Isaiah 7:14 is a verse we hear every year during the Advent season, and it is a verse many may overlook because it is so familiar. The name Imanu'el in Hebrew means "God with us." That name is a name that can really make you pause. God is with us. And not just that- God came to be with us in the tiny baby Mary gave birth to in the stable in Bethlehem. God could have come through any means and He chose perhaps the most vulnerable form- a baby born poor in a small town.
WAIT. Take a moment to let that sink in. We are talking about GOD here- the God who can shake the earth and carve out mountains and stitch together matter to form anything He wants. He can come to us in any form, through any series of flashy miracles that would strike awe in the hearts of every man instantly. Instead, He chose to come on what looked like an ordinary night in an ordinary small town to what looked like a pair of ordinary people as a baby who looked like any ordinary baby. And perhaps the way He chose is the most awe-inspiring way of all.
C.S. Lewis writes in his book Miracles, that the greatest miracle of Christianity is the Incarnation- God becoming man. David Platt, in his sermon series on the book of Matthew points out that if the Incarnation is true- that Jesus is fully man and fully God, then all other miracles in the Gospel make complete sense. It is not that Jesus Christ rose from the dead that should astound us, it is that Jesus Christ, God Himself, could die in the first place. When speaking about Jesus to a group of Muslims, Platt talks about when he proposed to his wife. He asks the men if he should have sent a friend to ask her to marry Platt rather than ask her himself. Of course the men agreed that that "in matters of love, it is better to go yourself." Platt draws the connection to the Incarnation: God sent His Son- God sent God Himself- to become man to save the lost. In matters of love, in the greatest matter of the greatest love, God knew He alone could go and save us all. The Incarnation, the birth of Immanuel, God with us- it is the beginning of the center of God's love story.
Isaiah told of God's promise of Immanuel about seven hundred years before the birth of Christ. God's people waited. The birth of Jesus, the Christmas story, is a story of a promise fulfilled. I sometimes imagine what it would be like to be one of those shepherds that night- doing my job like I did every other night- only moments before the greatest miracle of the world was about to take place. Ordinary nobodies, startled by an angel and the first Christmas carol, learned that the wait was over... God is faithful and has kept the promise He made. God chose those shepherds- men whom we do not know their name or story- to be among the first to worship and adore God in the flesh.
Magi later followed to bring gifts fit for a king to a baby in a smelly stable. My mind flashes to the smelly places in Haiti and the dirty babies in rags- I can't imagine the first Christmas looked much different and the thought of richly dressed Magi of great wealth and education traveling to Haiti to see one of those dirty babies with gold, frankincense, and myrrh seems CRAZY. I think about how the children in the mountain village of Zoranje looked with curiosity and amazement at the two American dollars we handed them for 11 avocados and think about how shocking the gifts the Magi brought to a poor baby boy and his working class parents must have seemed.
But this is all a part of the miracle- the miracle that defies all logic and turns the world upside down. And if God humbled Himself in such a way, how much more are we called to humility. God did not consider himself too great or too powerful or too wise or too holy to come to us yet he is great beyond all measure, all-powerful, wise beyond all understanding, and the Holy One. So we learn from Immanuel, God with us, that we must go where He goes and love whom he loves and become the humble servant of all. In Philippians Chapter 2, we are called to have the same mind as Christ in our relationships with one another, Christ, "who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross." (verses 6-8)
This is THE Christmas Gift, THE Christmas miracle. God becoming man out of His great love for us.
Oh come let us adore Him.
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