This Will Be A Sign To You

“This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”
Luke 2:12

At our church we have what we call “Stations of Advent.” We ask our artists to create paintings or images of ten different scenes of Jesus’s birth narrative. Each piece of art is connected to a passage of scripture and is accompanied by reflection questions. As I slowly went through each station, taking in both the artwork and the scripture passages, I was struck by a few things.

First, for Mary and Joseph, Bethlehem was not the plan. They lived in Nazareth. Their whole world was in Nazareth, including their home where they had been making preparations for the new baby. Jesus’s room was being set up in Nazareth. The place where the birth was likely to happen was being prepared in their Nazareth home. Bethlehem was not their plan.

In fact, going to Bethlehem was the result of an oppressive, pagan Caesar wanting to take a census so that he could tax the people even more. They took the 90 mile walk from Nazareth to Bethlehem because of the greed of a pagan, Roman ruler. This was not the plan. This was unexpected. And the timing of this journey couldn’t have been worse. This was not a convenient trip. This was the result of having to “do what you are told” when you are Jewish and those doing the “telling” are Roman.

When they got to Bethlehem, the guest rooms of their family who lived there were all filled because of the census. They likely waited until the last possible moment to leave Nazareth, hoping that the baby would come early so Mary wouldn’t have to make the journey pregnant.

They were likely getting to Bethlehem late compared to their relatives. And just when it couldn’t get worse, Mary goes into labor. All of their plans for Nazareth were out the window. This baby was going to arrive in Bethlehem.

But Bethlehem was not ready for a baby. There was no delivery room ready. There was no baby room ready. The only ounce of privacy they could muster was to go out and be with the animals. Laying baby Jesus in an animal feeding trough post-delivery was not the plan. The manger was not the plan. It was the result of their poverty and the Roman Emperor’s greed.

What the Lord showed me was that the manger in Bethlehem was not Mary and Joseph’s original plan. It wasn’t even their backup plan. It was the result of oppression. It was the result of poverty. The manger was not a sign of some glorious birth. It was a sign of a lack of resources.

That is the story that Mary and Joseph would have experienced on the surface. But there was this whole other thing happening behind-the-scenes that they couldn’t see, that we couldn’t see, and that had to be revealed. It had to be highlighted to us by angels and prophetic words from the Old Testament. What seemed like a mistake — what seemed like a messy, inconvenient, ruining of plans — was actually God’s plan all along.

Angels showed up to shepherds and said that the sign that this little baby was in fact the long awaited Messiah and Savior of Israel was that he would be in a manger. On the surface, the manger was a sign of ruined plans, an overcrowded city, and economic hardship. But the angels showed us something different. God transformed this manger into a different kind of sign. It became a sign that Jesus was, in fact, the Messiah. (Luke 2:8-20)

God does the same with Bethlehem. While Bethlehem wasn’t Mary and Joseph’s original plan (and it seemed like just the bad idea of a greedy Roman Emperor), Bethlehem was God’s plan all along. When the Magi showed up and asked where the Jewish Messiah was supposed to be born (Matthew 2:1-12), the chief priests and teachers of the law all pointed to Bethlehem. The city of Bethlehem was transformed from “inconvenient, ruined plan” to the prophesied plan of God reaching hundreds of years back to the prophet Micah.

And God would continue to do this throughout Jesus’s life. The ultimate example of this is how God transformed the cross, a sign of Roman oppression and torture, into a sign of forgiveness, salvation, love and grace.

God has a way of taking our ruined plans and saying, “No, this was My plan all along.” God has a way of taking our signs of darkness and despair and saying, “No, this is a sign that points back to Me.”

In the New Testament, “signs and wonders” is a nickname for miracles. Miraculous events performed by Jesus and the disciples became signs pointing people to the reality that God’s Kingdom was breaking into the world and breaking out among us. But in the story of Jesus’s birth (though His birth itself was a miracle), we also see God use other things, ordinary things, even ruined things as signs pointing to the in-breaking of His Kingdom.

God uses all kinds of signs pointing to and revealing His Kingdom on earth. Whether it be a manger or a miraculous birth, a miracle or messed-up plans, all of these signs are used to point us back to Jesus and His Kingdom.

Can you see them in your own life? What signs are appearing right now in your life to point you back to Jesus? It could be something wondrous and miraculous. It also could be your ruined plans and less-than-perfect situation.

Can you see the signs? During this Advent season, these signs are all around us if we have eyes to see.

Self-Limiting

Who, being in very nature God,
    did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
    by taking the very nature of a servant,
    being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
    he humbled himself
    by becoming obedient to death—
        even death on a cross!
Philippians 2:6-8

As Christmas approaches, I’ve been thinking a little about the incarnation–God becoming human in the person of Jesus. Nothing can limit or contain God except Himself. When Jesus became human in the incarnation, it was a gigantic act of self-limitation on the part of God. The One who was once omnipresent, self-limited to a time and place in history. The One who never experienced pain, hunger, or thirst, self-limited Himself into a human body that experienced all the basic human needs for food and sleep. He made Himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant.

Does this mean that Jesus wasn’t the fullness of God?

No. Colossians 2:9 is clear, “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.” Imagine a dad playing basketball with his young son. If he is a good dad, he will “self-limit” the amount of force and skill that he exerts. He does this out of love for his son. Does this mean that in this moment he is “less” of a dad? Quite the opposite. In the dad’s loving self-limitation he is fully himself and maybe even the best version of himself because his love is tangibly on display. The same is true of Jesus. “The Son is the image of the invisible God…” (Colossians 1:15).

What about God’s omniscience and power? Did God self-limit those in the incarnation?

I believe He did.

It is true that we see Jesus know things He couldn’t know without supernatural insight. We also see Jesus do incredible miracles that He couldn’t do without divine power. Yet, I believe that what we see in Jesus is a tiny fraction of God’s total omniscience and power. I believe Jesus only did that which is possible to do through the power of the Holy Spirit. He only did that which was possible for a human to do who is completely filled and empowered by the Spirit and perfectly connected to the Father. In other words, I believe Jesus did these things as a perfect human conduit of the power of the Spirit not as God the Son.

Luke 4:1 says that Jesus was “full of the Holy Spirit” after His baptism as He was led into the desert to be tempted. Then, having been victorious over Satan in the desert, Luke 4:14 says that Jesus returned to start His ministry “in the power of the Spirit.” It’s not until this happens that we start to see Jesus do miracles, healings, and deliverances. So I believe that the “supernatural” aspect of Jesus’s ministry was Him acting as a human fully empowered by the Spirit and completely connected to the Father. I don’t believe they are instances of Him flexing is divinity (though He had every right to as God the Son). So even His miracles are an aspect of His self-limitation.

We know that the power He could have displayed could have been so much more overwhelming. Jesus even said, leading up to the cross, “Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?“(Matthew 26:53). There was so much more power that could have been unleashed but wasn’t. Again we see Jesus’s self-limitation.

Though Jesus knew things about people that He couldn’t have known without supernatural help (see John 1:47-48 & 4:16-18, Luke 5:22 & 9:47), I believe this was Him operating in what the apostle Paul would later call gifts of the Spirit like words of knowledge, words of wisdom, and prophecy (1 Corinthians 12:8-10). Yet, we still see that Jesus self-limited His foreknowledge when He talks to His disciples about the end times and says, “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Matthew 24:36).

Jesus’s self-limitation in the incarnation was a radical act of love toward us. It also leaves us followers of Jesus without excuse. We can no longer write-off parts of Jesus’s ministry with the statement, “Yeah, well, He was God.” We sometimes like to think Jesus’s divinity gets us off the hook from having to operate like Jesus did in the fullness of the Spirit. But, though He could have operated out of His divinity, I don’t believe He did. Everything He did He did as a human fully surrendered to the Father and fully empowered by the Spirit. And though we will never be the perfect conduit of the Spirit that Jesus was, we are still called to be a conduit just the same.

Christmas Movies

Missy and I are finding ourselves weary of the “lessons” of so many Christmas movies. Many movies have at least one kid filled with questions and doubts about Santa who is then told to “just believe.” But the child at home watching this movie learns to “believe” just in time to discover their belief in Santa to be false.

What’s the message here? It doesn’t matter if your belief is true, just believe in something? Belief in something is the virtue, not truth? This message is toxic to real faith.

Or what about the movies that have some greedy character that is all about the presents they get at Christmas. Then the lesson at the end of the movie is that Christmas isn’t about the gifts but about….wait for it….family and loved ones. Really? But what about the kids who have a dysfunctional family? How are they supposed to watch that movie?

The truth is that Christmas is about the gift of Jesus, not a generic sense of family. And no matter our family situation, Jesus loves us and is God with us, Immanuel. That’s the good news!

Or what about the movies that tell kids that if they are good enough, they will get lots of presents from Santa. So the kids whose parents went through a rough year this year–who lost their jobs or their business or their health–what are they supposed to think when only a few gifts are around the tree? Is the lesson that they weren’t good enough?

We are spreading the lie of performance mentality with all of this, or worse, the lie of works righteousness. Performance mentality says that if you perform well (in life, in school, at home) then everything will work out. And if you don’t perform well, it won’t. So if things are bad, push harder to perform better. Works righteousness is similar. It says that if you do everything correctly, you will be in right standing with God and He will bless you. Both of these are lies. We live by grace through faith and not by our performance or our works.

I know these are just silly movies, but the messages in so many of these movies are horrendous. Missy and I are having a harder and harder time sitting through them without getting a little nauseous. Sometimes I just want to be a Grinch. I want to turn off the delightful little Christmas movie midway through and tell my kids, “Don’t believe anything you just saw. It’s crap. It’s not true.” And maybe one day soon I will.