One of the remarkable things about the birth of Jesus is how God spoke about this throughout the Old Testament. God does not dwell in time the way we do, and we are told that His plan of salvation was thought of even before the creation of the world. (Rev 13:8) He gave many ‘clues’ about this plan throughout history, from the first promise of a rescuer in the Garden of Eden (Gen 3:15) to things which only really became clear once Jesus was born.
Yesterday we saw that Isaiah spoke of the virgin birth hundreds of years before it happened. (Isaiah 7:14) The star which features in the journey of the Magi was spoken about in Numbers 24:17. The place of Jesus’s birth (Bethlehem) was prophesied in Micah 5:2. The suffering which Herod would inflict on young boys because he could not bear the idea of another king is spoken of in Jeremiah 31:15. It’s always worth reading the footnotes in the Gospels as they often remind us of the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies and help us to ‘connect the dots’ in the Christmas story.
The birth of Jesus was not just something God decided to do at the last minute, nor was it an accident or something that was unplanned. God knew that people needed rescuing and that we couldn’t manage it by ourselves. He knew that He had to intervene. (Isaiah 63:5) The good news of Christmas is that we now can be reconciled to God, all because of the birth of Jesus; as the song says, ‘And man will live forever more because of Christmas Day.’ (‘Mary’s Boy Child’)
