A Child Is Born

Dec 23, 2015 2066

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given… (Isaiah 9:6).

The Messiah was coming. Everyone knew it, and every Jew carried a mental picture of this man who would deliver them from slavery and subservience and make their nation great again. The Messiah had been the subject of their hopes, dreams and prayers for thousands of year.

He would embody all that was great in their history: he would have the wisdom of Solomon, the prestige of David, the holy authority of Moses, the stature of Abraham and the military skill of Joshua. They had dreamed about him, all through the devastating years of slavery in foreign lands, all through the domination of the Romans in their own land. Every day they looked for him, longed for him, prayed for him.

But he confounded them all. The God of the universe came as a baby, with all the helplessness of a new-born. He would have kept Mary up at night, he would have cried to be fed, he would have needed his nappy changed. Yes, God became a man at man’s most helpless and vulnerable. So, if he was indeed the Messiah, there wasn’t going to be any rescuing of Israel from the Romans any time soon, and life would just go on in the same old miserable way it had for as long as anyone could remember.

But we are blessed to know that God had other plans. He made a full commitment to the human race. He became a man—fully. When the prophet foretold that he would bear our griefs and carry our sorrows, Jesus would do that literally, as he grew through childhood, became the man who would minister to his people for three brief but astonishing years, and on the Cross fulfilled his ultimate purpose for our salvation.

God came to this world as a baby. He was born. He lived, ministered and taught. He died. Because God loved the world so much he gave his only son, so that anyone who believes might live forever.

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