There is an important principle in Scripture that we must grasp if we are going to understand the story of Christmas, and it is this: as goes the king, so goes the kingdom. The reason we live in a world under the shadow of death, a world full of war, sickness, suffering, selfishness, perversion, and greed, can all be traced back to the decision of one man: Adam. As the image of God, Adam was made king—God’s vice-regent—over creation. But Adam’s decision to rebel against God brought not only Adam and Eve, and not only the whole human race descended from them, but even the creation itself, under the curse of God’s wrath. As goes the king, so goes the kingdom.
As a race, we are alienated from God, cut off from the divine life, and therefore spiritually dead and under the threat of coming divine judgment. This is a plight from which we cannot extricate ourselves. We need a deliverer. We need a hero who stands outside our predicament who can lower himself to where we are and raise us up to where he is. The first Adam brought us into the death we are in. We need another Adam to raise us up from it.
As the story of the Bible progresses, we see promises of a new Adam—and thus a new king—to come, and we see these promises gradually narrow to one particular line of descent. In Genesis 3:15 we see that the coming one will be an offspring of the woman, or a human being. He will be one of us, and yet somehow not complicit in our collective rebellion against God. In Genesis 12 we see the promise of blessing to the world tied to the offspring of Abraham. In Genesis 49 we see one particular tribe of Abraham’s descendants—Judah—promised a king to come. And in 2 Samuel 7 we see that one man from the tribe of Judah—King David—receives a promise from God that his throne will endure forever. The picture that emerges is that the Davidic king will be the Last Adam, the one who comes to deliver us from the condemnation of the First Adam.
But David could not fulfill this role. Though he was devoted to the Lord, he was an adulterer and a murderer. Nor did any of his royal descendants fit the bill for as long as the kingdoms of Israel and Judah endured. With brief periods of revival interspersed throughout the story, the trajectory of David’s dynasty overall is a downward one. As the centuries wore on, ungodliness took a greater hold of the kings and the people, and God finally fulfilled the curse of the covenant to its full measure and sent the Babylonians to topple the throne of David, remove the king, destroy Jerusalem, and send the people into exile. The house of David, to which God had pledged enduring loyalty, fell to the ground, and there it lay for nearly six-hundred years as foreign powers ruled over the people of Israel. We see that reality manifest in this very passage, where the decree of taxation from Caesar Augustus, a pagan emperor of Rome, has power over the people of God, the Jews. Israel and the world needed a faithful king, a second Adam, but to this point the line of David had not produced one.
You are implicated in this story, because all of your hopes for peace with God, for deliverance from the curse of death, for salvation, are tied to the success or failure of the line of David. As goes David’s house, so goes the world. And this simple story about a baby in Bethlehem is the amazing story about the time when God, in fulfillment of his ancient promises, rebuilt the house of David and brought salvation to the world. In his narrative, Luke gives us first the event itself, then the announcement of the event, and then the human response to the event. We will unpack these three elements today as we meditate on Jesus’ birth, noting the wonder of his birth, the word of his birth, and the witnesses of his birth. As we do, let us worship again the Savior who came to us when we could not save ourselves and became for us what we needed: a new David, a new Adam, a King who came to reestablish God’s sovereign rule over creation.
We begin with the narration of the event itself, noting first
The natural thing to ask at this point is, “What wonder?” This is, after all, a very simple account. Luke spends a meager seven verses, providing very few details or fanfare. And yet, if we look closely, we see that this account is full of wonder.
(1) First, there is the wonder of the place of his birth: Bethlehem. It was unusual that Joseph and Mary would be there at all. Joseph was a resident of Nazareth in Galilee, about ninety miles north of the city of Bethlehem. He never would have gone to Bethlehem at the time when Mary’s baby was due except for the fact that he was obligated by the decree of Caesar Augustus to return to his ancestral home. And because he was of the line of David, he had to travel to Bethlehem, thereby setting the stage for the fulfillment of the prophecy of Micah 5:2 about the Messiah’s birth in that city. But why did God design it this way? Why did he choose Bethlehem instead of Jerusalem? It is interesting that in verse 4 Luke specifically refers to it as “the city of David, which is called Bethlehem.” The qualifying phrase distinguishes it from the better-known city of David, Jerusalem, the city where David and his descendants ruled. Jerusalem was large, populated, and full of history. It was the location of the temple, the central worship site for the entire nation. Bethlehem was a small town with very few credentials other than the fact that it was David’s boyhood home. Why Bethlehem instead of Jerusalem? By going back to David’s roots, God’s purpose is to show that what is happening is not the birth of one more king in a line of David’s descendants, who for that reason would be destined to fail. What is happening is the rebirth of David’s line itself. Jesus is not just one more Davidic king; he is a new David. The house of David that had crumbled to pieces six-hundred years earlier would get a new start in the same place where it all began: Bethlehem.
And what should cause us wonder about this account is that Caesar Augustus, a pagan emperor, in the very act of asserting his sovereignty over the nation of Israel through taxation, unknowingly prompted the fulfillment of prophecy that would result in the deliverance of Israel from all earthly powers. See the wisdom of God in this, and wonder!
(2) But this account is also notable for the wonder of the nature of Jesus’ birth. Notice what verse 5 says: “[Joseph went up to Bethlehem] to be registered with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child.” Luke calls Mary Joseph’s “betrothed,” not to indicate that they are not officially married. They are. They are living together as husband and wife; if it were not so they would not have traveled together like this. But Luke still calls her his “betrothed” because their marriage has not yet been physically consummated, as Matthew notes in Matthew 1:25. So, Mary is Joseph’s “betrothed,” that is, still a virgin, and yet she is “with child.” In a subtle manner Luke is reminding us of what the angel had previously announced to Mary in chapter 1: that she would conceive and give birth to a son in an extraordinary way, by a divine miracle, and not by the natural process of human procreation. And thus, Jesus’ birth is a wonder in that it was a virgin birth.
Why a virgin birth? Wayne Grudem’s reflections on this are worth hearing: “If we think for a moment of other possible ways in which Christ might have come to the earth, none of them would so clearly unite humanity and deity in one person. It probably would have been possible for God to create Jesus as a complete human being in heaven and send him to descend from heaven to earth without the benefit of any human parent. But then it would have been very hard for us to see how Jesus could be fully human as we are, nor would he be a part of the human race that physically descended from Adam. On the other hand, it probably would have been possible for God to have Jesus come into the world with two human parents, both a father and a mother, and with his full divine nature miraculously united to his human nature at some point early in his life. But then it would have been hard for us to understand how Jesus was fully God, since his origin was like ours in every way.” The virgin birth answers to our plight in that it involves Jesus entering into our race from above; we could not climb out of this pit ourselves, and we need someone from the outside. And yet it also answers to our guilt in that it involves Jesus becoming fully one of us, and thus able to represent us before God in his death and in his priestly intercession. Again, see the wisdom of God, and wonder!
(3) And we also see in this account the wonder of the circumstances of his birth. Verse 7 notes that Mary wrapped her firstborn son in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the local inn. Luke does not tell us where they went. Traditionally, the reference to a manger has been taken to imply that Jesus was born in a stable. That is certainly possible. Or it could have been a cave, the house of a poor family who had animals living under their roof, or perhaps some other location. The point is that while the account does not give us all the details, it does clearly point to circumstances of poverty, and perhaps even rejection. Paul writes of Christ in Philippians 2:6-8 that “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” And thus a life given over completely to humility and service, a life that would end on a Roman cross, begins here in an animal’s feeding trough. What is the meaning of this? John Calvin’s reflection is noteworthy: “When he was thrown into a stable, and placed in a manger, and a lodging refused him among men, it was that heaven might be opened to us, not as a temporary lodging, but as our eternal country and inheritance, and that angels might receive us into their abode.” It is, in other words, a testimony to the extent to which divine love will go to rescue us.
Every aspect of wonder in this story shows us that God does the unexpected: out of the ash heaps of human failure and inability, God, in his all-sufficient power, wisdom, and grace, works salvation for us. The city of Bethlehem reminds us of the failure of David’s line and its rebirth in the person of Jesus. The virgin conception and birth shows that a divine miracle was necessary because the human race was incapable of producing a savior on its own. The humble circumstances of Jesus’ birth show that God rejects what we value most and reveals himself in ways we would think are foolish: in a baby, in a manger, on a cross. Let us behold the wonder of the glory of Christ in this unimpressive simplicity, and may we find here the hope that comes at the end of our failures.
The story then moves on from the event to the announcement of the event. And so we have seen the wonder of his birth; now note
Such a wondrous event must be reported, and we have here the account of the first ones to receive the news. As a band of shepherds were out minding their own business, tending their flocks, clueless about what had just happened in the town nearby, all of a sudden an angel appeared to them, and radiant divine glory lit up the night sky. As anyone would be, these shepherds were stunned with fear by this sudden revelation.
he angel told them not to be afraid. His purpose was to deliver them good news, news that would herald the coming joy of the messianic age, news that would be, as verse 10 says, “for all the people.” “The people” here is a reference to Israel, for the news that the angel announces is that Israel’s long-awaited hope, her Messiah, has finally come.
The content of this news is delivered in verse 11: “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” Notice several things about this announcement: First, it is said that this baby has been born “unto you.” This phrase echoes the language of Isaiah 9:6, the great prophecy of the Messiah, which reads, “For unto us a child is born.” Jesus was not just born to Mary and Joseph. He was born unto the shepherds, who function in this story as those with whom we as readers are supposed to identify. This means he was born unto the nation of Israel as a whole, and more than that, he was born to you and to me. Our only proper response to the miracle of Christmas is to hear this “unto you” as a word spoken directly to each one of us, and we must all own Christ as the one born, not just for humanity, but for me. Will you make Christ your own? Second, notice again the mention of the place where he is born: “the city of David.” This is already the sixth mention of David in two chapters of Luke’s Gospel. And throughout the book of Luke and Acts, Luke will mention David another 18 times, most in connection with Jesus. David looms large in this story, for his house, his dynasty, his failed line, is being rebuilt with the coming of the Messiah. Third, notice the trio of titles applied to him: “a savior, who is Christ the Lord.” As savior, Jesus represents hope for Israel’s deliverance form enemy oppression. As Christ, or Messiah, he is the one anointed by God to rule from David’s throne. And the title “Lord” points to his authority and is a bold hint of his divinity. The baby in the manger is none other than God himself come in the flesh. As the song says, “Mary, did you know that your baby boy has walked where angels trod, and when you kiss your little baby, you’ve kissed the face of God?” God the Son united to himself a complete human nature, joining together divinity and humanity in one person forever. This is, as C.S. Lewis called it, the Great Miracle.
Following this announcement the angel tells the shepherds what sign they can expect to find, namely, the baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger. Bethlehem was not a large town, and there certainly would not be any other baby in town lying in a manger that night. And so it would be an unusual and unexpected sight to find.v
And with the same suddenness that the first angel appeared, so did a multitude of the host of heaven, praising God with these words: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!” These two statements are parallel, speaking of the two different spheres of heaven and earth. May there be glory to God in the highest (that is, in heaven) for this wonderful event of the Messiah’s birth. The final aim of the incarnation and redemptive mission of Jesus Christ is that God the Father may be glorified through the salvation of his elect people. Glory to God in the highest! And may there be peace on earth to those who have been chosen out of God’s good pleasure. When we hear the word “peace,” I think our minds naturally run to the idea of war and the hope that wars will cease. But we must know that all wars, all violence and strife among people and nations, stems ultimately from the disruption of peace between God and humanity. War is one consequence of a creation gone awry by sin, and the root of all war is disharmony with God. And so peace must begin with reconciliation between God and humanity, and this is what Christ, the God-man, has come to do. In him there is peace with God, peace that you can know if you will come to Christ in faith.v
And with the same suddenness that the first angel appeared, so did a multitude of the host of heaven, praising God with these words: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!” These two statements are parallel, speaking of the two different spheres of heaven and earth. May there be glory to God in the highest (that is, in heaven) for this wonderful event of the Messiah’s birth. The final aim of the incarnation and redemptive mission of Jesus Christ is that God the Father may be glorified through the salvation of his elect people. Glory to God in the highest! And may there be peace on earth to those who have been chosen out of God’s good pleasure. When we hear the word “peace,” I think our minds naturally run to the idea of war and the hope that wars will cease. But we must know that all wars, all violence and strife among people and nations, stems ultimately from the disruption of peace between God and humanity. War is one consequence of a creation gone awry by sin, and the root of all war is disharmony with God. And so peace must begin with reconciliation between God and humanity, and this is what Christ, the God-man, has come to do. In him there is peace with God, peace that you can know if you will come to Christ in faith.
No sooner had the angels left than the shepherds obeyed what they had been told: they went immediately to Bethlehem and apparently found the baby in the manger with little difficulty. And when they arrived they reported to anyone and everyone they could find (not just Mary and Joseph) what had happened. They became the first evangelists.
Two reactions to their report are given: in verse 18 we read that all who heard this report wondered, or marveled, at what they were told. Throughout Luke’s writings this is a common response to a revelation of divine glory, but not necessarily an indication that the true significance of what has occurred has penetrated the heart. For example, in Luke 4:22 we read that the people of Nazareth marveled at the things Jesus said in the synagogue, but this was just before they were ready to throw him over a cliff! Marveling is certainly not a bad reaction; in Luke’s terminology it is simply noncommittal about whether or not the person marveling has truly taken the significance of the event into his heart. But Mary’s reaction, which Luke sets in contrast to that of the others, is given in verse 19: “But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.” Mary, in other words, went beyond surface reactions and meditated deeply on what had happened. She certainly didn’t have a full understanding at this point, but she took the significance of these events to heart. Luke invites us as readers not only to marvel at Christ, but to identify with Mary and take the significance of his birth into our hearts.
And more than that, Luke invites us to identify with the shepherds, who went beyond marveling and meditating and in their exuberance returned “glorifying and praising God” for all that they had seen and heard. Luke often presents people “glorifying God” or “praising God” as they go on their way. And in most cases, those who do so have been transformed by an encounter with Jesus, such as the paralytic that Jesus healed in chapter 5. After Jesus has pronounced his sins forgiven and has commanded him to pick up his bed and go home, we read, “And immediately he rose up before them and picked up what he had been lying on and went home, glorifying God.” I imagine that these shepherds were never the same, having seen the hopes of Israel and the world embodied in this little baby in a manger. As readers, the shepherds are the characters with whom we are to identify most. And so may the wonder of the incarnation, the fulfillment of every promise God made to David, the hope of the deliverance of Israel and the remaking of the world, give us reason to glorify and praise God today.
It is worth noting here that shepherds were not among the elite in Israel. They were ordinary, unimpressive men. And yet God passed over the elite, the religious leaders, the kings, the philosophers, the aristocrats, and delivered the good news of salvation first to ordinary men. And this is entirely fitting for the mission that Jesus had. In chapter 4 Luke will tell the story of the beginning of Jesus’ ministry at a synagogue in Nazareth, where Jesus will read these words from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and declare them fulfilled in himself: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” God is not impressed by human distinctions. Through Jesus he pronounces blessing upon the poor in spirit. If these ordinary shepherds could be the recipients of divine favor through Jesus Christ, you can be too. Anyone who will acknowledge his own poverty before God will find Christ to be a source of unimaginable riches.
And on the authority of God’s own Word I proclaim to you that this is the year of the Lord’s favor. This is the time when his mercy is being shown to all nations. This is the day of salvation, the time when he invites you to come the anointed one, the Messiah, and find the forgiveness of your sins and life in the coming kingdom of the Davidic king. A savior has been born unto you, but he will not be a savior to you if you will not have him as such. Go to Christ now, and trust in his atoning death and resurrection for the forgiveness of your sins. And, because there is no such thing as a faith that is merely private, act on that faith by seeking baptism and by active membership in a local church.
For my brothers and sisters who are walking in obedience here in the fellowship of this church or in another church, look again to Christ as we celebrate, not only his birth, but the reason he was born: to die for our salvation. We memorialize his death for us by eating and drinking at the Lord’s Table today.
But as we remember his death, we also remember his resurrection from the dead, his enthronement as Davidic king, and his soon triumphant return. As goes the king, so goes the kingdom. Jesus established a kingdom that will not crumble. The house of David has been rebuilt, never to fall again. And because it has, the whole world will be made new again. Even so, come, Lord Jesus! Amen.