The incredible love of God

The Christmas story shows us the incredibly great love of God. It shows us that Heavenly Father's Son himself came to dwell among the people. The fact that we humans rejected Jesus is incomprehensible. Nowhere in the gospel is there talk of a large crowd of people watching in helpless horror as malicious people played out their power politics and got rid of their greatest threat, Jesus. The ruling class wanted Jesus dead, eliminated, out of the picture—and the crowds did just that. But the cries: "Crucify him, crucify him!" say much more than just: we want this person to disappear from the scene. From these words speaks a great bitterness from a lack of understanding.

It is amazing that Heavenly Father's Son became one of us; and it is all the more surprising that we humans rejected, mistreated and crucified him. It is inconceivable that Jesus would willingly endure and endure all this when a single word from Him would have summoned hosts of angels to defend Him? "Or do you think I could not ask my father, and he would immediately send me more than twelve legions [that is an innumerable multitude] of angels?" (Matthew 26,53).

Our hatred of Jesus must have struck the Father, Son and Holy Spirit like a bolt from the blue - or there must have been a redeeming spirit of unspeakable majesty at work here. Hadn't the triune God foreseen the rejection by the Jews and Romans? Did it catch him off guard that we torpedoed his solution by killing his son? Or was mankind's shameful rejection of the Son of the Almighty included as a critical factor in our process of salvation from the outset? Could it be that the Trinity's path of reconciliation involves accepting our hate?

Couldn't the key to reconciliation lie in willingly accepting our spiritual blindness tempted by Satan and the resulting judgment? What sin could be more despicable than hating God—and murdering by blood? Who would have such competence? What atonement could be more sublime, personal, and real than that of our Lord, who willingly accepted and endured our wrath and met us in our most shameful depravity?

The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are exceedingly serious about their love for us, and they want nothing more than that we accept this love with all our senses. But how can people be reached who have become so confused that they hide from the triune God out of fear? We can become so accustomed to seeing Jesus as the victim of God's wrath that we fail to see the much more obvious point of view revealed in the New Testament that tells us that he endured our wrath. In doing so, while taking our scorn and ridicule, He met us in the darkest recesses of our being and brought His relationship with the Father and His own anointing in the Holy Spirit into our world of depraved human nature.

Christmas not only tells us the lovely story of the Christ Child; the Christmas story is also about the incredibly great love of the triune God - a love that aims to meet us in our helpless and broken nature. He took upon himself burdens and suffering to reach us, even becoming the scapegoat of our hostility to reach us in our pain. Jesus, the Son of our Heavenly Father, Anointed in the Holy Spirit, endured our taunts, suffered our enmity and our rejection to give our real selves His life with us in the Father and Holy Spirit forever and ever. And he did that from the manger to beyond the cross.

by C Baxter Kruger