Jesus: The Word Made Flesh

 

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. John 1:14

 As I was vacuuming the living room this morning, I was thinking about Christmas coming up. I was considering where I should place my Christmas tree this year. I was wondering if my daughter would be able to come home for a day or two to help me decorate. I was up late last night working on Christmas gifts for my family. It’s still October, and yet I’ve got Christmas in my heart! I can’t help but wonder if the last four weeks of studying God’s faithful love for us throughout the Old Testament have been preparing my heart for this. But, just as the world was both perfectly ready and completely clueless when Jesus arrived, I feel the same way about our celebration of this wonder that is fast approaching.

 God taught us to mark special occasions and important memories with celebration. No, there are no Christmas trees or wrapping paper in the Bible, but there are lots of other examples of feasts and festivals that were specifically ordained by God. The first of these was the Passover, remembering how God miraculously brought His people out of Egypt, plundering it without war. It was a picture, a foreshadowing of the sacrifice God would make of His Firstborn Son, His Only Son, for our freedom from sin and death. People still celebrate it to this day, 3,338 years later! Once His people were free from Pharoah, God gave them other festivals to celebrate as well. There was the Feast of Firstfruits found in Leviticus 23:9–14 that took place with the first barley harvest and foreshadowed the resurrection of Jesus. Another was the Feast of Tabernacles, a huge community-wide camping trip, where the people remembered how God brought them through the wilderness (found in Leviticus 23:33–43). God knows how important it is for us to have celebrations and traditions to mark pieces of history that we need to remember and point us to our hope in Him for our future.

 So what exactly are we celebrating at Christmas? Is it just a birthday party for Jesus? Not really, especially since the likelihood of Him being born on December 25^th is pretty slim. According to scholarly research summarized in this article, Jesus was much more likely to have been born in mid to late September. What we are celebrating, commemorating even, was what was shared in our verse today, the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. God became man in the form of a tiny baby and experienced life on earth as a human, fully God and yet fully man, the mystery of the Hypostatic Union. He showed us how to live, how we were meant to live. He felt our pain, both physical and emotional, so that we could identify with Him more fully and vice versa. I wrote last week about my wonder at learning through Isaiah 53 that Jesus experienced pain and was acquainted with illness. God doesn’t do anything halfway!!

Here's the Thing: God loved us so much that He gave us exactly what we needed, Himself. He knew the only way we could be saved and He made it happen. If He is willing to do this, we can trust Him to fulfill every other promise we read in scripture!