Jesus came to save the world. He didn't come to be an example of nobility and morality and integrity. He didn't come to be an example of passivity. He didn't come to demonstrate patience and kindness and mercy and tenderness. He did all of that, but He came to be the Savior of the world.
Jesus Himself in Luke 19, 10 said, the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur. I'm your host, Phil Johnson. When a company has record earnings for the year, the CEO makes the announcement. When a nation declares war, the highest ranking leader of that country steps to the microphone. If there's important news to share, you can be sure the person reporting the news is also important.
Yet the most important headline of all time, the greatest piece of news ever, was first reported by just about the lowliest people on the social ladder. John MacArthur introduces you to those first messengers today in a study that's preparing you for next week's Christmas celebration. John calls his series the promise of Christmas. So turn to Luke chapter two and follow along as John begins the lesson. Let's open our Bibles to the second chapter of Luke's gospel. Let me start reading in Luke 2 8.
And in the same region there were some shepherds staying out in the fields and keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord suddenly stood before them and the glory of the Lord shone around them and they were terribly frightened. And the angel said to them, do not be afraid for behold I bring you good news of a great joy which shall be for all the people. For today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior who is Christ the Lord.
And this will be a sign for you, you will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger. And suddenly there appeared with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among men with whom He is pleased. And it came about when the angels had gone away from them into heaven that the shepherds began saying to one another, let us go straight to Bethlehem then and see this thing that has happened which the Lord has made known to us. And they came in haste and found their way to Mary and Joseph and the baby as he lay in the manger.
And when they had seen this, they made known the staten which had been told them about this child. And all who heard it wondered at the things which were told them by the shepherds. But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart and the shepherds went back glorifying and praising God for all that they had heard and seen just as had been told them. Now as we noted last time in looking at this text, the key statement in the narrative is found in verse 11. In verse 11 it says, there has been born for you a Savior. There has been born for you a Savior. That is the high note of this entire passage.
The shepherds and the angels are bit players, as it were, in the scenario in which the Savior who has been born is the main character. There has been born for you a Savior. This is the greatest news the world has ever heard. This is the good news. In fact, that's exactly what it says in verse 10, I bring you good news of a great joy which shall be for all the people.
This is the good news. One has been born who will save sinners from their sins and from eternal hell. In the very beginning the child born was not just any child, this was the long-awaited Savior of the world. This is the one who finally would save His people from their sins. This is the one who would finally be the Lamb that would offer the one sacrifice that would perfect forever those that are sanctified. This is the one who would come and pay the penalty for sin, offer the final sacrifice with which the entire sacrificial system would finally go away. The endless, literally millions of lambs that had been sacrificed had never been able to take away sin, but they had only pictured one who would.
The people waited and waited and waited for that one to come. Jesus Himself in Luke 19 10 said, the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost. In John 4 42, He is called the Savior of the world.
In 1 John chapter 4, maybe the most important statement of all those, 1 John 4 14 says, and we have beheld and bear witness that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world. Jesus came to save the world. He didn't come to be an example of nobility and morality and integrity.
He didn't come to be an example of passivity. He didn't come to demonstrate patience and kindness and mercy and tenderness. He did all of that, but He came to be the Savior of the world. The Jews had long waited for that to happen. They, as I told you last time, knew God as a saving God. They knew the nature of God was to save because He had delivered them from their enemies and He had so often delivered them from the immediate consequence of the sin, consequences which they deserved. He had rescued them from every imaginable kind of situation in spite of their sin.
So they knew God as a saving God. The God of the Old Testament had revealed Himself clearly as a Savior, but there was also the fact that though God was a saving God, there had never yet come one who had provided fully and finally that promised salvation. And so they long awaited the Savior of the world, the One who would come and satisfy the justice of God.
We find in this passage the angelic announcement that the Savior has been born, the One of whom Luke writes in the book of Acts, Luke wrote Acts as well, the One who would come and be the Savior to the degree that there is salvation in no other name but the name of Jesus Christ, Acts 4.12. The long-awaited Savior had been born, the One who would not only be the Son of David and who would rescue Israel politically from their enemies, not only the One who would be the Son of Abraham, fulfilling the Abrahamic Covenant and rescue Israel from its time of suffering, the promise of David would come to pass and Israel would have a kingdom that literally would be a kingdom of peace. The Messiah would rule over Israel in peace and not only over Israel but over the whole world and His kingdom would have no end, it would be eternal. Not only would the Messiah come and establish the fulfillment of Abrahamic promise and that is the end of suffering and the fullness of righteousness and holiness and blessing on the nation, but the Messiah would also come and save sinners. In fact, they wouldn't receive Davidic promise of the kingdom, they wouldn't receive Abrahamic promise of blessing until they had received New Covenant salvation. They were looking for a Savior who would come and take away sin. They were looking for the New Covenant to be fulfilled, a Savior who would come and forgive them for their sin, a Savior who would come and wash them, a Savior who would come and take away the stony heart and put a heart of flesh, a Savior who would come and give them His Spirit, a Savior who would rescue them from judgment, the judgment of God in eternal hell. And the great announcement of the passage here, the great angelic announcement is in verse 11, there has been born for you a Savior. This is the high point of redemptive history.
This is the greatest moment in the history of the world. Savior would come and He would take on the judgment of God for sinners. He would be punished in our place. As symbolically the Lamb died in the place of the sinner in the Old Testament sacrificial system, this Lamb, the perfect, spotless, pure Lamb of God would die for sinners and He would die such a perfect death and bear sin so perfectly that never would there be another sacrifice. Jesus would be the Savior of the world by taking on the punishment for sinners. He would die under the execution of God's wrath.
God would literally execute Jesus for your sins and my sins and since the penalty was fully paid, God would be free to forgive us and take us to eternal heaven and not send us to hell to bear the punishment for our own sins because Christ had borne it for us. Seven hundred years before the baby was born, seven hundred years before the Savior was born, a prophet, a Hebrew prophet by the name of Micah had predicted that when he was born, he would be born in a little village called Bethlehem, house of bread, a somewhat obscure village except for one fact. It was the hometown of David, the great king. It was where his father Jesse lived. And that was very important because that played into the fulfillment of the prophecy. The prophet Micah said that when he's born, he'll be born in Bethlehem. Though it would be a little place, he would be born there. The great Messiah, the Savior of the world would be born there.
As it turned out, God had to orchestrate all the events to make that happen. Caesar Augustus, who didn't know anything about Micah or the Old Testament or God and couldn't have cared less, decreed that a census would be taken. He decreed that sentence would be taken in all of the fullness of the Roman Empire, that included Judea. So the Jews had to comply with the census. They resisted apparently for some time because the census was given in 8 B.C.
They didn't comply until two to four years later. And when they did comply, Herod or somebody in Israel, maybe the Sanhedrin, maybe Herod, required that the Jews to register for the census had to go back to their house of ancestry, as it were, back to their origins. And so that meant Joseph and Mary, who were both in the line of David, had to go to Bethlehem, which was the home of their ancestor David, and there they had to register. And it just so happened that the timetable of the census required them to be there. Probably there was a deadline, like April 15th, that required them to be there at a certain time, and so they had to make the 85 to 90 mile journey while she was in the last weeks of her pregnancy, something you wouldn't normally do under those conditions because it was really a distance you had to walk, be carried on a donkey. But they did it because they had to, and that put them there at the strategic time, and the child was born exactly where the prophet said he would be born, in the little village of Bethlehem.
When he was born there, he was born in obscurity. The Romans were there, the soldiers were there, of course. They were everywhere Roman presence was. Roman presence would have been heightened in Bethlehem at that time because the census would have been going on there. They would have had Roman officials who were taking the census there. They would have taken up every available room.
People would be coming into town and staying with families and friends because they would be related to them, going back to the house of their ancestry. By the time Joseph and Mary got there, there wasn't any place for them to stay except in what was most likely a shed, a large lean-to that was an overnight stopping place for travelers. It could have been a situation where you had four walls surrounding a courtyard.
Those four walls would have little shanty-type rooms and probably a loft so that you could have some people below at ground level and some people climb up a little ladder and stay above. But all of those places were taken, even as primitive as they were, they would have been better than where Joseph and Mary ended up, which was in the courtyard, which was occupied by all the animals of all the travelers, donkeys and goats and probably some sheep and maybe some camels. Really an inappropriate place, a dirty place, a terrible place for a semi-private or quasi-public birth in a very obscure and very unlikely circumstance. But it was there that the Savior was born.
He was born in obscurity. Apparently nobody around there knew. None of the people knew. None of the Romans knew. None of the inhabitants of Jerusalem or the visiting folks knew. Just another baby being born as they heard the cry of Jesus when He came into the world.
The cry was just another cry of another baby. And it was so obscure, we don't hear any announcement at all going on in Bethlehem. Just Joseph knew and Mary knew. But it wasn't long till we come to verse eight and an announcement is made. And the greatest event in the saga of redemption has occurred and it's about to be announced.
And an unlikely announcement, it says in verse eight, in the same region there were some shepherds staying out in the fields and keeping watch over their flock by night. Now the Jews had been looking for a Savior for a long time. And even the Romans were conscious of a Savior of the world.
In fact, they gave that very title to Caesar Augustus. There is existing Roman indication in some of the ruins that Caesar Augustus had the title Savior of the world. People are always looking for a great Deliverer, always looking for a great Savior. And while Caesar Augustus was in Rome celebrating himself as the Savior of the world, the true Savior of the world was being born in Bethlehem in obscurity. There was only one true Savior. He had come to deliver His people from their sins and to bring them out of the judgment of God and to rescue them from eternal hell and to bring them out of suffering into blessing as had been promised to Abraham and out of subservience into royalty and reigning as had been promised to David. So He had come...He had come to bring the blessings of the New Covenant, the blessings of the Abrahamic Covenant, the blessings of the Davidic Covenant. He had come to save sinners and then to give them all the promised blessing. It's a little wonder all heaven broke loose and the angels showed up and started praising God. It's a little wonder the shepherds when they left at the end of this passage, verse 20, were praising God as well. This is the high point of all redemptive history, the greatest moment in the history of the world. That's why you have to stop a little and consider what's going on here.
You can't just whistle by this one. Now the message is good news. Good news, verse 10, good news of great joy.
And what's so good news? There has been born for you a Savior. The Savior has come who will save His people from their sins and therefore from death and hell, from the judgment of God and who will bring them into the promised blessings of a kingdom and a king of blessing beyond description and imagination. Eternal glory, all that, good news.
Good news, folks, good news. There is a Savior. There is forgiveness of sin. You can't escape hell. You can't go to heaven forever.
You can't be blessed by God. Now as we unfold this passage, I want to give you a few points. Number one, the proclamation of good news. You know, it's the most unlikely group of people to make this proclamation to if you were orchestrating this, if you were a PR agent and you were designing a campaign to announce that the Savior of the world had been born, the last people you would go to was a bunch of shepherds. I mean, literally the last people you would go to. You might say, well, you know, we want to get this...we want to get this thing out, we need to go to the people who have the greatest influence. We want to go to the influencers, as they would be called today.
We want to go to the movers and the shakers. We want to go to the people who have the ear of the world. So first of all, we might consider going to the high priest.
I mean, he would be the religious leader of Israel. We might be considering going to the chief priests and the scribes who are the teachers. We might be going to the Sadducees who basically made up the Sanhedrin, which is the ruling body of Israel, a body of 70 elders of Israel, basically responsible for the nation as a theocracy under God. Or you might say we'd go to the Pharisees because they had the great...they were the religious fundamentalists, they were fastidious about prophecies and we might want to go to them because they searched the Scriptures, they were looking for the Messiah.
And we might want to go to somebody who had some influence, might even want to send a memo or a press release to Caesar Augustus to let him know that the true Savior had been born. Shepherds, not on your life. But that's exactly where the Lord sent the message. And verse 8 says in the same region, that's the region around Bethlehem. Bethlehem is about six miles south, directly south of the city of Jerusalem.
It's just a small village, certainly not a city. So down in that region there were some shepherds. There's no adjective for these shepherds. It literally says there were shepherds in the Greek, just shepherds. It doesn't tell us anything about them.
There's really nothing to say about them. This is the most unlikely group to which God's angel proclaims the good news of the Savior. Nobody would have assumed this, except for the fact that if you go back to Isaiah 61, in Isaiah 61 you have a prophecy that really has the Messiah speaking.
It has the pre-incarnate Christ speaking about His coming as Messiah. And He says, the Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me, it's the one He quotes in Luke 4 and says He fulfills. But He says, the Lord has anointed Me to preach the good news to the poor. Or to preach the good news, that word in Hebrew can mean the lowly or the humble, or as it's translated in NAS, the afflicted.
And He has sent Me to bind up the brokenhearted and to proclaim liberty to captives and freedom to prisoners. So when the Messiah comes, He's not coming to the up and inners. He's not coming to the influencers. He's coming to the poor, the lowly, the meek, the afflicted, the brokenhearted, the captives, the prisoners. That's just a category of outcasts. When the Messiah comes, He's going to touch the outcasts.
He's going to touch the lowlifes. In fact, as Jesus went through His life, He attracted to Himself the outcasts of society, tax collectors and absolute nobodies and prostitutes and sinners and drunkards, and you know all of that because the Jewish elite, the aristocracy of religion in Israel, criticized Him for that, and they said He hangs around drunkards and prostitutes. That's what messianic prophecy said. The Messiah would come to the poor and listen, He would come to the outcasts, He would come to the lowly, and shepherds qualified for that. Mary in her Magnificat, praising the Lord when she was told she was going to be the mother of Messiah, in Luke 1 52, praised God for exalting the humble, exalting the lowly. And if you go to 1 Corinthians chapter 1, you have the Apostle Paul saying in verse 26, in the purposes of God to salvation, there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many of the human intellectuals are saved, not many mighty, not many noble, because God chooses the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, the weak things of the world to shame the things that are strong, the lowly are base things of the world, and the despised God has chosen.
Then nobody can boast. And that begins at the very beginning. The first announcement of the birth of the Messiah is made to the lowliest, commonest of unskilled peasants in the Jewish social strata. Now it doesn't mean to say that being a shepherd was somehow an illegitimate profession, somehow something that ought to be despised for its own sake, not at all. In fact, Abraham functioned at some point in his life as a shepherd, and Moses functioned, you remember, caring for the herds of his father-in-law in Midian as a shepherd, and David was a shepherd.
In fact, a thousand years before Jesus was born, David was watching sheep in this same area, maybe in the same field. It isn't that there was somehow a shameful profession, it was just a lowly profession. It was the lowliest of tasks. Shepherds were insignificant. They were basically ignorant. They were uneducated. They were unskilled. They did the kind of work shepherding that was generally given to children to do because it was so simple to do.
It didn't take any particular talent or any skill. They were basically unskilled. They had no trade, they had no skill.
They were really the lowest paid. And beyond that, beyond the fact that they would be the lowest people on the social ladder, by virtue of the necessity of caring for sheep seven days a week, they lived in some level of violation or another of Mosaic law. They couldn't maintain the Sabbath the way the Sabbath should have been maintained because of their necessity to work. They violated the Sabbath to some degree. They couldn't maintain the myriad of man-made regulations that had been added and piled and heaped on top of Sabbath law, which confounded the people for the most part because of their inability to keep these fastidious regulations developed by the Pharisees. But certainly shepherds couldn't abide by them, so they were looked not only as on...not only as low socially, but they were looked as living in general violation of religious law and therefore to some degree or another they were outcast because they violated the ceremonies.
They really were the lowest of the low. As time developed from the time of the New Testament on, as the fastidious legalism of the Pharisees began to capture more and more of the hearts of the people, shepherds began to be more and more and more despised. And if you read Jewish literature over the next hundred years or so, they were more and more and more despised.
In fact, it wasn't long after this that they began to be seen as unreliable, untrustworthy, unsavory characters who were largely suspected of stealing sheep and doing all kinds of illegal things. They were not anybody close to the high echelons of society. And maybe that's a shock to you because all your life you grew up imagining these shepherds were some kind of special people. Well, they were the least special of all people. And isn't that the point?
Isn't that the point? Isn't that just like God to disdain the religious elite, to disdain the quote-unquote spiritual establishment, to disdain the hypocrites who thought they were good enough to achieve relationships with God by their own self-effort and to make the announcement, the greatest announcement that ever been made in the history of the world to the lowest of the low, the humblest of the humble? Shepherds. And by the way, lest you demean being a shepherd, Jesus Himself was happy to call Himself the good...what?...Shepherd.
So there's nothing wrong with the task in itself. But in society they were the lowest and commonest nobodies of Israel's society and culture. In fact, this is interesting, shepherds were not allowed to testify in court in that society for a number of reasons.
One, they weren't trusted and two, they weren't thought to be intelligent enough to put things together. They had such poor standing and poor reputation, just perfect for God. If that's not a metaphor of God saving the lowly sinner, what is? The Apostle Paul got a grip on this, didn't he?
First Timothy 1.15, Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners of whom I am chief. The lower the sinner, the greater the glory to God who saves him, just perfect for God to stay in the palace, to stay in the temple, to stay in the priests and go for the outcasts, go for the lowliest of the low. Now I would believe, and I can't be dogmatic about this, but I would believe that the shepherds that the Lord picked for this announcement were probably shepherds who believed in the true and living God. They were probably devout. They may have been among those who in verse 25 are described as looking for the consolation of Israel. That is, they were looking for the Messiah. They were looking for the redemption of Israel, looking for the Redeemer.
Because in verse 20, when they had gone and seen the child, realized what happened, verse 20 says they were glorifying and praising God for everything they had heard and seen. It must have been that they were living in anticipation of that. It's very likely that though they were socially on the lowest level, they may well spiritually have been on the highest level. They may have been devout. They may have been the ones looking for the redemption of Israel. Why else would the Lord tell them this? And of course, when they heard the message, they were so filled with excitement, they went immediately to Bethlehem. By the way, as a note, I'll get to this next time, they were never commanded to do that. I mean their response was not, well, that's nice.
What do we care? Their response was to go immediately to Bethlehem and begin to search, which wouldn't be easy. How do you find this baby among babies? It was likely that they were devout, if lowly shepherds. That's John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, bringing you face to face with the life-changing, hope-giving Promise of Christmas. That's the title of our study here on Grace to You, the Promise of Christmas. You know, these days leading up to Christmas are busy, and that's all the more reason to keep Grace to You as a regular part of your day. And with that said, have you ever wondered how it is we're able to be here for you every Monday through Friday?
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