Sermon Tone Analysis

If you can bring yourselves, in your affections, your feelings, your passions, your desires, and all that you have in your organization, to submit to the hand of the Lord, to his providences, and acknowledge his hand in all things, and always be willing that he should dictate, though it should take your houses, your property, your wives and children, your parents, your lives, or anything else you have upon the earth, then you will be exactly right; and until you come to that point, you cannot be entirely right.

“But when we are really in that power, we shall find this difference, that whereas before, it was hard for us to do the easiest things, now it is easy for us to do the hard things.”

Brigham Young

—A.

J. Gordon

Paul Lee Tan, Encyclopedia of 7700 Illustrations: Signs of the Times (Garland, TX: Bible Communications, Inc., 1996), 1366.

***PRAY***

If you have your Bibles…please turn to .

While you’re turning there, I want to recap what we learned last time.

We learned that Gabriel’s message to Zacharias was the very words of God because he stands in the very presence of God.

That Zacharias’ faith was weak despite the presence of God’s #2 angel.

We learned that Zacharias was disciplined for his doubt/unbelief but the discipline was also a sign from God.

We learned that Zacharias’ unbelief was not unlike others in history, but God saw inside his heart to see his doubt clearly.

We learned that God would accomplish His will despite our doubt.

We learned that Zacharias’ and our doubt causes us to miss out on:

The privilege to bless people.

The privilege to share the good News.

The privilege to celebrate.

Our challenge was to determine in what areas of our life do we doubt God in that make us:

Unable to speak

Unable to see

Unable to hear

We just finished studying the Announcement of the Forerunner, now we begin a study on the Announcement of the Messiah.

Verse 26

Good old Luke and his details .

You ever

Well that first verse made me ask the question, Why did God wait 6 months to visit Mary to announce Jesus’ coming?

Why is that phrase there?

In the sixth month

Why did it happen at this time?

This is a really good detail from Luke and it will serve a greater purpose for us when we get down to verse 56 in a couple of months.

Just kidding about the couple of months, but when we do get down to verse 56 we’ll talk about why this little detail matters.

a city in Galilee called Nazareth.

Another nice little detail that will serve us in understanding the rest of this chapter.

This time though at verse 39.

I’m going to slow down a little here.

Because there’s a lot of extremely interesting historical information here that will shape your understanding of Mary at the end of our study.

1.

This idea of engaged.

This word engaged is the Greek word Mee-steuoh (mnesteuo).

Engaged is just not an adequate word to understand what Luke is saying here.

Neither is pledged or espoused as it is translated in the NIV and KJV respectively.

The Authorized version translates it espoused and the NIV pledged.

To most Americans, there is nothing legally or even morally binding in a relationship described with these words.

Only the ESV adequately renders this word Betrothed.

This is the sense or the meaning that Luke was trying to convey to us.

The word has the sense of being legally promised in marriage to someone else.

This is an interesting way to define this word.

Because I don’t think that on the surface it really describes the full breadth of this agreement.

From our 21 century perspective, this just seems like another way of saying legally married.

And technically this is true, but let me define it to you a little differently so you can get the meaning more fully.

In this case, Mary was legally promised by NOT HER, but by her Father

Mary was legally promised by her father, NOT MARY, but by her father toooo NOT JOSEPH, but to Joseph’s father.

True, Mary is to be Joseph’s wife, but the legal agreement is between the two fathers.

Let me explain:

In this case, Mary was legally promised by NOT HER, but by her Father

Most Old Testament texts about marriage reflect Israelite agrarian society in the early Iron Age.

Families lived off the produce of the earth.

Men, women, and children worked the land, to process its yield, in order to survive.

The family property was owned and managed by the male head of the household, who would pass it down to his sons.

Sons would remain in their parents’ household, marrying women from outside the immediate family and raising their children on their father’s land (Wright, God’s People, 53–58).

Children contributed to the household labor pool, learned how to manage the family farm, and some inherited it upon the death of the family patriarch.

In order to keep the property intact, the father would leave most of the inheritance to his oldest son (Deut 22:17).

Jocelyn McWhirter, “Marriage,” ed.

John D. Barry et al., The Lexham Bible Dictionary (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016).

Families lived off of the fruit of their farming efforts.

Men, women and children all worked the land in order to survive.

Since the family property was owned and managed by the male head of the household, it would be passed down to his SONS.

Sons would stay within his parents’ household, marry and raise children on their father’s land.

Children were important contributors to the family business, so to speak…to the livelihood of the family.

So, giving a daughter away to be married, an important contributor to the livelihood of the whole family was no small loss.

The losing father had to be satisfied that he was getting a good deal before taking that loss.

In other words, the losing father had to be compensated appropriately before he would give away this commodity…i’m sorry did I say that out loud?

I mean give away his daughter to be married.

On the flip side…the gaining father had to make sure he was getting his money’s worth.

You know the old saying…you get what you pay for??? Well, the gaining father wanted to make sure he was getting what he was paying for.

And what he was paying for is not just a wife for his son…no she was ultimately being added to HIS workforce.

So the parents of the son had a significant stake in deciding who would enter their household and mother the future heirs of the family business.

Sometimes the brother of the potential wife had a stake in the decision whether to let her go or not.

The reason for this is most likely the male head of the family, the father, was old and close to death and that brother would be inheriting the family property and he would want to make sure that he was well compensated for losing a worker from his inheritance.

For example:

Laban and Rebekkah.

In Abraham is about to die and he sends his top servant off to find a wife for Isaac.

****this is why Laben was involved in Rachel’s betrothal

God guides Abraham’s servant to Rebekkah and in verse 29 Laban enters the scene.

You see Laban pulling out all the stops to make sure Abraham’s servant is treated like royalty.

He’s taking care of the guys camels

Feeding and watering them.

He brings him and his crew water to wash up with

He prepares food for him and his crew.

You can almost picture it…Laban is running around doing whatever he can to find favor in Abraham’s servant’s eyes.

Most Old Testament texts about marriage reflect Israelite agrarian society in the early Iron Age.

Families lived off the produce of the earth.

Men, women, and children worked the land, to process its yield, in order to survive.

The family property was owned and managed by the male head of the household, who would pass it down to his sons.

Sons would remain in their parents’ household, marrying women from outside the immediate family and raising their children on their father’s land (Wright, God’s People, 53–58).

Children contributed to the household labor pool, learned how to manage the family farm, and some inherited it upon the death of the family patriarch.

In order to keep the property intact, the father would leave most of the inheritance to his oldest son (Deut 22:17).

Why in the world is Laban going to all this trouble?

You can almost picture it…Laban is running around doing whatever he can to find favor in Abraham’s servant’s eyes.

Look back at verse 30