Why Did He Come?

We tend to  romanticize some parts of history, when it suits us, and forget just how dark, or sad, or desperate it was when the event, we commemorate, was really happening.  Stained glass windows of the saints don’t tell the whole story of how those saints suffered.

I once went to the Dacchau death/concentration camp from WWII, when I was in Europe many years ago.  When it was operating in the 1940s, it was a horrible, filthy place—-full of vermin, lice, disease and the stench of death.  But after the war,  the local folks turned it into a tourist attraction with clean bathrooms, sturdy wooden bunks, flowers and none of the  smell of the disease that killed thousands. We don’t like to see, touch or smell sadness….we avoid graveyards, talking about death, and sometimes we even water down parts of  our Christian faith.

You’ll see a lot of nativity scenes in homes or outside churches over the next few days.  I have three “creches” in my house. They usually look a little rustic, but the mangers scenes always have clean hay, nice farm animals, appear to be very quiet, holy, serene, peaceful—with heavenly lights illuminating the manger.

Of course that’s not how it was. Jesus, the Son of God, was born in a barn—-a cheap building that housed donkeys, goats and sheep. I have a barn and my uncle hard a barn—they’re nasty when it gets wet and tend to be cold and drafty.  It’s not the place to give birth to a baby.  For goodness sake, the King of Kings first bed was a feeding trough for animals! It was not clean, sterile, well-lit, or quiet.  And yet, that’s where He was born.  He didn’t have a mattress, or some fancy embroidered blanket; they used old clothes to make Him a bed to lay on top of the straw, and it was smelly!

He was raised by a carpenter—-a good man that loved the Lord—-but not an affluent man. They had to work hard. Before he was 30 years old, Joseph, died. His life was not easy and He was not always treated properly.

The man did NOTHING wrong but was slandered, abandoned by His best friends, doubted by His own siblings, laughed at, spitted at, hated, almost beat to death, ridiculed, and finally murdered in the most tortuous ways the Romans could offer.

So tonight, I want to ask you, “Why?”  Why would Almighty God, the Supreme Being, perfect and holy in all ways,  subject His only Son to such a humiliating birth, insults, and a heart-broken young life?  Why did He plan for Jesus to born in squalor, and why did He permit rumors to exist that He was an illegitimate child?  Why not a more impressive, royal, mighty and awe-inspiring birth?

From the time He was born, Jesus was hated. People like Herod wanted Him dead—even as a baby.  During His first three decades, God Almighty’s Son, lived a pretty inconsequential life. But that all changed at God’s timing. At thirty year of age He began to speak about His Heavenly Father, of how people should be living, and of God’s plan for mankind. Immediately He was treated different by people—-they knew He was not-of-this-earth.  Why does God do things this way???

Well, this is actually pretty consistent with what God does. It’s man that doesn’t “get it”. God chose a little rump nation, like Israel, and made them His choice to lead the world.  He choose three hundred men with Gideon to defeat 135,000 Midianites.  God chooses small things, little nations, unnoticed people and does impossible things…..but then it becomes obvious that it was His hand, not happenstance, or luck that caused earth shattering things to occur.

That’s part of the good news of Christmas.  Jesus was sent by God in a such a shocking way to remind us that He was not sent to save the rich…the mighty….the privileged….the well bred—but all people— the poor….the illegitimate….the uneducated….the ones that the world wants to throw away!  He was born lower than most any other baby—-but after that lowly, dirty, humbling birth, God elevated Jesus so that at His name every knew will bow.

So let me remind you of two things:  One, no matter who we are, or where we come from, or how disturbing your past, the Christ-child came for you, as much as He did for the wealthy, the popular, the beautiful or the privileged!  He was born for the lowly as well as the exalted ones—and frankly His life on this earth was more identified with the poor and the outcasts than it was with the pretty and popular.  You can’t accuse God of not understanding your childhood, upbringing, or the challenges you’re facing—He does, in fact, understand on an experiential basis whatever hardships you have had.

Second, and perhaps even more importantly, Jesus knew what He was doing when He obeyed His Father and and agreed to come as a vulnerable, fragile baby, in a dangerous, decayed and dying world.  He was not tricked, coerced or forced to come. He came here with eye wide open to what He would be subjected to and how Hw would suffer and die. There was no “plan B”, Jesus was the one and only Son of God—-and God chose to send Him here, in the manner He did, to not only rescue us, but to demonstrate the enormous nature of His love!!!  Jesus did not have to do this!  It was a choice He made because of His great love!!  But why, oh why, does He love us so much???

I can’t answer that question—-I don’t know—-I cannot explain it.  But I do know this:  Man does not exist for his own sake, but neither is anyone of us  a mistake  We’re told in Revelation that, ’Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.’(Revelation 4:11, KJV) We were made not because He needed to be loved, or so that we might love Him, but because God desires to love us! Let that shake you up for a moment.  He does not need worship, adoration, or purpose. He has all of this and more for all eternity.   But in creating each one of us in this room , we have become, singularly,  the  objects of His love.  God, our Creator, put us here so that He might love us!!!….and He wants to not only love us, but one day to rest ‘well pleased’ in what we have become.

Listen to this: You are so valuable, so beloved by Him, so singularly unique that He sent His Son, born to the world illegitimately—when in fact it was divine—as proof of the limits He would go to, to prove how important you are to Him!  Why did He does this? Because He wants you and me in His presence for eternity and does not want to lose us to the Deceiver—God wants to redeem you for Himself.  But God, who is by His very nature pure and holy, cannot and will not condone, pardon or ignore those things we think, or do, that are contrary to His perfection!  “To ask that God’s love should simply love us and accept us as we are—-born and raised in sin—-is to ask that God should cease to be God!”  (C.S. Lewis)

God is holy and pure—-He can be none other than that!  He created with the option of choosing or rejecting Him and He is doing all He can that we would choose Him—-and that’s evidenced when we submit all Him to make us holy and totally lovable.  What we are outside of God, and we might call ‘happiness’ is not the end God chiefly has in view: He intends to bring us to a new and mightily higher experience of “happy”.

Think about Jesus’ life.  When he began his ministry, He was always doing things in an unconventional way.  No one would have guessed that what He established with a bunch of misfit teenagers and young men would have established the greatest religion in the history of the world.  Unlike other mighty leaders, Jesus withdrew from crowds, told those He healed to tell no one else, never spoke against the ruling government, defended people that were guilty of in and condemned the pride of those that in appearance never sinned.

And 33 years after His birth and at the end of a perfect, holy and selfless life, Jesus faced the opportunity to prove His love for all of us—He yelled to an unjust execution—when could have easily destroyed those who hurt Him  The son of God allowed mortal men to torture and kill him, even though he could have freed himself from Rome’s deadly grasp!

As we mature in Christ, we probably see Christmas more circumspectly  Where we once could not wait to celebrate His birth, and of course open all the gifts, hopefully we more and more we are humbled by the birth of Jesus. The way of the world is to  expect, or even demand, much for ourselves and from others, but the lowly birth of Jesus puts that kind of reasoning to shame.  The manner in which He  arrived was a signal of why he arrived: to redeem hearts, not to rule governments.  Our purpose on this earth, would we follow Jesus, is not to look out for our needs, but the needs of others….it is not to collect, but to distribute….it is not to be loved, but to sincerely love others.

If you know Jesus—the One born in the manger—you’re a new creature and you see things, people, possessions and power, different than the common man does.  Christians should be known by how the mirror Jesus in their lives. Do you? Do you strive to listen to your enemy or silence your enemy?  Do the means things you in revenge to mean people allow you to sleep more serenely, or are you embarrassed that you failed to properly love and pray for those that do nasty things to you?

There is simply no place in the body of Christ for cruelty and meanness.  We love rags-to-riches stories, so if many of us were writing Christ’s story, we might begin with a manger, but we’d end with a throne.  But Christ’s life began in a manger, and it ended on a cross. He warned his followers that a cross could come for them as well. An upside-down kingdom began with an    upside-down birth. When Jesus himself is humble, how do we justify our pride?