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A baby being born is an amazing thing. It happens all the time, but it’s still amazing.
If it’s your baby, no one needs to tell you that. It’s life-changing and you don’t need a “notification” on your phone to remind you—“Calendar alert, you had a baby.”
If it’s someone else’s baby, your emotions can vary a lot. You might not care at all. Or it might not be such a happy thing for you if you’ve wanted a child but some reason it’s not happening.
This morning we’ll look at a story of a baby being born. It’s amazing and life-changing—definitely for the young mom and her husband.
But it’s supposed to be life-changing for us as well. And God does a lot so we’ll see that.
So, let’s read Luke 2 and try to see the birth of Jesus as God wants us to see it. And may it change your life even this morning.
I’ll read Luke 2:1–21.
Let’s pray.
The first person we meet in this passage is Caesar Augustus. He was the first Roman Emperor. By this point he’s been Emperor for just over 20 years. It was the Roman Senate that gave him this name, Augustus. His birth name was Octavius. “Augustus” seemed more fitting for his new role. It means “august” or “exalted.”
As Emperor he expanded the boundaries of the Roman Emperor significantly. One of the ways he did that was by his use of censuses and taxes. This funded things like the building of roads and beautifying Rome, but it also helped connect the more remote parts of the empire.
Our scene takes place in Bethlehem in Judea, absolutely one of the remote parts of the empire. To fly it in a plane is a trip of 1400 miles.
His decree set in motion a whole chain of events as his network of governors went into action. Eventually that decree would reach the city of Nazareth, and Joseph and Mary would know they needed to go to Bethlehem to take part. That was the city of their family line, so they would have to travel the 100 miles south to Bethlehem. Bethelehem is about 7 miles south of Jerusalem.
It was this census that got Joseph and a very pregnant Mary to leave their hometown of Nazareth to go to Bethlehem. The pattern at that time was to go to your family’s town of origin. Joseph and Mary were connected to King David himself, so they went to Bethlehem. Bethlehem is called here “the city of David” (v. 5).
Why Bethlehem?
But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days. (Micah 5:2)
Without the census of Augustine, Jesus would have been born in Nazareth. There’s nothing wrong with being born in Nazareth, but the prophecy said Israel’s Messiah was to be born in “Bethlehem.”
[Luke] sees God as Lord of history, and the actions of the emperor in faraway Rome do but set forward the divine plan and purpose.
Leon Morris, Luke, TNTC, 90
The mighty Caesar Augustus would have assumed he was always doing his own bidding, determining his own outcomes.
What we see here is that in doing exactly what he wanted to do he was simply helping God accomplish his plans.
A man like Caesar Augustus would always assume he was the Chess Master. It turns out he was just the pawn.
As we know, Mary “was with child,” basically 9 mos pregnant. If you were Caesar Augustus you could stay home to have your child. If you were a poor carpenter from Nazareth and the Emperor wants to count you to tax you, you leave town. Pregnant wife or not.
Luke tells the story like a man, not a woman: Luke 2:6–7. When Mary is back in Nazareth talking to her friends, this isn’t how she’s going to tell it!
Yes, it’s brief. But let’s not miss the details either:
When you see these details, the observation of Leon Morris feels just right: “Everything [about this] points to poverty, obscurity and even rejection” (TNTC, 92).
You see how this opening passage flows. It starts in the palace of Caesar Augustus with a decree that affects the whole Empire. It ends with a teenage mom giving birth to her first child in a place suitable for animals. The baby is placed where food for animals should go.
II. The Savior in the Manger
But then the simplicity and poverty of the scene changes dramatically. Now we recognize something is happening than can truly be called cosmic.
If this were a movie the camera would now leave the stable and pan out into a nearby field where shepherds were “keeping watch over their flock by night” (Luke 2:8).
We go from a poor, obscure carpenter and his wife to a group of shepherds in a field at night.
It’s easy to romanticize shepherds in the Bible. After all, King David was a shepherd. Moses was a shepherd. Jesus calls himself the Good Shepherd.
But shepherds were a rough crowd and often not trusted—and for good reason. They sometimes didn’t make a clear distinction between their own sheep and the sheep of others. As a class of men, they were on pretty low level. In a court of law they weren’t allowed to give testimony (Morris, TNTC, 93).
This doesn’t at all mean these were bad men in the field near Bethlehem. It just means they came from a class of people on the low end of the spectrum. Like Joseph and Mary, they were at the opposite end of the spectrum from Caesar Augustus.
But it’s these men who receive the greatest birth announcement in history. No heir to the throne in any palace of the world had a greater birth announcement.
Luke 2:9–14
And then the scene gets even bigger, brighter, more thunderous. The “angel of the Lord” is joined by a “multitude of the heavenly host.”
“A multitude of the heavenly host” = An army. Could conceivably that army Jesus mentions in Matthew 26:
Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? (Matt 26:53)
A legion is 6,000 troops, so 72,000 angels “at once.” Remember, it was just one angel that killed 185,000 Assyrians in one night (Isa 37:36).
We just don’t want to get the wrong idea here and imagine a glowy group of babies and young women with wings singing over “Christ the Lord.” This is an army beholding a new and unexpected plan of their General who is the Son of God.
Imagine a quiet night watching sheep and suddenly you look up and 72,000 fierce angels are above you proclaiming God’s glory!
There is one kurios and it ain’t Caesar Augustus! Pomp and circumstance, gold and statues can surround an earthly king. But for the Lord of lords, “a multitude of the heavenly host praising God” is more fitting (v. 13).
Once the proclamation ends the angels disappear into heaven.
The shepherds respond at once. They were told to look for “a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” in a manger wrapped in swaddling cloths. They went into Bethlehem and found Joseph and Mary and the baby.
They told them how they got there, why they came. “And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them” (2:18). Joseph and Mary and anyone else present were amazed.
But then Luke tells us “Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.” There’s at least some chance that Mary was the one who shared all this with Luke as he wrote his narrative. She “treasured” and “pondered” and so was able to share it with Luke.
I want to go back for a minute and pick up something I didn’t develop. When the angel told the shepherds who was born in the city of David, the angel said, “Christ the Lord.”
“The Lord” was lying in that manger, wrapped in swaddling cloths. “Lord” is the Greek word, kurios. It can apply to earthly lords and masters. But here it means something more.
It refers to THE LORD, God himself.
One of the most famous stories of the OT is where God reveals himself to Moses at the burning bush. This is the passage where God was telling Moses he would use Moses to deliver Israel from its slavery in Egypt.
Here’s one excerpt of that:
God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.” (Exod 3:15)
You see where it says, “LORD,” in all capital letters? That’s how English Bibles often translate YHWH. That’s as close to a proper name for God in the OT as there is.
But when the OT was translated into Greek, the translators in Exod 3:15 used the Greek word kurios.
The angel was really telling the shepherds that the baby lying in the manger is the God who revealed himself to Moses at the burning bush. It’s the same God.
Jesus the Son of Mary did not begin to exist when he was “conceived in the womb”—Luke 2:21. In eternity past he was the Son of God, existing in all his power and glory.
This “multitude of the heavenly host” knew him as the Son of God in eternity past long before they knew him as “a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.”
When the angel Gabriel came to Mary and promised she’d have a son the angel said to her, “He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High” (1:32). And then, “The child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God” (1:35).
This baby was no ordinary baby. He was far more than the Son of Mary. He was the Son of God. As weak and frail as he looked in that animal trough, he remained the Son of God.
John Calvin:
Here is something marvelous: the Son of God descended from heaven in such a way that, without leaving heaven, he willed to be borne in the virgin’s womb, to go about the earth, and to hang upon the cross; yet he continuously filled the world even as he had done from the beginning!
John Calvin, Institutes[1]
The last detail is the shepherds showing to all the world how you should respond to this.
Luke 2:20:
And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. (Luke 2:20)
Join them! You’re “hearing” this morning. “Praise God” for what’s being said here.
If you do, it’ll change your life forever. You’ll realize in that manger is not just the eternal Son of God but eternal life…for you.
Let’s fast-forward a bit to an event a few decades in the future. When a man named Lazarus had died. Jesus would raise him from the dead. But before that he had a conversation with Lazarus’ sister Martha:
Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. 22 But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.” 23 Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” 24 Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” 25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, 26 and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:21–26)
Well, “do you?”
The conversion of David Nasser. Fleeing Iran, finding God in TX.
Prayer and closing song
[1] Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2.13.4.
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