Matthew 1:18-25 + Isaiah 7:14

Discussion Questions

1. During this incredibly festive and busy season, what are we doing to actively prepare our hearts for Advent? Are we taking time to pause and give thanks to God who eagerly condescended to be with us?
2. Joseph heard a word from God and immediately obeyed. Can the same be said of us when we face difficult, unusual, or uncomfortable circumstances? How immediate is our obedience?
3. Mary trusted God completely, even though she had to be utterly confused. What can we learn from Mary’s response of faith and trust? Do we fully trust our infinite God when our finite minds struggle to make sense of things? Are we resting in the God who is always working and will one day make all things right?

Transcript

As most of you know, we study through Books of the Bible here at The Village Chapel. We have a passage we want to look at today; even though it’s Advent, we’ll break from our normal book studies. If you need a copy of the paper Bible, raise your hand up real high and we’ll get you one. There is also up on the screen, I believe, the QR code if you’d like the notes and quotes. You can jump to that on your phone and maybe that will be helpful to you as well.

Before we get started though, I really want to give a little bit of a shout out. Kim mentioned a prayer request from Arizona. But do you know—I mean, this is amazing— we’re going to each week take a little time to greet our folks that are worshiping with us online. That camera back there with a red light right now is [our live feed where] I’m going to address you guys. We’re so grateful to have folks join us from literally around the world. We had last week, we heard from Portland, Oregon. Anybody a Portland fan here? Both of you? Okay, good. That’s great. And we had some folks from northeastern Ohio join us last week. Any Ohioans? Okay, there’s four, five or six of you, maybe a few more. That’s right. Also as far away as Nairobi, Kenya. Whoa, that’s good. It’s very nice. Yeah, that’s Village Chapel right there, baby. Nairobi, I looked this up, a city of 4 million people. Lagos, Nigeria, the largest city in Africa. We had response from Lagos last week as well. 21 million people in that city. I hope whoever is worshiping with us from there will also invite some of their 21 million friends to join us next week. Perth, Australia. Any Australians? People that like the Australian accent, raise your hand. Okay, good! You can always get a few of those. Good-day. And we heard from there and there’s like two million folks in Perth as well. So for all of those folks, we pray that you are well and we’re so glad that you could join us for worship over the past week and the study of God’s Word and hope that you’re able to do so today as well. And that we’ll continue to help spread the Word, not just because we’re not trying to just build a big church or something like that, but because we just want the gospel to go out and we want people to be studying God’s Word.

Our study for the Advent season is going to be called “Immanuel: God With Us.” Today though, we’re going to talk about “The Dawn of Redeeming Grace.” And I’m going to look at a passage in Matthew, if you’ll join me there. You can open your Bibles up or swipe there on your devices.

We hear a lot about the true meaning of Christmas and as you come to church during this season you hear people talk about Advent. What is Advent? What is the season of Advent? What’s the true meaning of Advent? Where did that come from? And we’re going to reach today all the way back 700 years before the time of Christ into the Book of Isaiah for one verse in particular that’s so important as we talk about the incarnation, as we talk about the coming of Christ into this world.

He came into what was a very dark world, not just physically dark. Indeed, our cities are so bright. I love to drive around the neighborhoods and see all the Christmas lights and all that stuff, and I loved being out here for the Christmas festival. I don’t know how many of you were here, but we all took pictures. It’s just an amazing event and you can go on Instagram and see a bunch of that stuff, but it’s just twinkle lights and lots of people and all that sort of thing. So we love that, we love light, all of us do. And it’s because, actually, darkness is dark. And when the prophet Isaiah spoke about the coming of the Messiah, he spoke at a very dark time. King Ahaz was the king in Judah, down in Jerusalem, the Southern Kingdom. The kingdom had divided in two. We’ve been studying 1 Kings lately, and so this is kind of later than that, than where we left off in our study.

But as the kingdom divided into two, the North generally called Israel, the South called Judah. It became at the time of Isaiah a pretty dark place. There was pressure—political pressure, war, threatening wars. There were all kinds of political tensions and it sounds a lot like the kind of darkness we experience in our own day and time as well. Except in their day and time probably it was much more harsh and much more tangible than we might experience. I know that’s hard for us because, a lot of times for us anyway, we might think our slice of history is the most important one, the biggest one. This is the “Oh my goodness, the train’s falling off the track” and all that, but it’s not nearly as bad as it might’ve been during the time of Isaiah, how dark it might have been at that time.

And yet there came this promise from God to the prophet Isaiah. Closer to our own time, the 20th century English author, Dorothy Sayers once said, “The drama is the dogma.” The dogma and the drama are kind of the same thing. And she emphasized it because some people say, “I don’t want a religion with any dogma.” And she would say, “No, the dogma is the drama, the drama’s in the dogma.” What we believe is what’s so radically amazing and weird to a watching world, if their proclivity is to not believe that they aren’t willing to believe. So we’ll look at this throughout the Advent season, this “Dawn of Redeeming Grace.”

Dawn can be a noun or a verb. Dawn can be that rose pink thing that happens in the sky before the noun dawn happens each day, if it happens to be a sunny day. But it can also be a verb where we’re talking about something that is emerging, something that’s coming to perceivable light, something that’s becoming clear to us that wasn’t clear to us before. And I’m so glad to declare that with the arrival of Jesus, which we will celebrate around this time… We don’t know what day he was born. I hope that’s not bursting anybody’s bubble. We’re not really sure. I mean December 25th is a date. And sometimes, trust me, I’ve been wanting to push it over the cliff and just say, “You can have it.” And let’s talk about the incarnation of God coming, becoming man, becoming one of us and how fascinating that is, how wonderful that is, how radical that is. I’m just really glad to declare that with the arrival of Jesus, redeeming grace has begun to dawn on us.

It presupposes that there will be preceding darkness of night every year in the Advent season. It begins for us in the bleak midwinter. We sing that sometimes, don’t we? Because the daylight hours are fewer and the nighttime hours are more than normal. And isn’t it weird that at 4:45 it’s dark? That’s pretty strange. And just about the time I get used to it, God decides to change that and all of a sudden it’s light until 5:15 and I’m going, “Whoa, I feel like I’m up a little too late here.” But now I mean it’s 6:00, I’m starting to yawn and think about going to bed and all that sort of thing. It’s just crazy the way it works like that.

Where did we get Advent from? Well, this guy was probably one of the ones, his name’s Maximus, he was the Bishop of Turin in the fifth century. He had a series of homilies that were entitled, “En Adventu Domini.” And we had a guy who was kind of a Latin scholar that was in the last service. And I always love it when the scholars come up to me and help me figure out how to pronounce things because I sound like a real hillbilly when I’m in Advent. And I guess in Latin, the proper pronunciation for the word adventus would be “adventus.” Some of you have taken Latin and I see some heads going like this. And then this guy was quick to tell me that, well, that was the scholarly pronunciation. That’s the way they said it. But then the Catholics came along and they sort of adopt co-opted and they said “adventus.” And so I guess that’s whether you’re from the South or the North of the Roman Empire or not. I mean you can say, maybe the Roman Empire had a Southern accent as well, I don’t know. Down here, I moved down here from Philadelphia. Everybody’s, “Hey y’all.” And then, “Hey, y’all. Hey, hey y’all, y’all.” And it’s like it goes on and on and up in Philadelphia it’s like, “Yo.” It’s different, we just say things differently.

Maximus evidently had some homilies called En Adventu or Adventu Domini. A buddy of his who I think was more of a hipster, look at his hat there, I think he hung around in coffee shops a lot. This is a guy named Caesarius, bishop of Arles in around the sixth century, 502 to 542. In his writings we found a mention of the preparation before the birthday or the celebration of the birth of Christ. So there’s something about a preparation that was going on for the birth of Christ, that celebration that he was talking about. And yet there’s still no, you look through his writings, the extant copies of his writings, you still don’t see a general rule or instructions for the observance of some season called Advent.

Then a little bit later is Gregory the Great. Now a lot of you have probably heard of him. And he just had a sermon that had been titled by somebody for the second Sunday of Advent as if there was a first Sunday of Advent and a third Sunday perhaps, but not certain. So what’s the exact origins of this thing we call Advent? And the answer is we don’t know. And sometimes that makes people uncomfortable. It doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable. It makes me feel like historians are being honest because I think it’s pretty impossible to be able to know everything there is to know about every question you might ask or I might ask about a tradition that rose up in the early church. The term Advent does indeed come from the Latin, adventus or “adventus,” and it’s a rich word. It refers to “an arrival, an appearing, a coming” or even in some of the places as I was studying it, it’s referring to “the presence of Christ among us, His appearance.”

Here’s his first appearance, His second coming that He talks about in Scripture, and there are at least four different great words that refer to that—and I won’t go into all of that, you can look that up online. It’s a great afternoon of trolling through the internet trying to find all of that. The point is not just to get all caught up in trying to figure out the what, the when and the where of His appearing, but to ask the question why did He come. It is apparent that whatever the date of His birth may or may not have been, He really did walk the planet. It’s not just the Bible that talks about a Jesus of Nazareth that walked around doing some rather strange things and died a rather difficult death. And even some rumors of the fact that He got up again from the dead. What I hope happens to all of us then is that we move through this year’s season of Advent with a renewed sense of God’s eagerness to be with us.

The God of the Bible that we talk about here at The village Chapel week in and week out as we study the 66 books of the Bible, that God didn’t just create the world, do a marvelous thing and then drop-kick it over into the back fence of the universe somewhere and say, “Have a good time. Try to figure it out if you can. If you want to pray to Me once in a while, okay.” No, that’s not the God of the Bible at all. The God of the Bible reveals Himself throughout the Scriptures all the way back to Eve and Isaiah all the way back to Genesis and the creation of in itself and then all the way the other way through the 66 Books of the Bible to Revelation.

God, the God of the Bible, is eager to be with us. And so I ask you, are you eager to be with Him and all that that might mean, and letting down your guard to allow yourself to be loved by Him because for some of you it’s really, really difficult to let down your guard to be loved. Some of you don’t trust that He could love you like the Scriptures claim that He does. We will together commemorate the birth of Christ as we go through Advent. We will saturate in and celebrate the life of Christ and we will anticipate the return of Christ as one U.K. evangelist, Glenn Scrivener, says, “It’s Incarnation fest.” We always want to sort of put an event together, don’t we, that we can promote…. I love Glenn’s sense of humor.

Kim will be talking about this sort of past, present, and future senses of His arrival, His appearing, if you will, on her aforementioned podcast, which I’ll give a husbandly plug for right now. You don’t want to miss that, it starts tomorrow and I think you’ll really enjoy some of the things that she has to present.

Brett McCracken is an author that some of us here on staff have enjoyed reading from time to time. In one of the articles I read by him, he said,

“The essence of hope is not the downplaying, justifying or avoidance of present pain and sorrow. Rather, hope is the expectation that as real as the pain is now, it will one day feel as foreign as our faintest memories.”
Brett McCracken

As real as the darkness you might sense right now in the world that you live in, that I live in, we all live in, and there’s a lot of it. There’s fear, there’s anger, there’s acrimony, there’s confusion, there’s chaos. As one theologian that I respect quite a bit says, “We live in a world that is intellectually confused and morally bankrupt.” If he’s right, and I actually believe he is, where do we turn? Where do we find an anchor? Where in our darkness can we turn to face the direction of an approaching light?

And we will suggest to you throughout the Advent season that the light is approaching and it’s a great story, it’s “The Dawn of Redeeming Grace.” And I want to read about it from Matthew Chapter 1. We want to turn there in your Bibles and just take a look with me. I’ll be reading from the New American Standard Bible here today. And we’ll take a look at that Isaiah verse as well in just a moment. Before we do, let me pray.

Lord, thank You for Your Word that it’s living and active. Thank You for the way You draw us to Yourself through what we read in these pages. I pray that You give us today a clearer vision of Your truth, a greater faith in Your power, and a much more confident assurance of Your love for us. Pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen and amen.

Matthew 1, and I’m going to read verses 18 to 25 in a minute, but look at verse 1 just for fun. “The record of the Genealogy of Jesus, The Messiah.” Messiah is the Jewish or the Hebrew version of the word Christ, which is a Greek word. It’s a title. It’s not Jesus’ last name. His first name is Jesus, but His last name is not Christ; that’s His title. He’s Jesus the Christ. And He typically was called Jesus of Nazareth, meaning that’s the town He grew up in. So this is “The Genealogy of Jesus, The Messiah, the Christ, also the Son of David.” He wasn’t the immediate progeny. He wasn’t the immediate son of David, but He’s a descendant of David. And the reason that Matthew starts that way is because the predictions of all of the Old Testament, which Matthew will quote almost 100 times, all of those predictions talk about this Messiah, this Anointed One that was going to come and was going to literally bring salvation. He would be a light in the darkness, He would bring healing in His hands, His arms would be open wide and God’s salvation would dawn on humanity. And so it was great and wonderful promises, and Matthew who used to be called Levi (remember, he was Levi the tax collector who used his pen to keep a record of what people owed, and then Jesus came along and changed his name to Matthew, which means “Gift of God”) used that same pen to now keep a record of how God had paid the price in full for you and for me. And when you look at this genealogy, I’ll leave this for you to read on your own. There’s 42 names there.

The first time we started watershed Bible study, we actually began with the Book of Matthew and I did like two years in Matthew and 16 weeks or something in the genealogy of Jesus. And we ungrew that Bible study really fast. It was awesome because nobody wanted to plow through those names like I did, I just totally geeked out on it. But “this is the record of the Genealogy of Jesus, The Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” In other words, He’s in the right line. And He didn’t start, “Once upon a time…” which we’re used to stories that have talking animals and fables and myth and legend and all that. Most of those are “once upon a time” stories. This is the beginning of the record of the genealogy, historical reality, of Jesus who was the promised Messiah, who’s also a son of David and a son of Abraham. He came in the right line. God’s promise for a Messiah goes all the way back into the Book of Genesis. And the story of Abraham was included in that story of Genesis. It actually goes back before that to Genesis Chapter 3.

But the story of God sending a Messiah, a deliverer, an anointed one, a King that you could trust, a King that you could love, a King that you would want to have as your King, that story is so amazingly timeless and beautiful and we want to lean into that story. We’re all longing for that. We may or may not know that. Let’s go to verse 18. “Now, the birth of Jesus Christ was as follows.” Sound like an accountant? Sounds a lot like an accountant. Here’s my categories, here’s my columns, here’s my spreadsheet. It was this way. I love that. “When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit.”

Now there are so many questions that would raise as well; if we had time, we’d dive into a bunch of them. But to the point, they had a three-stage sort of approach to marriage back then. For the most part here in our world, it’s kind of a two-stage thing. You get engaged and then you get married, right? Back then they had engagement, betrothal and then they had the consummation of the marriage ceremony. Sometimes that ceremony would last like a week long, lots of food and everybody comes. There’s just an amazing opportunity for a city-wide party and that sort of thing. But before all of that, “While she was still just betrothed to Joseph, before they came together.” What could that possibly mean? You’re going to be able to connect these dots. “She was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit.” And I don’t know what that was like for Mary as a young teenage girl to go and after the angel, Gabriel, spoke to her, and we have that record later, but for her to be overwhelmed by that story and an angel telling her that she was going to become pregnant and yet how could this be?

And then the reality of her little tummy starting to… To tell mom and dad, ‘Mom and dad, guess what? I’m pregnant.’ And what her parents must have thought. The kinds of difficulties that must’ve created in her relationship with her parents. Did her dad get outraged? Did her mom shriek in horror? I mean, this is a real human person here. A real human family. And then Mary to go and to talk to Joseph and to say, ‘Joseph, I have something I need to tell you.’ And then for them to have just that time as a couple for this young girl to tell Joseph, don’t know how old he was, might’ve been much older actually. He’s probably an arranged marriage, because he passes from the scene. We kind of lose track of Joseph and we don’t really know, we don’t have a record of, what happened to him.

But when she told him that, what must that have been like? ‘Joey, I got something to tell you.’ And he, we’re told right here, verse 19, “Being a righteous man and not wanting to disgrace her.” He actually cared about her. “Planned to send her away secretly. But when he had considered this, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, ‘Joseph, son of David.’” That’s interesting that he reminds him that he’s in the line of David too. And even though he would only be the legal guardian of the boy, Jesus, he knows what it’s like to be in the legal line of David. “‘Don’t be afraid, Joseph, to take Mary as your wife; for the Child who has been conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit.” And that’s what Mary would’ve told Joey, ‘God did it. And I know you won’t believe me, but God did this and that’s what the angel told me.’ And that’s what the angel ends up telling Joseph as well.

And so many times we are so afraid to go on ahead and obey God in a moment that we cannot explain, in a moment where we can’t figure it out, how it happened, in a moment that to our senses, to our scientific sophisticated mind, we don’t think that’s possible. And yet God says, ‘In spite of all of what you see here, think, feel, I want you to do this.’ And what did he do? The angel goes on to say, “‘She shall bear a son; you’ll call his name Jesus. He will save His people from the sins.’ And all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet: “Behold a virgin shall be with Child and bear a son, call His name Emmanuel.” Which translated means, “God with us.”

“Joseph awoke from his sleep.” And this is so beautiful. I mean, you want to study the life of Joseph. “And he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him, and he took Mary as his wife, but he kept her a virgin until she gave birth to a Son; and he called His name Jesus.” Just like the angel commanded him to do. That’s just really amazing. It’s worth turning right now immediately to the passage in Isaiah that the angel quoted, “therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: Behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son and she will call his name Emmanuel.” Which we already know from Matthew. We know what that means, “God with us.”

So today we’re going to be talking about “The Dawn of Redeeming Grace.” And I want to point out that it involves or it involved a Sign, it involved a Son and it involved a Savior. And it still does. And I hope as we go through this study that’s exactly all that will dawn on you, that very kind of thing.

“It is noteworthy that the clearest promises of the Messiah have been given in the darkest hours of history… Immanuel is a grand word. ‘God with us’ means more than tongue can tell.”
Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I can’t even begin to tell you with words, all of the words that I might or be able to muster, I can’t begin to tell you how significant it is that God wants to be with us. It’s mind-blowing, eye-popping, heart thumping to me.

And so we get around to this time of the year and some preachers will say, ‘Oh, I’m kind of nervous, I don’t really have anything to say. I’ve done 24 of these sermons in the Advent season, in the Christmas time and talking about the incarnation, all that sort of thing. And I feel like I’ve exhausted the subject.’ Oh no, we have not. We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the subject. It is the biggest question in the world: Why would God come for us? A lot of people think the biggest question is why is there only one way? And they’re really saying, “I want my way, I want God on my terms.” And God says, ‘I broke into the darkness of your world, I burst through into your rebel heart.’ When you said as a collective group of humans, you said, “No, God, we can do it on our own.” Just like a petulant little two-year-old—nothing against two-year-olds. I was one once and so were you—there are times when the two-year-old is inconsolable. If you agree with me, whisper a Methodist amen. Okay, yeah. We got some realists here. Yeah. Chesterton used to say, “The only provable doctrine of the Christian faith is original sin.” Because he can see it on the street. And I always add, or in the mirror; it’s right there. That was us and that’s been us over and over again with God. And yet, mind-blowing, eye-popping, heart thumping, He came anyway for us. When we had determined that we knew best, when we had determined that we would not do what His counsels advise us or command us to do. We would not do what His wise warnings of Scripture warn us about. And how they call us to faithfulness and discipline and all. And we would not do that because we don’t feel like it or we feel like He let us down or we’re anxious about the way it might go, and we don’t think we can trust Him enough. And it all gets down to that, doesn’t it? It all gets down to, do we trust Him?

I love Mary for the sense that when you read the narrative of her, the announcement, the one thing you are blown away by is that she says, “Be it done unto me as the Lord wills.” And I don’t pray that enough. I don’t pray that with such a disposition of the heart enough. But it is noteworthy as Spurgeon said, “The clearest promises of Messiah, they begin it in the darkest hours of human history.” And that time, Isaiah’s time as well as Mary’s time as well as our time, dark times indeed. If you don’t know it’s dark out there spiritually and morally, I need to stir you, I need to awaken you in some way. But I also need to say as a person myself and as a person who’s being saved—am I saved? Yes, I’m saved. But I’m being saved too, and one day I will be fully saved when he returns and sets all things right and I’m really looking forward to that—because now I’m struggling and wrestling with my myself and my sinfulness and my pride and my pain and all of that just like you are as well.

And we talk about that here at The Village Chapel it’s so important for us to do that. And it’s just then that the Word of The Dawn of Redeeming Grace comes, and it’s just in those times, those kinds of times, that it brings a word of hope to us. And we turn and we start to realize, “Hey, we need a Sign, we need a Son, we need a Savior.”

How many of you have ever asked God for a sign? You got a job offer, you want to go to this school or that school, should I ask this person out or not? For all the guys out there that are convinced that, and I’ve seen this happen, all these Christian memes on the inter webs, as they say, where it’s like you go up and ask this beautiful girl you’re going to marry, you want to date whatever. “The Lord told me that you are supposed to be mine.” And I go, “The Lord’s got my phone number too and He didn’t tell me that.” So it’s like that. But we look for signs all the time and Kim always says, “You shouldn’t live by signs, but you shouldn’t ignore signs either.”And so there’s a balancing thing to it, but you’ve probably looked for signs. The Lord speaks to Ahaz in Isaiah Chapter 7, and He says, He even calls Ahaz to ask God questions to reason with God. And I read a lot of commentaries that try to suggest they know what was in Ahaz’s heart. And I think maybe it’s true. He did this thing where he goes, “I will not question God.” I could hear him even saying it. G-A-W-D. “God, I will not question God.” I think that’s an Israeli English accent or something like that, I can’t quite get what that is. But it was sort of the hidden motive that seems to be, “I’m not interested in hearing from God” and maybe you’re like that too.

What signs are you looking for? What signs do you ignore? I mean, every single day you wake up and have literally a million signs in front of you. Your eyeball has 120 million rods in it, 6 million cones before you even perceive or see anything at all, your eyeball is a sign that something somewhere made something really incredible that you get to use and perceive stuff with. And then there’s all that stuff you sense and perceive.

Now, have you ever been coming home from the West, home to Nashville and you’re on Interstate 40 and you’re so tired and you’ve been driving, and yet you know you’ve driven it enough times like me. You know that, that sign that says “Nashville 27” is coming. Yeah. You’ve driven it so many times, you know 27 miles to home and you’re looking. And I want to just stir us to be eager and awake. I think the people of Israel were in one way hungry for a sign when the Lord gave them the sign of this virgin conceiving bearing a child, but I think some of them wanted a sign to be a different kind of sign. They didn’t want it to be green with white letters. They wanted it to be red and to be lit and they wanted there to be little children holding hands and doing ‘ring-around-the-rosy’ around it. They prescribed it in a lot of different ways, the way they want their sign to be. And we’re all that way with God sometimes.

We want God to speak to us on our terms and our way and we want the outcome to be under our control and that is not the way the God of the Bible works. The only way to know you’ve got ahold of a real God is to understand that from time to time He’s going to say something that outrages you and from time to time He’s going to do something completely different from the way you would do it, different timing, different everything. Then you might have connected with the God who is really there. And so He brings a sign that comes in a dark hour for Mary, a dark hour for Joseph, a dark area, a dark hour for Israel, for most parts of the world, a dark hour. And even for human history, I would say a dark time.

“Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son, and she will call His name Immanuel.”
Isaiah 7:14

And you see that’s why, I know the Hebrew word virgin there is alma, and I know that it could be translated ‘young woman’ as well as virgin. How is it that we think it’s virgin and not young woman? Well, because it’s intended to be a sign. Young woman would not be a sign. Young woman would be an everyday occurrence. A sign would be something unusual. A sign would be something that you maybe can’t even explain, like a virgin bearing a child, a son in this particular case. It’s very specifically said “and she will call his name Immanuel.” And this is what the Lord says to Ahaz. Ahaz, the one that’s like, “I don’t want to test the Lord.” And then God speaks and says, ‘You know what? I’m going to give you a sign anyway.’

So here we all are, a bunch of people going, “Show me a sign.” People have been doing that for a long time. “Show me a sign.” And the Lord says, ‘I sent you a book full of signs. What have you done with those? Do you even notice them or are you just wanting it to be a different color sign?’ And here in this particular day and time when they knew full well just like we do what it takes to create a human person and a little baby, here’s a sign, a young girl who’s a virgin, she hasn’t been… “Before they came together.” It says it right here, “Before they came together she was pregnant and she had this child.” And so it’s a sign and the only way it’s a sign is if she’s a virgin. If there were indeed, let me see if I can find this quote, I want to throw this up on screen for you.

James Anderson, he’s a Professor of Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte. Great book called, Paradox in Christian Theology. By the way, if anybody likes paradox, and I know some people struggle with it, but paradox is a wonderful thing, a wonderful bit of the Christian faith. He said,

“If there were to be an invasion of the imminent by the transcendent” (that is, if for instance, God were to come into the earthly temporal world that we live in) “all for the salvation of sinners, would we not expect it to be mysterious, to defy human comprehension? Such mystery would be a mark of reality, not human invention.”
James N. Anderson

So there’s a lot of people that will just fold their arms and go, “I’m sorry, it’s impossible for a virgin to conceive and bear a child.” Name one other time that that’s happened and they can just fold their arms all day long. And I got to tell you, I happen to be one who would argue that you believe a lot of things you can’t explain. Every single day you flip a switch in your house or you tell Alexa to turn on the light or whatever it is, and it happens. And I’m going to bet if I ask for a show of hands, most of us can’t explain how it happens. I think there are a couple of people in the room that can explain it, but that’s a far different thing from what we’re talking about here—God becoming a human being. I bet most of you can go out here and turn the key or push the button whatever in your car and you’re pretty much expecting that the engine is going to start. And when it doesn’t, you get really mad, but you can’t explain either when it starts or why it doesn’t start and yet you expect it to start and you trust that it will start.

We believe a whole lot of things that we can’t explain; we do it on a daily basis. So that’s not the issue that I get to be the one to explain it and to be able to explain it. Just because I don’t know how God did it doesn’t mean God can’t do it. It doesn’t even mean that it’s irrational for me to think that God might do it. Why? Well, because I actually believe that God created everything ex nihilo, out of nothing. That I can’t explain at all either. Any God that can create everything out of nothing to do the virgin birth thing is like nothing to Him. Just like walking on water is nothing to the One who created gravity and water and feet. He can do that stuff. So let’s get past the nonsense of trying to say it’s an intrinsic impossibility. No, it’s not to the God that creates everything out of nothing.

Some of you will remember the 1995 song, “One of Us” written by Eric Bazilian, sung by Joan Osborne. She asked the question, “What if God was one of us?” It was is a massive hit. It’s got a classic sound to it. I love the guitar intro to the whole thing. And it asks a really great question. I think it’s important to ask. And I think that’s the whole point of our study today. What if God were one of us? If He was one of us, how would that change us? And I think that’s what the songwriter wanted us to think about too, is how would that change us if God became one of us and just a stranger on a bus, et cetera, et cetera. The whole point.

Our dark and sinful condition separates us from God. The Son of God became one of us in order that we might become the children of God, sons of God ourselves, sons and daughters of God (John 1:12). We can’t do that on our own. Are we His? Yes, He owns us by right of creation. He owns every single one of us by right of creation, we are His possession. But His interest is in relationship, not just possession. And He wants you to know Him and so He’s made it possible for you and for me to be in right relationship with Him, and it really is mind-blowing.

“It’s one thing for God to be with us as God, but it’s on a whole different level for God to be with us as a fellow human being who spent forty weeks in utero, learned how to crawl then walk, suffered through puberty, eventually faced the firing squad of Roman crucifiers. We have that God.”
Chad Bird

Can you imagine what it must have been like for Jesus to leave all the comforts of heaven to condescend, to become one of us, to be stuffed inside of a little baby, inside a womb, to be subject to birth at all? To be subject then to learning, to be crying out, to be cold, to be rejected by schoolmates later on, to be rejected by disciples even later on, disciples He had poured His whole life into and that they rejected Him and to be hung on a cross, to have His hands pierced with nails, have His side pierced with a spear, not for anything he did wrong? He didn’t do anything wrong.

The Apostle Paul put it this way: “God made him [Jesus] who knew no sin to become sin on our behalf so that we might become the righteousness of God in Christ.” (2 Cor. 5:21) So Jesus who knew no sin was on the cross bearing the sin of the world, your sin, my sin, the sin of the Roman soldiers that put Him there, the sin of the Jewish religious leaders that manipulated for Him to be brought up on trumped up charges of insurrection, all of that. He did that. Why? Because His great love for us motivated Him to do it, because He was willing to become humble like that. Gavin Ortlund in his book, Humility, great book. A bunch of us on staff have read a couple times. It’s a really, really wonderful read.

“The central belief of Christian theology is what we call the Incarnation, the belief that God became man. It is a staggering idea on many levels, but most breathtaking of all, perhaps, is what it reveals of divine humility.”
Gavin Ortlund, Humility: The Joy of Self-Forgetfulness

See, this is so different from any other religious belief system on the planet. I mean, look at them all. They’re going to unfold their list of things you got to do to appease the gods. And the Christian faith as we go through the books of the Bible and we point out the gospel to you all along the way, it’s good news, it’s not good advice. Good advice tells you what you ought to do. Good news tells you about something that has happened and that’s what the gospel is. Christ has done something, He’s broken into our dark world and He’s come on a rescue mission. And that’s why we can say “The Dawn of Redeeming Grace” involved not only a Sign and a Son, but also a Savior.

I love the David Gooding quote, I’ve used it before, but I love it.

“God has appointed a captain of our salvation, and made Him responsible for seeing us through this world home to glory. Thank God we can count on His faithfulness and know that He will never fail, never once lose His patience with us, or His temper with us. That he will fulfill His appointed task to the very end. He will save to the uttermost all who come to God by Him.”
David Gooding, An Unshakeable Kingdom

Would you come to God by Him? Don’t come to God by religion. Don’t come to God by just being a Village Chapel attender. Don’t come to God by just living in the South here in America. Come to God by Christ Jesus, in Christ Jesus, place your trust, your hope, your confidence in the finished work of Christ. Believe the good news, don’t just look for some good advice. I think the Scriptures overflow. There’s plenty of good advice. There’s plenty of wisdom there. There’s plenty of wise warnings there, that’s true. But Jesus didn’t come just to be your example, He came to be your Savior and that’s why it’s good news. That’s why it’s the best news I think we could ever be talking about.

I’ll close it with this quote by Tim Keller from Hidden Christmas. Great book by the way. If you don’t have a copy, you want to go out and buy one this week.

“‘Immanuel’ means the ideal has become real, the absolute has become a particular, the invisible has become visible. The Incarnation is the universe-sundering, history-altering, life-transforming, paradigm-shattering, event of history.”
Tim Keller, Hidden Christmas

Anything but dull. Dorothy was right, the drama is in the dogma. The dogma is the Incarnation. And that’s why we’ll be talking about it all month long: God becoming one of us, that we might be reconciled to God by the finished work of Christ on the cross. Let’s pray.

Lord, thank You for this story of Your announcement to Joseph through this angel. The prediction 700 years before that time, to Isaiah, to King Ahaz, to the guy who didn’t even want the sign, You gave a sign. Here we are all eager, at least most of us, to hear from You. Here we are open or at least pretending to be. Here we are Lord, needing Your help to even begin to comprehend the slightest bit about what You’ve done in becoming one of us, to save us. Take this historic and global reality, Lord, and make it personal for each and every one of us right now, no matter how long it is we’ve been following Jesus, if we’re a Christian or if we’re not a Christian. No matter how many more questions and no matter how many more signs we say we want, I pray Lord, that we will turn to You. And this one sign that you have indeed put right in front of us this morning and that we will respond in faith believing because of You giving us the gift of this revelation of what You’ve done in the person and work of Christ Jesus. In His name we pray. Amen and amen.