God With Us

Matthew 1:18-25

Introduction

Everyone is excited when a baby is born. Grandparents are proud, parents are nervous and excited and everyone cheers at the beginning of new life. When our daughter was born we lived in The Pas and after she was born, I was walking down the hallway of the hospital and some people from our church saw me and said that just by the look on my face they could tell that it was good news.

One of the challenges which parents face at the birth of a child is the naming of that child. While mom is pregnant baby books are purchased and names are evaluated. The choosing of a name often takes a lot of time and negotiation. Parents have different reasons for choosing a name. Sometimes the baby is named because of family tradition. For example, those of you who follow NFL have heard about RG3 or Robert Griffin III. When he was named the choice was made to name him after his father and grandfather. For some people the way a name sounds is very important. We talked with someone this week about baby names and when we mentioned a baby’s first and second name they said, “That sounds good together.” Sometimes names are chosen because of the meaning of the name. When our children were born, it was important to me that their name have some faith based meaning, so Joel means “Jehovah is God,” Kristen means “Christ follower” and Jonathan means “gift of God.”

These days we are talking about the birth of someone who is very important to us. His birth was very exciting and full of significance. The names given to this child are also full of meaning. As we examine Matthew 1:18-25 we want to think about what these things mean for the world and for us. Let’s begin by reading this passage.

I.                A Baby is Born

A.               A Problem

Last weekend, my sister and her family were here for the engagement party of their adopted children whom they unofficially adopted a few years ago. There are three of them, a couple and the man’s 24 year old brother and they immigrated from Congo. The young man found a girl he wanted to marry who lives in Winnipeg and so they came from Edmonton to negotiate the dowry and then to celebrate the engagement. In summer they will be married in Edmonton. As they described, particularly the paying of the dowry to the bride’s family, I realized that the practices surrounding engagement and marriage are somewhat different than what we are used to.

The same would be true of the customs common in the Middle East at the time when the Bible was written. At that time, an engagement would be negotiated between the groom’s family and the bride’s family. After the engagement, there would be a period called the betrothal. During this time the couple would be considered so significantly promised to each other that a death of one of them would leave the other widowed. Yet they did not live together during this time. Then after about a year of betrothal, they would be married and come together as husband and wife.

During the time of betrothal of Joseph and Mary, Joseph discovered that Mary was pregnant. This was not good news. Anyone who would find out that she was pregnant would suspect that Joseph had made her pregnant. This would not have been morally acceptable in the community. Joseph, however, knew that he had not caused her to be pregnant. Therefore, the only explanation he had was that she had been unfaithful, which was the same as adultery because of the deep bond of the betrothal.

The text tells us that Joseph was a righteous man. What does a righteous man do when he finds out that his betrothed has been unfaithful to him? What does a righteous man do when the community suspects that he has had sex before the appropriate time? As a righteous man he had to distance himself from Mary so that everyone would know that he had not done it. It also would be just for him to allow the penalty for adultery to be carried out on Mary.

However, the text also tells us that he was “unwilling to expose her to public disgrace.” That would have been the righteous thing to do, but he also understood that it was harsh and so we see something else about Joseph and that is that he was gracious and compassionate. He obviously loved Mary and was kind enough not to want the full power of the law applied.

So Joseph was wrestling with this difficult situation. How could he do what was righteous and at the same time compassionate? The only solution he could think of was “to dismiss her quietly.” In that way he would maintain righteousness but also not expose her to the harsh penalties of the law.

B.               An Explanation

While he was thinking about these things an angel of the Lord came to him in a dream to explain the situation to him. The angel encouraged Joseph not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife. He explained that it was not some other man who had caused Mary to be pregnant, but that it was God Himself, through His Spirit who had caused Mary to conceive.

It says a lot about Joseph that he accepted this angelic message. He was a man who must have trusted God even though I suspect that he did not understand what all this meant. Yet we see that he did follow through on the explanation of the angel. He obeyed in several ways. He took her to be his wife. That means that if people found out the time between marriage and the child’s birth was too short, they would have assumed that Joseph had done it. In taking her as his wife, he was saying that he was willing to bear this potential accusation. He honored her further by taking her as his wife, thus likely shortening the period of betrothal and yet he did not have sex with her until after Jesus was born. It seems to me that to do this it took a man with compassion, self-discipline and one who honored both God and his wife. He also obeyed by naming the baby Jesus, just as the angel had told him to.

This is the story of the birth of Jesus as Matthew tells it. It presents significant information about the importance of His birth, but it is in the naming of the child that that meaning is explained.

II.             A Baby is Named

In this account of the birth of the child, two names are given to him. These two names are loaded with meaning about what Jesus came to be and do and it is worth our while to think about these names and their meaning.

A.               Jesus

The name Jesus was not an uncommon name among the Jews. It was the Greek form of the name Joshua which was quite common. The “Je” portion of the name refers to Jehovah and the “sus” portion of the name comes from the verb “to save.” So the name means God is salvation or God saves. The angel told Joseph to name the child Jesus and that the reason for this name was in accordance with the meaning of the name, “for he will save his people from their sins.”

The desire of the Jewish people of that time was for salvation, but it wasn’t necessarily salvation from their sins that they sought. They had a pretty good system in place to deal with their sins. The nation would meet together on Yom Kippur every year to offer a sacrifice for the sins of the nation and God had promised that if they did this they would be forgiven. In addition, any time anyone sinned, they could make a sacrifice in the temple and the promise of God was that their sins would be forgiven. Forgiveness of sins was not uppermost in the minds of most of them. What was uppermost in their minds was salvation from the oppression of foreign domination. The Romans had conquered the land and they were not nice. They mocked, they oppressed, they taxed and they contradicted their beliefs. The salvation the Jews were waiting for, after 500 or 600 years of oppression by various nations, was for salvation from oppression. They waited for Messiah to come and save His people from foreign rulers.

Is salvation from sins in our mind as we think about the name of Jesus who came “to save his people from their sins?” We also would like salvation from all kinds of things. We would like salvation from poverty, lack, oppression, injustice and broken relationships. But the message of the angel is that “…he will save his people from their sins.” Why do we need salvation from sins more than any other kind of salvation?

If we compare ourselves with one another we could easily get the idea that we don’t need salvation from sins. Everyone is like everyone else. Oh sure, there are a few people who are a lot worse and they need salvation from sins, but we ourselves are not really that bad. But is that an accurate understanding of things? When we compare ourselves with God or when we stop excusing all the little missed steps we take, we know that we do need salvation from sins.

We know that sins are in all of us. After a wonderful worship service in which we sense the holiness of God and rejoice in His goodness, we may well be motivated to commit ourselves to holy living and to pleasing the one whose love we have experienced. Yet most likely by the time we have gotten home we have sinned in some thought, word or deed.

We know that sins have power over us. We may be perfectly able to have victory over one area and we rejoice at the strength we have never to slander another or to lust. But what about the other areas? What about the gossip or the hatred which in spite of our best efforts still draw us into disobedience far too often?

And when our careless word or hateful deed is released, we watch as hearts are crushed or souls discouraged and we once again are made fully aware of the awful destructive power of sin.

Ultimately the destructive power of sin leads to death. Death is the punishment of God for sin, but it is also the final target of the trajectory of the destructive results of sin. When we contemplate sin like that, we know that we need salvation from sins – our own, our communities and our world’s sins.

            So the good news contained in the name of this child is good news indeed! Salvation from sin assumes that we share in the problem of a world in bondage to evil and redeems us from our contribution to it.

            The story of Jesus is the story of how that happened. Jesus came into this world to live as a human being. He lived all his life and never once did he give in to any of those destructive urges. He lived without sin. The relationship between sin and death is that of an equation. If you sin, you die. If you die, you must have sinned. If you don’t sin, you don’t die. If you don’t die, you must not have sinned. However, that equation breaks down when it comes to Jesus. He did not sin, but he died, How can that be? The only possible explanation is that He did not die for his own sins, but for the sins of every person on earth. He took the punishment for every one of us. The guilt of every sin we commit has been placed on Jesus. That is how Jesus saved us from our sins. He took the guilt of our sins and the punishment for our sins on Himself. Because He was raised from the dead, we know that God accepted His sacrifice and because of His resurrection, He also made it possible for us to live in a new way by the power of His Spirit instead of under the power of sin. That is how this child fulfilled the meaning of His name, Jesus.

B.               Emmanuel

The other name which we find is that given by the angel to Joseph, the name Emmanuel. The angel explained to Joseph that the name came in prophetic fulfillment. The prophecy was made in Isaiah 7:14 and originally referred to someone who was to be born in that day, but had already long been recognized as referring to the coming Messiah. Emmanuel, or Immanuel, either way is OK means “God with us.” The “imman” part means “with.” The “u” means us and the “el” part of the word means God, so “with us God.”

Although everyone understands that God is present everywhere, Emmanuel means something more than the omnipresence of God. The power of God’s presence with us is explained in the way in which Jesus came to be on earth. This is the mystery of what happened to Mary and what Joseph had to understand. Mary was a human girl. She was not immaculate, as some suggest, but was a normal human woman with normal human temptations and normal human failures. Being born of Mary, Jesus was completely a human being. That is the part of the story emphasized in the name “Emmanuel” which speaks of presence in the human family and in the world of human beings. What is really exciting about this name, however, is that it is God who is with us. The story tells us that Mary conceived without the help of any man. We don’t know exactly how this happened, whether the Holy Spirit caused the egg to be fertilized or whether the Holy Spirit placed a fertilized egg into the womb of Mary. With artificial insemination and test tube conception we don’t find this as difficult to understand as people might have at one time. These are also not the important things, but what is important is to understand that however it happened, through Mary and through the work of the Holy Spirit, God became a human being. God came among us in a way that He had never been among us before. The mystery of the birth of Jesus to Mary by the agency of the Holy Spirit gives us the wonder of incarnation, of God becoming flesh, of God coming among us.

What is the meaning of God with us? Philip Yancey has a wonderful chapter on this theme in his book, “The Jesus I Never Knew.” I have borrowed from his writing to help us think about the meaning of this name.

            Emmanuel means that we have a humble God. When foreign dignitaries come to visit our country, the cost can be huge. In 2010 Canada hosted the G8 and the G20 summit in Toronto. Before it even began, the cost for hosting this event was projected to be around $1.1 billion. About $160 million of that was for hospitality and much of the rest was for security. When God came to earth, he was born as a baby to a poor family in a feeding trough for animals. Yancey says, “The God who came to earth came not in a raging whirlwind nor in a devouring fire. Unimaginably, the Maker of all things shrank down, down, down, so small as to become an ovum…” Philippians 2:6-8, describes that humbling when it says, "…who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross." What are the implications of that humbling?

            God with us means that God is approachable. Yancey points out that “In most religious traditions, in fact, fear is the primary emotion when one approaches God.” Even in the Old Testament people approached God with fear. When Moses stood at the burning bush, he was told to remove his sandals because of the almighty presence of God. When Israel stood at the foot of the mountain, they were told not to touch the mountain because God was on the mountain and they could be struck down. When Uzzah reached out to touch the Ark he was killed immediately for his impiety. Yet a God who becomes human has changed the paradigm. No more is God distant, aloof, unapproachable and fearful. He has come to us and therefore, we can go to Him. Yancey says, “The God who created matter took shape within it, as an artist might become a spot on a painting or a playwright a character within his own play.” Therefore, “In Jesus, God found a way of relating to human beings that did not involve fear.”

            God with us means that God came into this world in order to defeat power and overcome authority but to do so through weakness. When Mary celebrated her pregnancy in the presence of Elizabeth we read in Luke 1 that she rejoiced that she was about to have a baby. But she also understood something of the unusual way in which God was going to work through Him. She understood that through the “lowliness of his servant,” “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” Through becoming Emmanuel, God came into the world to accomplish victory through weakness and this theme continues throughout the life of Jesus as he accomplished victory over sin, death and all powers by accepting death as his method of operating.

            Yancey tells the story of the fish he keeps in his aquarium. He cleans the water, cares for them and feeds them every day. Yet every time he comes near to them they respond with fear and swim quickly to the farthest corners of the aquarium. The only way to remove the fear and let them know that he is caring for them is to become a fish himself. That is what God has done.     

Conclusion

            Those of you on Facebook may have seen the post we put on this week. It explained the meaning of Christmas in this way, “God visited us. Later on we’ll be heading back to His place.” That is Christmas in a nutshell isn’t it? Emmanuel was the name of the child that told us that God visited us. Jesus was the name of the child that tells us our sins can be forgiven and because they are, we are able to go to God’s place.

            What a blessing! The wonder of this is that the birth of this child is not meant only to be celebrated, but to be received. I saw a rendition of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen this week. I liked the music, but the way in which it was done, it seemed as if those performing had no clue about the power of the words they sang. The song declares, “Remember, Christ, our Saviour was born on Christmas Day to save us all from Satan’s power when we were gone astray.” Such truth can not only be celebrated, but must be accepted, followed and lived. May Jesus, Emmanuel become more than just the reason for the season, but the reason why we wake up each day, the foundation of our daily plans, the confidence of our hope and the basis for our joy.