Luke’s Gospel and the Book of Acts are written as a complementary pair which tells a single story with a single subject. In Luke’s Gospel, the story begins in the Temple with Zechariah chosen by lot to burn incense (Luke 1:8), receiving a vision from Gabriel which informs him of the coming birth of John the Forerunner, who will “go before” the Lord to prepare His way and turn the hearts of the children to the fathers and the fathers to the children, as spoken of by Malachi (4:5-6). The first half of Malachi rebukes the priesthood and nation for their pollution of the altar of God. The second half describes the prophetic plan of redemption- a plan which will be initiated by God’s messenger who will “prepare the way before me” (Malachi 3:1) and followed by the personal coming of Israel’s God to renew true worship. That it is Gabriel who appears to both Zechariah and the Virgin Mary is highly significant, as Gabriel only acts twice elsewhere, by name, in the entire Bible: in Daniel 8 and Daniel 9. In both settings, the context is again the purity of worship in the temple. Daniel 9:24-27 records Gabriel’s message to Daniel: there will be seventy weeks of years at the conclusion of which the worship of God will be purified and after which the old temple will be destroyed.
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