So open your Bibles to Luke chapter 2. We're continuing to examine our Lord's birth. This is the time of year when we traditionally celebrate his coming into the world. Last Lord's Day, we looked at John 1 verse 14, which is certainly about Jesus coming into the world, but it's not the first passage that we think of at Christmas time. Luke 2 is the passage that most of us think about when we think about Christmas. It contains Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem, Jesus' birth with a manger as a crib. A little further on we get angels and shepherds. Many of the things that we think of when we think of the Christmas story. So this morning we're going to focus on the first seven verses which brings Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem where Jesus was born. So let's begin by reading Luke 2 verses 1 through 7. In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria. And all went to be registered, each to his own town. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the town of Nazareth to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem. because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. And while they were there, the time came for her to give birth. And she gave birth to her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. Now Luke is very straightforward in his account. He doesn't embellish it. He doesn't wax eloquent. He just tells us very plainly how Mary and Joseph, who were in Nazareth in Galilee, came to be in Bethlehem where Jesus was born. This simple, direct narrative is exactly what Luke said that he was going to do in his opening. This is how Luke began his gospel. He wrote, In as much as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all these things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account to you. most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things that have been taught." Basically, Luke said, a lot of people have written about the things that happened with Jesus. And he also made the point that there are a lot of eyewitnesses and ministers of the word. And by ministers of the word, he meant the apostles. who were there and they were still available to attest to these things when Luke was writing his gospel. Incidentally, Luke was in Israel probably for a couple of years while Paul was imprisoned there before Paul was taken to Rome. And Luke would have had ample time and access to these eyewitnesses and many of the apostles. So Luke decided, inspired by the Holy Spirit, to write an orderly account. He addressed it to this man who he calls Theophilus. Now Theophilus may have been the actual name of the person that Luke was writing to, but Theophilus means God lover. So it's also possible that this is just a name that Luke assigned to the person he was writing to. Regardless, Luke has an audience in mind, and he writes this orderly account for a specific reason. that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught. So Luke's audience is someone who loves God and who has been taught the truth about the Lord Jesus. And Luke writes these things to give him certainty about these things, to give him confidence. And I want to approach our text this morning with that in mind. We are people, I hope, like Theophilus. We love God, and we have been taught the truth about Jesus. So this morning, I want to examine this passage in a way that gives us certainty about the truth of Jesus' birth, to give us confidence that God, the eternal, infinite word we considered last week, did indeed come into this world. That truth lays the foundation for everything that comes after it. That Luke writes in the rest of his gospel. That Jesus grew to be a man and lived a perfect life. That he died a redeeming death and then rose from the dead. Everything that he did and everything that he taught is only valid if God really did become man and Luke tells us in simple straightforward words that he did as We begin to study these verses this morning We should recognize that the details Luke included and the way that he presents the story is would have been compelling to a man, a Gentile, living somewhere in the Roman Empire, almost certainly not in Israel, sometime around AD 60. He would have been close enough in time and in geography that he would have recognized the larger details that Luke gives here, but he would have been far enough removed that the specific details would have needed to be relayed to him. And Luke's purpose was to write these things, to confirm to Theophilus the truth of this account in a way that would give him certainty of the things that he had been taught. So that's how I take this. To someone who wasn't there, wasn't in Bethlehem or even in Israel, and maybe wasn't even born yet, although he could have been born, but who was much closer in time and in place than we are, these things would have rung true. Theophilus would have read of the census that Caesar Augustus wanted to take, and he would have thought, yeah, that makes sense. I can identify with that. He would have read the first registration when Quiririus was governor of Syria. And he would have known what Luke meant by that, because that was part of Luke's purpose, to ground all of this for Theophilus. And that's at least part of the reason that Luke organizes this in the way that he does. I think there's more to it than just that, but that's part of it. What Luke does is he starts with the state of the world at the time. In the first two verses, Luke identifies what was going on in the world at that time. And Theophilus would have recognized that. And then Luke narrows his focus down to Israel. In verses 3 through 5, Luke explains how this worldwide event would have played out in Israel, how it affected them. And even if Theophilus hadn't been aware of those details, they would have fit with what he did know. And then finally Luke narrows his focus yet again to the personal story of Jesus. In verses six and seven, it becomes very personal. Mary and Joseph are in Bethlehem, and Mary gave birth. It doesn't get much more personal than that. And this isn't just a legend. It's not a myth. It doesn't read like that. It's grounded in a place and in a time. This happened. But there's more going on than just Luke validating the story by offering these details. That's part of it, but there's more. When he tells us about the world, there are things that we can discern about the world that our Lord chose to enter. When Luke tells us about Israel, there are things that we can learn about the people that the Messiah came to. And then when he zeroes in on the person of Christ, there are things that we can discern about him as well. It's not so much that Luke cleverly composed his prose in a way to accomplish all of this. It's more that God chose this specific time in history, and God brought the world to this point. Luke simply tells us the truth about Jesus' birth, and the meaning comes from the circumstances that God ordained in the world and in Israel, and from the details of Jesus' birth. So we begin with the world in verses one and two. Luke begins by writing, in those days. In what days? Luke's referring back to the beginning of chapter one here. In the days of Herod, king of Judea. There were a few Herods who reigned as king over Judea and other parts of this same region. This one is Herod the Great. He was the founder of the Herodian dynasty. Herod ruled from 37 BC until, scholars think, 4 BC. And this actually helps us to narrow the year when Jesus was born. It was during the days of Herod which ended in 4 BC. Now when the Catholic Church was setting up the calendar in the 6th century, they thought they knew when Jesus was born. And so they made that year AD 1, the year of our Lord 1. It turns out they were wrong about that, but then they've been wrong about a lot of other more important things Anyway, this was what Luke does. He just matter-of-factly tells us what happened. In the days of Herod, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus. Caesar Augustus epitomizes the larger world that Jesus came into. His actual name, his given name, was Gaius Octavian. He was the great nephew of Julius Caesar. But Caesar, Julius Caesar, didn't have an heir. So he adopted Octavian. Now Julius Caesar was an extremely successful military general and politician. And he became so powerful that although Rome didn't yet have an emperor, Caesar was effectively Rome's dictator. And that's actually what got him assassinated. He became too powerful and the Senate feared that he would make himself king of Rome. Now Octavian didn't inherit all of Caesar's power right away. He became part of a triumvirate or a trio that effectively ruled Rome. Now the third member didn't last very long, but Octavian and Mark Antony ended up fighting it out for control of Rome. Octavian won. And shortly after that, he forced the Senate to make him emperor. And then the Senate conferred on him this title, Augustus, which means illustrious one. And it was understood to be a religious title, not a political one. Augustus fashioned himself a god. He wanted to be seen as a god and he wanted to be treated as a god. He was an extremely effective ruler of Rome. Don't imagine that he merely rode his uncle's coattails. After consolidating power, he effectively ended all of the civil wars that had plagued Rome for more than a generation. And that peace extended out into all of the provinces as well. In fact, Augustus established an era of peace and prosperity for Rome that historians call Pax Romana, or Roman Peace. And that would extend for 200 years, when Rome's rule went largely unchallenged, and any uprisings were quickly put down. And during this time, Rome became rich. From a purely human, military, and political perspective, Augustus was an amazing, remarkable man. In modern-day Turkey, there's an ancient government building with an inscription from Augustus' day that first describes how Augustus took the disorder of the world and brought order. And then it calls Augustus the savior of the world. That was Caesar Augustus. Now think about all of this. He made himself king of the world. He made himself out to be a god. He brought peace to the world, at least a version of peace. And he was called the savior of the world. Augustus was an Antichrist and perhaps one who was only surpassed one day by the Antichrist and he was at the height of his power when Jesus came into the world. So he made a decree that all the world should be registered. He wanted them counted. Now, that may seem reasonable, it may seem good governance, but there are a couple of implications here. First, you count the things that you own. You count your money, you number your troops, We're told not to count our chickens before they hatch. And that means don't count on having something before you actually have it. So by counting all the people, Augustus is asserting ownership or dominance over them. All the people in all the world. On a more practical level, Counting was done for tax purposes, not taxation for the common good, but really primarily as tribute to Rome. The conquered people were forced to honor Rome by increasing Rome's wealth. And on top of all of that, it was just an onerous, cumbersome process. It was inconvenient and potentially expensive to conduct a census like this. And so the people didn't like it. In fact, if you look at Acts chapter 5, at that point the Jewish council was discussing what to do with the apostles. And this was probably 40 years after the time we're talking about. The council had warned the apostles to stop preaching, but the apostles refused to listen and obey. So some of the council members wanted to kill the apostles. But there was one Pharisee on the council and he cautioned the others not to do anything rash for fear of how Rome might respond to something like that. And one of the examples that he used as a warning to the others on the council was of a man named Judas the Galilean who led a revolt against a census and Rome killed him and scattered all of those who were with him. Now, the census that Judas the Galilean rebelled against was actually the second one that was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. And we know that from other sources. But this shows us that there was serious opposition in Israel to Rome taking a census. And probably in the rest of the world as well. But as wicked and as accomplished and as oppressive as Caesar was, he could do nothing outside the providence of God. God ultimately brought Augustus to power, and that's true of every leader. God sovereignly controlled everything that he did. and God used Augustus' empire for God's own purposes. Following Jesus' life and death and resurrection, the Roman Empire, with which Augustus largely created, proved the perfect backdrop for the gospel to spread in ways that couldn't have happened before. And the registration, the census, God used that too, as we'll see. So what do these verses reveal to us about the world? Wickedness flourishes, or at least it seems to, and Augustus embodies that. But God is in control, and his purposes prevail. And now, as we continue through the text, in verses 3 through 5, we focus in on Israel. Verse 3 says that all went to be registered, each to his own town. His own town doesn't refer to the town that he currently lived in. It means his family's home, based on the land that was given to the family way back when Israel first entered the land. So Joseph belonged to David's lineage. And David's family, well before David's time, had been given land in Israel. Bethlehem. So Bethlehem was where Joseph went to be registered. Now, this, going to your family's ancestral home, that was a decidedly Jewish way of doing things. They wouldn't have necessarily done the census this way in the rest of the Roman Empire, because most people in the empire wouldn't have had a family town that they could trace back to through their roots. When Augustus Caesar decreed the census, it's unlikely that Rome would have told the various governors and rulers how they should count. They just told them, get it done, and it was up to them to figure out how to do it. And so this system would have made sense to a Jew. In fact, they kept records of families down through all of the generations and of the land that had originally been assigned to each family. Incidentally, those records remained in Jerusalem until Rome destroyed the temple in AD 70. So when Luke was writing this, about a decade earlier than that, He would have had no trouble in researching Jesus' genealogy from the time that Israel entered the land. Now, we don't know how it was decided to count the people in this way, whether Quirinius saw it as an easier way to do it based on the existing records, or it's possible that Herod dictated it, because Herod would have obviously been involved in the logistics of this whole endeavor. Or maybe it was the Jewish council that insisted on it. Regardless, this is how they did it. And this reminds us of the importance of Jesus' lineage. It can be traced back through both Joseph and Mary. In fact, if you look at the genealogy that Luke gives us, beginning in Luke 3, verse 23, it says, Jesus, when he began his ministry, was about 30 years of age, being the son, as was supposed, of Joseph, the son of Heli. Only Heli wasn't Joseph's father. Heli was Mary's father. But since Joseph wasn't Jesus' biological father, which is a point that Luke alludes to in the text, Luke identifies Joseph's father-in-law, Jesus' biological grandfather. Because that's what Luke was concerned with, with the actual bloodline. Only Heli was Jesus' biological grandfather. Now Matthew, on the other hand, Matthew was concerned with the legal right of succession to the throne. And that would have been passed through the legal father, even if the son was adopted. So Matthew identified Joseph's father, not his father-in-law. Matthew writes, and Jacob, the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Christ. And both lines, through Joseph's father and through Joseph's father-in-law, Mary's father, they both trace back to David. And there's some really interesting things going on in those genealogies. They're beyond our scope this morning, but they both lead us back. to David. And both of those lines give Jesus a right to David's throne. And these are the only two lines. It's not as if every descendant of David had some claim to the throne, but Jesus had a double claim. This raises an important question though. If Joseph's family through Jacob and Mary's family through Heli were of the line of David and if they were the human heirs to David's throne, Why were they living in Nazareth, in Galilee, 90 miles away from Bethlehem, the city of David? Now, even if the throne, becoming king, wasn't on their radar, Joseph obviously knew that Bethlehem was his own town. The land around Nazareth had been given to the tribe of Zebulun. That was way back when, when Israel first came into the land. Why were Joseph and Mary living there. Well, here's what we know. The tribe of Zebulun, along with the other tribes of the northern kingdom, they went into captivity in Assyria about 700 years before this. Now sometime after that, the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, the southern kingdom, along with some from the tribe of Levi, went into captivity in Babylon. Now the people from the Babylonian captivity eventually returned to Israel, 70 years after going into captivity. But those in the Assyrian captivity, they never returned. Now scripture doesn't tell us this next part, but we know from other sources that about a hundred years before Jesus was born, there was a king in Judea. Now he wasn't a legitimate king because he wasn't from the line of David, but he was a Jew and he was functioning as king. And he managed to gain control over that area, the area that would be called Galilee during Jesus' time, and that had earlier belonged to the Northern Kingdom. But he needed Jews there. He needed Jews to occupy that land. So, since the tribes who had originally been given that land weren't available, he resettled people from Judea to that area. Now we don't have anything in scripture or in Josephus or in anybody else that points directly to Joseph's ancestors being part of that resettlement. But that is how Judeans ended up in Galilee. So it's likely that's the reason why both Joseph's family and Mary's family were living there at this time. But what this shows us is how messed up things are in Israel at this point. How logistically far they were from establishing the promised kingdom. These two families, direct descendants from David, with the greatest claim to the throne. They don't even live in the city of David, or anywhere near the city of David, or even in Judah. This was the Israel that God's Son came into. God used a pagan emperor's senses to get Jesus' parents from one side of the land to the other, so that Jesus could be born in the city of David, which is what was prophesied. And Jesus' very pregnant mother had to walk, or possibly ride a donkey, 90 miles in order to get there. Now in human terms, there was nothing about the state of the world or about the state of Israel that would suggest to us that the timing was right for God the Son to arrive as the Jewish Messiah, the rightful King of Israel. But that's exactly what God wanted and we know it's what God wanted because Old Testament prophecy extensively points to this exact moment Everything lined up even if it makes no sense in human terms So the world was ruled by Caesar Augustus who claimed for himself much of what was due to the Lord Jesus and Jesus alone and and his kingdom seemed to be doing really well. Israel, on the other hand, was not doing so well. And then here Luke narrows his focus again. What about this baby? He was the true king of the world. He was the one true God and the only source of true peace, the only savior of the world. Yet he was born in the most humble circumstances. And again, Luke is very matter of fact. While they were there, the time came for her to give birth. And she gave birth. When it's time, it's time. You can't put it off. She gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger because there was no place for them in the inn. This is where we find the charm of the story, this idyllic scene, the cattle calmly lowing, the baby peacefully sleeping in the manger, Mary looking on proudly as Joseph keeps watch. And we commemorate this in nativity scenes and Christmas pageants. And of course, it's good that we honor our Lord's birth in those ways. But I don't think Mary and Joseph found it so charming. the livestock, the smells and the flies that come with it, perhaps a primitive shelter. Traditionally, it was a cave, but there's no biblical evidence of that. It doesn't say cave or even stable for that matter in scripture. The inn, the inn where there wasn't any room, it probably wasn't an inn at all the way we think of an inn, a commercial endeavor where they would rent rooms to people who came. More likely, it was just a crude public shelter, where travelers could come and camp on a first-come, first-served basis, sort of a first-century rest stop. But since Mary and Joseph weren't there early enough, they couldn't get a place inside. And so they likely settled down outside, in an area where the donkeys or whatever other animals the other guests may have tied up were staying. And that's when the baby came. And they appropriated a manger, which is really just a feeding trough to use as a makeshift crib. It's quite a contrast to Caesar Augustus, who no doubt slept in luxury in his palace in Rome that night. But this was God's choice, that he would come into the world under these circumstances. So what does this tell us about the Lord Jesus? That he would willingly and purposefully choose this setting. It says the same thing that Paul said about him in Philippians 2. Speaking of Jesus, Paul wrote, Though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped. That means that Jesus was so secure in his deity that he didn't feel any need to hang on to it tightly. He wasn't worried about it. He wasn't worried in the sense that he never thought that if he wasn't careful, he could lose what he had. Caesar Augustus was no threat to Jesus. As Jesus would later tell Pilate, the Roman governor, 30 some years later, you would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above. And that was true of Augustus too. He was only where he was because God put him there. The same God who was lying in a manger 1,500 miles away Jesus was secure in his deity. He was secure in his mission. And he was content to lie in that manger patiently as God's plan to redeem mankind and glorify himself continued to unfold. And this is what we see in these opening verses of the Christmas story. A fallen world, a false kingdom seemingly mighty and unshakable. A wayward nation stumbling in the darkness. Outwardly, nowhere near realizing the fulfillment of the promises that had been made to them. And a savior. the rightful king in conditions fully unsuitable for his majesty. But these were conditions that perfectly fit his mission, his grace, his humility. John writes in the first chapter of his gospel, the true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. That is the meaning of Christmas. The creator of the world came into the world, but the world did not receive him. And he came to his people, and they didn't receive him either. But to those who do receive him, they become children of God, born again, co-heirs with Christ. the father has highly exalted him and he will reign forever and We will reign with him to his glory and to the glory of the father forever. Let's pray Heavenly father. Thank you that you did send your son into the world that he willingly came that he accomplished all that he did Father it seems such an unlikely thing to us that but we recognize it is the perfect unfolding of your plan. Father, please continue to exercise your plan to perfection as we look forward to one day when Jesus will come, not as a baby in a manger, but as the King of the world, and will be recognized as such by the entire world. Thank you for that. To the Son's glory and your glory, in Jesus' name, amen.