It seems so odd that when Christ came into the world, he came to a small town where most of the anonymous and inconsequential people were likely worn out and run down. For too long, the people of Bethlehem had been politically oppressed and most, it seems probable, had given up on the prophets’ promises of liberation and a coming king.
It seems strange, too, that when Christ came, he came in a barn where his flesh and blood body was laid in a feeding trough, the last place anybody would ever look for a counselor, king, and savior (Isaiah 9:6). And it’s bizarre that when he came, he came to a pair of poor, no-name parents.
The story’s puzzling because prior to his incarnation the Bible tells us that Jesus had existed forever, eternally predating the creation of our world (John 17:5). What’s more — and harder to imagine — is that everything that existed on the night his human birth — all that was visible and invisible — had been created through him and for him (John 1:3; Colossians 1:16).
As Jon Bloom, a writer and the chairman of Desiring God Ministries, wrote, that includes “his own human DNA that instructed each cell to perform its duty in forming a body and brain.” Before his human birth, Jesus created his mother’s blood and the amniotic fluid that slicked his hair. He was responsible for instilling into his own body the “startled reflex that would wake him crying.” He made the cotton that had been woven into the swaddling clothes that Mary wrapped around him. Before this humble entrance, he had spoken the world’s forests into existence, including the trees used to build his manger. From eternity past, he had known his mother. He had formed his fatigued and dutiful earthly dad. He made the shepherds who rushed to worship him. He had created the angels who “filled Bethlehem’s sky with good news of great joy.” Prior to this lowly birth, Bloom notes, Jesus himself had formed the “strange star drawing strange Persian astrologers to adore him.”
As he lay in a manger, surrounded by the chaos of the world-wide census, he looked like any other kid who had just been born. Yet, he was “the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation” (Colossians 1:15). In his humanness, he may have cried, slept, and cooed like every other baby. But in in his divinity, Bloom recalls, he was holding the created world in working order (Colossians 1:17).
God the Son came because God the Father loves this world (John 3:16), and because Satan had scarred so much of its beauty (1John 5:19). He came because all mankind had become sons and daughters of disobedience — because, Scriptures say, people “followed the course of this world and the prince of the power of the air, living in the passions of our flesh and carrying out the desires of our bodies and minds, becoming children of wrath by nature and destined for eternal destruction” (Ephesians 2:2-3; 2 Thessalonians 1:9).
At Christmas, then, we’re grateful that God the Father, because he is rich in mercy, sent his only begotten Son to rescue us and make us eternally alive (Ephesians 2:4-5). We’re equally grateful that God the Son loved the Father — and us — so much that he came to die on the cross, fully paying our debt so that we might rejoice in eternal life (Philippians 2:7-8; John 1:14; 1 Peter 2:24; John 3:16).
Jesus lived a perfect life and died a sacrificial death so we would be with him forever, knowing, minute by minute for all eternity, the inexpressible joy of seeing him in his glory (Hebrews 7:25; John 17:24; Psalm 16:11).
That’s the reason, writes Bloom, that he came and was born to common people. It’s why a manger was his first bed and why shepherds were the first to know of his arrival. It’s why he was reared in Nazareth and why his people rejected him (John 1:11) and why, after years of preaching a gospel of grace and healing the sick and delivering the demon possessed and raising the dead — he was betrayed by a friend and abandoned by his closest allies. It’s why religious leaders handed him over to Gentile tyrants who ruthlessly executed him. And why he was raised from the dead.
Jesus came so that we might become the adopted sons and daughters of God, and thereby share with him “every spiritual blessing of his eternal, infinite, glorious inheritance” (Colossians 1:12; Ephesians 1:3-6).