Our text this morning is Matthew chapter 1, beginning at verse 18 through the end of the chapter. Matthew chapter 1. As you find your way there, let’s pray that the Lord would help us.
Gracious heavenly Father, we come to this text which may be new to some of us, familiar to many of us, and yet we are certain that You have new things to teach us, to remind us, new ways of understanding, and certainly You have work You mean to do in each of our hearts, that we might repent of our sins, turn to Christ, know Your favor, know of all these wonders we have been singing of, joy, peace, life, light. May they be ours in abundance because of Christ. Come, speak to us now. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.
Matthew chapter 1, beginning at verse 18.
“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.”
Perhaps some of you have seen that just in time for the Christmas season Netflix has a new nativity movie out. It’s called Mary. Don’t know if I recommend it or not; I watched 15 minutes, that’s all I could do. It does have very high production values. I wasn’t sure, it’s very epically done, I wasn’t sure if I was looking at the Middle East or Middle Earth. It was very well done. But at least the 15 minutes I saw, and I guess given the title Mary, the 15 minutes I saw were based on apocryphal stories about Mary and her supposed miraculous birth.
But you can watch the brief trailer online. It looks like a grand, epic, Hollywood narrative. The trailer, two or three minutes, crescendoes and reaches a climax with this final line: Love will save the world.
Wonder what you make of that, “love will save the world.” Well, on the one hand, that is a wonderful statement. It’s abundantly true. As Christians, we know from the Bible God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. So without a doubt, Christmas is about love, God so loved, and Jesus came to take away the sins of the world. That was the mission. The Son’s love for sinners, while we were yet sinners He showed His love to us in this that He died for us, and then the Father’s love for the world and the sending of His Son. So you can, by all means, introduce the Christmas story by saying “love will save the world.” It’s true.
And it’s also one of those statements that I have to imagine is intentionally broad, vague, and ambiguous because I haven’t seen an official poll on it, but I would bet that love has nearly a 100% approval rating in our culture. People are for love. Nobody says this is a season of hate, love as a general concept, as an ideal, is pretty well liked. Always has been.
It is very easy therefore to reduce the Christmas story to undefined, create-your-own-meaning story about the power of love to save the world. If you’ve been in church your whole life and you’ve got lots of good theology, you can dump all of that theology in there and it’s a great statement. If you know nothing about the Christmas story, or you don’t even like what the Bible says if you knew what it said, you can also import meaning into that statement and say “love will save the world.” Well, I would really like love to save the world.
As we saw last week, Matthew’s gospel will not allow us to stay at that rarefied air of a general, vague sentiment. In fact, here in Matthew the Bible story of Christmas leaps off the page with historical facts and particularities and deliberate titles. You cannot describe Matthew 1 simply as saying “love will save the world.” As we saw last week, in verses 1 through 17, Matthew introduces this by giving the genesis of Jesus, His genealogy, to show us that Jesus was a real live, flesh and blood, Jewish man. He still is, the incarnation is perpetual. Jesus, who was the Christ, the Son of David and the Son of Abraham. If those were the three designations that we saw last week, Christ, that is the Messiah, the anointed One, the long-awaited Deliverer, the Christ, also a Son of David, the royal David’s Son, the King to sit on the throne, and the Son of Abraham, the Promised One who will be the means of blessing to the whole world, those were the three titles given to Jesus last week, here in the second half of Matthew chapter 1 we have three new titles. These will be our three points. I want you to see from this text Jesus Christ was one, born of a virgin; two, He is Immanuel; and three, He is called Jesus because He saves His people from their sins.
Now even if you’ve heard this story dozens or hundreds of times, and all of those three points immediately land on you like very familiar territory, I dare to say that, if you listen carefully, there will be things in this sermon that you have not thought about before. I make no apologies for saying that this is going to be a theological sermon, so get your good theology, well, none of you have hats and you all have pants, so your pantheology trousers on. We want to think theologically about this passage because the Bible is a theological book, and without a robust theology, Christmas devolves into cheap sentimentality. If you don’t come at Christmas with some theology, it will overwhelm you in a commercialized sense with nothing but sentimentality. Sentiment is good. Even as Presbyterians we have feelings once in a while and we like that. There’s lots of nostalgia. There’s beauty, there’s lights, there’s family, there’s memories. All of that. We’re for that. But not merely a sentimentality.
So let’s look at each of these and I think we’ll learn something.
Number one. We see in this passage Jesus Christ was born of a virgin. So it says, verse 18, “the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. Before they came together,” so that’s a euphemism, before they had had sexual intercourse, “before they had come together, she was found to be with child.”
Now we’re not told exactly how was she found to be with child. It may have been very simply she starts showing, or maybe she’s talking to family members and she’s talking about the things that change and things that happen and don’t happen when you’re a woman and what is going on here. Maybe rumors were simply swirling about as she dared to ask questions of people. Maybe Joseph was the first one who saw that the hand was often on her belly. What’s going on? She was found to be with child.
And lest we think, we’re going to come here to the virgin birth, or technically really the virginal conception, lest we think, well, these were simple people and they were in the first century and wow, they just believed in lots of myths and superstitions. No, no, to believe in a virgin birth was just as difficult then as it is now. Because you know how many virgin births they had all seen in their lifetimes? Zero. Nobody thought, well, Mary is with child, we’ve got at least like a 10% chance maybe it’s a virgin birth. No one thought that. Joseph’s immediate conclusion, quite reasonably, was this woman that I’m engaged to is with child, and he knew they had not been together, it stands to reason the only logical explanation, that she’s cheated on me. She’s been with another man. How else would she have this child?
Betrothals were as binding as marriage in the ancient world. You can see that there’s a little footnote to that effect. That when you in the first century among the Jews, an engagement was legally binding. Hence we have the word that he needed to divorce her. Now we don’t think of that. You don’t have, it’s not a legally binding contract, you don’t have to register with the state or it’s a good thing, men, to check with the parents first, we ought to go that, but it’s not legally binding in the same way that it was, so he needed to divorce her.
It was really quite easy for Jewish men to divorce their wives. In fact, some of the rabbis said they could do it for as little as burning your toast; it’s a real statement among one of the rabbis. Now not everyone saw it that way, but it was a relatively easy thing. In fact, if you had been cheated on Joseph initially thought, it was very understandable that you would expose your adulterous fiancee to shame and ridicule for the shame and embarrassment that she’s caused you. Everyone would know these two are engaged, they’re betrothed, they’re legally bound to each other, and then here she goes, cheats on her legal husband-to-be, and what does he have a right to do as she has cast shame upon him? He can cast shame upon her.
But we read, of course, that Joseph was a noble man. It says in verse 19 her husband, notice again in one sense he’s already legally considered her husband, being a just man. Now that word, a righteous man, probably means that he was a law-abiding man. In particular, kept the law of Moses. He was a man who considered obedience, he did the right thing. He was a man of integrity. He was a just man. And, and it’s hard to know is this part of because he was just or is in contrast to strict obedience, but the two certainly go together, he was a just man, righteous, obedient, and he was merciful. He was unwilling to put her to shame.
Now this is not the main point of the sermon, but just a parentheses for each of us and maybe in particular for men, you want to know, look at Joseph. What does it look like to be strong man? You are on the one hand eager to obey. It’s not a bad word. He was just. He was righteous. He took seriously the law of God and at the same time he was a merciful man. He had every right to expose her to shame and ridicule. He was just and he was merciful and he thought, “I don’t need to do that to Mary,” even though as far as he could tell she had cheated on him, broke his heart, embarrassed him. But he said, “I’m going to do this quietly.”
But before he can do it, an angel comes, and an angel reveals, “Stay with Mary. This child within here is not from a man, it’s from the Holy Spirit.” And Joseph, notice at the end of the passage, verse 24, “when he awoke from sleep he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him.” Here again we see the character of Joseph. He did.
This is a hard thing. Joseph doesn’t get a lot of play sometimes in the Christmas story, but this was a hard thing for Joseph to do. The angel says, “No, you stay with Mary. People are not going to understand what’s going on. It’s going to look for all the world that you’re staying with a philandering, adulterous woman, but you stay with her.” Then when he names the child as he’s instructed to do, this was in a way the official act of adoption, that the father here, though not a biological father, is going to name Mary’s son to include the child in his home, in his family line, adopting him as his own.
The virgin birth is presented to us as supernatural, obviously, but also as straightforward historical fact. It’s rather striking Matthew doesn’t try to explain it but he wants his readers to know that Mary was a virgin when she gave birth. That’s why we have this line again at verse 25, “but knew her not until she had given birth.” Matthew just wants to make this absolutely clear. It’s not like, well, then they quick got married and they were able to have relations together so that someone might wonder, well, really was she mixed up about this birth? She just had a tummy ache for a few days and really this child was Joseph’s. No, the child is not Joseph’s. They did not have relations until she had given birth. The implication here is that afterward they did. This undermines the Catholic notion of the perpetual virginity of Mary. Later we see that Jesus had siblings.
But here we see this absolutely came to Mary in only one way possible, by the Holy Spirit. This was not a pagan copycat story. Sometimes you hear that. Well, the ancient world, they had all sorts of stories about virgin birth and this is just one more and maybe Matthew put this in here just as a kind of apologetic, just to make this story about Jesus seem more palatable to a first century audience. But there were no stories of a virgin birth like this.
Alexander the Great is sometimes put forward as a story of a virgin birth. Alexander’s most reliable ancient biographer, which came several centuries after his death, makes no mention of a virgin birth besides the story that began to circulate about Alexander’s supposedly unusual conception came after the rise of Christianity. And it certainly wasn’t a virgin birth because Alexander’s parents were already married.
There’s a story then about Zeus, Dionysius was born when the god Zeus disguised himself as a human being and impregnated a human princess. Now that was a myth, no one probably believed that it was literally true, but even that story of Greek mythology, notice was not a virgin birth, it was a story of Zeus becoming a man and having a union with a human being. Nothing, as we’ll see in a moment, like the Holy Spirit’s role that we read about here.
Or sometimes people say, well, this is a bit of Mithra, he was a popular god in the ancient world, but he was not born of a virgin, he was born of a rock, which I suppose was likely a virgin rock but a rock nonetheless. Moreover, the cult of Mithra in the Roman Empire dates to after the time of Christ, so any supposed parallels between Mithraism and Christianity is Mithra dependent on Christianity, not the other way around.
The other example people sometimes give, going out to the Far East, is of Buddha. His mother dreamed that Buddha entered her in the form of a white elephant. This story about the Buddha does not appear until five centuries after his death, whereas this is given to us by eyewitnesses and we have extant manuscripts within the lifetime of these apostles, not five centuries later like the Buddha. And even in that story, the Buddha’s mother was already married.
So you get the drift. Any of these so-called parallels always occur well after the life in question, centuries later. They usually occur well into the Christian era and they are not really stories of a virginal conception anyway. There are no parallels to this kind of story. And, more importantly, or just as importantly, it would make no sense whatsoever for Matthew to insert some bit of pagan mythology into this book which is targeting a Jewish audience. We saw that last week. Beginning with his Jewish genealogy, Son of David, Son of Abraham, over and over we have all these fulfillment passages, this book presumes a knowledge of the Old Testament, of the Hebrew Scriptures. The last thing a Jewish author wants to do to present to his audience their Jewish Messiah as Christ and Son of God, is to sprinkle in a bunch of idolatrous pagan notions. If anything, Matthew might have had reasons to skip this story if it were not true and so essentially important.
The last thing that any Jewish author is going to do is to say, “You know what? You know why you ought to believe in your Jewish Messiah who comes to save the people and reign in Zion is I’m going to throw in some stories of the hated Romans, or the Greco-Roman culture to entice you to this.” That would be the worst way to convince Jews.
Notice how careful Matthew is with his language. He says, look up at verse 18, “she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.” In Luke’s Gospel we read, Luke 1:35, “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.” Here the language there that Luke uses? The Holy Spirit will come upon you, the power of the Most High will overshadow you, and the child to be born, that child already now incubating in Mary’s womb, is called the Son of God.
Clearly both Matthew’s account and Luke’s account is described in such a careful, restrained way so that we cannot conclude that this was by any means of sexual relations. Now we are not told the precise mechanics, it’s supernatural, but we must see clearly there is no human causal agent in the conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary. The causal agent is the Holy Spirit. The birth of Jesus Christ comes about. He is true man descended from the flesh and blood of Mary, but not by any ordinary propagation.
Let me give you a quotation here, and it’s a little bit dense, but you’re not dense people so you can track with this. This is from one of my favorite theologians who is very good and sometimes dense, Francis Turretin from the 17th century. So if you had on your bingo card, “Will Pastor Kevin give us Turretin on the Sunday before Christmas?” you can just check that off. Yes.
Here’s what he says, describing the virginal conception. He’s going to give several contrasts, five of them, and they’re all kind of saying the same thing. So listen. He says: “The Spirit acts in the conception of Christ not materially but efficiently.” So that means not by matter, not by physical stuff, but efficiently, He makes it happen. “By power, not by seed.” So this is not by a biological seed as all of us were born. “By might, not by intercourse, so that what was conceived was by the power of the Spirit but not from the substance of the Spirit,” meaning it wasn’t that the Spirit took the form of a man and had a union with Mary. And then the fifth contrast, “not by generation,” here meaning not by any human biological generation, “but by blessing and consecration.” All of that just trying to safeguard what is happening here, that the child within here is from the Holy Spirit. There is no human causal agent, the Holy Spirit is the causal agent.
Notice also, thinking about what Luke says in that passage we just read, Luke 1:35, that the incarnate embryo within Mary is called the Son of God. If you believe that a child only becomes a person at birth or at some moment after conception called ensoulment, then among many other problems you will have a heretical Christology. From that moment, not some later time did that child within her become the Son of God, not some later time was a soul then given. Matthew says Mary was with child. The embryonic Savior within her is called rightly a child at the moment of supernatural conception, the embryo within her was a human being, a person, a child, not any child, the God-man Jesus Christ.
Why is the virgin birth, the doctrine of the virgin birth , so important? As some of you know your Church history, you know that in particular at the turn of the 20th century it divided the Church, sadly divided the Presbyterian Church, first in the north then in the south, but it must have been divisive because this is such an essential element of Christian orthodoxy and has been from the very beginning. The beginning of the 20th century some theologians questioned whether we really needed to insist upon the virgin birth. Here we see it is absolutely important to the Christmas story and to the theology of who this child is.
Here’s how the Heidelberg Catechism puts it: “What does it mean that He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary?” That’s the line from the Apostles’ Creed. What does it mean He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary?
Here’s the answer: That the eternal Son of God who is and remains true and eternal God,” now hold on to that, we’re going to come back to that idea in just a moment, He’s not anything less than God, He’s not divested Himself of any of His God properties, “took to Himself through the working of the Holy Spirit from the flesh and blood of the Virgin Mary a truly human nature so that He might become David’s true descendant, like His brothers in every way except for sin.” That’s the theological freight that is carried to us through the virgin birth, a flesh and blood with a human nature, a true descendant, a true descendant, hereditary descendant of David, like his brothers in every way except for sin.
So He’s born of a virgin. So if Netflix says “love will save the world,” good. Where did this love come from? If you’re going to include in there this virgin birth, we’re on the right track.
Here’s the second point, and it follows from the first. You see verse 23. Here’s the prophecy of Isaiah. The virgin shall conceive and bear a son and they shall His name Immanuel, God with us.
This is not the first time that God will be with His people, so don’t misunderstand what that means. In fact, you can argue that Immanuel is really the whole point of the Bible. If you had to summarize the Bible in one word, now there are some different words you could use, but this would certainly be one of the correct answers. What is the Bible about? One correct answer is to say Immanuel.
There in the garden as they had perfect fellowship with God in the cool of the day, and yet because of their sin, Adam and Eve were estranged from God, they were at enmity with God. Then the story of the Bible from Genesis 3 onward is how this holy God can dwell in the midst of an unholy people.
The promise to Abraham was “I will be with you.” The point of the tabernacle and then the temple was that God symbolically would dwell there, the tabernacle with the 12 tribes around it so that it could be said God is right there in the midst of you. We read already from Joshua chapter 3 this morning, or Joshua chapter 1, “Do not be dismayed for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” The psalmist, the prophets, used this language frequently, that God is with you.
So this concept of Immanuel, God with us, is in one sense not new, it is the story of the whole Bible, God is always saying “I will dwell with you.”
What is unique then, and momentous and amazing about the incarnation, is that now for the first time God is with us as one of us. With us as one of us.
So, here, you’ve got your thinking hats still on? The most difficult doctrines in Christianity to understand, because ultimately they are beyond complete human understanding, are probably the doctrine of the three persons of the trinity and then the doctrine of the two natures of Christ. So how do we think of this, “God with us”?
Well, we need to be clear what this does not mean. We don’t want to conceive of the incarnation as some kind of rupture in the trinity, that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are somehow now without the Son because He’s gone somewhere else. We don’t want to think that the Son has, in taking upon a human nature, now ceases to uphold the universe, that He no longer does that, that would be incorrect.
Here’s one phrase that may help you understand the incarnation – the incarnation comes by addition, not by subtraction. By addition, not by subtraction. Now even that could be misunderstood, but here’s what we mean, that the Son of God took to Himself addition, assumed a human nature and therefore a human body, a human body that is liable, it needed sleep, it needed food, needed water, could suffer and die, that only in being joined with a human nature, only in having a human body, could the Son of God do the most un-God-like thing possible, suffer. God as God can’t do that. To suffer and then to die.
But not by subtraction. That is, He did not divest Himself of His nature. He did not shed any qualities of God-ness. He was for a time, that glory was veiled so we truly can say that the incarnation was an exchanging of glory for humiliation, at least form our vantage point. He took to Himself the form of a servant, He did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, Philippians chapter 2, but on the transfiguration it’s not that Jesus Christ was becoming something He had set aside but rather their eyes were opened to see who He had been all along. He was still the second person of the trinity, the supreme, divine, glorious Son of God.
We should not think of the incarnation as a movement from one spatial location to another. You can look this up. I wrote an article about it this week. That is to say, here’s just to get our minds a little scrambled, the Son of God came to earth without leaving heaven. He came to earth without leaving heaven. How? Because the Logos, the Word, the divine Word enjoining Himself, in assuming a human nature, and having this without confusion, without division, this union, human and divine, a true union in the one person Jesus Christ, yet that union did not fully circumscribe the divine nature so that there continue to be a life of the divine Son or the divine Logos even beyond the incarnation, so that we can truly say He came down, can use that language, Scriptures, the Nicene Creed does, and yet in coming down He did not leave, He did not cease to exercise all rule and authority.
Here’s what the Church father Athanasius said in the fourth century, writing about the incarnation. He said, “The Word,” so the Logos, capital W, the Word like John 1, “the Word was not hedged in by His body nor did His presence in the body prevent His being present elsewhere as well. When He moved His body, He did not cease also to direct the universe by His mind and His might. No, the marvelous truth is that being the Word so far from being Himself contained by anything He actually contained all things Himself. This is the wonder as man,” so listen, here’s Athanasius, “as man He was living a human life and as Word He was sustaining still the life of the universe. As a Son, divine Son, He was in constant union with the Father, not even His birth from a virgin therefore changed Him in any way.”
It ought to hurt your mind just a little bit because we’re dealing with amazing things. This is the Son who created His mother. This is the only child who got to pick His parents.
Calvin says there is something marvelous, the Son of God descended from heaven in such a way that without leaving heaven He willed to be born of the virgin’s womb to go about the earth and to hang upon the cross, yet He continuously filled the world even as He had done from the beginning. He did not cease to be God.
So we should not think of the incarnation as a transmutation. You don’t want to think of the divine nature as undergoing any essential change. The divine nature remained as it always was, impassable, omniscient, and immutable. The divine nature assumed human flesh. That language is better than saying the divine nature “became.” That makes you think that the divine nature was transformed, you know, autobots roll out, was transformed into something else but remained what He had always been. In becoming man, the second person of the trinity did not cease to be God. He became what He was not, a man, without ceasing to be what He was.
There was no God-man until the moment of the incarnation. So even technically when we sometimes speak about Jesus existing forever, you can say that because Jesus is now the name of the divine Son of God so long as we understand that He was not known as Jesus until He was born as a human being. It might be better to speak about the eternality of the Son of God. But if by calling the Son of God Jesus that’s what you mean, we can certainly do that.
The point is that prior to the incarnation there was no God-man, there was the incarnation of the Son so that now, however, because the incarnation is perpetual, meaning, this is amazing, Christ did not shed, He did not set aside. It’s not like He came to earth and I’m going to do this, I’ll do this human thing for a while, He continues as the God-man. As some theologians put it, theanthropos, theos meaning God, anthropos being the word for man. He is the God-man. So one theologian says He descended as Logos, He ascended as theanthropos, and He will and continues for all time to reign as the God-man.
Wasn’t temporary. Perpetual. Born of a virgin, Immanuel, God with us, as now one of us.
Then here’s the final title, and this is the simplest to understand and it may actually be the most offensive for people in our culture. Yes, the virgin birth is hard to understand and requires supernatural faith and so does Immanuel, God with us, but this may be the greatest offense – you shall call His name Jesus. Why? Because He will save His people from their sins, verse 21.
In Greek it is Iesus, in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, it is Yesu. Both are derived from the Hebrew. The name is Yeshua or Joshua. Made up of two parts, Yah short for Yahweh, and hoshua meaning salvation, hence Mary and Joseph give their little baby a very common name but here with special unique significance. Yahweh is salvation.
Now this may seem like the most obvious truth in the Bible. If you grew up in the church, if you are here and you’re 5 years old, this may be one thing you already know about the Bible and praise God if you do. Somebody says, “tell me about Jesus,” Jesus died on the cross to same me from my sins. Yes and amen.
Do not miss, however, the massive implications of this one statement: You shall call His name Jesus for He will save His people from their sins.
So it tells us what this Jesus chiefly came to do. He will be a teacher, we follow His teachings. He will be a miracle worker. He will have compassion upon the sick. He will cast out demons. All of those things are true. He will teach about the kingdom of God. Yet here in Matthew 1telling us what His name means, what is the chief thing that He came to do? He came to save, to rescue, to deliver, to redeem. You say, “Well, I knew all that.” But think about what this is not saying. The angel does not give Him a name to say, “and here’s the chief thing that this Jesus, born of a virgin, has come into the world to do.” He has come here to transform the culture, though He has certainly done that. We pray always that there might be the influence of Christians and Christ upon our land.
It does not say that He came to build a political kingdom, and in fact that is precisely what many of the Jews were expecting and what they heard, “Son of David, yes, finally, the King to get these Romans off our back, to sit on a real throne in Jerusalem. We’re going to be in the good ol’ days of David and Solomon again.” They tried at one point to make Him King by force, but that was precisely not what He came to do.
You wonder if some people heard that and almost were a little disappointed. Call His name Jesus because He will be the King. Well, He is. He will save His people.
Now it’s one thing if he said, “and He came to confront the sins of our enemies.” I like that Jesus. I want that King Jesus to conquer all the people that I don’t like. Always happens, doesn’t it? The people you don’t like, God doesn’t like? It’s great how it just seems to line up that way in our hearts.
But here it says, no, Jesus came to save His people. People like you, people like me. And His people, notice there’s a personal dimension. Yes, He came to do much more than just be an individual personal Savior but never less than that. We don’t want to just zoom up into the stratosphere and say He came to renew the cosmos and that’s wonderful, I’m a part of the cosmos. He came first of all as a personal Savior for your sins. That’s the real kicker. If you give the message at Christmas, “Jesus,” okay, a lot of people still like that. You can even say “Jesus came to save the world.” All right, you can fill in what “Savior” means, you can fill in what “world” means. As soon as you say that other word, though, you’ve got a scandal. Jesus came to save His people from sins. Their sins.
It’d be one thing if you said He came to save them from ignorance, He came to save them from a lack of purpose, He came to save them from unhappiness, He came to save them from suffering, He came to save them from a harsh world, He came to save them from their emotional difficulties, He came to save them from the harm that had been done to them from others. All of those things certainly have an element of truth. But what is underscored here is that He came to save His people from sins. Your sins. My sins.
If you do not understand that, you do not understand Christmas. Love will save the world. Yes and amen. And why did the world need saving? Because it was awash in sin, in darkness, in God-thumbing rebellion.
Heidelberg Catechism. How does the holy conception and birth of Christ benefit you? Answer: He is our mediator and with His innocence and perfect holiness, He removes from God’s sight my sin, mine since I was conceived. That’s why it matters that He was born of a virgin because He was made like us in every respect except for sin. We needed a sinless Savior, someone, a God-man, to lay a hand on us both.
Can’t understand the story of Christmas if you don’t have a doctrine of sin. Oh, the good news may seem very warm and fuzzy and light and lots of songs to sing, but you will not understand what the angel told Mary and Joseph about His very name. You understand that in the Bible names meant something. They often told others who you were, what purpose God had for your life, so Adam was the first man; Eve was the mother of all living things; Abraham was the father of many nations; Benjamin was the son of his father’s right hand; Moses was drawn out of water; Peter was the rock; Barnabas was the son of encouragement; and Jesus, more than a great teacher, more than an enlightened man, more than a worker of miracles, more than giving us meaning in life, more than a self-help guru, more than a self-esteem builder, more than someone to make your wildest dreams come true, more than a political liberator, more than even a caring friend, more than the transformer of cultures, more than giving purpose to the purposeless, Jesus is a Savior for sinners.
Here’s the good news. I have to imagine that you and all the people around you right now happen to be sinners. Now you know the people around you are sinners… So are you. So is everyone behind this pulpit right now. If you are a sinner – it’s easy to say, well, I’m just imperfect and we all make mistakes – no, I mean, don’t push out the Bible words. We just import our own words – broken, imperfect, not all the things I wish I were, I’ve got a learning curve, growth edges, and all the things – sin, evil, transgression, iniquity.
If you and the people you love happen to be sinners, merry Christmas. Because God sent His Son in love that He might live and die and save sinners like you.
Let’s pray. Father in heaven, we give thanks for peace and light and love and good will and joy to the world. We give thanks for all of these things because they are bound up in Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham, born of the virgin Mary, Immanuel, God with us, a Savior for sinners. May we never tire of the old, old story, so work by Your Spirit, the same Spirit that overpowered the virgin to cause her to conceive, now give new spiritual life in the hearts of any here who are far from You, bring back the wandering soul, correct those who have strayed, and give us voice and heart to sing this good news of Christmas. In Jesus we pray. Amen.