EPISODE 24 Luke Chapter 2 ” The Christmas Story” for Share The Word

Hi, and welcome to Share the Word, the best way to learn your way through the New Testament one chapter at a time. We know there are a lot of devotionals and encouraging thoughts for the day from the Bible available online, but our goal is a little more to honestly and systematically present the whole story of the New Testament. So let's listen in to today's lesson and go a little deeper. Luke chapter 2, the greatest story ever told. Luke loved stories. Most people do.

Jesus loved to tell stories. So Luke's Gospel we're going to see has plenty of good material to work with. As we study through Luke's writings chapter by chapter, we're going to hear more of Jesus' stories, often referred to as parables, that is, stories with purpose or deeper meaning, more of them in Luke than anywhere else. But when we open to chapter 2, the story we encounter here is not a parable. It's the actual account of the birth of Jesus, God's Son, into our world. Luke's source, remember he told us he wrote after extensive investigation, interviewing the eyewitnesses.

Luke's source for what we read here is most likely Jesus' mother, Mary. Not sure anybody else would have the details he shares with us here except her. And the story he relays in chapter 2, I think, is the greatest story ever told. It's not long, but it's beautifully written, straightforward, and immensely powerful. When I was small on Christmas morning, as my family gathered to open gifts, my father always prefaced that by reading the Christmas story from one of the Gospels. Sitting around on our living room floor with the decorated tree and wrapped packages beneath it, I was anxious to get through the preliminaries as I saw them.

But he was trying to help me get that the reason we give gifts at Christmas time is because God has given us the greatest of all gifts in sending His Son to be our Savior. Remember, God loved the world so much that He gave His one and only Son, the indescribable gift, as the Apostle Paul puts it. My dad wanted us to understand and appreciate that there is no Christmas without Jesus. It's a celebration of His birth, the most significant thing that's ever happened on this planet. When I got to be maybe nine or ten, I think, a Sunday school teacher of mine had our class learn the Christmas story from Luke chapter 2, memorize it in the King James Version of the Bible. I still remember it.

I often don't read this anymore because we have better translations now in more contemporary English. But man, it's hard to surpass it for the poetic beauty with which it renders Luke's account of the birth of Jesus. So no matter what month it is when you're listening to me, try and imagine it's Christmas morning now and listen to Luke chapter 2. As it came to pass in those days, there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor in Syria. So all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.

Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth into Judea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be taxed with Mary, his espoused wife, who was great with child. And so it was, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn. And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night. And, lo, an angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were sore afraid. And the angel said to them, Fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be for all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign for you: you shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling cloths, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with that angel a multitude of heavenly host praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, Let us now go up to Bethlehem and see this thing, if it's come to pass, which the Lord has made known to us. So they came with haste, and found Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning that child.

And all those that heard it wondered at the things that they were being told by the shepherds. But Mary kept all of these things, and pondered them in her heart. Joseph the carpenter and his young fiancée Mary were from Nazareth in the north of Israel. Luke learned the details and now relays to us how it was then that Jesus came to be born in southeast Israel in the little village of Bethlehem, about 150 kilometers away. Those towns exist to this day, by the way, and if you drive from Nazareth on a straight shot to Bethlehem, it's a little over two hours. But how about if you walk?

I've never walked that kind of distance and definitely would not want to. I'm sure Joseph didn't want to either. First, because he had to do this to comply with a government edict, a decree from the Roman occupiers requiring the Jewish people to return to their ancestral towns to register for a census. It was a registration to be used for taxation purposes. Because Joseph was descended from King David's family, Bethlehem, David's hometown, was where he was required to appear and to be registered. But beyond that aggravating reality, he had to make this journey, and Mary was heavily pregnant, ready to deliver.

We don't know all that was going on in Nazareth at that time, their hometown, but Mary was not about to stay there without Joseph in her circumstances. So they traveled together. You can imagine this was not a pleasant several days of traveling. Mary had to be very uncomfortable. They were making an arduous trip in order to get taxed by their despised Roman occupiers. The whole experience seemed daunting and beyond aggravating.

But there was a big reason for it. Their child would not come to be known as the son of Joseph, but as the son of David. King David was born in Bethlehem, and Jesus was a direct descendant of his. The Old Testament prophet Micah, 500 years earlier, had written that the Messiah, the son of David as he's called, would be born in Bethlehem. So, although the timing seemed awful, this was a divine appointment for them to be in Bethlehem at this exact time. It was necessary in God's plan.

They made it to Bethlehem safely, but Mary was at the verge of giving birth. Unfortunately, probably because many others had to return to Bethlehem for the same reason they were, when they arrived there was no place to stay. Their families had probably not lived there for generations, so there were no relatives, and the one and only inn was already full. When the time came for Mary to deliver, they were apparently in a stable, or possibly a cave used as a stable to keep animals out of the weather. There was no other place for them. And so, in that humblest of circumstances, the Son of God was born.

He was tightly wrapped in cloths and laid in some straw in a manger. That's an animal feeding trough. There were shepherds just outside of Bethlehem who had their sheep safely in the fold for the night. They were sitting, likely around a fire, probably eating something, and they were discussing things, you know, how they hated this new tax from the Romans, or whatever current events were on their agenda. For them, it was a night like any other night, any other night for a thousand years. Why, King David, as a boy, a thousand years before them, had grazed his family's flocks in these very same fields.

He'd composed psalms of praise to God while looking up into this same night sky. But this night was not like any other night before or since. It was the night God chose to inaugurate His divine plan for our redemption. The night our Savior was born. Then the quiet conversation of the shepherds was suddenly broken when they were confronted by a shining angel of God, and the brightness of heaven's glory surrounded them like they were the focus of a dozen helicopter searchlights. They were terrified at the suddenness of this and had no idea what could be happening.

The angelic voice said to them, Don't be afraid. I have great news for you and for all people. For this very night, right here in Bethlehem, the Savior has been born, Christ the Lord. This is how you'll know him. You'll find him wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger. Instantly, the brightness of the glory manifested into countless angels in the sky surrounding them, filling the air with their voices, and they were shouting, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to those with whom God is pleased.

Then the scene melted away. The angels vanished. The echoes of their praises faded. The darkness and quietness returned, and the night sky and twinkling stars were as before, as though nothing had happened. Those shepherds must have sat there dumbfounded for a moment or two, looking all around and then at each other as if to say, Did you guys see what I think I just saw? When they all agreed they had, they decided to go into Bethlehem and look for what the angel had told them.

It was probably not too hard to find that stable where the child had been born that night, likely near the inn where they may have first checked. Bethlehem was a small place. Here's how I imagine it. A very protective Joseph pulls open the big stable door to see who had come at such a late hour. He sees these wide-eyed, awestruck shepherds who had angelic voices still ringing in their ears. They're talking over top of each other as they try to describe to him what they had just seen and heard.

As Joseph listens to their amazing story, he realizes they're no threat, and he allows them to come inside. Let's follow them in. Close your eyes for a moment. Can you smell the hay? The heavy, musky scent of animals. Can you see in the dim light the look of pride on Joseph's face?

Do you see an exhausted young woman lying back in a straw covered with his cloak? Carefully, come in closer. Look right beside her, right there in the animal trough. What do you see? Wrapped tightly in cloths and nestled in a bed of straw lies a newborn baby. See how tiny, how fragile.

A seven or eight pound bundle of God, now in a very large, very dark world. Think about that. On that vulnerable little infant hung all of heaven's plans for redeeming the fallen human race. That's why his parents were instructed to name him, remember, Jesus. The Lord is salvation. God had chosen to initiate the greatest thing he would ever do, his plan for our salvation, in a way no one would have ever possibly imagined.

I'm sure those shepherds then, now in calmer tones, relayed again to Mary exactly what the angelic beings had told them about her child. As for Mary and Joseph, hearing this was another confirmation of what God had already revealed to them. I love the line of Luke's when, after hearing the shepherds' amazing report, he says, As for Mary, she treasured all these things, pondering them in her heart. Experiencing the miracle of birth, another living human being coming out of your womb, is mind-blowing and unforgettable enough when you experience it for the first time. But how about in Mary's unique case, this highly favored young woman, as it's put, realized she had just given birth to the long-promised Messiah? That's what the word Christ means, that she was holding in her arms the literal Son of God who had been supernaturally conceived in her body.

So, yeah, I guess Mary was treasuring all these things, pondering them over and over in her heart. Beyond Mary and Joseph, the first witnesses to the miracle of the incarnation were animals in a stable. Then those lowly shepherds. It's actually hard to imagine a more unlikely scenario, a humbler situation for the Son of God to make his entrance into our world, isn't it? Maybe that's why those angels who appeared to announce Jesus' birth were so excited. Peter writes in his first epistle that the angels in heaven had long wished to understand God's mysterious plan for our redemption, but they certainly never imagined this.

They had to be astounded by it. The Creator and Sovereign of the universe, Almighty God, had Himself entered our world as a tiny baby in a stable full of animals, entrusted to the care of a simple young woman on whom His fragile life depended. The apostle Paul records an early Christian hymn, or a creed possibly, in Philippians chapter 2, which goes, Although He existed in the form of God. He did not count his equality with God as a thing to be held on to, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant and being made in the likeness of men. He emptied himself. He laid aside many of his divine prerogatives to become here, to become like us and to live in our world.

The big word for what these verses are all referencing is incarnation. I'm not one to try to impress you with theological terms, but this is an important concept that you should know because it is a precise term for an essential Christian belief. The incarnation. That was when God became flesh, when God assumed a human body and a human nature as the very real person we know as Jesus. This is why Joseph was told in a dream by God, Don't hesitate to take Mary as your wife, even though you've discovered she is pregnant and you know that it's not your son, because her child is miraculous. Her child is actually the Son of God.

This is an integral part of God's plan for our salvation, this miracle we call the incarnation. It had been foretold by an Old Testament prophet named Isaiah 700 years earlier. Joseph was reminded, A virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel, which means God with us. God with us. That's exactly who Jesus was, God with us. The miracle of the incarnation was a positive ID for Jesus' identity, and for a whole lot more, remember.

We discussed in the Gospel of John, as well as last lesson in some detail, why Jesus had to have a dual nature of God and man. Every false teaching, every heresy that has come down the pike for the last almost 2,000 years now. Has distorted Christianity right at this point. The reality of the dual nature of Jesus is absolutely essential to the Christian faith. Remember, Jesus Christ had to be a real flesh and blood human like us in order to be our ultimate representative, to live that perfectly righteous life which none of us can do. Then this perfect man, representing all of us, had to suffer and die the penalty our sins deserve, which he did at the cross on Calvary.

But he also, at the same time, had to really be God in order for that payment to be infinite enough and valuable enough to atone for all the sin of the human race for all time. No mere mortal man's death could ever accomplish that. It's only because of who Jesus was, the incarnate Son of God, that our redemption was achieved. So the incarnation was a critical linchpin of God's, in the great plan for our salvation. Did you notice in this second chapter, Luke has described a couple very unlikely but critically important things providentially converging that set God's mysterious plan for our salvation in motion. First, Mary, a young woman who had found favor in God's eyes, was chosen to bear the Christ child, pregnant, having never been intimate with a man.

This seeming impossibility, we learn, was the result of a miracle caused by the Holy Spirit, and it fulfilled Isaiah's very specific 700-year-old prophecy about a virgin conceiving and giving birth to a son. Then, very late in Mary's pregnancy, political circumstances in their country caused Joseph to have to travel to Bethlehem in Judea. Although that was not where they lived, he had to return there in order to comply with a Roman edict, and Mary and her state was not going to be left behind. And that led to the fulfillment of another very specific 500-year-old prophecy found in the Old Testament writing of Micah about the location of the Messiah's birth. A Roman decree at just that time requiring their return to their ancestral home for tax registration? That's why Jesus ended up being born in a small village called Bethlehem.

What a coincidence, you might be thinking. If that's what you're thinking, think a little deeper. Scattered throughout the Old Testament, prophecies by several different people are written, very specific prophecies about a coming Messiah, written between 500 years and back to as far as 1,500 years before Jesus' actual birth. This chapter actually brings three of them up, namely that the Messiah would be from the family line of Israel's greatest king, King David; that he must be born in the little village of Bethlehem and nowhere else; and that he must be born to a young woman who was actually a virgin at conception. Coincidences? Really?

What are the odds of those things occurring in any one Jewish child? But there are many more, just as specific about the Messiah's ability to do unheard-of miracles. We saw that many times in the Gospel of John happening, as Jesus was attested to do by many eyewitnesses. About the very year he would be presented in Israel, about his rejection by the religious establishment, about his sudden death and the specific way in which he would be put to death. About the circumstances of his burial, and even that his corpse would not decompose, which could only mean that he would be resurrected. Very specific prophecies made by Moses in the Psalms, David, by Isaiah, by Micah, by Daniel, and other Old Testament writers.

Really, what are the odds of them all coming true in the birth and life and death and resurrection of Jesus? We'll get into that big idea in more detail later in Luke's account. But I'm giving you right now some food for thought. Looked at through the science of probabilities, there is actually zero doubt that Jesus is the fulfillment of these ancient prophecies, which means zero doubt that he was the Messiah and Savior God had promised to send. By the way, it's precisely because of these facts that Christianity took off like wildfire in the first century.

When people understood how Jesus fulfilled way too many prophecies, too many promises of God to deny that he was the one, and especially when he rose from the tomb after his public execution that was witnessed by so many people, it became undeniable to honest people that Jesus was in fact the promised Messiah and Savior God sent, and they accepted him as their Savior and Lord in droves. And so this is how the greatest story ever told began, humanly, in an unimaginable way, with a pregnant virgin, astonished angels, terrified shepherds, barnyard animals as the first witnesses of the most significant history event ever. Yet from heaven's vantage point, this was all perfect. There in the ancient city of his ancestor King David, this miraculously conceived little baby was delivered, and he was named Jesus.

Jesus, the Lord is salvation, because this one and only this one, the Son of God, would one day save his people from their sins. If you're enjoying these commentaries, please help us share the word by passing along the podcast to your friends and family. For more information, visit us at sharetheword.org. From all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.