Luke chapter 2 tonight, beginning at verse 1, we'll read verses 1 through 7 of this glorious account of the birth of Jesus Christ. 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. May the Lord bless the hearing of his word.
Well, when it comes to the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, the scriptures really want to impress upon us who has been sent to us. The prophecies of the Old Testament are clear. They told us who to look for and who the identity of the coming Messiah would be, and something like Micah 2 is beautiful: "But you, Bethlehem, Ephrath, though you are little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of you shall come forth to me the one to be ruler in Israel, whose goings forth are from old, from everlasting." The one to come. Think about that great anticipation of the one who is to come and his identity. That sort of announcement is, as the Scripture says, "Emmanuel, God with us," as is celebrated in Matthew.
With His coming, we would expect certain things. The two sermons sort of run together in our continuation. We would expect certain things. We would expect a glorious display of His greatness. We would expect everyone in celebration. We would expect the world chanting and saying and singing His praise. And yet, we have nothing like it. It's stunning when you open up the Scriptures and just look at some of the details that we usually pass right over about the birth of Christ and what it's actually saying to us about Him and the kind of Savior that He is, a humble Savior.
Luke has the specific purpose of showing you how the joyful receiving of the Messiah was received among the people to whom they were blessed to see and to whom it was given, but that that greatness by and large was hidden to the world. It's a remarkable thing. That's why we've looked at this morning the blessedness of those whose eyes see and whose ears hear.
At the beginning of Luke, we have details given surrounding the birth of Jesus Christ. You'll notice here that they come to Bethlehem. We have the city of the great king. And this was where the birth had been prophesied and promised to be. That's where King David came from. And you'll notice here that certain details are given: "In those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered." The purpose was that the Roman government at this time was levying a heavy tax, season of taxation, on the people right at the arrival of Christ on the scene of history. Isn't that something to think about? Heavy taxation. Census and taxation. We're going to number the people, and it's time to tax them.
Luther says something I've never really thought about before. "This being the very first taxing, it appears that this tribute was never before paid until just at the time when Christ was to be born. By this, Jesus shows that his kingdom was not to be of an earthly character, nor to exercise worldly power and lordship, but that he, together with his parents, would be subject to the powers that be."
I don't know if you've ever thought about that. Who is this? He's the king who's over all the powers of the world. He's the king that appointed all the powers of the world. And here we see him slip into history, being under these powers and being taxed himself. The world is being taxed, and I think what a message that we initially see here, that as the world is being taxed from earthly rulers and being required to pay money, God is sending his free gift into the world in the midst of all this to give salvation. It's a remarkable thought. The world's leaders are taxing. God is giving, giving you everything. But everything about him, as we saw this morning from Mary, is different.
We see these details that emerge at his birth. We read that Mary brought forth 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. We considered this morning briefly that the womb that he chose, the womb that was chosen, was not an empress's womb. It was not a woman of great dignity or notoriety. It was a lowly servant, a nobody. In the backwoods part of the empire. Here he comes. And the whole course of his path, the whole course of his ministry, is really captured here in these first few verses of Luke chapter 2.
How we assume it went is that Jesus came into the world on a cold winter night, and Mary and Joseph, these are all the sentimental cards that we send out all the time, and this is the imagery that we get, This is the nativity scenes that we get, that Mary and Joseph are seeking a place, and in a common inn somewhere, they ended up at somewhere like the roadway inn down here, the last place you want to be. And not just that, they were put in the back. They were put in the parking garage, and Jesus was delivered there.
Well, here's what we know about first century homes. This was not a hotel like we understand it or a motel. The word that's chosen for in here is unique. Luke didn't choose the traditional word for in as we understand it as he uses elsewhere. The word is interesting and requires some understanding here of homes and what they were like in the first century. Many have observed the proper translation of this really should be, "They had no room for them in the guest room." That's the sense of this: they had no room in the guest room.
This was census time. Hospitality was huge and common, and there were no more rooms in the house for them. This was a classic Middle Eastern home. They were split level. There was a main living room where the family all lived. Think of our modern comforts today. The family all lived together. They had little rooms attached for visitors, for hospitality. Below them was the room for the family cow, for the donkey. And every night, the cow would be brought in to the bottom part of the house and the donkey. And they had in the middle of the living room floor a little hole. And that was where what we call a manger was set. And the family, the animals would come in, and that's how they would feed the animals in these houses. As I said, we have pretty good modern standards today. These mangers were in the middle of the living room.
Luke 2 is saying something interesting. They obviously had come into a home of friends. There was no room for them in the guest room. But as they're there, she goes into labor, no epidurals. She's in the home, and she brings forth her firstborn child and lays him in the center of the home in what we call the manger. Now, why would those kind of details matter? It's interesting history. It's very significant when you put together the whole picture here of Jesus coming into the world, isn't it?
What Luke is capturing is something for us that's important. Anyone who read this story in sort of Middle Eastern life and eyes would have been absolutely shocked to have ever had an account like this. The Messiah came into history and came into our world and was laid where? No pomp, no glory, no celebrations, really. We have one here in Luke 2 that's coming. But I think the emphasis that Luke is really driving us to see here, He was born in a peasant's home. He was born in a peasant home He was born in the home of the poor and the lowly. I don't know how much you meditate on things like that. That's why these times are good to think about these things that we never think about.
Think of his prayer in John 17: "Father, glorify me with the glory that we had together before the world was." I can't even describe that. This is what he chose. Now, if you think of this morning and what we learned about Mary, listen again to the whole picture and try to complete the picture. "For consider your calling, brothers, that not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth." Noble birth. Catch that. Not many of you were ever given of noble birth. Why? Well, precisely because the ones to whom, as we looked at, this blessedness comes, belong to a very Savior who was never of noble birth.
So far, the king of all the earth, the one through whom everything was made, the long-awaited Messiah, is subjected to taxes, then has a peasant's birth, and then is in a little vessel where animals ate. Can you fathom that? Can you contemplate that? He's among the nobodies. He's among the disregarded. He's among the needy. God had his command had every magistrate possible and Roman emperors and tetrarchs. He could have announced this in Caesar's palace. Our own wisdom would say that the glory of such a figure, the glory of the God of heaven and earth what kind of glory, what kind of honor, what kind of name, what kind of recognition should he receive? But all this is telling us something.
When you look at the Old Testament when he would arrive, if you read it carefully you have verses like this: "And he shall set up at an ensign among the nations for the nations. He shall assemble the outcasts of Israel and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth. The Lord God which gathers, Isaiah 56, the outcasts of Israel says, I will gather others to him besides those that are gathered unto him. If your outcasts are in the uttermost parts of the heaven, from there the Lord your God will gather you. From there he will take you."
I can keep going. You see the imagery here of how he came, who he came for, who he identifies with. And now you can appreciate what's happening here when you put this together. The star comes and it rests here and the magi walk in into this very scene. And here is the brightness of his rising and they're worshiping him where he lay. They saw him. And it's announced in the next scene to who? Shepherds. In terms of social and economic status, shepherds were at the absolute bottom of the barrel. No one said, "Well, what are you going to do in life? I really want to be a shepherd." Shepherds were the poor man's occupation. But here, the angels are appearing to the shepherds.
I want a message here when we think about who the Messiah chooses to identify with. The great problem all throughout history, at least for Israel in the first century when we study it, was that their expectations for him were all wrong. They wanted this warrior to overtake Rome. They saw his power, remember, in John 6 after he fed and did miracles, and they wanted to establish the throne right then and there. And what is the message of Christ and his kingdom? Right from the beginning, he did not bring the kingdom in as people expect, nor did he come to those to whom we would expect it to come.
What a marvel if in Mary we recognize that God has always told us that He has chosen "the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, the weak things of the world to put to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things and things that are not to nullify the things that are so that no one may boast before God." But put it together with this: "For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you, by His poverty, might become rich."
Is that not the best announcement I can give? He who was rich became poor so that through his poverty you would be rich rich in what? Salvation, deliverance, everything. Isn't that what Mary celebrated?
This is why the reformer said, "Don't follow the mighty people in this life if you want to come to Christ. What should you look for? Don't be ashamed to follow those to follow those whom the Lord in order to cast down the pride of the world has taken from among the dung of cattle to be your instructors." That's John Calvin. He's talking about me, right? The dung of cattle to be your instructors. This is how the Lord works throughout history. It's precisely the poor in spirit who receive it, the poor in spirit who see it. It's not just in monetary terms we're talking about here. We're talking about the poverty of the soul.
And there's something at the end of verse 7 I don't want us to miss. It's a verse that's always stunned me. "And she brought forth, gave her birth to her firstborn son, wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger because there was no place for them in the inn." Some of the old translations say, "There was no room for him in the end." The plain meaning of that, there was no room for him in the end. But the larger, I think, picture of Scripture in that little phrase is that there was no room for him in the world. He never belonged here.
You know, I had a young man in my former charge who ended up dying in a car wreck in a hard life. And I remember talking with his dad and ministering to his dad after. And the comforting, most comforting thought was for him to get through it: "My son never belonged to this world. He belonged to the Lord." And that's the sense of this. The Lord never belonged here. But he came here. And the plain meaning here, the bigger picture is, is what Isaiah says of our Lord: "He was despised and rejected of men." That was his path. As very birth, he has to flee to Egypt because they want to kill him.
Now, why these details? It is to bring the message here tonight that he's considered you. That's what both sermons bring together, and that you are blessed. You are his lowly. You are the meek. You are his people, you are his poor in spirit. And it is with that that we can sing the true song, "Joy to the World," that captures what it says in that song: "Joy to the World, the Lord has come." And they looked at Luke 2, the writers of that, based on Psalm 98: "Let earth receive her king, Let every heart prepare him room."
Now, you know what that means. Let every heart prepare him room. The world has no place for him. The world has no place for us. But as "Joy to the World" captured, and they understood about this, "let every heart prepare him room. Heaven and nature, let them sing." This is the good tidings of glad joy for us.
And I ask the question tonight: Who sees it? Who receives their king? It is those who understand that Jesus came to identify with needy people, sinners. And to give them great joy, clothed in the garments of the gospel for us. To go through, not just a baby, to be a baby in a manger. But to grow, and to live righteously, and fulfill the law, and then go to the cross. And then rise again to redeem us.
Do you see God's gift to you today? Maybe the greatest blessing today is we're talking about blessedness. It's verse 45 of chapter one. "Blessed is she, Mary," blessing to Mary by Elizabeth. "Blessed is she who believed, for there will be fulfillment of the things which were told to her from the Lord." Blessed is she who believed. Blessed is she who believed. Well, couldn't we also say today, blessed is he who believes. Blessed is she who believes. Blessed are all who believe. That's what he wants. Receive this gift. Believe in what he has said, and in your hearts, prepare and make him room.
Let's pray.
Heavenly Father, thank you for this gift to us. Thank you for your rich blessings. Thank you that he who was rich became poor, so that him becoming poor, we might become rich. What a gospel. Thank you that he came to save sinners, as Paul said, of whom we all can say tonight we are chief. Bless us as we, Lord, worship you. Thank you for all your good gifts to us, but most of all, thank you for your salvation. We believe you. We receive your gift with joy. We believe your word. Thank you for considering us, O Lord, and giving us a place in your kingdom that truly matters. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.