Isn’t it terrible to be separated from someone you love? Perhaps your spouse has served a deployment and you were separated by thousands of miles for months on end. Maybe you live far away from your family and feel separated from them. Or perhaps you have experienced the separation that death brings between you and those who were closest to you–your father, your mother, your spouse, or a child. That last type of separation in particular is such a painful reminder of the effects of sin in our world. Sin and death divide families, ruin relationships, and tear loved ones apart. Sin also estranges us from God. When we live in sin, God is not with us, not because he abandoned us but because we abandoned him. But the beauty of the message of the gospel is that through Jesus God is with us again. In fact, the name Immanuel that was given to Jesus means ‘God with us’ (Matthew 1:23). 

Under the Mosaic Law, the Israelites were constantly reminded of the fact that sin separated them from God. God’s presence was among his people in the tabernacle (later in the temple) but the priests had to offer animal sacrifices and be ritually clean in order to approach God in their temple duties. (See Hebrews 9:6-8).

So imagine the Jews’ surprise when Jesus began teaching that he was the Son of God (making himself equal with God). They thought that God was in the temple, hidden away and separate from the people. And yet here was this man, walking through the cities of Judea, teaching the people, and performing miracles, and he claimed that he was God. This is the miracle of the incarnation: that God the Son became human, without losing any of his divinity whatsoever. He was born by the virgin Mary who miraculously conceived him and he experienced the hurts and pains and temptations that we experience. Because he was fully human, he is able to sympathize with our weaknesses (Hebrew 4:15). And because he is fully God, the sacrifice of his perfect and sinless blood satisfied the demands of justice and opened the opportunity for all people to be justified by faith in Christ (Hebrews 2:17, Romans 3:21-26).

Jesus Christ was God the Son who walked among us. He truly was God with us. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, we have peace with God and access to him (Romans 5:1-2, Hebrews 10:19-22). This Christmas, let your mind wander back to that little city of Bethlehem where some 2000 years ago a baby was born and was laid in a feeding trough. He was no ordinary baby. He was and is Immanuel, God with us, the Lion of Judah, our Savior and our Lord. Let your mind wander back to that scene and give thanks and praise to God for the miracle of the birth of Jesus.