Luke 1:1-25
Good morning, RTB’ers! And Happy New Year 2024!! We are so happy to have you along with us on this ride! May your Scripture reading be blessed, may you be filled with the Holy Spirit as you read and study, even as Zechariah’s promised son would also be filled (Luke 1:15). Sorry for the delayed post… Blame it on the ball dropping in New York and the eighth-note dropping in Nashville! Happy New Year, indeed!
I had commented to many of you that I would not be answering the STS questions in my morning posts. That’s your chore, actually not a chore but a blessing in that your work on those questions will bring you to a greater understanding of the text that we’ve just read, and with that greater understanding you will be blessed! If you read the “preface” material (those six pages from ix to xiv) you have learned that these STS questions, for the most part, have definite answers to which the authors are pointing you. But in answering those questions you will have also dug deeper into the reading and asked yourself further questions. Ideally, that’s the way it will be all year long, a set pattern: Pray, read, reflect, answer questions, reflect further, pray again, read e-mail comments, post your own comments, then go about your day. It’ll be a worthwhile 15, 20, 30 minutes of your time. Enjoy!!
So my further reflection on today’s reading has to do with the promised son, John, and his relation to Elijah, the prophet from the Old Testament (see I Kings 17-18): And he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God, 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. (Luke 1:16-17) I can’t even think the name Elijah without the song, “Days of Elijah” playing in my head: “These are the days of Elijah, declaring the Word of the Lord…” I’m guessing that those lines, those verses will now be playing in my head all day. And that’s a good thing!!
Blessings!!
I opened a different Bible for the first time in a while and found a sheet of paper from an old Bible study with the family of Annas the high priest — and lo and behold, there is a son of Annas named Theophilus! He was also a high priest from AD 37-41. Look him up in Wikipedia — there is an interesting article! I had totally forgotten that little fact, but won’t again.
Katey, I refer you to your comment in 2020… 🙂
Oops! Guess I need to learn something more than once! But it’s still interesting!
Yes, Katey, it is interesting, whether this is the same Theophilus to whom Luke is referring or not. I wonder how many people named Theophilus there were in the Holy Land back in the second half of the 1st century AD?