“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given.” ~Isaiah 9:6

Yeah, yeah, God is with us. I know he lives with us. But only metaphorically, right? God is with us in a spiritual kind of way, a mental or psychological way. There’s no way God can actually live with us on earth. I mean, God is perfectly perfect. Infinite. Transcendent. Holy. Divine. Eternal. Wholly other. The barriers of time and space and divinity are too great. God can’t actually live with us here. After all, we are human. And sinful. Finite. Physical beings with physical limitations and shortcomings. God with us isn’t really real.

Isaiah 9 says “Wrong!”

It says God came to us. It says the Incarnation of our great God is a real, physical, historical fact. God left the glory in heaven to come to us.

Now that would be a very horrible thing if God were a monster. If God were bent on destroying us or desired to torture us, his coming to us would be a terrifying thing.

But our God loves us. He is a loving God. He desires communion with us. He wants to be family with us. He calls us his children and wants us to call him our Father. He loves us so much that he determined a long time ago to do whatever it takes to get us out of the dark and into his eternal Kingdom of Light. Even leaving heaven. Even putting on our flesh and taking on our great burdens of suffering and sin and shame.

To save us.

“The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.” ~Isaiah 9:2

I pray that you have a great Christmas with your family and friends. I pray that you are blessed today with peace and good will. And I pray that you give thanks today for the incomprehensible gift of God’s coming to us in humility, in the form of a helpless newborn baby, to rescue us.

Merry Christmas,

Allan