Good morning. Welcome to Trinity Reformed Baptist Church Jackson, Georgia. It's December 21st, 2014. Joining us now is Brother Steve Martin. He brings us a message from the Word. What a great time of the year to be together. I was not quite 21 years old when, by the grace of God, I was saved. And I can remember the Christmas before the Lord saved me because it was like every other Christmas. It was like every other Christmas. Good times were coming, presents, my parents loved me, a tree, some of the best food of the year. And on Christmas of 1968, I missed it like every other Christmas. My parents would take me to church most of the time. I wasn't super rebellious other than I found it boring, and those of you who are sitting here whose parents are making you come, it's boring with what? Four O's? Boring. And I got the message that Jesus Christ died on a cross in Palestine for the sins of the world or the sins of his people, wherever. And President Eisenhower was the president, Mickey Mantle was my favorite baseball player, and they all made the same hell of beans difference in my life. Very little. And then God began to work in my life. And the sad part was, though, even though I saw that the world was messed up and what was wrong with the world was in me, there was something wrong in me, I still never connected the dots. So here was Christmas 1968. All right, Christ died on the cross and that's Easter and Christmas as he came, he's born a baby. That's good. And wonder what I'm going to get for Christmas this year. I was like, hello. And then a week later, through the providence of God, I heard the gospel in a saving way. Maybe I'd heard it before, but I definitely heard it that day. And I remember looking back to Christmas going, it was just a week ago. I mean, you can be that close to the kingdom, you can be a week away from being saved, a day away from being saved, and not get it. This Christmas can be as clueless as every other Christmas you've had to endure. So I can appreciate those of you who are with us this morning who aren't believers. I can remember it very well. If you're an adult when you're converted, you can remember your BC days. So I can commiserate with you and also pray for you. This morning what I wanted to take you through was to help you avoid what's called presentation fatigue. Some of you are in sales and presentation fatigue is You've said this thing, your little spiel, so many times, it's like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you can, you know, if you have a little thing that you have to share with somebody, you can share it upside down across the table. You just know your little spiel. And things that are very familiar are often unexamined. And things that are very familiar and unexamined frequently become unimportant. And so, though you know the details of Christmas and, you know, just what we read from the two passages of Scripture, those two beautiful hymns, There is enough to convict every person in this room on Judgment Day. You will not be able to look Jesus Christ in the eye and say, I never got it. I never heard the gospel. Well, you heard it this morning, just in the two hymns and in the scriptures that were read. But familiarity can breed contempt, particularly if the Spirit of God is not working in your heart. So I thought I would do something today to kind of shake up what we normally think about Christmas. You know, Christmas is a little baby in a manger. Okay, we get that. And there's no room in the inn. Okay. And there's donkeys and camels and sheep and wise men and parents and who knows all who was there in the stable. Okay, we get all that. But a question I have for you is, if Jesus is who he claimed to be, if Jesus is who Christianity claims him to be, what in the world was he doing before the manger in Bethlehem? What was Christ doing before the manger in Bethlehem? I don't know, I guess he was just doing whatever you do in the Old Testament. I don't know if I've ever thought about that. Have you ever wondered what Christ was doing before he was a baby in the manger in Bethlehem? Well, today I want to look at that because it's profound. You can't appreciate, you have no ability to fully appreciate who Jesus is if you don't get who he was before Bethlehem. Because in a sense, what happened at Bethlehem is dependent on all that he is and was before he came to that manger. C.S. Lewis said, the most profound thing that's ever happened in the history of this planet is the day that Jesus came to be born, because once God had determined that he would send his son, then Easter is just the follow-up. Easter, as far as the foregone conclusion, once God decides to save. If he decrees that he's going to save, and he sends his son, then everything else is going to follow on because God is sovereign. So what was Jesus doing before he was a little baby in his mother's womb, a little baby being born, a little baby lying in a manger being worshipped by shepherds and parents? Well, there's several things. I'm going to try to whiz through them today, so put on your seatbelts, kind of pull it hard so you won't fall out of your chair if we go around the corner too fast. But we're going to look at who the Bible says that Jesus was and is prior to being born a baby. The first thing the Bible puts before us is the fact that Jesus Christ was God and always was God before he became a baby in the manger in Bethlehem. You kind of go, right, I understood he's kind of the God-man, but do you really understand what that means? That Jesus Christ was God, co-equal to God the Father, and later to be revealed as co-equal to God the Son. That's what Jesus was and is prior to his being born. The Bible teaches that there are three members of the Godhead, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. They're all equal in power, in attributes, in deity, and they have different assignments that we see them carrying out in the Bible, but they're the three members of the Godhead. They're co-eternal, co-equal, and Jesus always existed as God prior to being born in Bethlehem. There was billions of years, as we count time, when he wasn't a man, when he was only the second member of the Trinity. It was a big deal in heaven. It shook up heaven, when we'll see later, God the Father and God the Son covenanted, and the Son would take upon himself human flesh, and he would visit planet Earth. But that had never happened in the history of the world. God the Father and God the Son had always related to one another. And that goes to a second aspect of His being eternally God, is that there had always been this love relationship between the members of the Godhead. The Father had always loved the Son. What the father said about his son one day on planet Earth could have been said every millisecond of every day in eternity past. This is my beloved son. With him, I am well pleased. And that was true of every single millisecond in the history of eternity. The father had always loved the son. The son had always loved his father. And you can include the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit in that divine Trinity. The spirit had always loved the son. The son had always loved the spirit and the father and the spirit, etc. So here we have Jesus Christ, who came to earth, but in the whole history of eternity, those are two words that are hard to put together, history, which is in time, and eternity, which is beyond time. But in the history of eternity, so to speak, it was a big deal. It was a new thing. It was a startling thing, a stark thing. God was going to become a man. But Jesus had always been God, unbounded. uncreated, without needs, always in a loving relationship with his father, always in a loving relationship with the Spirit. The Spirit says that in the Word, we read from Isaiah 9, that someone was going to be born who was a baby, but yet he was Almighty God. He was the wonderful Counselor, the Prince of Peace, the Mighty God. The Apostle Paul says in Colossians Christ is the image of the invisible God, for in Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. For in Him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily." Wow, how does that happen? And if you're sitting here going, yeah, that's one of the things about Christianity I don't get. Well, hey, join the club. Nobody professes to understand that. I don't profess to understand what the Bible says that Jesus is holy God and holy man at the same time. The Bible says it, so I believe it. But how that works, I can't explain it to you, and no one can. Exactly. Jesus is holy God, even as he's being born as a baby and is fully a human being. You go, well, that's kind of mind-blowing. That's hard to get your head around. Yeah. In fact, something to think about. Some of you who have questions, you say, well, I have questions about Jesus, or I have questions about Christianity, or I have questions about what happened on the cross. You know, if you understood everything about God, either you or God would be unnecessary, because you'd both be the same, wouldn't you? There are things about God who, by our very nature, is finite creatures. Creatures means somebody made us, we were created. Finite means limited. To be a finite creature means somebody made me, and there's limits. There's limits on my life, my strength, my knowledge, my everything. To think that there's things about God I can't quite grasp, that doesn't discourage me in the least. That makes me even more think that Christianity is true. Because if I could just scope out everything about Christianity, everything about the Godhead, everything about what God's doing in eternity and time, He must not be a very great God, because my little pea brain could comprehend all of them. So the fact that God's bigger than me, and there are things I can't quite grasp, that doesn't bother me. And it shouldn't bother you, I think, if you have a dose of humility. The author of Hebrews says, Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets. But in these last days he has spoken to us by his son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom he created the world. Christ is the radiance of his glory and the exact imprint of his nature. Of the four Gospels, the Apostle John shares the most by pulling aside the curtain and says, let me tell you something about the father-son relationship. Now, it's on all four of the Gospels, but John, who was the closest to Jesus, does the most to pull the curtains aside and say, you know, there's things about Jesus's eternal relationship with the Father that sometimes we don't think about. In John's Gospel, chapter 1, it says, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. So here we have this person, this being who's given the label or nickname of the Word, and he's with God, but he's also God himself. He was in the beginning with God. Later in chapter 3, John says, no one has ascended into heaven except he who descended down from heaven, the Son of Man. Whoever this Jesus is, the Son of Man, this Word, he came from heaven. In John 6, Jesus is recorded by John as saying, I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose no one of all that he has given to me, but raise them up on the last day. But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about all this, said to them, Do you take offense at this? What are you going to do if you see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? Heaven is Jesus' home. He's always existed in eternity past. Coming to space and time and living in history was a new thing. Jesus came for thirty-three years. He returned back to heaven. John's Gospel chapter eight. Jesus said to them, You are from below. I am from above. You are of this world. I'm not of this world. Jesus then said to them, Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am. And we know from the Old Testament, the passage in the burning bush, when Moses came up to the burning bush and what's going on here? And someone speaks to him from the burning bush and says, I am who I am. I am eternally who I am. Take off your shoes, you're on holy ground." And Moses finds himself groveling in the presence of deity. So for Jesus to say, before Abraham ever existed a thousand years ago, I've always existed, I am. In John chapter 16, Jesus is quoted as saying, I came from the father and I have come into this world and now I'm leaving this world and going back to my father. And I could repeat examples of this in John's gospel, where Jesus is saying, I'm not of this world. I am not like one of you. Exactly. I am a human being. I'm very much a human being. I get thirsty. I get tired. I get hungry. I need sleep. I could be hurt. You prick my finger and it bleeds. I'm just like you, except I don't have no sin. I came from heaven, I'm going back to heaven, I'm here in a 33 year day stay over. 33 years as a day stay over, so to speak. In fact, in Jesus' final prayer in John's Gospel, if you want to read a prayer and meditate on it, read John chapter 17, where it's a whole chapter where Jesus is saying to his father about his life here on earth, things like this. Now, glorify me in your presence with the glory that I had when I was with you before the world even existed. Father, I desire that these people also whom you have given to me may be with me where I am to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world, before there was planet Earth, before there was Orion, before there was the Pleiades, before there was anything in stellar space, before God had created anything, for seeing the fall. God had already entered into a relationship with his son before the foundation of the world to come, to be the God-man, who would represent God to man and man to God. So what was Jesus doing before he was the baby in the manger of Bethlehem? He was always Almighty God. All the attributes of God, total sovereignty, infinite love, goodness beyond our comprehension. wisdom beyond our comprehension. Holy, holy, holy. And Jesus didn't come to earth because he needed anything. Jesus didn't come to earth because he was lonely. Some really bad preachers give some really bad impressions of why Jesus came. He was lonely. He needed you. He wasn't lonely. He had always had an infinitely perfect, eternal love relationship with the Father and the Holy Spirit. He didn't need a crummy relationship to make him happy. I mean, compared to being eternally loved by the Father and the Spirit, having a relationship with me, and you too, don't look so pious, would be kind of crummy. He didn't need crummy relationships to be happy. But he didn't come for what he was to get from us. He came for what he was to give to us. Everything that the Bible says about God the Father is true, God the Son, and that's who He is and that's what He was doing before He came to earth. A second point, which follows harder than that, besides being Almighty God and besides having this eternal love relationship, is that Jesus was the creator of all that exists. Before there was a manger, before there was Bethlehem, before there was planet Earth, Jesus, always existing as God, created those things. The Bible calls him co-creator. He and God the Holy Spirit were delegated apparently by God the Father to create everything. It says in Genesis chapter 1, God spoke the world into creation. Since nothing thwarts his will, all he has to do is think something and will it, and it happens. Because nothing thwarts his will. He needs no information. He didn't forget anything. He speaks and hears the universe. John's Gospel, chapter 1, verse 3. All things were made through Christ, and without him was not anything made that was made. Everything that's in existence is here today because Christ made it. The Apostle Paul speaks to the Colossians. For by Christ all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible things and invisible things, whether thrones and dominions and rulers and authorities. All things were created through him and for him. The author of the Hebrews says, he upholds the universe by the word of his power. He created everything. But how did the constellations stay there? Why do they function the way they do? Well, scientists thinking and describing something, they're explaining it, make egregious mistakes. I can describe something. Why do swans and geese fly south in the fall and then fly north in the spring? When I was a kid, it was called instinct. What's instinct? We don't know, but it's just something about it. They just do that. But now we know it's genetic encoding. It's in their chromosomes, really. And what is that? We don't know. It's just what they do. In other words, you can change your description, but you're not really explaining why are these things hardwired to do that? Because God made them that way. He created them. The author of Revelation records what the angels are singing in heaven, and this is what they're singing to the Lamb upon the throne. Worthy are you, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created. Did you know you exist this morning, whether you're one of the worshipers or whether you're one of the board? Because God wanted you to exist. He spoke your name and spoke you into creation, so to speak. Your parents didn't have to have you. You had no right to be born. There was no law in heaven. Well, on such and such a date, they had to be born. So, OK, I guess we're going to go through with this. None of us had to be born. We didn't have to have our lives. But God willed that it be so, and Christ is the one who creates all things, including us. Every living thing, every inanimate thing, everything owes its existence to Jesus as the creator. Every star in every galaxy, you know, it's estimated that there are not simply stars, or suns, as we might think of them, not simply galaxies, but there's as many galaxies, you know, we're in the Milky Way. You can see pictures of how big the Milky Way is. We're in the Milky Way. Well, it's estimated that there are as many galaxies as there are grains of sand on all the seashores of the world. You go, wow, that's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot. But all these things exist because Christ created them. Every microbe in every drop of pond water. You know, one of your first things you do in school is you get a microscope and you go find some little pond somewhere and you go, you can't see anything, but there are things in that water. And you put the drop of water on a slide and you look at it at 10 or 100 power and you go, whoa, there are wriggling things in there. I don't think I want to drink that pond water. I don't think I want to bathe in that pond either. There's lots of creepy crawlies in there. Every one of those things has its existence because Christ willed it. Every atheist muttering blasphemies against God owes her very existence to Christ. Every seraphim or cherubim, every angelic creature that's now worshiping in the presence of God, every fallen angel that's temporarily serving the devil, owes its existence to the fact that Christ created them. Nothing exists that does not owe its existence to Jesus Christ. So the baby in the manger created the galaxies. created planet Earth, created Israel, created the dirt, created the wood, created his mother, created his father, and then by a fiat work of the Holy Spirit, he is created in the womb of Mary. That's what biblical Christianity teaches. You go, wow, that's kind of mind-blowing. Yeah, it is. It makes you feel real small, and it makes you wonder why this Almighty God would have an interest in teeny little us. But a third thing, before the manger, Christ was not only creating all things as almighty, ever-existing God, but the Bible says He currently, at this moment, every millisecond, holds everything together so that it works. He didn't simply create it like someone might create a watch and put it on the table, and having wound it up, would step back and let the watch work. The Bible says that Christ currently, every millisecond, sustains everything that's currently in existence. What do I mean? Every star functions exactly as Christ planned it, and Christ sustains that star, moment by moment, for every light year that is in existence. Every squirrel in the woods nearby functions exactly as He planned it, and Christ sustains that squirrel's life. And when Christ's purposes are through for that squirrel, or that star, it will come to an end. Every mountain and glacier and tectonic plate and every lightning bug and garden snake and garden snail and every human being has our existence moment by moment because Christ sustains the cells in our body or the things that make up the mountain or the dirt. And our God is so great that he can work sovereignly, just without any help, or he can work what we call through secondary means. Like, he wanted your nose broken, so I punched you in the nose. I was the secondary means, and your nose got broken. Or he can just somehow punch you in the nose himself, and you've got a broken nose. Now, thankfully God doesn't go around punching people in the nose and breaking their noses. He uses numbskulls like me to do things like that. He uses secondary means. But the point is that God doesn't have to do everything in a miraculous way. He can work through secondary causes to accomplish His perfect will. He can work through a traffic accident, or a fall off of a ladder, or a brain tumor, or the H1N1 virus. He can work without means and he could just call your name and you die. Your cells don't function anymore. Well, one of the cells started exploding exponentially and became cancer. Not even the human authorities of this world, not even supposedly the big people or the important people, function apart from God's sovereign will in their life. In John 19, John records Pilate trying to intimidate Jesus by saying, You will not speak to me. Don't you know who I am? I have authority to release you, and I have authority to crucify you. I'm Mr. Big for Palestine. I'm the Roman governor. I have the power of life and death in my hands. And Jesus answers him and says, You would have no authority over me unless it had been granted to you from above. If God hadn't put you here, you wouldn't be here. And you have no authority over me except that which is granted to you. Paul told the Colossians, Christ is before all things, and in him all things hold together. Christ not only created the wood that they made the manger out of, but he was mold by moment upholding the cells, the molecules that made up that wood. He was holding together his mother, who physically gave him birth in the incarnation. You go, whoa, that's hard to get my mind around. Granted, I never said Christianity was easy, or for the simpleton, it's incredibly profound. But it's so profound that a child can understand and agree to it, even though they can't understand all the details of how it works. It's a matter of humility, not of brain power. Do you accept what's revealed by the scriptures? What causes electrons to fly in their orbits around the neutron? What causes stars to give off starlight? What causes birds to fly south? What causes the seasons? Why does the sun come up every morning? Well, scientists can describe certain physical secondary causes that they understand, but beyond that, Christ holds all things and makes them function. They are all upheld by Christ. Am I going to be a victim of cancer? Will I live to be 90? Will God hold the cells of my body together? Christ is the one who sovereignly determines all these things. He not only brings things into existence, but then He sustains all things. The author of the Hebrew says, Christ upholds the universe by the word of His power. If you were watching the news in 1988, you would have heard nothing but how the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc nations were X and Y and Z and the Cold War and all these things. And then in 1989, an amazing thing happened. Seventy years of communist rule fell in a few weeks. And no world war resulted from it. They just fell from corruption within and the unrest of the people. and a lot of Christians who had prayed, but the so-called interminable Soviet control of Eastern Europe and the vast stretches of Asia disappeared in a few weeks without bloodshed. What happened? Christ had allowed it to happen. Its time upon planet Earth was over and Christ brought the Soviet Union to an end. Isaiah said, without this Savior I am the Sovereign Lord and there is no other. I form light and I create darkness. I make well-being and I create calamity. I am the Sovereign Lord who does all these things." Our lives are in His hands. Again, Christ was holding together the molecules of the manger, the swaddling clothes, the straw, the stable, the dirt under the stable, the star that brought the wise men to Bethlehem. the molecules of the bodies of the wise men, Christ was doing that. He was upholding all things, even as he's about to be born as a baby in a manger. That is stuff to think about and meditate on. But then he's doing more than that. Before the manger at Bethlehem, Christ was the crown prince of heaven. He was the king of glory, and he was doing his father's will and sovereignly reigning over planet Earth. There's a passage of Scripture you may have seen. You may have seen R.C. Sproul's The Holiness of God videos. And you may have seen his excellent discussion of Isaiah chapter 6, verses 1 through 7. In the year King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated upon a throne, and His glory filled the temple, and it made the temple walls bulge, and it made the doors bulge. And here was this glory, the effulgence, the outshining of the glory of God. And angelic creatures were singing back and forth to one another, holy, holy, holy. Holy, holy, holy, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of hosts. And I fell down like a dead man. I was overcome. Well, it's interesting about that is in John's Gospel, Chapter 12, verse 41, John says, Isaiah said these things because he saw Christ. That was not God the Father seated on the throne in Isaiah, Chapter 6. That was the Lord Jesus Christ in his pre-incarnate glory, who was being worshipped by angels who Isaiah saw on the throne. Christ is the Lord of glory. He is the one who you see in so many of the appearances of the Old Testament in stupendous glory. Isaiah couldn't even find words to say. In Ezekiel chapter one, if you read the introduction to a couple of the Old Testament prophets, these guys are minding their own business when suddenly someone appears to them and calls them to prophetic work. And the one who appears to them is beyond glorious, but he's also a man. Ezekiel chapter one, above the expense over their heads, there was the likeness of a throne in appearance. The throne was like sapphire and seated above the likeness of the throne was a likeness of a human being and upward from what had the appearance of his waist. It was like it was gleaming metal, like the appearance of fire enclosed all around and downward from what had the appearance of his waist. I saw, as it were, the appearance of fire and there was brightness all around him. Like the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud on the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightness all around him. Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. And when I saw it, I fell on my face. Daniel says, I saw in the night visions and behold, with the clouds of heaven, there came one like a son of man and he came up to the ancient of days. So here's another member of the Trinity, one called the son of man's coming up to someone else who's called the ancient of days. And he was presented before him and to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom that all peoples, nations and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed. Christ was the King of Glory. He was reigning in the Father's stead, establishing the kingdom that would be built. The New Testament reveals that this Crown Prince, this King of Glory, is none other than the Lord Jesus Christ. In John 18, Jesus answered a question by saying, My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jewish leaders. But my kingdom is not of this world. Then Pilate said to him, So you are a king. Jesus answered, you say right that I am a king for this purpose. I was born for this purpose. I have come into the world. He didn't deny that he was the king. He that he was the king of the Jews. What did I have written about his cross? This is this man was the king of the Jews. The Jewish leaders came back. No, no, no. Just say he said that he was the king of the Jews. And Pilate goes, what I've written, I've written. Get out of here. But it was true. He claimed to be the king of the Jews. He was crucified for being the king of the Jews, that he was the king of glory. In Revelation chapter one, you have the Apostle John in a little tiny island at the eastern end of the Mediterranean in the Aegean Sea, a rocky spit called Patmos. I, John, your brother and partner in the tribulation and kingdom and of the patience and endurance we are to have in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. I was in the Spirit on the Lord's Day. Notice it was on Sunday. It was on the Lord's Day. And I heard behind me a voice kind of like a trumpet saying write what you see in a book and send it to the seven churches and then he was the seven churches that I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me and I'm turning. I saw seven golden lampstands and in the midst of the lampstands one like a son of man clothed with a long road with a golden sash around his chest. The hairs of his head were white like wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire. His feet were like burnished bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters. In his right hand he yelled seven stars, and from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength. And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand on me, saying, Fear not, I am the Alpha and the Omega, and the Living One. I died, and behold, I am alive forevermore, and I hold the keys of death and of Hades." Wow. He wasn't just a little baby. He just didn't come to start a Christmas club at Kmart. He really is Almighty God, and he really is coming to reign and rule. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, in the great chapter on how people are resurrected at the end of time and the resurrection of our bodies, Paul tells the Corinthians, then finally comes the end when Christ delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and every power raised against him. For Christ must reign until he has put all of his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For God has put all things in subjection under his feet. And when he's built his kingdom, the last person to come into it, he will take his kingdom and he will present it to his father and say, the reason you sent me to planet Earth to redeem a people and save them, to make them members in your kingdom, I have accomplished. I present the kingdom to you. R.C. Sproul said one time, he was really preaching in one sermon, he said, you know, people talk today about whether or not they've accepted Christ. He goes, really? My bigger question is, is Christ going to accept you? Is this great God waiting for you to do something? Or is this great God someone, oh, if he will just have mercy on me. He's not going to be coming hat in hand going, will you please accept me? Can I do something to make you like me? The question is not that, the question is, what are you doing in the face of this overwhelming God? Will He accept you? Why should He accept you? Before the manger in Bethlehem, Christ was being worshipped and served by countless of angelic creatures. Now this doesn't seem like a big deal to you, and it didn't seem like a big deal to me for a long time. But then the more I thought about it, and tried to visualize in my mind what that looked like, and looked at some of the scriptures, it shows a matter of how great someone is by who hangs around them, or who doesn't. Who serves him? Who is in his retinue? Who is in his entourage? The Bible says there are creatures that are not human beings and they're not God. They're angelic creatures. And there's orders of them. We know there's words like seraphim and cherubim. We know there's words for angels. We know at least two of the angels have names, Michael and Gabriel. OK. And all kinds of speculation has fallen, you know, from some people about these things. But we do know that angelic creatures are greater than human beings. They're supernatural creatures, they can do things that we can't do. Their powers and abilities are beyond nature, supernatural. We saw in Isaiah chapter 6 that while, when Isaiah saw Christ seated on the throne, and the glory, the outshining of the magnificence of the person of Christ was so great, it filled up the temple and made the walls bulge and the doorjams shake, so to speak. And then you heard what's called an antiphonal chorus. One side sings, and then the other side sings back in response, not like cicadas on an August night, but not unlike that in the sense of that's what an antiphonal chorus is. Well, here are the cicadas over here in about ten seconds later. The cicadas over here respond. Well, antiphonal chorus is the angels in heaven singing the praises of God. But it says there's thousands upon thousands upon thousands of these angelic creatures. In fact, one of the titles of God, every time you see it, it should bring this image to mind, of God seated on his throne and incredible numbers of these supernatural beings worshipping him and serving him. Every time you see the phrase, the Lord of hosts, the hosts are all these angelic creatures worshipping and serving Christ. It's used literally hundreds of times in the Old Testament to speak about our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of hosts. In First Kings chapter 22, the prophet Micaiah said, The reason I'm not afraid of you, King, the reason why I do the right thing and don't give it to you and tell you what you want to hear is I saw the Lord sitting on his throne and all the host of heaven standing beside him at his right hand and his left. If you know that the God you serve is almighty, omnipotent, great and good, and the multitude of creatures who serve him are overwhelming. And you turn to some little human king and to scare you. One time, George Whitfield was asked, how in the world do you preach to some of the howling mobs that you preach to? He said, because I've been in the presence of Almighty God, and that's scarier than being in the presence of a howling mob. Well said. How great is just one of these angelic creatures? Well, there's a couple of examples in Scripture. In Exodus chapter 32, God tells the people of Israel, I am so sick and tired of your rebellion, your backsliding, your bad attitude, your murmuring, I've had it. I'm going to send you into the promised land, but I'm not going to go with you, because if just one more time you screwed it up, I'm just going to go off on you and exterminate all of you, and we'll start off with the people of Moses. and said of the children of Abraham, and I'm just going to exterminate all of you, and so rather than exterminate all of you and make it appear that I went back on my word, I will give you the promised land, and I'm not going to go with you. You will not have my presence. No more pillar of cloud by day, no more pillar of fire by night. I'll send one angel, and he will drive out all the inhabitants, and you'll get the promised land. You'll get the Christian bookstores. You'll get the TV stations, radio stations. You'll get all the junk. You just won't have my presence. One angel would accomplish wiping out all the inhabitants of Palestine so Israel could inhabit it. One night in the Book of Kings, one angel slays 83,000 Assyrians who were laying siege to Jerusalem. And what's left of the Assyrian army struggles back to Assyria. One angelic being In Matthew chapter 26, Christ is being arrested and Peter, like us, is going to save him. Christ isn't going to be arrested. He's not going to go to the cross. This isn't going to happen. So Peter pulls out a sword and starts flailing away. So what happens when a fisherman takes up a sword? Well, he misses cutting off your head, and he cuts off your ear, which is a different kind of this way or this way, but not a good shot, and he only manages to get the ear of a slave called Malchus, who Luke records because Luke's a doctor, and they know these kind of things. And what does Jesus say to Peter? You need to take lessons? No. Need to go get some more swords? No. Do you not think that I cannot appeal to my father and his will at once? And he would send me more than 12,000 angels, 12 legions of angels. If I wanted to get out of this, if I came to dodge death, if I came to avoid this very incredibly hard thing that's about to come upon me, I could get out of it. I could appeal to my father, 12 legions of angels, 12,000 angels, one angel could wipe out all of Palestine anyway, but the overwhelming show of power would just be obliterating everything. That's not my purpose. But again, these are all the creatures that are in the presence of God, worshiping Him. You know, you can tell a lot about us by who we hang with. What are my friends like? Who do I like to hang with? Who do I respect? Who are my peers? Are they noble people? Are they good people? Are they people who are causing me to reach higher, to be a better Christian, to grow in grace, to be faithful? Well, I suppose if I could could hang around angels that would probably be good for me. Christ is worshipped and served by multitudes of supernatural beings, any one of whom is more glorious than all of us put together. And yet it's amazing, if you read Psalm 8, that what God's going to do is, in redeeming you, He's not only going to save you from your sins, but He's going to adopt you. So when you get saved, you bypass the angels and you go straight to the big house. You get to live in the throne room of God, you get to live in God's holy house for the rest of eternity, a place higher than the angels. And finally, one more thing that Christ was doing before he came to earth and was born in that little manger in Bethlehem. He had entered into a solemn relationship with his father to do one thing. I will come and fulfill your desire that someone bear the sins of all of my people for all time. Christ covenanted with his father that he would bear all the sins of all of his people, that they might be saved from the wrath to come, and they might be inhabiting eternity, so that a billion years from now, as men count time, you will look at beloveds who are believers and you go, can you believe we're really here? Can you believe that he would do that for us? Can you believe he would enter eternity and leave time to save wretches like us? and make us children of God, members of the family of God? Can you believe that? Pinching is allowed in heaven, but you can only pinch yourself. You'll have to pinch yourself to remind yourself of how gracious God has been to you. He could have passed you by. It was unthinkable, but Christ did not say, no way, I'm not going down there. I'm not becoming one of them. You may think this is a ludicrous illustration, but it's not bad. I want to ask if anybody is a member of PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. But PETA is an organization that has great compassion on animals, because in their theology, in their worldview, animals are just like human beings. I saw a cover of a PETA magazine that showed a couple of cows looking at the camera, and the title said, Food or Family? Were these cows food, or were they family? And the article went on to say they were family. No, I've never met their family. Perhaps they were. But let's say that you had compassion on animals. You know, certain people in And India will not step on an ant, because that could be Uncle Charlie, and reincarnated because of bad karma. And this Balaki got reincarnated into a lower caste, so he's an ant. So you don't step on ants, because it could be relatives. So you have a great esteem for ants and bugs and everything, every created thing. Well, let's say that, you know, it rained the other day, and I noticed, sure enough, every time it rains, there's dead possums on the highway. In fact, there's a problem here in the South that every time it rains, there's dead possums on the highway. And someone needs to have compassion on these dead possums. So you say, you know, I thought Pastor Martin was kind of whacked when he brought that up Sunday, but you know, that is a problem. Someone needs to help these poor things. They're going to get wiped out if someone doesn't help them. So you decide you're going to start Save the Possum program. And you're going to go out and you're going to save the possums by driving them down country roads, getting people driving them down roads with little loudspeakers. And you're going on saying, be careful, watch your step. There's cars out there. It's raining. You don't see too well and you're not real bright. So be careful. We don't want you to get killed. Now, the problem is the possums don't speak English. Or even if you can have people from other languages speak, you know, this is really a pretty illustration. No, it's not. It's perfect. So how are you going to get the possums to listen to you? Well, what if someone could become a possum and speak to them and help them avoid the slaughter? You go, well, I suppose if someone could become a possum and speak to them in possum language, I suppose that would work. Fine. Are you willing to become a possum and stay a possum for the rest of eternity? Because Christ assumed humanity Christ became a human being. When Christ went back to heaven, the Bible says he did not take off his humanity like when I lived in Southern California on the beach and guys wearing their wetsuits would take off their wetsuits after coming ashore because you went from being otherwise cold in the water but toasty with a wetsuit to really hot on the shore with a wetsuit. So you take off your wetsuit and go back to your bathing suit. Is that what Christ did? No, I can't get rid of this humanity. The point is that You wouldn't want to become a possum. That's just ridiculous. That's ridiculous. You think that's a stupid illustration. But a possum is still a creature. The distance between me and a possum is hardly anything. The distance from Almighty God to becoming a creature, for the Creator to become a creature, is an infinite drop, an infinite humiliation, an infinite lowering of stature. Even if you became an amoeba, if I became an amoeba, it still wouldn't, because we're still both creatures. But for Christ to become a human being is an even infinite farther fall, so to speak. But Christ was willing to do that. He had entered into a relationship with his father. At the end of the service, the benediction will begin with these verses. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. Why? Why did he come here? Why did he leave eternity? He came to save sinners. Paul told the Ephesians, God, the Father, chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, before there was planet Earth. God had already chosen to save us. Matthew 25, 34, Jesus says, Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from before the foundation of the world. Before there was a planet Earth, God had planned to save you. Revelation 13 and 17, everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the Lamb's Book of Life is not going to heaven. John's Gospel is full of examples of Jesus speaking about his eternal relationship with the Father and coming to save the people. Let me close and my time is up. Christ was doing a number of things. He was doing everything. He made everything. He was moment by moment, millisecond by millisecond, upholding everything. He was reigning as God's vice-regent. He was worshipped and served by angels. He had always been God and was in the eternal love relationship with the Father and the Spirit. And then he becomes a man, a baby in a manger in Bethlehem. And he's upholding the manger, and he's upholding the straw, and he's upholding the mother who's cradling him, and he's upholding the wise men, and he's upholding the three gifts from the three wise men, and the donkeys, and everything there. There's great mystery, but there's great to marvel and wonder at. This is the God who later would die on the cross as the God-man for the sins, all the sins of all of his people for all time. Paul can say, I know whom I have believed. I get it. God revealed himself to me on the road to Damascus. I thought Jesus was just a man, but on the road to Damascus, he revealed himself to me and he was brighter than the Palestinian sun at midday. His glory was so effulgent. I know whom I believe, and I'm convinced that what I have entrusted to him is in safekeeping until the day when it's all over with. If you're not a believer, I didn't yell and scream and talk about judgment. I didn't threaten you with anything nasty today. But if fear of judgment doesn't get you thinking, how about love for your person? What do I mean? Jesus came on a rescue mission and this almighty one set aside his glory. He wasn't worshipped by angels. He wasn't carried around and worshipped and served when he was on planet Earth. He was despised and forsaken of men. He was despised and forsaken of men. A man of sorrows. What a weird title for this glorious person. A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Why did he go through this grief? Because he left, he loved rebel sinners enough to do something for them that they wouldn't appreciate. And then he said, because you can be numbskulls, because you can be so hard-headed, I will send the Holy Spirit and he will, you know, if you ever see the trilogy, Back to the Future. McFly, anybody in there? You and I could have been standing at the foot of the cross like the Roman soldiers and the Jews and we wouldn't have gotten it. Being there in the first century wouldn't have helped. Seeing the movie The Passion of the Christ didn't make anybody a Christian by seeing Christ's Passion. Because unless the Holy Spirit works in your heart, you could care less. Two and two is four in biblical thinking, but two and two is eighty-seven, two and two is five, but it ain't never four if God the Holy Spirit doesn't help you get it and see what's really happening. Do you see the greatness of the one who came to save you? Now, I was hard-headed and foolish for twenty-one years, and just blowing off all this truth that was swirling around me. And God in compassion finally said, McFly, you need to come and see this truth. And so he is. Holy Spirit work in my heart is the Holy Spirit speaking to your heart about your need of trusting in Jesus Christ for who he really is. Almighty God come to earth and a rescue mission to save sinners. Let me close with a statement from C.S. Lewis, a man who was merely a man and said the sort of things that Jesus Christ said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic, like on the level of the guy who says he's a poached egg, or else he would be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the son of God, or else he's a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about his being some great moral teacher. He did not leave that option open to us. He did not intend to. God come in the flesh at Christmas, the baby in the manger on a rescue mission to save you and me. Let's pray. Father, as we have yet Christmas before us, and there's more carols we will hear, presents we will receive, information that we will process, may we have very clear in our minds who it is that came at that first Christmas. Who was that baby Jesus? What was that baby Jesus doing? Oh Lord, would you please take us from being mockers and scorners and the board to being worshipers and lovers and marvelers who couldn't believe that Jesus would come for them? For those who are already believers, Lord, would you make this Christmas one not to be forgotten? Because again, you gave us a glimpse into the greatness of the Savior. It's in his name we pray. Amen.