EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR
3/16/2026 7:540 PM
My
Worship Time Focus:
PT-2 “The
Purpose of God is Gracious”
Bible
Reading & Meditation Reference:
Luke
1:59-63
Message of the verses: 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, inquiring 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 (ESV)
John MacArthur continues his discussion on “Circumcision
surgery was usually performed by the father or another appointed person. (On at
least one occasion, it was performed by a woman—Moses’s wife Zipporah [Ex.
4:25]). According to later Jewish
tradition, there had to be at least ten witnesses present. They could, if need be, later attest that the
circumcision had been performed. The
practice of naming the child on the eight day, the day of circumcision, is not
prescribed in the Old Testament. By the first century A.D. it had become a
common practice (how widespread is not known), perhaps based on the tradition
that Moses was named and circumcised on the eight day after his birth. In addition, Abraham received his new name on
the day he was circumcised (Gen. 17:5, 23).”
Now as we look at the passage we can
see that the people who had gathered to witness the the circumcision of
Elizabeth’s child decided to get involved in naming him. Now for a group to participate in the naming
of a child was not unusual; according to Ruth 4:17, The neighbor women gave
him [the son of Boaz and Ruth] a name, saying, ‘A son [i.e., descendant] has
been born to Naomi!” So they named him Obed. Now Obed is the father of Jesse, the father
of David. “To honor the faithful
priest, who had endured so much suffering and sorrow due to his and Elizabeth’s
childlessness, they were going to call the boy Zacharias, after his
father. Naming first born sons after their fathers was not unknown, though
naming them after their grandfathers was more common.
MacArthur writes “In Jewish culture,
names were meant to be descriptive.
Sometimes they reflected a person’s physical characteristics; for
example, Esau means, ‘hairy,’ and Jacob, ‘one who grabs the heel’—an obvious
reference to what he did after his birth (Gen. 25:26). Other names expressed the parents’ joy over
their child’s birth, such as Saul and Samuel, both of which means ‘asked for.’ Other names, such as Elijah (‘Yahweh is God’),
reflected the parents’ faith.
“The well-intentioned attempt to
name the child after his father however, provoked and immediate, forceful
reaction from his mother. Ouchi
(no indeed) is an emphatic, strengthened form of the negative adverb
ou, and could be translated, ‘not so’ ‘by no means,’ ‘not at all,’ or in
contemporary idiom, no way.’ Instead of
being named after his father Elizabeth insisted adamantly that her son was to be
called John, just as the angel Gabriel had commanded Zacharias (1:13). There was to be no discussion; this was not going
to be a group decision.”
Now the reason the baby’s name was
nonnegotiable was because it was God Himself, as He had done in the cases of
Isaac (Gen. 17:19), Isaiah’s son (Isa. 8:3), Hosea’s children (Hos. 1:4, 6, 9),
and would shortly do in the case of Jesus (Matt. 1:21), had chosen it. MacArthur writes “Ioannes (John)
is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Jehohanan (or Johanan),
which means ‘God is gracious.’
The name reflects God’s gracious salvation, in which John would figure
prominently as Messiah’s forerunner. The
names of his parents also unfold aspects
of the plan of redemption. ‘Zacharias’
means ‘God remembers’ (i.e., is faithful to His promises), while ‘Elizabeth’
may mean, ‘my God has sworn’ or ‘my God is an oath,’ in other words, He is ‘the
Absolutely Reliable One’ (William Hendriksen, The Gospel of Luke [Grand
Rapids: Baker, 1978], 65). Both of those
possible meanings of Elizabeth’s name also refer to God’s faithfulness.
Now taken aback by Elizabeth’s
vehement rejection of their choice of a name and her insistence of naming the
baby John, those gathered there with them said to her, “There is no one
among your relatives who is called by that name.” Now by giving her son a name not shared
by any of her or her husbands relatives, Elizabeth had gone against Jewish
custom. So perhaps feeling that as a
woman she had overstepped her bounds, these among them decided to go over her
head to her husband, Zacharias.
Now Zacharias was still under God’s
chastening for doubting what Gabriel had said to him in the temple as seen in
1:20, Zacharias was unable to speak or hear (the word translated ‘mute’ in 1:22
[kophos] refers to those who are deaf in 7:22; Matt. 11:5; Mark 7:32,
37; 9:25]). That they made signs to him
as the were asking Zacharias what he wanted his son to be called
also argues that he was unable to hear, or else they would have simply have spoken
to him.
MacArthur concludes “In response to
their inquiry, Zacharias asked for a tablet.
Pinakidion (tablet), used on here in the New
Testament, refers to a small, wooden, was-covered writing tablet. On this tablet, which had been his only means
of communicating for the last several months, Zacharias wrote as follow, ‘His
name is John.’ His reply was terse
and emphatic; Elizabeth had said that the child ‘shall be named John’ (v.
60), but Zacharias declared that his name is John. As far as he was concerned, that had been the
child’s name since Gabriel announced it to him. His decision, therefore, was
final, and left those present astonished.
“But if the choice of the child’s
name surprised those present, what happened next would utterly amaze them.”
3/16/2026
8:25 PM
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