67 Now his father Zacharias was filled with the Holy Spirit, and prophesied, saying: 68 “Blessed is the Lord God of Israel, for He has visited and redeemed His people, 69 and has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of His servant David, 70 as He spoke by the mouth of His holy prophets, who have been since the world began, 71 that we should be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us, 72 to perform the mercy promised to our fathers and to remember His holy covenant, 73 the oath which He swore to our father Abraham: 74 to grant us that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies, might serve Him without fear, 75 in holiness and righteousness before Him all the days of our life.

Zacharius prophesied of the future, in the present tense. This is because when God says He will do something, it is done. The moment God promised to buy His people back from the grip of death, it was completed because God doesn’t lie. Ever.

Think now of a man who has seriously violated civil law. He is guilty of multiple grizzly murders, is arrested and held without bail. He is no longer free to come and go as he pleases. He can’t live within his own home, sleep in his own bed, or go out for a meal with friends. He is held captive by the law until the time of his execution. Governments will spend millions of dollars to hold a criminal such as that, until justice is done.

In the same way, when you and I sin, we seriously transgress God’s Law--the Ten Commandments. We are told in Scripture that the Law is perfect, holy, just and good. It demands absolute moral perfection, and when its perfect precepts are transgressed, it demands (and will get) absolute retribution. Every time we sin all we do is store up the Law's wrath, and the day will come when God manifests His righteous indignation against all evil. The Bible calls that day, "the day of the wrath of Almighty God." So each of us is kept in this large holding cell called earth, until the time of our execution when we will be the recipients of capital punishment, and then damned forever from that which is good.

So shake off any notions you may have that God doesn’t care about right of wrong. Shake off any pretense that He doesn’t exist, and then flee to the Savior. He will save you from your greatest enemy--death itself:

"But now we have been delivered from the law, having died to what we were held by, so that we should serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter" (Romans 7:6).