Bethlehem's Cross

Bethlehem's Cross

Mic.5:2 - But thou Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall He come forth unto Me that is to be ruler in Israel…
Lk.2:7 - And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped Him in swaddling clothes, and laid Him in a manger…
As Mary, exhausted by the birth, watched as Joseph laid the Son of God gently into the support of the wooden trough, it pictured a day in which other hands would violently place the Son of God upon the support of the wooden cross. Perhaps somewhere two other infants slept who would one day be lifted up on either side of this baby, Emmanuel. Only God is capable of using everything to point to His Son and all the facets of His loving ministry that had brought Him to this accursed world. While the Lord Jesus lay in that manger men were blaspheming and committing adultery and becoming drunk in that very city. The world was surely not anticipating His coming, and even the Jews had changed the Spiritual quality of His Messianic ministry into a national victory for Israel rather than a death destroying victory through the atonement. And the thought of Israel’s Messiah being born to a peasant girl in of all places a cattle stall was unthinkable.

But even in the candlelight of the moment, the shadow of the cross hovered over the infant’s resting place. These wooden beams provide for Him sleep, but the coming wooden beams would provide for Him death. And the humble teenage virgin mother must have gazed at her child in amazement. Do you think she must have gone back again to Gabriel’s words and tried to understand just who He was. Did the words “save His people from their sins” mean that He would bring them out of Roman bondage, or was it deeper than that? And His humanity seemed to mask the Spiritual realities of His divine Personhood from everyone but the keenest seeker whose hearts can hear the Spirit of Truth. And soon the prophet Simeon would warn Mary about the coming piercing sword that would impale her very heart. Who would have believed this infant was destined for the cross, and if the prince of darkness himself had known they would not have crucified Him. No one knew.

But never forget in the joy of His birth that He would be a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, and ultimately rejected of men. As the Eternal Word walked though this sin cursed world His heart must have broken, for He saw Adam fall and He witnessed all the consequences throughout the ages from heaven‘s glory, but now he sees through the eyes of man. But here He is, entrusted to a handmaiden of Judah, and safe in the care of His Father’s angels. The incarnation is the greatest of all mysteries as Paul rightly observed, and to see the Word as a baby is especially past our finding out. How many of us have wondered at what age Jesus became aware of who He was? It seems evident that at the age of twelve as He taught in Jerusalem’s Temple that He began to fully inhabit His calling, but to what extent did He willingly allow Himself to be subservient to the understanding of a little boy? But we do know that as this newborn slept in the innkeeper’s afterthought, he began a thirty-three year incubation that would culminate in the gruesome and glorious work for which He came.

Bethlehem has become the waiting room for Golgotha. This new life has an appointment with the place of the scull, and the world will see a justified punishment for a blasphemer, but the eyes of the Spirit see a spotless Lamb who knew no sin, slaughtered for those who were thoroughly practiced and inhabited in sin. Many times we have thought about when did Jesus actually pay for our sins. Did it begin with the scourging? Did it start will the crown of thorns? When He was nailed to the cross? The spear? Did it begin upon the lifting of Him on the cross? Just maybe, on that humble night in Bethlehem, the Infant of Sacrifice was born with His little face fixed like a flint eastward toward a little hill outside Jerusalem and to a pair of cruel Roman planks, somewhat like the planks that held Him now. A story of God’s eternal plan that resists human intellect but grows in the nurturing arms of faith, also His gift. And the recipients of this child, His adopted family, must bow in reverence and whisper “Thanks be to God for His unspeakable Gift“.

For unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given.