Colleen:  Can you imagine?  This nobody, unknown but very devout Orthodox Jew, was engaged to be married to a godly Jewish woman, and all of a sudden she’s pregnant, and he knows he’s not the father.  Now, the thing about this is that in Jewish tradition the betrothal is a legal arrangement.  And it can only be broken by a divorce, even though the couple hasn’t come together as husband and wife yet.  The betrothal is the beginning of the legal marriage.  So the only way one can get out of it – you can’t just say, “I’m giving you back the ring,” and leave.  You have to end with a divorce.  So Joseph, finding out that his fiancée is pregnant, decided not to make a public spectacle of her because he is a godly man, and he doesn’t want to shame her.

Nikki:  That’s amazing.

Colleen:  I agree!  I mean, wouldn’t you want to clear your name and make sure people knew?

Nikki:  Yeah.

Colleen:  But he doesn’t want to shame her, and he’s going to divorce her quietly and just kind of pretend this has never happened.  But a remarkable thing happens.  Joseph the carpenter has a dream, and Joseph’s story, the little bit that we know of his story, is actually found in the book of Matthew, in Matthew 1 we find this.  And in Matthew 1:20 it says, “An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream saying, ‘Joseph, son of David'” – do you notice that?

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  Joseph is of the line of David too, not just Mary, which Luke informs us.  But Joseph is of the line of David.  “Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child who has been conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit.  She will bear a son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.  Now, all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, ‘Behold, the virgin shall be with child and shall bear a son, and they shall call His name Emmanuel’, which translated means, ‘God with us.'”  How would you feel if you were Joseph?  And we don’t hear any details about it except for the next two verses, “And Joseph awoke from his sleep and did as the angel of the Lord commanded him and took Mary as his wife, but kept her a virgin until she gave birth to a son, and he called His name Jesus.”

Nikki:  That’s incredible.

Colleen:  It’s overwhelming.  He received a lot of information in that little dream.  First, his wife’s pregnancy was a miracle.  He was not to blame her for being immoral.  He was not to look for somebody who had dishonored the betrothal vows.  She was pregnant by a miracle of God.  Another thing he learns is that God is expecting him to marry her and be a father to that child.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  Which is pretty remarkable, really.  And it’s interesting that the point is made that he is of the line of David because a stepfather, his lineage would be considered the lineage of the son.  This means that Jesus is legally in the line of David both through His legal relationship with His stepfather Joseph and with His birth relationship through His mother, Mary.

Nikki:  That’s incredible.

Colleen:  Both sides are legally His inheritance, so He is of the line of David.  Here’s Joseph, finding out that God is expecting him to take care of this woman as his wife and to take care of her son, who is not his flesh and blood.

Nikki:  You know what strikes me about this?  You have Zechariah – and I’m not trying to pick on him, but you have him seeing the angel –

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  – and then he asks, “How will I know this is true?”

Colleen:  Oh, that’s a great point.

Nikki:  And then you have Joseph, who had a dream.

Colleen:  Yes.  And a pregnant fiancée that he can’t explain necessarily.

Nikki:  Yes!  And he doesn’t question, “How can this be?  How do I know this is true?”

Colleen:  That’s true.

Nikki:  There are no questions.  It’s just immediate obedience.

Colleen:  That’s true.  That’s an amazing thing.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  I’ve thought a lot about Joseph, realizing that he was a stepfather, and the fact that a lot of my life was spent as a stepmother to two sons.  I’ve thought a lot about what it meant for him to embrace that child of Mary, knowing it was not his flesh and blood, but knowing that it was God’s assignment to him and choosing to protect and nurture and be a role model for that little boy as his own, even though he knew Jesus was from God.  Yes, his unquestioning obedience is remarkable, but it’s what saved their lives in the long haul.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  Don’t you just wonder what Joseph’s parents were thinking, what Joseph’s brothers were thinking, and they have the wedding, and Mary is pregnant, but he takes her home as his wife, obedient only to God, plugging his ears essentially to what had to be a town full of accusations.

Nikki:  And isn’t it merciful that it’s not even recorded in Scripture, all of the things that must have been said about them.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  We just see these statements that highlight his obedience.

Colleen:  Yes.  And Joseph ends up having two more dreams of angels.  What was the next one?  It’s in Matthew 2.  Jesus is born in Bethlehem in the days of Herod the king, and Magi came, and it tells that story, and then –

Nikki:  Well, then you have the Magi leave, and they had a dream as well.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  They were told not to go back to Herod.  It says here in 2:13, “Now when they had departed, behold an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Rise, take the child and His mother and flee to Egypt and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about the search for the child to destroy Him.’  And he rose and took the child and His mother by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod.  This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I will call my Son.'”

Colleen:  Wow.

Nikki:  It’s incredible.  That night, the very night of the dream, during the night he took his family.

Colleen:  He didn’t hesitate.

Nikki:  Uh-uh.

Colleen:  We always think, “Yes, God chose Mary to be the mother of Jesus,” that was a divine ordinance, but His choice of Joseph is no less significant, even though we don’t know much about him.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  How many men would take a pregnant wife, believe the angel, believe that this was a son from God, and love that child as his own and uproot his life over and over to protect them and to keep them alive?

Nikki:  And according to Scripture, he did all of this without question.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  It’s incredible.

Colleen:  And Egypt!  Well, think how significant it was to go to Egypt.  It says this is to fulfill the prophet, “Out of Egypt I called my Son.”  Well, this wasn’t the first time God called His Son, in a sense, out of Egypt.

Nikki:  Right.

Colleen:  What was the first?

Nikki:  Well, when He pulled Israel out of Egypt.

Colleen:  Exactly!

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  He pulled Israel out of Egypt, and it was interesting to me, after I left Adventism and joined a Christian church and heard the Bible taught, you know, in a correct way, I learned that there is a phrase among a lot of Christian theologians that Egypt is the womb of Israel.

Nikki:  Oh, wow.

Colleen:  There are multiple fulfillments of that.  It was Egypt where Jacob’s descendants multiplied from a band of 75 to 2 million and became a nation that God delivered from Egypt.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  And it was Egypt where God kept His Son safe from a mad Roman king who was slaughtering the babies in Judea, two years old and younger.  And He kept His Son safe back in Egypt, and then He brought Him out from there.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  And Joseph, this stepfather, this man who didn’t know what he was getting into when he became betrothed to Mary, immediately understood this was God’s appointment for him and took care of these two, keeping them alive and protecting them.  So we don’t know anything about their time in Egypt, but we do know that after Herod died, Joseph had another dream.

Nikki:  Do we know how long he was there?

Colleen:  I don’t think we know exactly.  I suppose that if we looked at historical records we could figure it out because I think Herod, his death is fairly well known.  I understand that it was not long, maybe two or three years, but I don’t have a date.

Nikki:  Okay.

Colleen:  So he had another dream once Herod had died, and what was that dream?

Nikki:  Well, that’s in verse 19,”But when Herod died, behold an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, ‘Rise, take the child and His mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child’s life are dead.’  And he rose and took the child and His mother and went to the land of Israel.”

Colleen:  And it’s interesting too because in verse 22 he hears that there is a new ruler reigning over Judea, which is in the south, it’s in what used to be the southern part, the southern nation.  When he finds out that Archelaus is reigning in place of Herod, he was afraid because Archelaus was a cruel man, and then, my goodness, being warned in a dream again, he left for the regions of Galilee.  And he came and lived in a city called Nazareth, and this was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophets, “He shall be called a Nazarene,” but what a job he was given.  Years ago I heard a song by Michael Card.  Some of you probably have heard it.  It’s an incredibly poignant song, but it’s called “Joseph’s Son,” and I just want to read the words, because it sums up so beautifully what must have gone through Joseph’s heart as he sat there protecting the young Jesus and His mother Mary.

How could it be this baby in my arms
Sleeping now, so peacefully
The Son of God, the angel said
How could it be?
Lord I know He’s not my own
Not of my flesh, not of my bone
Still Father let this baby be
The son of my love.

Father show me where I fit into this plan of yours
How can a man be father to the Son of God
Lord for all my life I’ve been a simple carpenter
How can I raise a king?
He looks so small, His face and hands so fair
And when He cries the sun just seems to disappear
But when He laughs it shines again
How could it be?

Father show me where I fit into this plan of yours
How can a man be father to the Son of God
For all my life I’ve been a simple carpenter
How can I raise a king?
How could this baby in my arms
Sleeping now, so peacefully
The Son of God, the angel said
How could it be?

Nikki:  Those are great lyrics.

Colleen:  And I think Joseph was a great man, because God chose him to be the role model to Jesus of how to be a man:  How to be a father, how to take care of His family, how to love, how to work.  We don’t know anything about the details of those years, but we know that this man, who would respond to God’s revelation at a moment’s notice to keep Mary and Jesus alive, this man was the one who taught Jesus how to be a man.  And it was a divine appointment as surely as Mary was, in my mind.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  Now that we’re facing Christmas and we see these stories of these two men, who were really unknown, but now they have a place in God’s eternal Word because of their faithfulness and obedience and because God chose them to do His will, we have ways that we can look at our lives and know that God sees us, and He’s not done with us either.  We can trust Him to bring His work to us and to redeem the situations that we can’t resolve.  I had an email this morning.  It was just very brief, it was following our podcast on the sufficiency of Scripture, and it said this:  “Hi.  I believe that you believe what you said.  How do you know what you believe is true?”  And that was it.  And the question was about our belief that Scripture is sufficient and Scripture is reliable.

Nikki:  And without error.

Colleen:  And without error.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  But these stories help us understand that.

Nikki:  The Christmas story affirms the trustworthiness of Scripture.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  It’s full of answered prophecy that was written more than 400 years before these events occurred.

Colleen:  Absolutely.

Nikki:  And Scripture helped these people understand their lives.  It made sense of their life.  And it does for us today too.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  Scripture helps us understand our own lives.  It’s where God speaks.

Colleen:  It’s because it’s living, piercing through our spirit and soul, joints and sinews, understanding the intentions of our hearts.  We can understand our lives when we trust Scripture.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  Those men, Zechariah and Joseph, who lived at a time when Israel hadn’t heard a direct word from God in 400 years, believed Him when He sent His messenger and said, “The prophecies are being fulfilled.”  They knew the prophecies, and they understood that what Gabriel was saying was the fulfillment of those prophecies, and they acted on them.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  As Christmas approaches and it feels like a lot of our lives are filled with sometimes almost meaningless routines and activities besides deadlines and special events that always happen at Christmastime, we can know that our lives are not pointless.  If we have trusted in Jesus, that baby, who was promised hundreds of years before He was born – if we can trust that God will keep His promises to Israel, He will keep His promises to us as well.  And that baby grew up a sinless man, God in flesh, and He died the death of a perfect man, who took our sins into Himself and nailed them to the cross in His body.  He was buried, He rose again on the third day, for the forgiveness of our sins and for reconciling us to God.  And when we believe that, our lives have meaning, and God will reveal to us what He wants us to do, and we can trust Him.

Nikki:  So in this week leading up to Christmas, I would just encourage you to spend time in the Word looking at all of the different prophecies that were fulfilled in the Christmas story.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  And you can do this reading out of Luke and out of Matthew, and look in your marginal references.  It will direct you to those prophecies, and this kind of study really works to build our trust –

Colleen:  Absolutely.

Nikki:  – in the inerrancy of Scripture, and it really does answer that email you got this morning.

Colleen:  It does.

Nikki:  That is how we know it’s true, and it might take time –

Colleen:  Um-hmm.

Nikki:  – but it is the most important thing we can do.

Colleen:  We can trust Scripture, and if God kept His promises to bring Jesus the first time, He will keep His promise that He will come again.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  And He sees us, and He’s calling us to trust Him.  So enjoy this week leading up to Christmas, and Merry Christmas, Nikki!

Nikki:  Merry Christmas. †