“Saved from Our Enemies” — What Zacharias Meant

The first time Luke’s Gospel says anything about salvation, it is an old priest singing about enemies.

That we should be saved from our enemies, and from the hand of all that hate us.

Luke 1:71

That is not where a modern reader expects a Christmas song to go. And it raises the obvious question: is this political? Is Zacharias expecting the Romans to be thrown out?

The answer is in the sentence he is building toward, and it is worth following the whole song to get there.

A Man Who Had Not Spoken in Nine Months

Zacharias had asked for a sign and been given silence. He has just written His name is John on a tablet, and his tongue is loosed. The first thing he does with his restored speech is prophesy.

That matters for how the song reads. This is not a set piece. It is a man who has spent three-quarters of a year unable to say anything, filled with the Holy Ghost, and the first words out are about God keeping a promise.

What He Actually Says

The structure is tighter than it looks in English:

God has visited and redeemed His people. He has raised up an horn of salvation in the house of David. He spake by the mouth of his holy prophets. The purpose: that we should be saved from our enemies.

Then the reason: to perform the mercy promised to our fathers, and to remember his holy covenant — the oath sworn to Abraham.

And then the purpose clause that governs the whole thing:

That he would grant unto us, that we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him, all the days of our life.

Luke 1:74–75

There it is. The rescue is not the destination. Fearless service is.

The Word

Luke 1:71 is one of the corpus occurrences that arrives through a noun rather than the verb — sōtērian, salvation, which the KJV renders with a verbal phrase, that we should be saved.

The peril is named without euphemism: enemies, and the hand of all that hate them. This is covenant language with a long history. Israel had been enslaved, occupied, deported, and occupied again. When a priest in the temple courts says saved from our enemies, every hearer knows the catalogue he is drawing on.

Is This Political?

Partly, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Zacharias is not speaking in metaphors about inner peace. The oppression he has in mind is real and external, and the God he praises is the God who brought a people out of Egypt.

But the song will not stay there, and Zacharias himself does not leave it there. Watch what happens when he turns to his son:

And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest: for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways; to give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of their sins.

Luke 1:76–77

Salvation, defined a second time, six verses later. And this time the content is the remission of sins.

So the song does what the whole New Testament does with this vocabulary. It begins with the deliverance a first-century Jewish priest would name first, and it moves — without disowning that hope — to the deeper ruin underneath it. The enemies are real. The sins are more fundamental.

Why Both, and in That Order

It is tempting to resolve the tension by deciding that the enemies were “really” spiritual all along. That flattens the text.

It is equally tempting to read verse 71 as a hope Jesus disappointed — the political rescue that never came. That misreads the ending.

What Luke gives is a genuine progression. Zacharias is not corrected; he is completed. The God who swore to Abraham does visit and redeem, and the visiting turns out to reach further than an occupying army. The nation’s enemies were never the deepest thing holding it.

And the purpose clause holds both together. That we might serve him without fear. Whatever the deliverance is from, it is toward a life of unafraid worship — which is exactly what a people cannot have while they are either enslaved or guilty.

Tender Mercy and the Dayspring

The song ends with an image worth reading slowly:

Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us, to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.

Dayspring is sunrise. People sitting in darkness, under the shadow of death, and light arriving from outside — not generated by them, not earned, simply risen.

The last phrase names the destination: the way of peace. Not the absence of enemies. Peace, which in this vocabulary means wholeness with God.

What This Passage Establishes for the Rest

Three things this song settles early, before the Gospel has properly begun.

Salvation in Scripture includes real deliverance from real oppression, and that is not a lesser or embarrassing part of the vocabulary. God is genuinely the God who rescues His people from those who hate them.

Salvation is grounded in covenant, not improvisation. Zacharias’s whole argument is that God is keeping an oath sworn generations before. Nothing here is new; it is remembered.

And salvation has a purpose beyond safety. Delivered in order that we might serve Him without fear. The rescue is for something.

An old priest, silent for nine months, opens his mouth and lays out the shape of the whole book. The enemies are named honestly, the covenant is named as the ground, the remission of sins is named as the content, and fearless service is named as the point.

This study is part of What Does It Mean to Be Saved?, an examination of every New Testament use of saving language in context, within Resource Cluster 3: Life in Christ. 91 of 91 passage studies are complete — see every occurrence.