MESSAGE IN A MANGER
Christmas Around The World—Part 2
This week Sarah and I are celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary. A few years back Sarah gave me one of the most thoughtful gifts for our anniversary. In fact it was several gifts. And I had the fun of opening several gifts throughout the day. What I didn’t know was that each gift was symbolic of a favorite memory of our years together. I was simply having a great time opening gifts.
She had come up with a list of favorite memories from each year of our marriage, she then individually packaged a gift that represented each of those memories. So at the end of the day I had about a dozen presents. She then asked me to think about each gift and what memory it represented from our life together. Each gift was great, but each gift had a deeper message from Sarah’s heart.
I wonder if sometime God doesn’t do those kinds of things with us. Most assuredly he did that during the first Christmas. When everything was said and done…the baby was born, the angels appeared, the shepherds paid homage…when everything was said and done. The bible tells us that Luke 2:19 (NIV) But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.
I wonder what she was thinking. I wonder if she understood the hidden messages—the deeper messages of that first Christmas.
In 1984, Mark Lowry was asked to write a script for a church Christmas play. Lowry wrote a series of questions that he would like to ask Mary, the mother of Jesus. These questions were used as filler in between the scenes of the play. Six years later, Buddy Greene wrote the music; thus, the Christmas play script became the song.
Mary Did You Know?
DID YOU KNOW THE TIMING’S TALE?
The Fullness of Time Had Come
Luke 2:1-5 (NIV) In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. [2] (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) [3] And everyone went to his own town to register.
[4] So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. [5] He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child.
I wonder if Mary knew that Jesus was born right on time, in exactly the right spot. The timing was important. Paul declares in his epistles, ‘the fullness of time had come.” Did Mary know that? Was she aware that all the maneuvering, the machinations, the census, the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem was precisely timed in God’s plan millennia before?
Jesus came, in fact, at exactly the right time. Even those who are not believers will say that it was the best of times for the gospel of Jesus Christ to be disseminated across the western world and beyond. Pax Romana, the Roman peace, had brought nations under the rule of a single emperor. People could travel on the Roman roads. There was a common language. But even those outside the Roman Empire saw a star that moved across the sky from the east, and they too came. It was the very best of times for the Son to come.
Timing was important for the rest of Jesus life also. Jesus was born on time. Jesus commenced his ministry on time. When his mother wanted him to start performing miracles, he told her that his time had not yet come. When the mobs tried to kill him he said his time to die had not yet come.
God’s timing is perfect, but I always tend to think that he’s late. Don’t you? I wonder if Mary thought the timing of that census couldn’t have been worse. I bet Joseph thought it was a huge inconvenience. I bet the innkeeper thought…those poor kids…having a baby on a night like tonight with every room occupied, nothing available but the cow-cave. Bad timing, that.
Eternal God Cages Himself Into Time
Luke 2:6-7 (NIV) While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, [7] and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.
I wonder if Mary understood that the eternal God who had invented time was now caging Himself into our time. Limiting himself to one location and one point of time. Limiting his knowledge to what he absorbed at the moment.
When you think about it, this is incredible—the marvel of the incarnation, to the astonishment of angels. This Christ, whom Isaiah saw seated on his throne in heaven, rises from his throne, and then he disappears from view. And to their utter amazement, in a miracle that is shielded from our view, the eternal Son of God, who was God and was with God, is found conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary, taking human flesh from her, and then is born as a baby. They see him lying in a manger.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us for a little while. One of the hymn writers put it, "Our God contracted to a span, incomprehensibly made man." And in Christ we see the glory of God and our human flesh united in such a way that the two become one. He assumes what is ours, that we may inherit what is his.
And so on the night of his birth, as heaven and earth touched in Christ, the angels appeared in a multitude and praised God and said, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests." It was as if they were saying to the shepherds and to all of us human beings: Do you realize who has come to you? Do you realize the gift you’ve been given? We’ve been worshiping him in the glory of heaven, and he’s now taken your flesh. Glory to God in the highest! Do you realize the favor of God that rests upon you in the coming of his Son?
It was a journey, a grand journey, but not only from heaven to earth but also from eternity to time. For this heavenly telling of the Christmas story says that "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning." When? When was the beginning? Go back as far as you can possibly imagine. Can you imagine 2,000 years ago or 10,000 or how about ten million or a billion years ago or a trillion or a billion trillion years ago? No matter how far in our wildest imagination any of us can go back in time, the beginning was before that.
In the beginning the Word was. He already lived and existed because he never began. And then he started this journey from eternity to time. He came to our calendars, to our clocks, to our way of thinking and organizing schedules. He counted birthdays and spoke of the days of the week and lived in terms of bedtime and time and work days and days off, and he must have felt terribly closed Son of God who had forever ago lived in all of the expanses of an untimed eternity. He must have felt caged by the clock.
When he came into time, he fit into our schedules. He became part of our history.
But he came not only from eternity to time. He came, in a sense, to reset the clocks of time. Once our calendars were calculated by the reign of kings or queens. For example, a year could be called "Tenth Year of the Reign of a certain emperor." But that is no longer true. Today calendars of the world are set in terms of the coming of the Son of God.
Christians and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus and must set their calendars and clocks by the coming of the Son of God from eternity to time.
And I suspect what is true on earth is equally true in heaven. For while heaven may in the past have not had calendars and clocks as we think of them, even heaven must be reset in terms of the coming of the Son from heaven to earth, from eternity to time. Our calendars and clocks are now synchronized so that heaven is connected to earth and earth is forever connected to heaven. Our time has changed heaven and eternity by the coming of the Son.
One of the first Christmas hymns written by an American writer and published in the Christian Register in 1849, "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" emphasizes the social implications of the angels’ message: achieving peace and good will toward our fellowmen in the midst of social difficulty.
The writing of this text occurred at a time in American history when there was much unrest, including the foreboding of the tensions between the North and Southern States, social upheaval due to industrial revolution, and the time of the "Forty-niner" gold rush.
It Came Upon a Midnight Clear
DID YOU KNOW THE SHEPHERDS’ SIGNIFICANCE?
The Great Shepherd Was Finally Arriving
Micah 5:4 (NIV)
He will stand and shepherd his flock
in the strength of the Lord,
in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God.
And they will live securely, for then his greatness
will reach to the ends of the earth.
Shepherds Were His Messengers
Luke 2:15-18 (NIV) When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about."
[16] So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. [17] When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, [18] and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them.
And then when they disappeared, the shepherds said, "Let’s go to Bethlehem." They believed! I wouldn’t have believed. I would have said, "This doesn’t make any sense." All the heavens to open up and the angels sing a cantata just to a few shepherds on a hillside! Why if a king were born, surely the angels would have gone to Jerusalem and sung for Caiaphas or for King Herod. That they should do it for us out here, it doesn’t make any sense. We must have been dreaming. Besides, if I’d been God and wanted to save the world, I wouldn’t have done it that way. I just would have called in the devil and twisted his nose and said, "Let my people go."
But God is amazing. He sends a little baby as weak as an earthworm, lying in the feedbox of a donkey. And that little baby crunches the devil’s back and overcomes all the power of hell and sin and death.
And the shepherds went to Bethlehem and they did not recoil when they saw the squalor, but knelt in adoration. And then they told the whole countryside, round about, what had come to pass. And then we read, "And the shepherds returned." That certainly must be a mistake. It ought to be, "And the shepherds shaved their heads and went into a monastery." But no, it says, "They returned." And where to? To their sheep! And a very good thing for the sheep indeed.
Go Tell It On The Mountain
DID YOU KNOW THE LOCATION’S LORE?
Micah 5:2 (NIV)
"But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah,
though you are small among the clans of Judah,
out of you will come for me
one who will be ruler over Israel,
whose origins are from of old,
from ancient times."
Luke 2:11 (NIV) Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.
Bethlehem: “House of Bread”
John 6:51 (NIV) I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world."
Bethlehem’s Main Industry: Sacrificial Lambs
John 1:29 (NIV) The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, "Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!
We know from Jewish writings at the time of Jesus birth that Bethlehem was the location of a special flock of sheep. This flock was pastured in Bethlehem and were destined for Temple sacrifices. Accordingly, the shepherds who watched over them, were not ordinary shepherds.
The same Jewish writings infer that they lay out all year long. They weren’t taken to sheltered locations for the cold winter months like other sheep. Like the other lambs born in Bethlehem, the Lamb of God was born to be sacrificed. Like thousands of lambs who were a symbol of his ultimate sacrifice they were born right there in Bethlehem to be sacrificed at the Passover, just like Jesus would be sacrificed 33 Passovers later in Jerusalem.
Invitation to receive Christ
