Are there hints or suggestions in the events around Jesus’ birth that shed light on Jesus saving us from the world, the flesh, and the devil?
Please turn to Matthew 2. The wise men have come to see the infant (or toddler?) Jesus, by way of Herod. After arriving to him and worshiping, they had been warned in a dream not to report back to Herod, to travel home a different route…since Herod has a sinister intention toward he who was born “King of the Jews.”
Let’s pick up in vv. 13-15:
13 Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” 14 And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt 15 and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, “Out of Egypt I called my son.”
Let’s ask our question again, now a little more narrowly: how does Jesus Christ save us from our flesh? Are there hints in the opening records of his life?
Well yes: 1) a baby; 2) no room in the inn; 3) a manger; and 4) in v.15 which we just read: “out of Egypt I called my son.”
We’ll set the stage with a 3.5-minute summary of the history of man and God, our history with the Creator: On the sixth day of the world, after the animals are created, God creates man out of the dust. Man is unique in that he’s created in the image of the Creator, to represent him into the whole world.
Well, the first man listens to the Tempter, fails to trust the Creator, and trespasses his command… and thus immediately falls short of his created intention, of acting for God throughout the world. And because image-bearing involves ruling the creation, the whole cosmos is implicated in the death that ensues. Now death reigns over God’s world and spreads into the descendants of Adam.
Instead of tossing the whole human project in the trashcan, God promises the coming of a Man that will ultimately crush Satan and evil underfoot by overcoming the legacy of the first Man. Then some thousands of years later, God makes his move: he sets apart a man called Abraham and implies that one of his descendants will be that evil-conquering Man.
So, through Israel (those are Abraham’s descendants), a people set apart to enact God’s salvation, the peoples of the earth would be saved. Saved back to their first purposes: brought back to trusting God unto full image bearing. Through Israel, first the rest of the peoples of the earth and then the rest of the cosmos will be healed.
So, how did that go? Even after being squared away in a God-appointed environment and being given the best set of instructions on the planet – heavenly instructions – Israel proves inadept at trusting God. They are repeatedly unfaithful to him, their eyes always roving for something a little better. Rather than bearing the image of God so they can teach other nations to, like all the other peoples they’re also operating by their flesh. They are as much as child of Adam – the trespasser, the broken image bearer – as any heathen nation.
That history lesson brings us to that first Christmas! What begins at Christmas? The great re-do. Something that the old theologians called “recapitulation.” I’ll quote a theologian here: Jesus’s advent is a new beginning for humanity, to fix our mistakes and change the end of the story. (Kirsten MacKerras) Jesus’s advent is a new beginning for humanity, to fix our mistakes and change the end of the story.
Jesus will save us from our human condition – the flesh – by being a pattern or template of a new human being. Have you ever gone to save a file on your computer, and up pops the indicator: A file by that name already exists. Do you want this to replace the old one? Well, yes. The 2nd Adam overwrites the 1st Adam. A new Head from which is born a new Humanity.
Jesus is a human, but he’s different, he enters humanity in a new way. How? He doesn’t have a human father; he is born of a virgin. This is important in that the sin of Adam is not passed down to him. But we should also note how the Scriptures describe Mary coming to be pregnant: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you [Mary], and the power of the Most High will overshadow you…” (Luke 1:35) Now that sounds like an intentional echo from the very first chapter of the Bible as the Holy Spirit hovered over the face of the waters. Jesus is a new creation of a 2nd Man. Recapitulation!
Jesus arrives at the world and steps into history as a new-born baby – with his whole life in front of him. Think about it: he doesn’t appear as a teenager or a middle-aged man, but lives the full human life, from new-born to burial. One of the early church fathers gives the reason for Jesus’ assuming the entire span of human life: that which is not assumed is not healed. God has come to redeem, do over, the entire lifespan of humans, so of course Jesus enters the world as a newborn babe!
From the very beginning of his life Jesus begins living a new human life that both parallels the 1st Adam and contrasts with the 1st Adam. This deliberate parallel with the 1st Adam is suggested even at his birth. I’m going to cite an observation of late 19th century journalist G.K. Chesterton. In his book entitled “The Everlasting Man”, he’s reflecting on the fact that the earliest records of human culture that we have are drawings in caves. And many times those drawings were of both humans and animals. Chesterton finds a parallel between our earliest records of humanity and the birth of Jesus:
“This sketch of the human story began in a cave; the cave which popular science associates with the cave-man and in which practical discovery has really found archaic drawings of animals.
The second half of human history, which was like a new creation of the world, also begins in a cave . . . It was here that a homeless couple had crept underground with the cattle when the doors of the crowded caravanserai [roadside inn] had been shut in their faces.
And it was here beneath the very feet of the passers-by, in a cellar under the very floor of the world, that Jesus Christ was born.”
Now… maybe you’re skeptical; you think Chesterton is being a little fanciful here. Maybe. But whether Jesus was born in a cave or a stable or a guest room off the main house – you can find various translations and interpretations; and whether Mary and Joseph are in that place because the townspeople were hateful or selfish…or they were concerned that they have some privacy – you can find different interpretations… – – –
– – -don’t miss the point that it was an unusual birth in that they were in an out-of-the-way place, and that place had been or was currently where animals dwelt. Thus, there’s something about the scene that’s intentionally primitive, even primal. In fact, in reading of it I don’t think we’re mistaken in our minds to return to the sixth day of the world. Luke 2 an echo of Genesis 1. Here and now, where animals before have been, arrives the 2nd Adam.
One more complication: Jesus isn’t only recapitulating the first Adam, he’s also in a way re-living the history of Israel, the people, God had said, from which would return blessing on the earth. Up to that point Israel had failed in this endeavor, but on that Christmas night an Israelite was born who would cover the same ground as Israel… but now do things right. And so as an infant, Jesus – this little piece of Israel – goes down to Egypt as Israel had in the past, and sometime later God once again calls his son out of Egypt. And this recapitulation of Israel’s history would continue into Jesus’ adult life: like Israel he would go out into the wilderness and be tempted. (Like Adam he would be tempted with food.) He would gather around himself 12 disciples instead of 12 tribes. Like Israel he would go up to the mountain but now instead of receiving the law he would re-interpret, strengthen it, take it into his own hands…
Summary: beginning at Bethlehem and throughout his life, this 2nd Adam lives every second as a faithful image bearer, and this true Israelite fulfills Israel’s vocation to serve the world by reconciling them to the Creator. To these ends he recapitulated Adam and Israel in his life, but also, and most importantly, by his death. In Romans 5 Paul compares the 1st Adam of the old creation and the 2nd Adam born on Christmas:
Romans 5:15ff: For if many died through one man’s [1st Adam’s] trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many. 16 And the free gift is not like the result of that one man’s [Adam’s] sin. For the judgment following one trespass [eating the forbidden fruit] brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification. 17 For if, because of one man’s [Adam’s] trespass, death reigned through that one man [Adam], much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.
On Christmas, a baby was born whose stated mission was to save us from our enemies. Fundamentally, what we needed rescuing from was ourselves, our flesh, our failure to live up to our human calling and the consequent judgment of God. At Christmas, God set forth Jesus as the beginning and Head over a new humanity, who are judged, not by the sin of Adam and their participation in it, but justified by the faithfulness of Jesus to His vocation, as the Son to a heavenly Father.
The second Adam in his violent and spiritually desolate death still was representing humanity, took on himself the full penalty of our sinfulness and trespasses and crookedness so that by his faithfulness we could be cleared and start down the road of becoming image bearers in truth. And as God raised this Last Man from the dead, in that same act the men and women he represents are justified, claimed by God forever. Called into new life.
In Adam, all falls apart. This isn’t just a theoretical fact, we can watch it play out in our society and in our lives, our hearts. But there’s a do-over! In Jesus, humans win. Israel fulfills its vocation as the people through which God would usher in blessing and overcome evil. The image bearer through the free gift of righteousness returns to God and living the truth of what he is: an image bearer. Creation wins. God wins.
Merry Christmas!
Let’s apply this. I think there’s something common to being human: We all have regrets from our past, stains from little and big decisions we’ve made in conversations, in indulging etc.
Isn’t part of our nostalgia wanting to return to a time before the darkness set in, a more innocent time? I have a photo of me at Christmas my senior year of high school: I’m sitting in the living room at 12051 W 54th Avenue in Wheat Ridge, CO. Storm the boxer is at my side and Hope the whippet is on my lap. I want to go back to then and start over: I want to spend my money better, I want to be a better husband, I want to be more engaged in rearing the children, I want to waste less time.
A do-over please.
There’s a pianist who died this year called George Winston. He had an iconic album entitled “December,” and you can listen to that whole thing on YouTube. Well, if you want to be depressed, go and read the comments to that video. Here’s a sampling:
LOVE this, reminds me of when I was younger and life was full of possibilities…
My sister gave me this album for Christmas when I was 15. I’m 57 now. I want things to be like they were then. I want to go home for Christmas…
Let me get back to the good ol’ days and start over.
But here’s the thing: if we were able to return to those earlier scenes, we’d find out we didn’t go far enough back. If I think a little more rigorously, I return to that scene at 54th avenue and realize: a year earlier I’d been sent out of state to a boarding school because I was chronically misbehaved. And before that are scenes and impressions from my teenage years that I’d like to leave behind but can’t. And that’s true going farther back, from my childhood too, back as far as I can remember. Great memories, good times, but something dark too. A stain of failure and crookedness covers my life. I’m not making this up.
And this isn’t just true on a personal level; it’s true on the societal level too. We like to fancy that there was a time in the past when everything was just the way it should be. If we could only get back to the good ol’ days.
There’s a Woody Allen movie called Midnight in Paris in which a modern-day writer pines for the good old days of the roaring 30s when writers like Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were alive. Well, while visiting Paris, at midnight he’s walking, and he bends a corner and somehow finds himself back in those roaring 30s with all those writers he admires. This is so great, he thinks. But as he returns night after night to sit among them, however, he starts picking up on this current: they all wish they could live in the good old days of the late 1800s… with those people who were really alive! And so it goes.
Yes, there’s a problem today, but there’s a problem yesterday too. And our problem goes down really deep, all the way down to our heart, and has spread into every part of us. One of those writers of the 30s was T.S. Eliot, and he’s got a play called “Murder in the Cathedral.” The play ends with the Archbishop being murdered by four knights who think they’re doing the right thing in killing him. Throughout the play there is this swirl of false motives, misunderstandings, crookedness, cowardice, unneedful bravado etc. Toward the end of the play the Chorus laments:
We are soiled by a filth that we cannot clean, united to supernatural vermin,
It is not we alone, it is not the house, it is not the city that is defiled,
But the world that is wholly foul.
Clear the air! clean the sky! Wash the wind! Take the stone from the stone, take the skin from the arm, take the muscle from the bone, and wash them. Wash the stone, wash the bone, wash the brain, wash the soul, wash them wash them!
That’s what Jesus Christ did. At Christmas humanity was given a new birth, and as the Holy Spirit applies that new birth to an individual there’s a washing…a washing of re-generation, Paul calls it.
We look to the past – stain. We look inside at our heart – stain. We look at our motives – stain. We look at our so-called good deeds – stained by people-pleasing and showing off and all kinds of fakery. We look at our future – if we’re honest that stain will follow us.
On the other hand, when we look at Jesus’ life we see only faithful image bearing. Here’s how you trust God as a toddler. Here’s how you represent God in your work. This is how a faithful image bearer has a cold, waits for someone to finish his sentence, observes others’ success, faces setbacks, dies etc.
We need a faithfulness that comes outside of us. That is not tied to our thoughts, our intentions, our resolve. Merry Christmas! We have Him.
Oh, sinner, get connected to Jesus Christ, the 2nd Adam: to his life, to his death, to his resurrection. How does that happen? You simply hear from the Spirit about him, his coming, his truth… and it clicks. It strikes you as legit. Boom, you’re in him. Hallelujah! And then you make that in-him-ness public through baptism; your public identification is with the Christ. And then you spend your life in community with his body the church learning about this shared life in the Spirit, figuring out how you can walk in step with the Spirit. You’re alive in Christ. You died with him. You were raised with him. You’re with him in heaven. Your real self hasn’t yet appeared but when Christ appears you will too.
You cannot survive without the recapitulation of Jesus Christ. You need his whole life – from newborn mewling baby to buried in death – to stand in for your whole life. God is offering that to you. He is offering to forgive your sins. To restore your glory as image bearer. No matter how crooked you are. No matter how crooked you will continue to be. Salvation of your whole life, through Jesus. Call on the name of the Lord, and you will be saved.
I don’t know the details of the final judgment. But when you hear God asking you something like Broken Image Bearer, why should you not be thrown into eternal fire. Why should I let you into the new heavens and new earth? If the first word out of your mouth is “I,” you’ve not understood Christianity. No, the first word out of your mouth should start with the letter next to “I,” – “J.” Jesus was born and lived faithfully every second of his life. He died in my place. You, God, were claiming me too when you raised him from the dead. Jesus is my life.
Now those would be the sentiments of someone who’s understood what Christmas was all about!
Great message. Hope you feel better soon. Merry Christmas!