I was talking to a man last week about our birthday party for Jesus, which is the informal family worship time we have here on Christmas morning. It’s capped by having the children blow out the candle on Jesus’ birthday cake. And he asked, “How can you fit 2003 candles on one birthday cake?”
Well, of course we only put one candle on the cake, for obvious reasons, but it got me to thinking. We also put only one candle on the cake is because until Jesus comes for the last time, there is still time for late-comers to follow the star and find the newborn King. Everywhere around the world, someone is always meeting Jesus for the first time. And whenever that happens, the joy and wonder of his birth echoes again with the angels’ song. “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!” [Lk 2:14]
Many of us here have known Jesus since babyhood, and it’s a little hard to imagine the incredible difference it makes, meeting Jesus for the very first time. Even I sometimes start taking for granted the comfort and joy that knowing Jesus brings, and I start wanting more ... wanting all the world to be ruled by the Prince of Peace, wanting people to stop using his name as a swear-word, wanting people to stop stepping on each other to get to the top... Well, I’m not the first to say “Come, Lord Jesus!” [Rev 22:20] and I won’t be the last.
Micah first made this prophecy, the one we’re looking at this morning, over 2,700 years ago, at around the same time Isaiah was preaching. It was a volatile and insecure period in Israel’s history, and it never got much better. People were scared to death. Assyria was in the process of annihilating the northern kingdom and once even got far enough south to besiege Jerusalem. That’s when King Hezekiah listened to Isaiah and trusted in God for deliverance, and Sennacherib’s troops withdrew, but other kings before and after him tried diplomacy and dubious alliances - including paying tribute to Assyria - to purchase a temporary illusion of safety. Thousands of people were killed during the various wars; farms and cities alike were destroyed. Society was in turmoil. Refugees from the northern kingdom of Israel poured across the borders. During the hundred years before the Babylonian exile, archeology shows that Jerusalem more than doubled in population - and that meant cheap labor and food shortages on top of the devastation already caused by the wars. Rulers and merchants were equally corrupt, justice was for sale, and life was cheap. People needed hope.
Isaiah and Micah gave it to them. Both Isaiah and Micah promise that a savior will come to deliver God’s faithful people from the violence and oppression they have been enduring. What wonderful promises they are, too! Listen again to this morning’s text: “O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days.... And he shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the LORD, in the majesty of the name of the LORD his God. And they shall live secure, for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth; and he shall be the one of peace.” [Mic 5:2-5a]
But you may not have noticed... I left out the middle part. I left out the part about waiting. “He shall give them up until the time when she who is in labor has brought forth.” [Mic 5:3]
Why does God do that? Why does he delay so long? Doesn’t he know how hard it is to hold on to a hope that keeps receding further and further out into the future?
Well, as I’m sure you all already know, the reason God does that is to make sure that his harvest at the end of the ages will be as large as possible. We’ve spent all year looking at John’s vision in Revelation, and at the many ways that God tries to get people’s attention, and the many times he gives us a second chance - and then a third, and then a fourth.
But still, it’s hard to wait. Many people in John’s day were losing hope. I am equally sure that many people in Micah’s day also lost hope, especially when they saw the refugees pouring into town and heard the terrible stories. And many Christians over the last few generations and centuries are tempted to accept the notion that Jesus’ second coming is just allegorical, metaphorical, symbolic, rather than a promise of a real event that we can count on.
How do we hold on to the hope?
We hold on to hope by recognizing that each time Jesus is born again in any person it is a sign of the reality of the kingdom, a sign that the promise of redemption that reaches out so far into the past reaches out equally strongly into the future. We hold onto hope by learning to recognize the presence and acts of God in everyday life around us. And we hold onto hope by stepping out in faith to answer God’s call and finding that Jesus is there, with us, even though the world cannot see him.
The great preacher Charles Spurgeon interprets part of Micah’s prophecy to refer to pre-New-Testament sightings of Jesus. Where our translation refers to a coming king “whose origin is from of old,” the KJV says that his “goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.” While most scholars today believe that the phrase really refers to Jesus’ descent from David, rather than his pre-existence with the Father from the dawn of time, the examples Spurgeon gives illustrate really well what I mean by finding Jesus alongside you at crucial moments in a life of following God. He gives the examples of Abraham, Jacob, Joshua, and the three heroes of Babylonian Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego...
Each one of these Old Testament heroes has an encounter with a mysterious presence whom they call “Lord” and in front of whom they call down in awe. And while mostly we think of these figures as angels, or messengers of God, rather than the Lord himself, Spurgeon points out that in Revelation, when John falls down before one of the angels, the angel rebukes him: “You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your comrades the prophets, and with those who keep the words of this book. Worship God!” [Rev 22:9]
Anyway, Abraham encounters this figure just before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, when he argues God into promising to save the city if he can find so many as ten righteous men in it. Before Jacob goes to meet his estranged brother Esau, he wrestles all night with a figure who is never identified, and ends up saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.” [Gen 32:24] A similar figure appears before Joshua just before the Israelites enter the promised land, leading the armies of the Lord. And finally, the Babylonians describe the fourth man whom they see in the fire with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego not as an angel but a God, or as the KJV puts it, “the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.” [Dan 3:25]
What Spurgeon points out is that each of these men encounters Jesus when they are engaged in something important and difficult for God. This is how he puts it:
“Observe for a moment here, that each of these four great occurrences happened to the saints when they were engaged in very eminent duty, or when they were about to be engaged in it. Jesus Christ does not appear to his saints every day. He did not come to see Jacob till he was in affliction; he did not visit Joshua before he was about to be engaged in a righteous war. It is only in extraordinary seasons that Christ thus manifests himself to his people. When Abraham interceded for Sodom, Jesus was with him, for one of the highest and noblest employments of a Christian is that of intercession, and it is when he is so engaged that he will be likely to obtain a sight of Christ. Jacob was engaged in wrestling, and that is a part of a Christian’s duty to which some of you never did attain; consequently, you do not have many visits from Jesus. It was when Joshua was exercising bravery that the Lord met him. So with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego: they were in the high places of persecution, on account of their adherence to duty, when he came to them, and said, “I will be with you, passing through the fire.” There are certain peculiar places we must enter, to meet with the Lord.
The promise of a savior, a redeemer, a king is just as true now as it was 2000 years ago. And the babe is born anew every time someone sees his star, and follows, and worships for the first time. But he also comes to us when we are at a point of crisis like Jacob; when we are stepping out in faith to a great task, like Joshua; when we intercede on someone else’s behalf, like Abraham; and when we are obedient under pressure, like Shadrach Meshach, and Abednego.
When we come to Jesus, he is really there, and when we follow him, he is really there. Yes, we long for the time when the whole world will bow, and obey, when “mourning and crying and pain will be no more,” and justice and righteousness will be the order of the day. But until that day comes, as long as Jesus rules in our hearts and lives, his promise of peace and freedom has already come true.
