TL, one of my favorite memories of you as a four year old was driving in the Jeep with the top down and you singing at the top of your lungs along with John Cougar Mellencamp, “I Need A Lover that Won’t Drive Me Crazy.”
I think that for much of the Old Testament, God sang a similar song about His people. Let me tell you how bad it got. We read these words in the book of Hosea:
When the LORD first began speaking to Israel through Hosea, he said to him, "Go and marry a prostitute, so that some of her children will be conceived in prostitution. This will illustrate how Israel has acted like a prostitute by turning against the LORD and worshiping other gods." (Hosea 1:2)
It was bad. Everyone kept forgetting their need of God. I can relate to this a lot. I do the same thing all the time. I forget that I need God, and every time that I do I get myself into trouble just like the Israelites in the Old Testament. They were continually pissing Him off and He was continually letting them have it their own way and allowing them to pay the price for their decisions. After they got in too deep He’d send a rescuer to bring them back to safety.
When things got really bad, half the country was taken away into exile and the other half was beaten and became virtual indentured servants, all of Israel began looking for a final rescuer. They believed that He would be the Messiah (the Chosen One) and would lead His people to ultimate victory, vanquishing their enemies once and for all.
Meanwhile God became so disappointed that he simply left. In Ezekiel we are introduced to the word “Ichabod.” It simply means the Spirit of the Lord left. He abandoned his people, leaving them alone and to their own devices. This wasn’t out of spite, but simply not wanting to be somewhere He wasn’t wanted. Do you know that between Malachi and the closing of the Old Testament writings, God is silent for over 400 years!
And then the Bible claims, and I believe, that God began to speak again; first through John the Baptist, and then Jesus. And though John came in the tradition of the prophets, acted like a prophet and finally died like a prophet, Jesus was nothing like anything anyone expected. He didn’t arrive like the Messiah should and He didn’t act like the Messiah should.
Paul says in his letter to the Philippians:
“You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had. Though he was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to. Instead, he gave up his divine privileges; he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. When he appeared in human form, he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal's death on a cross.” (2:5ff)
The Christmas story expounds on this idea. Jesus came humbly. He came to the lowly. He was born in poverty and lived a simple and poor life among the poor and for the poor.
Here is God and he comes to live with us. But he doesn’t come to the Donald Trumps. He doesn’t even come to the USA (In those days it would have been Rome). No, he comes to a small dirty out of the way town. He grows up a carpenter (before they had unions and made money) in an out of the way town that no one gave any mind to. It would be like us having our Messiah born in a small dusty town in Mexico. It is not what anyone expected. The joke in Jesus’ day was “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” It is kinda like me saying, “Can any good thing come out of France?”
God rarely seems to come to us in the way we expect.* We expect power, authority, he comes as a weak baby, dependent on the world, and lives as a servant giving up any rights to glory and grandeur that we may have thought he was owed. He never took power over people. He never demanded that they behave the way He wanted them to or thought was best.
We need to pay more attention to how he came and how he lived, because later on he tells us that our chance at real life – the life we are designed for – eternal life – is a product of us following Him and together living as He lived.
I’ve got a lot more to say about Jesus. As I read through this letter, it is nothing special. It lacks something and I am not sure what, but it is the best I can do right now. And the best I can do has to be good enough.
*It seems to me that people who make claims to know something about God (other than what is clearly stated in the Scriptures and confirmed by the church throughout its history) and His specific plans rarely do
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