From This Day Forward

From This Day Forward!

Isaiah 35:1-10

Christmas is absolutely the best time in all the year!

And it’s been the top of the charts now for over 2000 years.

Forget about the commercial frenzy – that’s not really Christmas, even though we get caught up in the whole scene anyway.

CHRISTMAS IS AMAZING!!

In fact, its utterly beyond comprehension, which is probably why we do all the outlandish things we do at this time of the year.

We eat too much, we put up lights everywhere, we bring trees into our houses, we buy things for people …sometimes people that we really don’t even like all that much …and then we wrap those gifts in beautiful paper which we will just be torn off and throw away! – whole forests disappear to provide December’s wrapping paper …which is a real headache for those of us concerned about our environment.

…but …we persevere in the celebration ….the greatest birthday celebration in the history of the world! ….a birthday celebration that has been going on now for some 2000 years!

All of this is just our feeble attempt to somehow celebrate something which is so incredibly amazing, so big, so vast, so utterly unbelievable that we are inspired to do incredible things to mark the occasion.

When we begin to get our heads around the reality of Christmas, it’s kind of like, a “pinch me, I think I’m dreaming” situation!

So, how do we get a grip on the idea of “Emmanuel” – God with us?

Folks, this Advent season, I want to challenge you to try your best to get your mind around it!

God coming to us – the Creator within His creation.

Listen to this text from Isaiah 35:1-10 – see what God has done…

“The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom. Like the crocus, 2 it will burst into bloom; it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy. The glory of Lebanon will be given to it, the splendor of Carmel and Sharon; they will see the glory of the LORD, the splendor of our God.

3 Strengthen the feeble hands, steady the knees that give way; 4 say to those with fearful hearts, “Be strong, do not fear; your God will come, he will come with vengeance; with divine retribution he will come to save you.”

5 Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. 6 Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert.

7 The burning sand will become a pool, the thirsty ground bubbling springs. In the haunts where jackals once lay, grass and reeds and papyrus will grow.

8 And a highway will be there; it will be called the Way of Holiness.

The unclean will not journey on it; it will be for those who walk in that Way; wicked fools will not go about on it. 9 No lion will be there, nor will any ferocious beast get up on it; they will not be found there. But only the redeemed will walk there,

10 and the ransomed of the LORD will return. They will enter Zion with singing; everlasting joy will crown their heads. Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away.”

It’s really hard to get the picture of what it means that Jesus came into our world. …to grasp and truly understand the reality of what we are celebrating at Christmas!

Rev. Robert Evans is a fulltime minister and a part time astronomer. His claim to fame is that he has discovered more Super Novas that anybody else in history, even more than the great scientists in their huge observatories.

A Supernova is an exploding star whose light can outshine an entire galaxy for about a month. How it explodes is an interesting phenomenon. Over time, millions of years, its inner gravitational pull becomes so strong that initially it implodes, drawing everything into itself. That gravitational pull sucks in everything, …including light – it becomes a black hole in the universe.

And its core becomes incredibly heavy. Imagine a million cannonballs squeezed into the size of a marble. Rev. Evans says, just a teaspoon full of this imploded star could weigh 200 billion pounds.

…And then suddenly it explodes outwards …sending all kinds of matter into space. It’s a nuclear explosion of such gigantic proportions that it would be the equivalent of a trillion hydrogen bombs all going off at once.

But you don’t need to worry about it. The nearest likely candidate to go Supernova near us is a star called Betelguese which is a mere 50 thousand light years away. To put that in perspective, to get there you would have to travel at the speed of light for 50 thousand years. In contrast, travelling at the speed of light, it would take you only 1.3 seconds to get to the moon, or 8.3 minutes to get to the sun.