Happy Christmas! Saturday is the big day, but some will be traveling today and tomorrow to get there. Some folks are already traveling by air, but may get to spend Christmas in the passenger terminal at a European airport. Oh joy... We like to go home or to grandma's for Christmas. Some people spend a lot of money and effort to do this, only to be stuck somewhere due to weather or perhaps weather and some one's cost-cutting. A Spanish company manages the British airport called Heathrow. Years of little or no snow meant that certain equipment and supplies didn't get replaced...and then the snow came this year and the airport has been shut down and unable to do that airport thing with the planes. We hear about this at times in the States. Companies and local governments make the same decision - we don't need all that expensive snow removal stuff: it never snows here! Ah to be caught with your britches in the lowered position for all to see.
In our own lives, we have probably done something similar; perhaps even exactly the same. We had little snow out in these parts for about 15 years or more. People stopped buying snow throwers; snowmobile shops went out of business; a person with a snowmobile might have paid to have the old junker hauled away; and even snow melting chemicals became hard to find for a season when the snow did arrive. We can't control the weather, but we can prepare for it. Sometimes, after years of not having something in the weather, we get lazy and equipment falls apart or people are sent packing, and then the stuff arrives. I don't think this experience in Europe will last as a lesson as well as it should. We as humans behave in pretty much the same way in these matters.
For around 400 years the Jews had not seen or heard from a real prophet. God sent a prophecy about a famine of the Word, and He delivered. Like a drought ending in a downpour, the dearth of prophecy ended around the last of the B.C. days. Anna and Simeon came to the temple expecting to see the Lord's Christ before they died. People no doubt wondered what was up with that. It had been some 400 years since they heard any real prophecy; who exactly were these two crackpots? Some might have warned the two about what happened to false prophets under the Jewish law. Back in those days people didn't point to their heads and say, "Ya got rocks in yer head!" They pointedly said, "You'll get rocks upside yer head, if'n ya don't shut up!" False prophets didn't have a long lifespan back in those days. Today a false prophet usually writes books, appears in infomercials, talks on Oprah, and takes in millions of dollars, but that's our times.
Around 6-4BC, the folks were waiting for this fellow:
Though he was God, he did not demand and cling to his rights as God. He made himself nothing; he took the humble position of a slave and appeared in human form. And in human form he obediently humbled himself even further by dying a criminal's death on a cross. Because of this, God raised him up to the heights of heaven and gave him a name that is above every other name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Phil 2:6-11 NLT
Paul didn't write these words until a few years after Jesus had ascended to Heaven, but he wrote about the gift we were given in the Christ. Each year we gather to celebrate this very thing - the Son of God appearing in the humble form of a child. The times are very different from those BC days when no prophets had appeared for so long. Back in the day: The shepherds moved their flock closer to Bethlehem in a drought of prophetic scripture. Trembled in fear when an angel appeared. Ran to town to see the newborn Messiah, and then came back to the fields praising and glorifying God in a new age. Christ the Lord had arrived on Earth to save us all.
God bless you on this beautiful Christmas season!
Bucky
No comments:
Post a Comment