As we approach the Christmas season, we will see many portrayals of the nativity scene depicting the birth of Jesus Christ. It is easy to view this typical nativity scene with a great deal of sentimentality of a cute, little baby in a manger, and we might miss the gravity of what truly occurred. That little babe wrapped in swaddling clothes in an obscure manger in Bethlehem was not just any other cute baby. That little newborn child was God manifest in the flesh! The baby that would grow up to be Jesus of Nazareth was “very God of very God”! It is almost inconceivable to think that the eternal, omnipresent, sovereign God who rules over this entire universe condescended to this earth and took the form of a newborn babe that had to be nursed, carried, and changed like any other infant. Truly, great is the mystery of godliness that God was manifest in the flesh (1 Tim. 3:16).
It is a great mystery to us how God could even become a man. God is omnipresent, everywhere present and nowhere absent, and even the heaven of heavens cannot contain him (1 Kings 8:27). When we think about the billions of lightyears vast this universe is, even all that space cannot contain God! Wow! How then could the omnipresent God be inhabited in the body of a little six-pound infant child? That doesn’t make any sense to my natural mind. That is a great mystery to us that we will not fully understand this side of heaven.
Jesus was like any other newborn who needed to be carried by his parents, nursed by his mother, diaper changed, and was reliant upon his parents to keep him alive as the Son of man. However, at the same time, in that newborn babe dwelt all the fullness of the Godhead bodily (Col. 2:9). All the power of the sovereign, omnipotent God, the King of kings, and Lord of lords dwelt in that little babe who was born and put in a manger in Bethlehem. That is the great mystery of godliness, that God became a man. God’s ways and thoughts are so much higher than ours like the height of the heavens above the earth (Isaiah 55:9). Truly, God’s judgments are unsearchable and his ways past finding out! (Rom. 11:33) Despite the limitations of our mind, let us meditate on the mystery of the incarnation during this Christmas season that truly God become a man to save his people from their sins! (Matt. 1:21)