Beholding the Christ Child

Merry Christmas! I feel like I am one day late; however, December 26^th is traditionally celebrated as Boxing Day, when gifts would be given to the poor, and household servants would be sent home with Christmas boxes to share with their families. However, I read recently that Boxing Day should not be observed on a Sunday, so this year Boxing Day will actually be tomorrow. So perhaps I should wish you all a happy Saint Stephen’s Day today instead, which has a multitude of Christmas traditions associated with it, too.
 
In any case, we are not quite done with celebrating Christmas, as today we will consider what it means to behold the Christ child. This covers the smallest window in time of any of our topics in this “big picture” series. So far we have looked at God’s process of creation (in some ways ongoing even now), the fallenness of humankind, the stricken earth, the tragic flow of history, the repeated interventions of God, and the promise of a Savior-Redeemer. Each of these cover huge time spans, significant chunks of history. The gestation, birth, and infancy of Jesus on the other hand was a very specific event, limited to just 2 or 3 years. But as we have already said, it stands at the center of history, with everything before anticipating it and everything after impacted by it.

Beholding the Promise of a Savior-Redeemer

Welcome! Today we continue our series entitled Beholding: A Wide-Angle View of the True Story of God with the message “Beholding the Promise of a Savior-Redeemer.” The idea of “beholding,” as we have explained in this series, is to ponder, to reflect, to think about the implications of key aspects of the big picture of the message of the Bible.
 
In his recent message, Tim shared about the struggles he had with finding a way to give a wide-angle view of God’s interventions through history. I likewise have found it a struggle to put into words what I want to convey.
 
Let me start by talking about the Bible as a whole. As an unbeliever, I remember reading about someone saying that if God wanted people to believe in Him, then He should have made His presence far easier to discern. The person went on to say that if God were to write His name in the heavens, then he would believe. I remember myself agreeing with this argument, although I also remember being a little afraid of the idea that God might actually do that – I was a bit scared of becoming some kind of super-religious, extreme – I would have used the word “crazy” – person. I don’t think I came all the way to the realization that I actually didn’t want God to exist, but this was shortly before I put my trust in Christ, and I was definitely beginning to move in that direction. I did not make the connection that my wanting God to not exist would of course severely impair my ability to conduct an honest investigation and make an unbiased conclusion. Fortunately, God in His mercy moved me past this kind of thinking, past my own biases, and opened my eyes and heart to Him.

Beholding the Repeated Interventions of God

As many of you know, 10 days ago Lisa was in the ER with breathing difficulties and they did a chest CT that had previously been scheduled as an outpatient test to be done a few days later. She had a very scary allergic reaction to the contrast used in the CT. As her airway was closing off, I alerted a nurse who responded within seconds with two others plus the doctor. With quick intervention Lisa did keep breathing, but later commented on how the outcome could have been so much worse if she had been in the clinic for the test rather than the ER. We were praying throughout the experience but did not realize that this was how God would intervene, in possibly saving her life.
 
Today we will behold the repeated interventions of God. Some we can recognize in the immediate, micro level, like Lisa did in the ER. We can also stand in awe of God’s overall involvement in the entire sweep of history, assured that each individual story adds up to his story. What is God up to? How is he involved? What are his eternal purposes? One of the challenges of seeking a big picture view like this is that we realize very quickly that it is indeed very big. I feel like we are looking over a huge forest that stretches to the horizon in all directions. The risk is that we could walk down into it, examine a few trees, and come back out thinking that we have understood the essence of the whole. I would like somehow to describe the trees and the forest, conscious of how impossible this task actually is.

Beholding the Tragic Flow of History

Good morning!  We are continuing in our series “Beholding.”  When Carl opened the series, I was surprised to learn how many times the word “behold” appears in the King James Version of the bible.  (More than 1000!)  Often, God’s purpose for the word is to cause us to pay attention or “listen up.”

 
In this series, we want to stand back and behold the big picture.  In the case of today’s message, we will get a glimpse of the Bible narrative and even up to the present day beholding the tragic flow of history.
 
Our word history is derived from the Greek.  In Greek, the word is historia.  They dropped the “h” sound around the time of Christ.  Sometimes it is fascinating how close the words are even as they’ve been taken into other languages entirely.  That Greek word historia does not occur in the New Testament, but the word historeo does, one time.  It is the verb form, and in Galatians 1:18 when Paul describes going up to Jerusalem to see Peter.  It literally says Paul went to historeo Peter and stayed with him fifteen days.  Paul went to examine Peter face to face, to get to know him.  Historia or history is a written account of such inquiries or narratives.
 
The root word for historia is in the bible many times (over 600) and is in fact one of the secondary words in the New Testament that gets translated as “behold.”  Most of the time the meaning is directly translated as to see or to know which sort of takes us back to where I started.  Today we are going to behold or pay attention to the story of humanity, mostly at a micro or personal level, though we will touch on some macro nation-state-empire topics.
 
There will certainly be some feelings of déjà vu as we go along, I think.  Ecclesiastes kind of gives us the short version of this message.
 
History merely repeats itself. It has all been done before. Nothing under the sun is truly new.  – Ecclesiastes 1:9 NLT
 
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. – Ecclesiastes 1:9 NIV
 
Let’s pray and we will fly through the ages of mankind.