Daily Devotional By Desiringgod Ministry – John Piper Ministry 21 November 2024 | Topic: Seven Surprises of the First Christmas
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Seven Surprises of the First Christmas
Ten years ago today was the birth of our first daughter. We talk about her being our Advent baby, with the name Gloria. We thought November 21 wasn’t too early to start looking ahead to Advent and Christmas.
I know we are a week from Thanksgiving, but would it be okay if I talked about Advent this morning? Kool 108 is already playing Christmas music. For weeks, the stores have been decorated for Christmas. Our society is no stranger to doing Christmas early — because it’s the number one consumer holiday of the year, of course. We might do Christmas from November 1 until December 25, but what we don’t do well is Advent.
Advent is an amazing opportunity for new habits. I hear that a vital aspect of this program is building new habits. We are, by nature, creatures of habit. This is not the product of the fall; this is God’s good design. Good habits help us flourish both in our external lives and in our inner person.
Of course, sin plays havoc with the habit feature of our humanity. So, an important part of redemption and practical holiness, by the power of the gospel and God’s Spirit, is the creation, over time, of new habits — habits of holiness and fellowship, daily habits of hearing God’s voice in his word and having God’s ear in prayer, and weekly habits of belonging to, and gathering with, his body in worship and upbuilding.
Annual Habits
Habits, however, are not just daily and weekly but also annual. God made seasons. And he made us to feel something deep down in those first days of spring, in the hottest days of summer, in the coziness of fall, and in the first snow-fly of winter.
For Christians, we have long linked the month of December with the birth of our Savior and anticipated one of our two highest feast days with essentially a month of anticipation called “Advent.” Adventus is Latin for “arrival.” The arrival we wait for is Jesus’s arrival.
An important part of this season often missed today is that Advent is a season of waiting. Each year, in our month of waiting to mark the arrival of God himself in human flesh, we remember the people of God who waited centuries — centuries! — for the coming of the promised Messiah to rescue them.
We now live in the era of the Messiah. Christ has come as the climax of history and shown us the Father and his grace for sinners. It is good for us, though, to rehearse the patient waiting and anticipation of God’s ancient people to renew and deepen our appreciation of what we now have in him.
Advent Will Change You
God’s good and powerful gift of habit teaches us an important truth for the Advent season: holidays and feasts not only fill our mouths with laughter, and bellies with food, but shape our souls, for good or ill. They form and re-form our hearts.
This Advent will change you. You will not be the same afterward. You will be the better for it, or the worse. You will be more like Scrooge, or more like the shepherds who worshiped. Will you be closer to Christ come December 25, or further away? Will you be warmer toward him, or colder?
And you won’t make the most of Advent very well if you don’t plan ahead a little bit. So, here I am, on November 21, one week before Thanksgiving and ten days before Advent starts, that I might challenge you to make the most of this Advent, starting next Sunday, December 1.
Mainly, what I want to do this morning is give you a foretaste of the kind of glories we love to commemorate during Advent and stir your soul to seek more of the same this Advent. I want to challenge you to try something. Read a short daily devotional. Or work your way slowly through the first chapters of Matthew and Luke, or the first chapter of John. Do something spiritually to make the most of the season.
Seven Surprises
To whet your spiritual appetite for Advent, and the kind of glories you’ll be looking for, let me rehearse seven surprises of that first Christmas — seven unexpected ways of God in which he sent his Son.
1. How Long God Waited
God made the world, and its history, to make his Son its hero. As soon as the sin and fall of Adam and Eve, God said to the serpent,
I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel. (Genesis 3:15)
From the beginning, God promised an offspring who, while bruising his heel, would bruise the head of the serpent. And oh what patience God has in unfolding his plan! Thousands of years later, and still a thousand years before Jesus came, God promised King David a descendant whose reign would last forever (2 Samuel 7:12–14).
Then three centuries later, still seven hundred years before Christ, came the famous Isaiah prophecies we love to quote during Advent, like Isaiah 9:6:
To us a child is born,
to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
And Isaiah’s contemporary, Micah, still seven hundred years before Jesus, prophesied,
You, O Bethlehem . . . ,
who are too little to be among the clans of Judah,
from you shall come forth for me
one who is to be ruler in Israel,
whose coming forth is from of old,
from ancient days. (Micah 5:2)
Then, three centuries later, a prophet named Malachi spoke God’s final words of anticipation:
Behold [there will be a lot of beholds in the Christmas story, because there are so many surprises], I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts. (Malachi 3:1)
Then God’s people would wait another four hundred years. Oh the surprising patience of God! How he planned and waited, and prophesied and waited, and “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman” (Galatians 4:4).
And all that patient waiting told the world, and prepared his people, for how momentous a coming this was.
2. The Virgin Mother
There was an obscure prophetic episode in the days of Isaiah about a young maiden who would give birth to a child whose coming would signal that God would deliver his people from their enemies at the time. Isaiah 7:14:
Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.
But seven hundred years later, this prophecy comes to an unexpected, greater fulfillment when not just a maiden but an unmarried maiden, an actual virgin, conceives and bears a son.
“God made the world, and its history, to make his Son its hero.”
The ancients weren’t idiots. They knew how babies were conceived. They knew babies were not conceived without a father. And yet, in this spectacular circumstance, unique in the history of the world — to make plain how unique was the coming of this baby — an unmarried maiden and virgin named Mary became pregnant by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, as announced by the angel Gabriel to her:
The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy — the Son of God. (Luke 1:35)
And so, the eternal Word, the second person of the Godhead, the divine Son, became flesh and dwelled among us through a miraculous conception by the Holy Spirit in a virgin named Mary.
3. The Backwater Hometown
When that angel appeared to Mary, we’re told in Luke 1:26:
In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth.
Then, in Luke 2:4–5, it says,
Joseph . . . went up from Galilee, from the town of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child.
After the birth in Bethlehem, and then fleeing to Egypt to avoid Herod’s attempt to slaughter the infants, Mary and Joseph moved back to Nazareth, where they were from, and raised Jesus there, in the backwater.
So, he’s known throughout his life as “Jesus of Nazareth,” which is not an honorable name. It’s a slur, a way of saying he’s a nobody from nowhere. He’s a bumpkin from the boonies. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46). Few, if any, outside Israel had even heard of it.
We might expect Messiah to arise from the palace in Jerusalem, or at least from David’s hometown, Bethlehem, with its regal reputation, and with Micah’s prophecy. And Jesus was born in Bethlehem. But he wasn’t raised there. He was not Jesus of Jerusalem, or even Jesus of Bethlehem, but Jesus of Nazareth. And such an undignified upbringing surprises us.
4. The Worldwide Census
This is an amazing detail of the Christmas story: God moved the hand of Rome for Jesus’s birth. He had promised a Messiah to David and from David, and so, at least figuratively, from Bethlehem. But Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth. So how might God get them there, that the child might be born in the city of David? How about a worldwide census ordered by the emperor of Rome himself? Luke 2:1–3:
In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. . . . And all went to be registered, each to his own town.
God moved the known world to get the unknown virgin from lowly Nazareth to regal Bethlehem, and at just the right time, to fulfill Micah’s prophecy in a surprising, literal way.
5. The Blue-Collar Visitors
That is, these were humble, uncouth shepherds — the often disrespected, blue-collar workers of the day. These are not dignitaries. This isn’t the mayor of Bethlehem, or even the local Levites, or anyone from nearby Jerusalem, whether priests, Pharisees, Sadducees, or Herod himself. You know the story. Luke 2:8–12:
In the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night [working the night shift]. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear. And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.
That’s another surprise: Mary “laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7). Swaddling cloths are expected. Laid in a manger? No way. That’s a surprise. Who is this child?
Then there appears with this angel “a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!’” (Luke 2:14).
So, what do the shepherds do? Now, this is not a surprise. They said to one another, “Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us” (Luke 2:15). And they go with haste and find Mary, Joseph, and the baby lying in a manger.
How amazing, that when the Son of God himself finally comes, in fully human flesh, it is not the dignitaries that the angels call first, but the lowly, blue-collar shepherds, which leads to a sixth surprise.
6. The Magi and the Star
After the shepherds, it’s not as if the Jewish dignitaries come running. Next comes foreign dignitaries, from far, far away. Matthew 2:1–2:
Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men [magi] from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.”
Now, don’t miss this because we’re so used to the magi coming every year: this is one of the greatest surprises of all. Behold, magi! Magi? You know what magi are? We get our word magic from magi. These are pagan astrologers, stargazers, wizards — ancient counselors to pagan kings who did not have God’s revelation in Scripture. These guys are out-of-bounds abominations, in Old Testament terms. They are sinners. And yet God comes for them. He draws them. And he does so through the very channel of their sin. Gazing into the stars for guidance, God leads them, draws them, and brings them to Jesus.
This miraculous star guides them to Jerusalem, to Herod, and he and his Bible-answer guys tell them about Micah’s Bethlehem prophecy. And then, how do they find the particular house where Jesus is?
After listening to the king, they went on their way. And behold, the star that they had seen when it rose went before them until it came to rest over the place where the child was. (Matthew 2:9)
This is shocking. It’s not just the miraculous star, but this: the trained Bible scholars of the day give the answer from Micah 5, and yet they do not even bother to make the relatively short five-mile journey to Bethlehem. The religious leaders and dignitaries stay comfy in Jerusalem, while the pagan astrologers go to Bethlehem to look for the Jewish Messiah.
Can you believe God did it like this? We really should beware our preconceived notions of whom God Almighty might draw near to worship his Son.
Perhaps some of you feel like outsiders to the church. Like the magi. You’re on the outside, looking in. You wonder if people on inside look down on you, or count you out, or think you’ve wandered too far away from Jesus. Behold, magi come. Our God loves to take the most unlikely and draw them near to worship his Son. He’s done this for two thousand years since he welcomed the magi, and he does it still today.
Which leads to our last surprise.
7. Simeon’s Prophecy
We finish with this. In Luke 2, we have the story of Mary and Joseph bringing their child to the temple to be dedicated, and there they encounter a holy man named Simeon. Luke says,
It had been revealed to [Simeon] by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ. And he came in the Spirit into the temple, and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him according to the custom of the Law, he took him up in his arms and blessed God and said, “Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel.” (Luke 2:26–32)
And Joseph and Mary marvel. Then Simeon turns to Mary and says these shocking words:
Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed (and a sword will pierce through your own soul also), so that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed. (Luke 2:34–35)
New mom, a sword will pierce through your own soul also. Can you imagine how this lands on Mary? “A sword will pierce my soul? What? And pierce my soul also? So, you’re saying my son, my precious baby boy, will one day be pierced?”
Her child being the Christ would not mean immunity to controversy, enemies, and great pain — but precisely the opposite. And Mary herself would have “a sword . . . pierce through [her] own soul also.” What could this mean but that some great tragedy was appointed? Could her own soul be pierced by anything other than his premature death?
Purpose of His Appearing
This leads to the question we finish with: Why had Jesus appeared? Why did the Son of God come among us, as one of us, fully God and fully man, at his first Advent? First John 3:5–8 tells us twice.
- 1 John 3:5: “You know that he appeared in order to take away sins.”
- 1 John 3:8: “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.”
Jesus came to take away sin and to destroy the works of the devil. And how would he do that? Through his being pierced.
He was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned — every one — to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all. (Isaiah 53:5–6)
And Jesus rose again from that lethal piercing, to declare us righteous in him by faith, and forgive all our sins against him, and go to work on us to make us truly righteous — and make us loving toward others, and less selfish. To work in us good habits for the joy of healthy souls and healthy relationships.
So, I challenge you: don’t just go through the motions this Advent. Approach the season in faith, as God’s new-covenant people, for Christ’s honor and your joy in him.
Join me this Advent in admiring the many excellencies of Jesus Christ: he is God and man, holy and virgin-born, upholding the universe by the power of his words and lying swaddled in a manger. Make some special effort with me to see and savor the person of Christ this Advent. He is worthy of our best daily, weekly, and annual habits.
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