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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Matthew 6:2-4 “Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. 3 But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
Why does Jesus talk about rewards for giving generously? Why not just encourage altruism?
He knows us. Having created us, and been one of us, he knows us and our motivations intimately.
If he had commended doing good acts for purely altruistic reasons, do good just to be good, help others just for them, give to charity just for the charity, we’d very quickly have found a way to make it about us.
A reputation for generosity, or a feeling of goodness..we can make these our God...the source of our ultimate worth.
This is what Christians have traditionally called sin...putting something earthly in God’s place.
Generosity should be a good thing, but when it becomes our Gods, becomes pride and self-conceit. These can pretend to be better rewards than God himself.
It's hard to avoid...human nature. Seems whenever we give, someone will notice. Either others notice, shower us with praise.
Or, Even if we hide it from others, we shower ourselves with praise.
Jesus’ claim is that these are small rewards in the grand scheme of things...and we’re wasting our time if we receive them, as we can easily believe we’ve been “paid in full”
And so Jesus commends something different...do it just for God.
Whether you give money, time, medical help, gifts, talents, whatever.
Hide it from others, hide it from ourselves, and give to others because God loves them as his own children.
Give in order so they will see God loves and values them…and wont’ even notice us.
Our heavenly father sees this kind of thing – his children becoming more like him – and rewards it with his attention, himself, far more rewarding than the temporary attention of any human, even ourselves.
In God’s presence, we realize that anything less, like worldly praise or feeling smug, was a poor substitute.
Jesus can commend this because it’s his way.
We now realize how spiritually poor we are. We’ve been accepting the applause of others & ourselves instead of God, we’ve let our pride and self-conceit replace him!
But all the same, from the safety of heaven, as God the creator and sustainer, came to earth.
He gave up his safety and majesty in the most selfless act possible. He died for us, and gained nothing but a restored relationship with us, a relationship that asks us to follow him into our own selfless acts of service.
When giving is done for God and God alone, a much greater reward awaits…God!
Challenge: What practical steps can you take to be more generous to others, and to keep the focus on God instead of yourself?
