HOLIDAY SHARING
JESUS CAME DOWN—A STORY THAT ISN’T JUST FOR CHRISTMAS BY BECKY BARNETT
Jesus came down. Have you ever stopped to embrace the greatness of that truth? Sure, we might read the “Christmas Story” in December, but have you ever sat down and really let it all sink in. Jesus left Heaven, where He reigned as God in perfect unity with The Father and The Holy Spirit. He left paradise and came down to walk the earth among us. The one who had never felt pangs of hunger now needed to be fed. The creator of all the rivers, lakes, oceans, and raindrops now felt thirst. PHOTO CREDIT: BECKY BARNETT
He began as a helpless baby—needing everything done for Him. He arrived on earth in a dirty barn where the animals slept and his bed was a feed trough. As He grew up, Jesus walked the packed dirt roads from town to town—He who had chariots of fire at his disposal and legions of angels to carry Him if He only said the word—He walked in the dirt and the dust and the dung just like us. He was homeless, a vagabond traveler, accepting the hospitality of those along His path and sometimes having nowhere to lay His head. He was tired. He was tempted. He needed to seek out places to be alone, to pray, to rest. He felt despair. He felt sadness. He wept at injustice and death and the pain of those around Him.
He endured a Roman crucifixion and felt the full weight and punishment of sin He never committed. He was humiliated. The God of the universe, who spoke every single thing into existence, who gave those humiliating Him their very life and breath. He was humiliated and He did not fight back. He didn’t call down fire from Heaven and wipe His torturers off the face of the earth or cause the ground beneath their feet to swallow them up. He could have. He had armies of angels ready to do His bidding. He chose to face the lowest, deepest, darkest form of humiliation and rejection. Having known perfection, He willingly came down and submitted wholeheartedly to the will of The Father. To live a sinless, perfect life and to die as a sacrifice in our place so that we might one day stand before God. We deserve to face the fullness of God’s perfect wrath for the wrong things we have all done, but Jesus took our place. Having accomplished this, He proved Himself to be who He told us He was, by raising from death and returning to Heaven. Because Jesus came down people can have a relationship with God. We can come into God’s perfect presence without immediately being toasted to a crisp, because the sacrificial death of Jesus covers all our iniquity. Jesus paid the debt and replaced all the sacrifices and atonement rituals of the past—He became the ultimate sacrifice. Jesus came down for a purpose. He wasn’t just a nice man, He didn’t just have a lot of good things to say. He was God incarnate. Jesus is God, who came down in the form of man, lived a perfect human life and yet never ceased to be God. His very name declares this truth to us, He is Immanuel—God with us. As we head into the end of the year let’s keep these things close to our hearts. When you hear the story of Jesus’s birth, reflect a bit more deeply on all the beautiful meaning behind the fact that Jesus came down.
He faced rejection, ridicule, betrayal, hatred. MKR Magazine September 2021
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