[39] In those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country, to a town in Judah, [40] and she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. [41] And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, [42] and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! [43] And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? [44] For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. [45] And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.”
(Luke 1:39-45, ESV)

What’s with the leaping inside the womb? Babies don’t know anything; they can’t.  It takes a miracle for John to recognize the Christ when both of them are unborn! So, the miracle babies are miracles all the way – and these two women have miracles in utero.

There is something wonderful in this that we can see even today. I meet folks now and then who tell me they don’t know a time when they didn’t know or love God. They can’t explain it to you, they just have always known. Sometimes they feel cheated because they don’t have some sensational story of meeting Jesus. It’s true, the exciting conversions are good and encouraging stories, but they don’t beat the work of our God putting His love and His new life into babies from the start. That’s something very special, and we celebrate it in infant baptism. Don’t get me wrong – spiritual miracle babies have to claim Christ, believe in Him, and repent as everyone else does. They just “get it” early on, and often, they don’t suffer all the stupidity and folly of perverse lifestyles and dumb choices like my family did.

The leap inside also makes me think of what Elizabeth says to Mary. Elizabeth is probably Mary’s senior by 30 or 40 years. She gets pretty excited when the unborn John leaps in her belly at the sound of Mary’s voice. She knows something supernatural is happening, and she claims it. Elizabeth also blesses Mary for believing “there would be a fulfillment of the word the Lord had spoken.” She is saying, “Mary, your real blessing is that you trusted God through all of this!” Of course, it is. Getting randomly pregnant as announced by an angel is heavy. If you think it wasn’t hard and confusing and she wasn’t tempted to worry and fear embarrassment, then you’re not living in the mental headspace of a 14-year-old girl (that’s our best guess from that culture – maybe 18.) 

It’s amazing – Mary is yielded. Yielded to what? The word of God. She takes God simply at His word. Period. That is the reason for her great and amazing blessing. This blessing, the blessing of being yielded to God’s word, is available to all of us. Advent invites us to celebrate, rest, and rejoice in the word of God fulfilled. Advent reveals how trustworthy, reliable, and amazing the words of God are – that’s why we keep quoting all these ancient texts that predict what’s happening. I encourage you to enter into a life yielded to God’s words.  How? Read your Bible, all of your Bible. Read the word, and you will know the Word Himself, Jesus. Step boldly into Mary’s example of a humble and yielded heart, and you will find a blessing, too.

[15] “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers—it is to him you shall listen— [16] just as you desired of the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly, when you said, ‘Let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God or see this great fire any more, lest I die.’ [17] And the Lord said to me, ‘They are right in what they have spoken. [18] I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. [19] And whoever will not listen to my words that he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him. [20] But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die.’ [21] And if you say in your heart, ‘How may we know the word that the Lord has not spoken?’— [22] when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him.
(Deuteronomy 18:15-22, ESV)

I remember seeing in old movies how folks would bite a coin to check if it was the real thing. Gold is soft enough that you can feel it when you bite down, and if someone had drilled out the center of the coin to fill it with something else – the bite test would collapse the coin and reveal the counterfeit attempt. Telling the real thing from the fake thing is so tricky nowadays, and it makes you want to give up. We think it’s a modern problem, but it’s an ancient one, too, and God’s solution is elegant and simple. God has folks called prophets. A prophet is someone who speaks for God, and you’ll know it’s God if the prophet accurately predicts the future – and these predictions are the stunners in the Bible. 

Much modern scholarship that studies the Bible says this: a book in the Bible with a prediction that comes true must have been written after the fact. In other words, it’s a lie. The most famous of these is when Christ describes the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. Christ finished His earthly ministry in AD 33, and the temple was destroyed in AD 70. Modern scholars scoff at prediction being possible, and conclude that the gospels were written after AD 70. Case closed. (So much for them, we know we’re reading fantastical non-fiction – where real supernatural wonders happen to ordinary people.) By rejecting Christ’s prophetic prediction, they reject the one criteria the Bible gives us to evaluate Him. As you read these verses, it’s obvious Moses is predicting the prophets that are coming. In fact, Moses repeats himself in verse 15 and 18, but in verse 18 he describes a prophet who sounds like a direct mouthpiece of God. He’s predicting Jesus! So if you say, with the sophisticated modern scholars, that no predictions are possible – then you undercut the power of the Bible to prove it is the word of God! 

So what are we supposed to do? Trust God’s word. The Bible gives us its own “Bible” test right here in Deuteronomy 18. Look at the predictions about Jesus all across the Bible. It’s a tapestry of prophecy and fulfillment at a level that astounds the mind and imagination. The only other explanation is that people made the entire Bible up as a colossal fraud. Sounds possible at first until you look at the 66 books, written across thousands of years by many different writers in different cultures. And remember, if it’s a fake, it shouldn’t have original moral teaching. Con artists and liars don’t write with much moral insight. Nobody doubts the scripture is full of moral teaching, so how can we trust the Bible? Moses tells us because he accurately predicted Jesus. God spoke and predicted an accurate description of Advent. Therefore, the Bible is God’s word and can be trusted and should be obeyed. Praise Him! Bite Him this week in communion! He is the genuine article.

[8] “Judah, your brothers shall praise you;

your hand shall be on the neck of your enemies;

your father’s sons shall bow down before you.

[9] Judah is a lion’s cub;

from the prey, my son, you have gone up.

He stooped down; he crouched as a lion

and as a lioness; who dares rouse him?

[10] The scepter shall not depart from Judah,

nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet,

until tribute comes to him;

and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples.

[11] Binding his foal to the vine

and his donkey’s colt to the choice vine,

he has washed his garments in wine

and his vesture in the blood of grapes.

[12] His eyes are darker than wine,

and his teeth whiter than milk.
(Genesis 49:8-12, ESV)

This is anthropology 101 stuff — a very different culture than ours, with dramatically different customs. One of those customs was to give a “blessing” at the end of your life on your children. Sounds quaint, but it isn’t. It isn’t a “hallmark” moment; it’s family business. The “blessing” is a part of the estate, and Jacob is passing it out to the sons and grandsons before he dies. There’s a lot of them.

This passage describes Judah and how his dad, Jacob, blesses him. At this point in Genesis, you know that Judah is an evil character – he’s violent and cruel. He’s the one who comes up with the idea to sell his brother Joseph into slavery. It’s a bit of a dysfunctional family, and it might bear a striking resemblance to your own. That’s a good thing. If the dysfunctional families of the Bible have hope, then there’s hope for us. 

The blessing on Judah sticks out. Why? It predicts advent. Some two thousand years before Jesus, in what I imagine looks like a Bedouin tent, surrounded by his sons, Jacob describes how one of Judah’s descendants will be a king forever. Eternal. Are these merely the bold and ambitious hopes of an elderly father for a son? You might think so – if it weren’t for Jesus. A ruler to come that is greater than all the nations! Wow. Isn’t it amazing what advent looked like back then? A simple promise. I especially love the description of this coming ruler, with eyes like wine and teeth like milk. In the ancient world, those are both beautiful images and meaningful. The striking images can’t be missed, but it means more than that – it is abundance in eyes and smile, it hints at joy and celebration, it describes the easy wealth and power of the strong and mighty. It was a promise of Jesus triumphant. 

We don’t know how much Jacob could see into the future. Some intellectuals insist this prediction was added later to make Jacob look like a “prophet,” but that isn’t what the text says. Jacob says before he starts, “I will tell you about the things that will happen.” This is the same Jacob who saw the ladder up to glory, and the same Jacob who wrestled with God in the dark. He knows someone amazing is coming, and he describes Him. I know many of us want to know what is going to happen – we want to know what’s coming. God does not tell us that info very often. No, He doesn’t tell us what is coming, but He tells us who is coming. That is what He told Jacob, and that’s what Jacob told Judah, and it’s what He’s telling us. Praise Him!