The Sovereignty of God in Christmas (6)

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace, goodwill toward men.”  Luke 2.13, 14

On seeing the unseen
The writer of Hebrews explains that true, saving faith is rooted in things hoped for, but unseen. He writes, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11.1, my translation). We are so familiar with this idea that it’s easy to miss the great significance of what our sovereign God has accomplished through Jesus Christ in reconciling the whole of creation and restoring all who believe to our proper places in the grand scheme of things.

For as the first Christmas makes clear, the coming of the Baby born in Bethlehem signaled the beginning of the restoration of all things, including the reconciling of the material and spiritual worlds. Jesus came down from the heavens in order to make a way for heaven and earth to be united as one, in our souls, in the presence of God, and in a new world coming, and to come.

Christians perhaps take this for granted. And in doing so we miss a good deal of the significance of Jesus’ birth, and neglect to make good use of the benefits afforded us as citizens of the heavenly Kingdom. Let me explain a little more.

Religious, but not spiritual
People in Jesus’ day were confused about religion. They had their traditions, of course, and most of them believed in God. The “secular Jew” so common in our own day would have been almost unknown in the first century in Palestine.

At the same time, it had become difficult for most people to engage meaningfully with the spiritual realities back of their faith. The Pharisees, one of three religious parties in Israel, had reduced religion to traditions, formulas, and rigid norms of behavior. They invoked the name of God primarily to justify and preserve their roles as the keepers of Israel’s religion during a time of political constraint.

The Sadducees, the second religious party in Israel, believed in God but didn’t believe in a spiritual world. They were the religious liberals of their day, for whom the name of God was a convenient way of identifying with the people while, at the same time, occupying a kind of intellectual plateau, as they saw it, somewhere above the masses.

The Herodians were the third party of Jewish leaders, the smallest of the three, and were distinguished by their close allegiance with the Roman puppet king. They were the pragmatic political wing of Jewish religion and, as such, had little say in the day-to-day religious affairs of the people.

Most people in that day believed in a spiritual realm, but the only experience any of them had with that realm was demonic, rather than angelic, in nature. God had not spoken, whether through prophet or angel, for 400 years, and so, for most people, while they believed in God, any sense of a spiritual life would have been completely foreign to their experience.

Heaven come down
When the angel appeared to those shepherds, therefore, that must have been a truly amazing thing – so amazing, we can imagine, that most folks they told simply would have refused to believe (they were, after all, only shepherds).

But the angel’s appearing, followed by the multitude of the heavenly host, announced that the event they reported signified a new day, a day in which the “veil” separating heaven and earth was being drawn aside, and those who looked to Jesus could now begin to share in the life of glory and spiritual power which the hosts of heaven knew, and which their appearing on that Judean plain foreshadowed and foretold.

Jesus came from heaven to earth, but He also brought heaven to earth when He came. His message was that the Kingdom of God was near, had come, and was within us. Now we would begin to know the Lord, to be indwelled by His Spirit, to experience and express His glory, and to seek and advance His Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus came to make the blessings of God flow far as the curse of sin is found, and to begin the work of reconciling the seen world of time and materiality with the unseen world of departed saints, angels, and God on His glorious throne.

In the birth of Jesus, God began the work of reconciling the whole of creation to Himself, and us right along with it. It is thus no wonder that, at Christmas, the saints of God, seeing through to that unseen realm of glory, give evidence of their faith by singing, “Joy to the world! The Lord is come!”

Next steps: Read and meditate on Isaac Watts’ hymn, “Joy to the World!” How many different ways does this hymn celebrate the work of God in reconciling the worlds unto Himself? Talk with some Christian friends about this, then sing the hymn together.

T. M. Moore

We’re taking a 3-week intermission from our series on The Disciplined Life to review three archive series on the meaning of Christmas. This week’s study, The Sovereignty of God in Christmas, is part 3 of a 3-part series on Christmas, As Advertised, and is available as a free download.

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Except as indicated, Scripture taken from the New King James Version. © Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.