God Made Flesh

When we talk about Christmas, many times the conversation involves gifts, receiving and giving, love, the tree, mall or how much you plan to spend. This year a survey tells us the millennials will "out spend" all of us other significant shopping groups for Christmas.
The Christmas subject is, Jesus in the manager, or the story itself, but in this blog I want to focus on Jesus in a different way.

I want to look at him from eternity past to the manger.

In heaven, before creation, the Trinity consisted of God, the Word and the Holy Spirit. On earth, the ‘Word’ is called Jesus. God’s wisdom is made manifest or known to us through Jesus.
Jesus as the ‘Word” takes the mind of the Trinity and puts it in the form of the written word because it reveals to us the mind of our invisible God. As much as our words reveal to others our heart and mind and thoughts as people, so Jesus Christ is God’s ‘Word” to reveal His heart and mind to us. Since God is a spirit and Jesus, as the Word, is a spirit…Jesus' mission on earth was to become to us the visible image of the invisible God. That is what is meant when the prophet Isaiah said He is “Emmanuel- God with us.” That is what is meant in John 1:14, “and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The Word in heaven became flesh and blood. So God became flesh in the person of Jesus and lived among us. During that time, His mission was to demonstrate God’s love for us. When He spoke and taught, He told us of God’s great love for us. In both the demonstrations and the conversations, Jesus communicated to us that as human beings with a free will we are separated from God by sin. But through His life, death, and resurrection, He came to rescue us from the death that that sin causes. 

Billy Graham wrote, “Jesus came so we could know, once and for all, that God is concerned about the way we live, the way we believe, and the way we die.  God could have told us in other ways. Of course -He had - throughout the pages of the Old Testament and in the lives of his people. By His written Word he declared His love. But when Jesus the Word was born in Bethlehem of a Virgin maiden that glorious night in that desert manger, the ‘Word” became ‘the Living Word.” It bears repeating what we read earlier in this article, He was ‘Emanuel-God with us.’ 

Finally, of all the things that your life will be involved with this Christmas, remember the powerful message of that simple little stable….there…..God came in the flesh.