Tuesday - Study It - The Night That Changed The Religious
“The birth of Christ is the central event in the history of the earth — the very thing the whole story has been about.” — C.S. Lewis
We’ve introduced God’s big story in previous challenges using a six act play analogy. In Act 1, God created the world, his masterpiece, like a director’s great script. In Act 2, humans threw away the script, and the play went terribly wrong. In Act 3, it becomes clear humans can’t get back on script ourselves. In Act 4, God steps onto the stage of this world and begins to bring the world back on script. In Act 5 he invites us to improvise with him in a way that makes sense of all that happened before, and arrives at the ending God wrote – the kingdom of God.
Act 4 is the turning point of the whole thing. The moment a director steps onto a stage, the audience is shocked – no one would have expected the director to become part of the play.
But in God’s big story, there were clues – God had been writing the script this way all along.
The prophet Isaiah spoke these words for God 500 years before Jesus’ birth:
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. He shall eat curds and honey when he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good (Isaiah 7:14-15 ESV)
Immanuel means God with us. See the hints here? He’d be born of a virgin. Both things would normally be impossible.
But now in Matthew 1:18-25 you’ll hear echoes of that Isaiah prophecy in a story you’ve probably heard before.
Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us). When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took his wife, but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus. (Matthew 1:18-25 ESV)
Matthew saw it so clearly, and named it.
We see it so clearly in retrospect. We may even like to think that if we met this person, we’d have recognized him as God. This is God, walking on earth! He fits the predictions so clearly…in retrospect.
But so many didn’t see it at the time. Yes, he was visited by shepherds and later by Magi, and caught the attention of at least one despotic ruler, but he was mostly ignored until he was 30 years old.
That happened even though he fit around 400 prophecies written and propagated long before he was born. He made sense of them like he made sense of this one we’re focused on today – God with us, born of a virgin.
This doesn’t seem to have been a particularly important passage to observant Jews before Jesus was born, even though it’s of great interest to Christians afterwards. Yes, it referred to a new king being born in the royal family descending from David – that was important. The word virgin in this passage is hard to translate from the original Hebrew – it could be as general as a young woman, or as specific as one waiting to be married any day – even though both implied sexual virginity as the cultural norm when young and unmarried.
Even then, those who’d studied these prophecies best, the scribes and Pharisees of his day, considered him a traitor and false teacher, not their God with them.
I saw an interesting TED Talk (below) that explained how often experts are wrong. Alan Greenspan predicted uneneding economic growth right before a major recession, for example.
But looking back, we see how wrong those experts were, and the same here.
So what happened here? Why did the experts get it wrong?
Question: Why do you think the religious experts missed that Jesus fit the prophecies and predictions?
Reminder: We have a great Christmas event coming December 14th, 2013: The Original Christmas Party. Hope you’re coming!
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Hi! Welcome to Redeem the Commute. I'm Ryan, you host for the daily challenges. These daily challenges are meant to help people explore what it means to follow Jesus even during our busy commuting lifestyle. If you've never looked into what that means in the first place, I'd really encourage you, check out our Christianity 101 course first. You can take it live in-person or through our mobile app; great introduction to the basic concepts of what it means to follow Jesus that we try to build on in the Daily Challenges.
Every day and week, we follow a rhythm to help us, as one community, learn what it means to follow Jesus even when we're not physically together. Every Monday,we introduce the idea for the week. Every Tuesday, we see what the Bible has to say. Every Wednesday, we allow ourselves to be challenged in our thoughts. Every Thursday, we try to apply it and live it out in our lives. Every Friday, we take time to pray and reflect on the topic. Saturday is a day for rest and then Sunday is a day for community. We're going to start gathering together as one community soon. We just recently had a great baptism service and celebration where a number of our members came together in one place to worship God. We're going to do that more and more often over this year. So, stay tuned for some of our upcoming gatherings.
We're in a series right now called, "Reset." We're looking at how deciding to follow Jesus resets everything in our lives. We've looked at a number of areas that it impacts. This week we're going to look at how following Jesus impacts our view of family.
What’s a family for? Yes, there is a functional reality that families are a vehicle for providing food, shelter, etc. to our young. But family can also be an end unto itself – lots of people see raising a family, or raising a certain size of family, or a perfect family, as their life goal.
I recently read a book by Kevin O’Leary book of Dragon’s Den fame, where he repeatedly spoke about developing a family dynasty. The book opens with a story of divorce, where the husband had an affair and squandered his family dynasty because he didn’t realize the value of what he’d built up with his first wife. Kevin bases his book on wanting people to see “value” in their family, which he considers a place to teach values about money, debt, hard work, etc. But he never asks: why?
The problem when we see family as an end unto itself. Families are made up of broken human beings, they regularly break down, and they don’t always start. If we’re living for family, that’s very risky.
Jesus knew that Family can become an idol, or something we worship and pursue above all else, that could compete with his and God’s place in our hearts:
35 For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. 36 And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. 37 Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. 38 And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. (Matthew 10:35-38)
We can worship family, but when family fails to happen (or happen perfectly), that leaves us with nothing to hold onto. We need a purpose outside of this world, and Jesus fulfills that.
Much as people think Cxity is about promoting marriage and family values, that can’t be the whole story – Jesus and one of the church’s key leaders were single!
According to theologian Stanley Hauerwas of Duke University, Christianity was the very first religion or world-view that held up single adulthood as a viable way of life.
Pastor and Author Tim Keller says, “Nearly all religions and cultures made an absolute value of the family and of the bearing of children. There was no honor without family honor, and there was no real lasting significance or “legacy” without leaving heirs.”
That sounds like Kevin O’Leary’s religion, but Christianity stands in contrast to this! Clearly Jesus and Paul were promoting a different vision of family in their own lives and teaching.
Question: What do you think a family is for? What’s the point? What makes a good family vs. a bad one?
