Some Outsiders at Christmas

With all my heart I solemnly believe that a parallel should be drawn between the first coming of the Lord 2,000 years ago and His imminent second coming. For your quiet Christmas meditation and consideration I suggest this sobering challenge deducted from the word of God:

“When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?”  (Luke 18:8).  The implication is that He will find as little faith, i.e. the faith of expectancy, at His second coming as He did when He was born as a child in Bethlehem.  Of this miracle Isaiah prophesies, “Who has believed our message?  And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?  For He grew up before Him like a tender shoot and like a root out of parched ground.”  (Isa. 53:1-2).  This is a prophecy of His first coming taking the form of a humble slave (Phil. 2:7).  However, who has believed this message?

Ah, some did believe!  While there in the world was “business as usual”, and while the Jewish “state church” of that time was happy with their dead religion, orthodoxy, ceremonies,  feasts and rituals, but spiritually blind, some Messiah expecting believers came together in simplicity with outstanding persons like “the righteous and devout” Simeon, “looking for the consolation of Israel” (Luke 2:25) and a “prophetess, Anna, the widow, “serving night and day with fastings and prayers” who uttered words of comfort “to all those who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem”  (Luke 2:37-38).  They were the Lord´s blessed “outsiders” together with others, like the “shepherds in the fields” and the house of the priest Zacharias whose son, John the Baptist, was going to a powerful “forerunner” of our Savior (Luke 1:17), not to speak of the wise men “from the east” who “fell down and worshiped Him” (Matt. 2:1, 11).

So yes, there was an unnoticed and obscure group at Christmas time who was looking to the Lord and welcomed Him when He came. This will be the case at His second coming too.  To the streamlined Christendom and the secular world it will be “business as usual”, but there will be a group of the Lord´s people deeply related to the “outsiders” in Jerusalem.  Think about it, my friend, and decide for yourself and in the presence of God, to whom do you belong?

-jn-

21.12.08