God with Us

In my mind, one of the most amazing things about the incarnation is that God allowed Himself to be born into human flesh… and as an infant! (Not that there was any other way… but think about it… Almighty God as a baby?)

At my last church in Kalamazoo, every year in December they assembled a huge ‘living Christmas Tree’ and every year they would put on a big Christmas cantata. During my last year there, they tried re-creating the manger scene. They got a Mary, Joseph, and they got the youngest infant in the church to play the part of Jesus. I think this infant was about six weeks old at the time… and the danger you always run into when you use a live infant to play Jesus is that this young person could get hungry or have a wet diaper… or could just make a lot of noise in general.

And as luck would have it, this infant got hungry right in the middle of a very quiet and somber song. This particular baby didn’t hold back either. She wailed to the whole congregation that she was hungry! The choir director was visibly embarrassed… the choir looked at each other and just smiled in an embarrassed way… thinking ‘Uh, this wasn’t the way it was supposed to be.’

I remember very clearly this particular moment. It was one of those moments when God reaches down and opens your eyes to something about His character and it changes the way you identify with Him. I was sitting at the very back of the sanctuary watching the performance… and as this little one started to cry… I began to realize the extent of the sacrifice Jesus made in becoming a human. I don’t know too many infants who come out of the womb using nouns and verbs and putting together complete sentences. The only way a new-born knows how to communicate is by crying. They cry when they are hungry, they cry when they need to be changed, they cry if they are tired, they cry if they are hurt, they cry if they are scared, they cry for no apparent reason, newborns cry and sometimes they cry very loudly.

I think it is safe to assume that the only way Jesus could communicate to his parents during this particular season of his life was by crying… and it’s safe to assume that the only way he was going to get fed and get taken care of was by depending on a mommy and a daddy. Try and wrap your mind around this one: Almighty God, who created all the languages… who could’ve communicated in a thousand different ways (from audibly speaking to burning a bush without actually burning a bush)… Almighty God, as an infant… could only take a deep breath and wail at the top of his little lungs to get the attention of his parents. Almighty God… who never had a beginning, who is all powerful, all knowing, present everywhere at once… Almighty God, put himself in a position where he had to rely on an earthly mother and father for food and provision and protection.

As everybody looked around in embarrassment at the crying infant in the sanctuary that morning… I couldn’t help but sit there marvel at the sacrifice Jesus made to become one of us… and that was just the first night of his life.

Jesus came to the earth so that He could relate to our struggles… to our heartaches… to our joys… to our sorrows… to our victories… to our fears… and yes, even to our temptations.

I love what the author of Hebrews writes: “Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has gone through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are – yet was without sin.” (Hebrews 4:14-15)

I don’t know who wrote the next passage but I love it because it perfectly explains how beautiful and mysterious it is that God became man:

“He was the God-man. Not God indwelling a man. Of such there have been many. Not a man deified. Of such there have been none save in the myths of pagan systems of thought; but God and man, combining in one personality the two natures, a perpetual enigma and mystery, baffling the possibility of explanation.”

I’m not sure if any of you remember the 1996 pop song sung by Joan Osborne called “If God was one of us.” The lyrics asked ‘What if God was one of us… just a slob like one of us… just a stranger trying to make His way home.” Many people found the lyrics to be offensive… you can’t sing things like that about God. I found them to be sad, because I want to tell the writer of those lyrics that God already became one of us… and it’s through that man, it’s through Jesus that we can find hope and peace and freedom and salvation.

I am so thankful for the Christmas season, but I am most thankful for what it represents: The birth of our savior, Jesus Christ. The coming of Immanuel… literally, God with us.

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)