The Great Reversal

Again and again, Scripture reveals God as the One who does the unexpected and reverses the fortunes of great and small alike, bringing low the powerful and lifting up the powerless. Consider, for instance, the exodus from Egypt. The Lord was for the Israelite slaves and against Pharaoh, the mightiest king on the planet. In the end, Pharaoh and his fiercely strong army fell, but Israel endured (e.g., see Ex. 14). Then there is the story of David, the least likely of all of Jesse’s sons to be recognized as king but whom God elevated from being a simple tender of his father’s flocks to the most significant ruler of old covenant Israel (1 Sam. 16–2 Sam. 7).

We are not surprised, then, that in the advent of the Messiah, the promised Savior of the world, a great reversal happens. When God intervenes to bring His full and final salvation, He does so in an unexpected manner, bringing down the mighty and exalting the humble. That is what Mary says that our Father does in today’s passage, as we continue our look at her Magnificat (see Luke 1:51–53).

Why does Mary make this claim? Because the Messiah is born not to a person of great riches or political renown. Instead, the Christ is conceived in the womb of a young woman from Nazareth, a tiny town far from the most important city in Israel, Jerusalem. Nothing good, many people thought, could ever come from Nazareth (Luke 1:26–38; see John 1:46). Moreover, while Jesus’ adoptive father, Joseph, was a descendant of David (Luke 1:27), he was just one of many descendants of David. Nothing about him was particularly notable, and as we will see in our study of Luke 2:24, Mary and Joseph were also poor. Jesus’ origin according to His humanity was as humble as one could imagine and surely not a family from whom one would ordinarily expect God to send the King of kings. But it was certainly in keeping with how the Lord has worked throughout history.

Mary, in her Magnificat, also speaks of God’s provision of Jesus as a fulfillment of promises that the Lord made to the patriarchs of Israel (Luke 1:54–55). God promised Abraham, who lived two thousand years before Jesus, that He would bless the world through Abraham’s descendants (Gen. 12:1–3). Many may have doubted that God would keep His pledge, since it seemed to take the Lord so long to keep His promise, but there was never any chance that He would fail to do so. Dr. R.C. Sproul writes in his commentary on Luke that God “does not know how to forget. Once God makes a promise, it is sure.”