The story behind the story of the Christmas Nativity went
something like this; God gave Himself in the human form of His only Son, Jesus.
He sent him down to a pauper’s manger, in an infant's form. There, as a tiny
baby He made His bed and slept right where the oxen fed. Later in life God’s
heir would learn to toil in the trade of a carpenter. He would drive the nail,
push the plane and use a saw in his craft. He would live amongst scribes and
Pharisees, whose cunning eyes watched His every move and whose lying and cruel
tongues scourged Him with many acts of hate and slander. He would come to
understand hunger and thirst, and live in such poverty that He had no place to
even lay his head. For He would also come to understand the horrific tug of
human temptation, yet He never gave into those temptations, nor did He ever sin.
God gave His Son to live in exile among men. He sent Him down to the world
knowing all the time that His precious Son would have to endure the scourging
and mocking by those He came to die for, and have a crown of thorns placed over
His brow as a sign of that mockery. He would receive beatings on His back and
excreting pain on his cheeks by those that plucked the hair from His beard. In
the end, God would give that Son up to death and not just any death, but a
felon's death, the death of the crucified.
There He was on the cross, look at
Him, ponder a while what it was all about and see the anguish of Him that died
there. See, how the Father loved you and I! The pain in the heart of God was so
great from the sin that was laid upon Jesus, that God Himself had to hide His
face from Him. For God cannot look upon sin. Can you see the story behind the
story. For it tells us how fully God gave his Son to ransom the souls of sinful
man. God gave Jesus to be made a curse for us. He gave Him that He might die,
the just for the unjust, to bring us to God. God the Father sent
Himself, as part of the Holy Trinity, in the human person of His Son Jesus,
down to earth to be crucified as an acceptable sacrifice for the sins of the
world. A sinful world, I might add! What was in this world, that God should
love it? There was rebellion against his commandments, enmity, disregard and
even hatred for God’s laws and His Truths, yet He loved the world any way. He
was willing to redeem them, because they were perishing and could not do for
themselves that which must be done in order to restore them to Himself. God’s
love comes from within Himself and He loves because it is His nature to do so.
Nothing we can do will ever merit God’s love for us, He gives it freely.
Some of the Old Testament writers had a glimpses of this great
truth and often times came pretty near expressing it. Like today, those that
have lived in years past, worshiped many false gods and idles, yet there was
not one of whom the worshippers could rejoice and say, “My god loves me”.
When
God says in John 3:16 that, ‘He loved the world,’ that really means, as far as
each individual is concerned, He loves us, each one. Love which spares nothing, but spends itself to help and bless the
one it loves, is love indeed. Little love forgets to bring water to the feet of
them that need to be washed, but great love breaks its box of alabaster and
lavishes its precious ointment upon them without regret. God, says He, so loved the world, that is, all men under heaven;
even those that despise His love and will for that cause, perish apart from His
great love. God’s love
flows from its own secret source in the eternal deity, and it owes nothing to
any earth born piety, but comes from beneath the everlasting nature and throne
of the living God. God loved because He would love. “For God so loved the
world, that He gave His only begotten Son…” John 3:16
Hold Fast,
Bren
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