Tonight’s family service looked at the theme of ‘Christ in Christmas.’ Christmas is the time of year when we particularly think about how God sent Jesus as a baby to be born in Bethlehem. It’s a time of celebration: ‘good news that will cause great joy for all the people’, as the angels proclaimed to the shepherds (Luke 2:10). The Christmas story is worth all our attention and celebration because we see in this story how God sent His only Son to be born of the virgin Mary; it’s the start of the ‘good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God’ (Mark 1:1), for we see throughout the four gospels how this helpless baby born in a stable in Bethlehem grew to be the Saviour of the whole world, the sinless One who would die on a cross to take away the sins of the whole world.
Christmas is not the start of God’s story of salvation, however. Christmas is the time when we remember the birth of Jesus, but God’s plan to bridge the gulf between people and Himself caused by sin and rebellion and disobedience didn’t start at that point. One of the amazing truths of the Bible is that Jesus is central to the whole of the Bible. He is ‘in all the books of the Bible’; He is pictured or prophesied about in each of the 66 Bible books as well as in countless types in the lives of different characters in the Bible – which is why it’s important to read the Old Testament as well as the New Testament! On the road to Emmaus, ‘beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself’ (Luke 24:25-26) – a truly memorable Bible study!
A whistle-stop tour of Messianic prophecy in the Old Testament showed us Jesus in every book we find there. Many of the Messianic prophecies were fulfilled in His birth (see Isaiah’s prophecy that the virgin would bear a son in Is 7:14 or Micah’s prophecy that Bethlehem would be His birthplace (Mic 5:2)) and a scientist who picked out 48 prophecies about Jesus found in the Old Testament determined that the probability of one man randomly fulfilling them all is 1 in 10 to the exponent of 157. That is one followed by 157 zeros! – not very likely at all! Yet because God knows all things and inspired the Bible, Jesus was able to fulfil all these prophecies, and we can have confidence that the prophecies yet to be fulfilled – such as His coming to earth again for His people and His ultimate judgment of all – will one day, at the right time, be fulfilled. Our God is an amazing God!