"Outside the Box" (Luke 1, Gen.15)

As a kid I can remember driving around the neighbourhood looking at the Christmas decorations and singing Christmas songs with my family. We sang about ‘Santa Claus making his list and checking twice to find out who’s ‘naughty or nice’. The implication was good behaviour merited ‘good gifts’. Unfortunately,  the ‘Little Town of Bethlehem’ and the ‘Little Lord Jesus’ weren’t central to my understanding of Christmas.

What did a Jewish baby born 2000 years ago who would be executed on a ‘Roman cross’ have to do with me? However, for me, the message of the ‘life, death and resurrection of Jesus was meaningless. Then, in my mid-20s, God gave me a ‘new heart and put a new spirit’ in me. He ‘removed my heart of stone and gave me a heart of flesh’ (Ezekiel 36:25-27). Ironically, lyrics like, “Remember, Christ, our Saviour was born on Christmas day, To save us all from Satan's power, When we were gone astray… meant something to me for the first time.  

Lyrics such as…”Offspring of a Virgin's womb, Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; Hail the incarnate Deity, Pleased as man with men to dwell, Jesus, our Emmanuel” from “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” stretched my mind and opened my imagination. (See John 1:14)

Later, as a seminary student I was asked, ‘where was Jesus when he was born?’ My answer was in ‘a manger in Bethlehem of Judea, in ancient Israel’.  “And anywhere else”, I was asked.  I and the others with me were confused. Then our Professor explained that the ‘second person of the Trinity’ did not lose His divine attributes and become less than God by changing into a man. The incarnation was an act of addition, in which God added to himself a fully human body and soul. He did this without ceasing to be God. So Jesus Christ was fully God and fully man at the same time, and that was true even in the manger.

So while Jesus was lying in the manger, ‘heaven and earth could not contain him’. Mary could hold the ‘baby Jesus’, while he was holding the world together by the word of his power. He could cry for comfort, while being adored by ‘all the heavenly hosts’. John Calvin put it like this, ‘Christ left heaven without ever leaving heaven’. This is the meaning in the song: Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, Hail the incarnate Deity.

But why would God do this? Why would God take humanity upon himself? An important answer to this question is contained in the very first Christmas SONGS. In the ‘Magnificat’, which Mary sang a song of praise after being given the promise of a child who would be the ‘Son of the Most High (Luke 1:32) At the heart of Mary’s song is the promise that God made to their ancestors, to Abraham and his children. Then, Zechariah, after naming his son John, as instructed by the angel Gabriel, praises the Lord who had remembered his holy covenant, the oath he swore to Abraham. So to understand Christmas and the incarnation, then we’ll need to know something of God’s covenant with Abraham.

Mary’s Song (Luke 1:54–55 NLT) ⁵⁴ He has helped his servant Israel and remembered to be merciful. ⁵⁵ For he made this promise to our ancestors, to Abraham and his children forever.”

Zechariah’s Song: Luke 1:72–73 (NIV84) ⁷² to show mercy to our fathers and to remember his holy covenant, ⁷³ the oath he swore to our father Abraham. (God's Covenant with Abraham Gen. 15)

¹ The Lord speaks to Abraham roughly 10 years after he first arrived in Canaan. God had promised to make Abraham into a great nation, but Abraham childless and his servant was his heir. ³ The Lord promises Abraham that a son from his own body would be his heir. ⁵ He shows Abraham the stars telling him, “So shall your offspring be”. ⁶ Abraham believes and the Lord counts it to Abraham as righteousness. ⁷ Then the LORD reminds Abraham of the promise of the ‘land’ ⁸ and Abraham wants assurance. ⁹ So the Lord has Abraham cut some animals in half and he arranges the pieces across from one another. ¹² Then as the sun set, God tells Abraham that after being ‘enslaved in a foreign country’ in the fourth generation Abraham’s descendants would possess their land ¹⁵ and Abraham would rest with fathers in his old age. Then ¹⁷ a ‘smoking firepot with a blazing torch’ appeared and passed through the pieces. ¹⁸ We are told that the Lord “made or cut a covenant with Abraham” promising Abraham’s descendants the ‘land, from the river of Egypt to the  river, Euphrates’.

The ceremony bound the parties together and the animal carcasses depicted the ‘curse upon the party who breaks the covenant’. What ironic is that ‘Abram falls into some kind of a deep dream-like trance and only the manifestation of God who passes through the pieces’. If God fails to keep the covenant, then God would have to die? This point being that God would fulfill the covenant or He would have to cease being God. The curse of the covenant is symbolically represented at the inauguration of the ‘covenant bond’. Ironically, to bear the curse God would have to become a man. This is exactly what God did in the incarnation of Jesus.  He became a man to bear the curse of covenant. Moreover, in the ‘better new covenant in Christ’ at the inauguration of the covenant we have, not a symbolic death, but the actual death of Christ. In other words, the curse of the ‘covenant breaker’ came upon Christ at the ‘inauguration of the better new covenant’. 

This is the heart of Christmas. The Apostle Paul tells us to ‘consider how Abraham believed God’ and he tells us that ‘those who believe in Jesus are children of Abraham.’ ⁸ Moreover, Paul sees the promises to Abraham as the “gospel in advance to Abraham: All nations will be blessed through you” (Gen. 15, Galatians 3:6–8). Paul tells us that “those who belong to Christ are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” (Galatians 3:29)