God With Us

God With Us

“A virgin will conceive and bear a Son, and His name will be Immanuel (which is a Hebrew name that means ‘God with us’).” Matthew 1:23

One of the themes of Scripture, if not the centerpiece, is that God desires to be “with us”. God created Adam from His very breath and walked with Adam and Eve in Eden during the cool of the day. He instructed Moses to build a Tabernacle, a sort of mobile temple, to let the people know He was constantly with them, even when they were on the move. He tells them, “I will make my home among you and never turn away from you.” (Leviticus 26:11) Even when Israel forsook God through the time of the Kings, God kept wooing them back.

So, it is no great surprise that God finds the most intimate way to be with us; He comes to dwell as flesh and blood, taking all the realities of humanity upon Himself. This is why Christmas is so important. It reminds us that, not only did God dwell among us in Christ, but He actually entered the world in complete vulnerability. He began as a helpless newborn, the way each of us began.

Patti and I have three children. Each one is precious to us and we hope we did our best as parents to send them off into the world. None of them came with a scholarship, feeding instructions or a mind-reading app attached at their birth. Like all babies, each one was fully dependent on us for their care. Like most parents, that was a very frightening proposition, especially when we had not taken a language course in “baby”. Though incredibly resilient, infants are also fragile.

When Michael was about eight months old he was crawling across the living room floor. For some unknown reason I had a lamp plugged into an extension cord with the cord in easy reach of his tiny fingers. The connection was loose where the two cords met, exposing a bit of the metal plug. As most babies do, Michael reached for the plug and, before I could react, put it directly in his mouth. He froze, his mouth open, and I ran over, scooped him up, and then finally he began to cry. Fortunately, he had only a burn on the inside of his lips. But, he was vulnerable.

When Jonathan was about 24 months I unwittingly closed his fingers in the hinge side of a door. The moment I heard his cry I knew what I had done! His little finger bleed profusely. The very end of his pinky finger was broken, as small as the tip of an ink pen. After seven hours in the emergency room we exited with a toddler wearing a full-arm cast for a chipped pinky. He and his cast were the darling of the church nursery for the next few weeks. But, he was vulnerable.

When Sarah was born, ten years after Jon, she was adored by the whole lot of us. The boys and I went baby-girl clothes shopping immediately after her birth. From time to time during her infancy and into toddler-hood she would wake in the middle of the night bawling. It was as if she had woken from a frightening dream. Patti or I would simply hold her close, sometimes for as much as 45 minutes, until the moment passed. Though we never knew exactly what caused those late-night disruptions, we did know that she was vulnerable.

This may sound like a strange thing about God, but I wonder if becoming a baby was scary to Him. God is omniscient, meaning He knows everything. But there is a difference between “knowing” and “experiencing”. That is part of the reason Jesus came, so we could be assured that God understands our predicament, our trials and even our joys. Imagine being the Creator of All and contemplating life as a vulnerable newborn. The God who is Sovereign, who called the Universe into being, is now at the complete mercy of a young couple raising their firstborn child. He who commanded the Hosts of Heaven invaded humanity in helpless flesh.

Will you take some time this season, look at Jesus, and wonder at the miracle of “God with us”? Will you follow that same Jesus who, loving us to the very end, endured the suffering of crucifixion because God wanted to be “with us”? Will you rejoice that “God with us” was resurrected from the dead, not to make us some supernatural beings, but to endorse our very humanity. Oh, the mysteries of the grace of God. The All-Powerful God’s great desire is to be “with us”, and to do so, He laid aside His power, taking on our own vulnerability. That is the Christ we celebrate at Christmas.