When the angels proclaimed the news that a Savior had been born, that was not received as good news of great joy by everyone, and it still isn't today. On Truth for Life, Alistair Begg explains what it takes for the Christmas story to become truly significant in someone's life.
We're continuing our study in Luke chapter 2. Consider your calling, brethren, when you were called. Not many of you were powerful. Not many of you were from a noble background. Not many of you were particularly brilliant.
The consonant is important, the m is important. He doesn't say, Not any. He says, Not many.
And that's true. And part of the offense of the gospel is an offense that has silenced some of us, because our concern for the approbation of our peers, whether it is in the business or the scientific or the social community, is such that we do not want to be thought as those foolish people who actually believe that God was incarnate, came down the birth canal of Mary in the time and in the place that the Bible says. But he gave the news to the shepherds.
They are unlikely recipients. Because in the Bethlehem fields, those who were used to the arrival of the birth of lambs were now going to go and gaze upon the Lamb of God. They were going to arrive at this manger scene and hear the cooings of this little child—cooings that would eventually, from the same lips, produce the statement, I am the good shepherd, the good shepherd gives his life for the sheep. But we must move on from the unlikely recipients to the angelic appearance. Now, some people are stumbled over angels. I am not stumbled over angels. And I don't think you should be too. In fact, many of our skeptical friends who believe all kinds of interesting things want to step back from angels.
I just say, Why don't you include it with all of the other things that you're prepared to engage in? Frankly, I think it would be strange if the hosts of heaven were not involved at some level in this kind of announcement. I mean, you don't expect just some guy coming up the street with a bell, you know, shouting. People are like, Who's he? So that's Levi.
Yeah, they found him somewhere. He's supposed to go up and down Bethlehem just shouting, you know. They say it wouldn't have the same ring to it, would it? No, God says, The dispatch room in heaven is full with all the angels. It's like Caddyshack.
That's what it is. I imagine the angels all sitting around like caddies at a good golf course, and waiting for the caddy master to come along and say, You take that bag, and you take that bag. And so the angel master, Gabriel, whoever we want to think of, he comes along and says, Now I've got one for you.
Where am I going? Bethlehem? All right. Message? Good news, great joy, O people, Savior.
Got it. Who do you want me to tell it to? Shepherds. Are you sure? I mean, there's some pretty nice people in Bethlehem, some more upper kind of, you know, there's some political types. There's, you know, some people have done pretty well in Bethlehem. Hey, just go where I'm telling you, all right?
Just go there. And so the angel comes. The angels appear. It would be surprising if the angels didn't appear. Go and read your Bibles and think about angels for a while this afternoon. You'll discover that they're created beings, they're spiritual beings, they're intelligent, but they're not all-knowing, they're powerful, but they're not almighty. They exist to do God's bidding as servants and as messengers.
They're shadowy figures, they're mysterious figures, they're awesome, and they're real, and they show up at key moments. Here at the birth of Jesus—remember when Jesus is arrested in the garden and his disciples are prepared to defend him physically? He says, Put your sword away. I could call twelve legions of angels right now if we wanted to take care of it that way. At the resurrection, who is it that explains the significance of the empty tomb? It is an angel. And at the return of Jesus, in power and in glory, it will be with the sound of a trumpet and the voice of the archangel. So again, I say to you, it would be very strange if it was not an angel of God that was entrusted with such a magnificent story and such an important mission.
You don't want to leave it just to anybody. It is an angel that answers Mary's question when he has told her that she's going to become the mother of a child. And Mary said to the angel, How will this be, since I am a virgin? And then the angel says, The Holy Spirit will come upon you. The power of the Most High will overshadow you. This is an Old Testament picture. It's the picture of the cloud, of the presence of God, both identifiable by the presence of the cloud and veiled on account of the cloud, appearing over the ark, appearing in the presence of Moses, appearing at many times, signifying that God is present here. And the angel says, That you are going to become the temple of God, Mary, that which is born in you.
There's nothing like this anywhere else. The eternal God, who's coequal with the Father and with the Spirit, literally, literally and actually entered the virgin's womb and took upon himself our human nature. That is what the New Testament record is saying. The fact that liberal scholarship seeks to clean it up by saying, You know, people in the twenty-first century are so effete, they are so clever, that please don't go to them with any of that stuff. Take out the hard parts. It's just a brick in the wall. It's just a small piece of a great theological mosaic. You can take it out, and it won't do anything. If you take it out, there's nothing left. If you take out the virgin birth, you just took out Jesus of Nazareth. You just took out the Savior.
You took the whole thing out, literally, physically. What's this somebody I don't understand? Fine.
I don't understand either. But I believe. Do you believe? I don't believe by projecting myself into oblivion. I don't believe as a result of a blind leap into nothingness. I believe about this on the strength of what I believe about God as revealed in Christ. Because if your starting point is that there is no God, then why are you even wasting your time with a discussion about God incarnate?
It's irrelevant. But if your starting point is a God who created the entire universe, then since we, at this point in the twenty-first century, can create conception without sexual intercourse, why would we be surprised that the Creator of the universe would do exactly what we're told he did? It says, Thomas Watson, it's a sacred riddle, it's a paradox that God is manifest in the flesh, that the voice that thunders from the heavens can be heard crying in the cradle, that the hands that threw stars into space grab hold of Mary and suckle at her breast.
No, Christ taking flesh is a mystery that we will never understand. And that's why it says, And the angel of the LORD appeared, and the glory of the LORD shone. Of course it did.
How would it not? And again, I say to you that as in the appearance of God to Moses at the burning bush, the coming of the ark of the covenant into the temple, the mount of transfiguration when they were there with Jesus on the mountain, what you have here is a supernatural dimension. And as a result, the shepherds are filled with fear. And they were filled with fear. In the hymn writer, it's, Shepherds quaked at the sight. Quaked. It's a good verb, quaked, isn't it? I'm not sure if I was quaking with fear. It's a good verb. I like a good verb.
I hope you do too. But anyway, their response was that they were fearful. They didn't say, Oh, this must be the incarnation. They didn't say, Oh, angels, man, I'm getting sick of angels. They're everywhere these days.
No. They were floored. And that's what I want to say just finally in the moments that I have left, that here, as Luke records this for us, he's forcing us to consider the fact that the recipients were unusual, that there is no getting away from the fact that there was an angelic visitation, but wonderfully he provides for us, or they provide for us, a vital explanation. An explanation. You see, because the coming of Jesus into the world would mean nothing apart from God's own explanation.
Right? Unless we have some explanation of this, what are you going to do with it? And when men and women come to Christmas without the explanation of Christmas that is provided in the Bible, then it is possible to do all kinds of things with it. It just becomes sentimental. It just becomes whatever you want it to become. But if we're going to be operating from the text of Scripture, then we're forced to say, not only do we have the event as having taken place, but we have the interpretation or the explanation of the event.
What is going on here? That's the inevitable question that would have flooded the hearts of the shepherds themselves. Don't be afraid, says the angel. That's the kind of standard angelic greeting in the morning. He didn't say shalom or good morning. The angel said to get used to going, Hey, don't be afraid. Don't be afraid.
You remember C.S. Lewis says in the book on miracles, he says it's always shocking to find life where we don't expect to find it. Someone says, It's alive! And we jump back. Whoa!
I didn't realize that. The shepherds are going about their routine business, and suddenly it's alive! What is that? It's alive! Look out! What do we do with this?
Don't be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy. It's for all the people. It's a light for revelation to the Gentiles.
Let me tell you what's happened, says the angel. This day—that's time—in the city of David—that's place—a Savior has been born. That's the significance. Notice again, time, place, history, geography. The chapter begins, In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus. That's the history.
Again, history. On this day, in this place, a Savior has been born. You remember Matthew? It's recorded there, You will give him the name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. And we'll just end by noticing that his name is there for us. Savior Christ the Lord. Savior in that he is God's provision for our human predicament. He is God's provision for our human predicament. You see, part of the problem that some of us are up against when it comes to the story of Christmas is the sort of Charlie Brown thing, where, if you remember one of Schultz's cartoons in the early days, had Charlie holding a sign that said, Christ is the answer. And Linus, in one of the other frames further down, had a sign reading, What is the question? What is the question?
Now, that's legitimate, isn't it? Because Christ is the answer to the human predicament. What is the human predicament? Why are we the way we are? Why are we, after all this time, as developed humanity, still so sinful, still so rebellious, still so unbelieving, still so jealous, still so warfare-like? You would think after all this time we would have got it fixed. But it is not fixed.
Why? Because the heart of man is warped, turned in upon ourselves, as Luther put it, erring from our ways like lost sheep, missing the mark of God's purpose, stepping on his yellow lines, not loving him with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind and all our strength. In other words, I'm a sinner. I sin, I do sinful things, but the sinful things are not the issue. The problem is my heart. I have a sinful heart. I have a propensity to badness, not to goodness. And so do you. But until the Holy Spirit makes that clear to you, I could stand up here for fifty years of Sundays and tell you that Christ is the provision for the predicament, but until you are convinced that you yourself face that, my story means nothing to you.
Why would it? It's like somebody giving me a call this morning and saying, I'm in a boat on Lake Erie, and I'll save you from drowning. You say, well, okay, yeah, I mean, but I'm in Solon right now. I'm not on Lake Erie. And frankly, I'm not going there in the foreseeable future.
And certainly, no one is as cold as this. Hey, but thanks for the information. That was nice of you to call. Hey, honey, a guy just called and told me he saved me from drowning in Lake Erie. He said, but you're not in Lake Erie. I said, no, I know, I told him that, but apparently he just wanted me to know.
You sit out there, and you listen to me. He said, well, I don't know what he's on about. He's on about some—it's a salvation thing or something. He said, Luke's thing is about salvation. And apparently there's some people that need to be saved.
I don't know who it is. Maybe it's my wife. Maybe my kids are a bit messed up. They could get saved, I suppose, but not me. I'm long past being saved.
No, no, no. No, I'm really pretty good. You see, a Christian's a humble person, ultimately humble. Because when you take the Christmas carols, you realize that they reduce us on account of a grandeur and wonder of who God is. It's not a Christmas carol, but it is along the lines of a Christmas carol.
It goes like this. It is a thing most wonderful, almost too wonderful to be, that God's own Son would come from heaven and die to save a child like me. You see, some of us, until the Holy Spirit shows us what our me is like, we say, oh yes, of course. It really is quite wonderful, and it's quite expected that He would come and save a child like me. After all, I mean, let me tell you a little bit about myself. I mean, I'm not very religious, but I'm quite religious.
I graduated Lord of Heaven, and I am going on in my life, and this and that and the next thing. No, you'll never become a Christian from that position. You'll never become a Christian from the vantage point of detached curiosity. Oh, that's very interesting. You've got a story about salvation.
You must tell me about that sometime. No, but when God shows you that you're in the wrong with him, that you will be resurrected to eternal death on account of your rebellion against him, when that dawns on your heart, not as a result of the voice of a man but as the result of the intervening voice of God, then suddenly the news of the love of God in Jesus as a Savior will overwhelm you and will convict you and will convert you and will change you. And that's what it means to be a Christian. It's not signing up for a religious experience.
It's not turning over a new leaf. It is being radically transformed by God. It is crying out to God, Save me, because if you don't save me, no one can save me. Until you come to that point, you will remain outside of Christ. The day you do, if you have faith as slender as the web of a spider, God will take you to himself. He is the Savior. He is Christ. That's not his second name.
That is a title. He is the Anointed One. He is the Messiah. And he is Lord. And that word is the word that was used by Greek-speaking Jews to translate the Hebrew Yahweh.
In other words, here's the deal. Good news, great joy for all the people, because unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior. You need one. He is the Anointed One. He is the Messiah.
He is prophet, priest, and king. And he is God Almighty. You remember Horace told his students when they were writing literature, if you're writing a drama, he says, do not introduce a God into the story unless it is entirely necessary. Do not write a God into the story unless it is entirely necessary.
Makes perfect sense. And the reason that God has been written into the story of your life and mine is because it is entirely necessary. My dear friends, I have every sympathy with the people who've turned their backs on sort of Christmas humbug.
I would like to as well. Because the Christmas story is infinitely more significant, infinitely more demanding, infinitely more wonderful than that which is generally understood and proclaimed. There's a reason why people say it's trivial is because it is trivialized. You know, Christianity, you're supposed to put blankets over old ladies' knees and be kind to children. And it's a wonderful time for the children. Well, of course it is.
Who doesn't like having a nice time with children? But are we gonna sidestep this drama of the incarnation, this angelic visitation, this cry from heaven? We're gonna just pass it off with another eggnog and a few cheers of well-meaning?
Well, let's all get together and have a nice time. No, it's far more significant than that. God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.
That's what was happening. That he who knew no sin became sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. He was not counting their sins against them, because he was counting their sins against him, against his only beloved Son. He loved you so much. You talk about preparing a gift for somebody. You're talking about thinking about the absolute, appropriate, necessary, wonderful expression of love. What greater expression of love could there ever be than the God of all eternity should from eternity purpose to take his only beloved Son and send him into the world that you and I may be set free from fear of sin, from the reality of death, from the tyranny of the devil? God's love is so great. Would you spurn his love?
You say, Yeah, fair enough. Today, if you hear God's voice, don't harden your heart. Just call out to him where you are. Say, Lord Jesus, I haven't got it all sorted out, but I get the sin part, and I know I can't rescue myself. And since you have come to rescue, please rescue me. If you say that, if you mean that, God will.
I know. He promised. Father, thank you for the Bible. Thank you for this good news of salvation. Father, thank you for your love for us in Christ. May the love of Jesus draw us to himself, the joy of Jesus strengthen us in himself, and the peace of Jesus keep our hearts and minds. And may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God our Father and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit rest upon and remain with each one of us today and forevermore.
Amen. You're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life with a message titled, A Savior Christ the Lord. And if you just prayed that prayer along with Alistair, and you'd like to hear more about Jesus and the Gospel, let me encourage you to visit truthforlife.org slash learn more. Our hope at Truth for Life is that listening to this daily program inspires you to deepen your relationship with God, our Heavenly Father. And the book we're recommending to you today invites you to do that in a very special way in the routine events of daily life. The book is titled Every Moment Holy, volume three. It's a collection of more than 120 prayers you can pray to experience nearness to God in the midst of your daily tasks.
For example, there are prayers for doing creative activities for when you're cooking. There's a prayer for doing yard work. Request Every Moment Holy, volume three today when you donate to the Ministry of Truth for Life through the mobile app or online at truthforlife.org slash donate. Now our offices will be closed next week as we celebrate Christmas. So if you need to reach us by phone to request a book or to make a year-end donation, be sure to do that before 5 p.m. Eastern time today.
The number is 888-588-7884. We hope you have a wonderful weekend and are able to worship with your local church. On Monday, we'll continue our study of the nativity scene. Join us to learn about the remarkable sign and song that prompted the shepherds to go to Bethlehem. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.
