The Lord’s Day Morning
December 18, 2011
“Good Tidings of Great Joy to All People”
Luke 2:8-20
The Reverend Mr. Joshua M. Rieger
As we come today to the Word of the Lord, we’re going to be looking at Luke 2
verses 8 to 20. This is a continuation of the passage that Billy Joseph preached
on Wednesday evening. And so as we
begin this passage you’ll see that it begins by saying, “And in the same
region.” Well, Christ has just been
born in the previous passage. Christ
has just come on the scene. He is
lying in a manger wrapped in swaddling cloths and that in Bethlehem in the city
of David, and so as we come to this passage, “the same region” is the area of
Bethlehem. And we will be reading
there, but before we come to God’s Word, let us go to Him in prayer and ask Him
to attend the reading and the preaching of His Word.
Heavenly Father, as we come to Your Word today, we acknowledge that we come with
hearts heavy with guilt, hearts heavy with anxiety and fear, hearts that are
full of excitement about holidays and family and gifts and time off, but not
many of us come to it Lord with hearts that are weighed down by the weight of
glory of Your presence in Your Word.
Almighty God who caused holy men of old as they were carried along by Your
Spirit to write the Scriptures for our learning, we ask that You grant that we
might hear Your Word, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest
them so that we might embrace and hold fast to the blessed hope of the
everlasting that You have given us in our Savior, Jesus Christ.
We pray all of these things in His name and for Your glory, in Jesus’
name, amen.
Now if you would take your copies of God’s Word with me and read in Luke 2
beginning with verse 8:
“And in the same
region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by
night. And an angel of the Lord
appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were
filled with fear. And the angel said
to them, ‘Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be
for all the people. For unto you is
born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.
And this will be a sign for you:
you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.’
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host
praising God and saying,
‘Glory to God in the
highest, and on earth peace among those with whom He is pleased!’
When the angels went
away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, ‘Let us go over
to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known
to us.’ And they went with haste and
found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in a manger.
And when they saw it, they made known the saying that had been told them
concerning this child. And all who
heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them.
But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.
And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had
heard and seen, as it had been told them.”
All flesh is grass and all its loveliness is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of our God stands
forever.
As we come to this passage, we’ve spent the last couple weeks looking into
Matthew’s account of the birth and Mark’s reference to the incarnation.
And we’ve seen a couple of things.
We’ve seen that there is a gift.
Christ is a gift that we all need.
We’ve seen that Christ is also a gift that we should all want.
And last week we looked at the fact that Christ is the gift that we can
only and must receive through repentance.
In Luke 2:1-7, we saw on Wednesday night the details that God gave and
the ones that He left out with reference to the birth of Christ in Luke 2 were
showing us what was truly important.
Today we’re going to see the reason for the gift that was given and we’re also
going to look at the response it should drive us to.
Last week we saw that one response it should drive us to is repentance,
but we’re going to see that another response that should go along with this is
found in this passage as we see the angels’ response and as we see the
shepherds’ response.
I want you to see three things as we move forward in this passage.
The first thing I want you to see is the message that the angels
proclaimed. And as we see this
message it should drive us to Christ.
And the second thing that I want us to see is the recipient of that
proclamation. And as we see the recipients of that proclamation, it should make
us aware of our neediness. The third
thing that I want us to see is the response to the truth of this message.
So let’s look first at the message that the angels proclaimed.
THE MESSAGE THE ANGELS PROCLAIMED
First of all, it tells us that the message the angel came to proclaim was good
news. The angel was a fearsome
messenger. The message he
proclaimed, though, was good.
Imagine a scene that you may have seen several times before on TV or movies
where you have a person who is cowering in fear.
Somehow they’re oppressed.
Maybe they’re in a prison in a foreign land or maybe they’re persecuted by a
dictator or some sort of oppressive regime, and suddenly they’re in a room and
they’re cowering in fear and suddenly a Marine or a Navy Seal breaks through the
door with a machine gun in hand with his helmet on and dressed up in camouflage.
And the initial response is one of fear.
Now the initial response to a machine gun is always, I think, one of
fear. If you’re not familiar with
one, then seeing one even when it’s not in someone’s hands is a little fearful.
You might be wondering whether it’s going to go off or something like
that. But seeing this person who’s
fierce, standing there with a gun in hand, it’s an initial response of fear.
But then the sailor or the Marine says, “I’m here for you.
I’m here to save you. I’m
here to protect you.” And
immediately that fear is transformed to joy.
And this is what we see here in this passage today because angels are God’s
soldiers in His heavenly host.
They’re also His messengers, but we see them here as His soldiers in His
heavenly host. And so we know just
from looking at the Scriptures that angels are something that always instilled
fear in those who they come to. The
immediate response we see continually in the Scriptures is fear when people come
into contact with angels. And so
these shepherds are out in the fields near Bethlehem and all of a sudden this
soldier, this fearsome being, appears to them in the sky and not only does the
fearsome being appear in the sky — and that’s something that they should be
justly afraid of — but also the glory of the Lord shines about them.
And now this is something that also instilled fear.
When we look at the Old Testament, we see pictures of the glory of the
Lord, we see that when the people came into contact with it on Mount Sinai it
instilled fear. In fact, they did
not want to hear any more from God.
They wanted Moses to be the one who went up.
When the glory of the Lord came down in the first temple, once a year
when the chief priest was in there, it was something that was a fearful thing.
It wasn’t something that everybody came into contact with.
When the people returned from exile and they built a second temple, the
glory of the Lord was something that never returned to the temple.
It’s been something that has been missing for generations.
It’s something that is fearful.
And yet these men standing on a hills watching their sheep — I don’t know what
the weather is like; I don’t know whether it’s clear or cloudy, but it’s the
middle of the night and they’re just watching sheep.
It’s dark. Everything is kind
of lazy. They’re probably hanging
out, maybe talking around the campfire, maybe relaxing, and all of a sudden an
angel shows up and the glory of the Lord is shining all around them and they’re
very afraid. And this angel gives
them a message. What is this good
news that the angel proclaims? He
says to you, “Unto you is born this day in the city of David, who is Christ the
Lord.” Well to a people who are
waiting for Christ, they’re waiting for the Messiah, people who are aware of the
fact that the glory of the Lord has not returned to the temple — we are still a
people who are under subjection — they are waiting for a Messiah; this is good
news. They are a people who are
subject to a despotic rule and they’re waiting for a Savior.
This is a message of joy.
It’s something they’re waiting for.
And the angel doesn’t just give them this message, this joyful message, that
immediately turns the fear of his presence into joy; he also gives them a sign.
And the sign has two parts.
The first part is that there is a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths.
Well this is not something that is exceptional.
Babies are wrapped in swaddling cloths when they’re new.
In fact, we all are very familiar with these little cloths that are blue
and pink and white and as soon as we see them we know it’s a picture of a baby
in a hospital because that’s what it elicits in our mind.
This is something that we’re all very familiar with.
This is something that the shepherds would have been familiar with.
The second part of the sign is what is actually surprising.
The second part of the sign is that this baby is not just wrapped in
swaddling cloths, but He’s lying in a manger.
He’s lying in a feeding trough. This baby, which is from the first
despised and rejected, as Isaiah said, this baby who sleeps in a feed trough, is
the Savior, who is Christ the Lord, that the angels just told them about.
Not only does he give them this good news that the Savior is coming, but
the next thing out of his mouth is, “This Savior that you’ve been expecting,
this great joy, is just a few miles from here lying in a feed trough.
When you find the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes that’s not good
enough. When you find the baby
wrapped in swaddling cloths lying in a feeding trough, then you’ve found the
Savior.” And so they are looking for
this sign, this sign that the rejected one — He’s going to save you.
The despised one, He’s your King.
The humiliated one lying in a feeding trough is your Lord and your
Master.
THE RECIPIENTS OF THE PROCLAMATION
So we’ve seen this message – who receives this message?
We know it’s the shepherds but let’s look at a little bit more about the
shepherds. The shepherds are the
ones who most immediately receive it, although the angel does say this is a
message “for all men.” But the
immediate recipients of the proclamation are shepherds and there’s three reasons
that it’s important that shepherds are the immediate recipients.
First of all, shepherds were social outcasts.
If you’ve sat here and listened to sermons very long from this pulpit,
you’ve heard Dr. Thomas especially speak about the fact that shepherds were
social outcasts. They were people
who were not to be trusted. They
were not allowed to testify in trials because they were untrustworthy.
Just by nature of their work with sheep, they were ceremonially unclean.
So these are recipients who are social outcasts.
We see that this is a scene that recurs in Luke.
This is something that Luke often highlights.
We’ve been in Luke for a couple of years now and we’ve seen this over and
over again and we just saw last Sunday night when Brister was preaching to us
from Luke 16 about this picture of the beggar outside of the rich man’s house.
And when they both died, the beggar was the one who ended up in heaven
and the rich man was the one who ended up in hell, in the torments of hell, and
we see even there Luke is highlighting the unexpected — that Christ came to
affect those who were social outcasts.
We see it in this idea that the shepherds were social outcasts something
that shows us a people aware of their need.
But another reason it’s important that the angel came to a shepherd — the angel
who came to shepherds was proclaiming a Savior, a Messiah, a Christ who was the
descendant of great David, who was himself at the time of his calling, a
shepherd. It was a harkening back, a
reminder of who this Christ was, who this Messiah was, and what lineage He came
from. And so as they heard this
message, first of all they were shown that it was a people who were needy, a
people who were aware of their need to whom Christ came, but secondly we see
that it’s a people who are going to remember His lineage when they hear where
He’s coming.
And the third reason this is important is that the Bible, both New and Old
Testament, tells us consistently about the symbol of the shepherd in relation to
God and to His flock, to His congregation, to His sheep.
This is something that we’ve seen already.
The Bible, they don’t have the New Testament at the point that this
proclamation comes, but they’re very familiar with the Old Testament where God
is a Shepherd for His sheep, for His flock.
We think of Psalm 23 and the message that we have there.
This would have been something that was familiar to them.
The idea that we have in the New Testament that elders are to shepherd
the flock, the church of Christ — there’s a reason as the elders and deacons
kind of divide up the congregation of First Pres. in order to shepherd them, in
order to care for them and their spiritual needs.
They’ve called these groupings flocks and folds.
This comes from the very idea in the Scriptures that, you know, God has
provided under-shepherds. Christ is
our Shepherd, but God has provided under-shepherds to care for His sheep.
And we also see that God is called a Shepherd of His people Israel in the
Old Testament. And Christ in the New
Testament is called the Good Shepherd.
But there are other recipients. The
angel does say this is a message “to all men.”
We see that the recipients are Israel, who are also outcasts, although
Israel didn’t think of themselves as outcasts.
They were proud; they were unaware of the fact that they were outcasts.
They were a special people who’d received
the promises of Abraham, of Moses, of David.
They thought that they had a lot to be proud of, but they were a people
who, every time God had called them, had failed in the calling to which He’d
called them. They were a people
who’d sinned over and over and over again to the extent that they’d suffered
under the curse of God’s wrath for their sins.
They were so sinful that God punished them by allowing them to be overrun
by the most evil nation on earth at the time.
If that’s not outcasts, I don’t know what is, but yet they thought of
themselves very proudly. They did
not see themselves as outcasts, but they were still outcasts who needed a
Savior. And now, on top of the fact
that they’ve dealt with this exile, now that they’re back in the land they’re a
small people who don’t rule themselves.
They are living under the rule of another who limits the way they are
able to worship and serve and all of these other things, limits their own
decision making. There are people
that might remind us of, you know, the modern day Curds or gypsies or people
like that who don’t have a home, who are in multiple lands and no one seems to
really want them.
And it’s also to the Gentiles, to the rest of the world, who didn’t receive the
promises in the first place. They’re
referred to as “Gentile dogs.”
Christ refers to them in His teaching as swine, and yet Christ came even for
them. They were true outcasts.
The Savior, who is Christ the Lord, came to those who were in need.
He came, most specifically, to those who are aware of their need.
The message of the Gospel was taken to the Gentiles after the Jews
rejected it – time and time again, we see this in Paul’s ministry.
Read through Acts and see how Paul consistently goes to a town and begins
to teach in the synagogue and when he’s kicked out he takes the message to the
Gentiles. These were a people who
were needy. These were outcasts who
also needed the message of a Savior, and there was a Savior who came to meet
their needs.
Missionaries I’ve heard speak of the fact that often the people who are most
receptive to the Gospel are those who are needier because they’re aware of some
need in them. This isn’t across the
board; God obviously works in amazing places, but I’ve talked to several
missionaries who gave us an example of this people who were more aware of their
need being faster recipients of the Gospel.
Christ came to meet a need.
He came to meet the deepest need in man which we learned two weeks ago in
Matthew 1. He didn’t come to improve
life for some people who were already doing okay, to give them a better life.
He came to bring those to life who were already dead, those people who
had no hope in and of themselves.
And these are the people that Christ was born as a Savior to.
We need to take this opportunity as we look at this passage to focus on our own
neediness because we are a people who are inordinately materially blessed, but
we are still spiritually needy. And
so we may look around us and think, “We’re doing alright.
I don’t need too many things.
The gifts that I look forward to at Christmas are all blessings and
encouragements and things extra that are not needs.
I’m not looking for food or shelter on Christmas.”
But that does not change the fact that I am no less needy than the most
despicable outcast in Israel in the Gentile world the day that Christ came.
THE RESPONSE TO THE TRUTH OF THE MESSAGE
The third thing we see in this passage though is the response to the truth of
this message or proclamation that came to the shepherds.
There’s a response that we see.
First of all, we see how the angels respond.
One angel gives the message, one angel comes and proclaims these truths
to the shepherds, but one angel is not enough to respond in the correct way to
the message that’s being given. And
so rather than this one angel then praising God, what we see is immediately a
heavenly host appears. This is
something that’s exceptional in the Scriptures.
This doesn’t happen very often.
The times that we face a heavenly host are not usually in this type of
setting. We see Elisha who has his
eyes opened and his servants eyes opened and he sees the heavenly host
protecting them, but it’s not something that’s available for everyone to see.
This is a unique experience.
Usually you see one or maybe two or three angels come to people, and they’re
already afraid. Imagine if you’ve
already responded in fear to one angel coming and now an entire multitude of the
heavenly host appears! But the
heavenly host, the multitude, is responding in joy, responding in praise, as
they sing, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with
whom He is pleased!”
They didn’t see this, the angels, as an opportunity to “ooo” and “ahh” over a
baby that was cute. This was a
chance to give glory, laud, and honor to the great God of heaven.
This was an opportunity to worship and praise the great God and Father of
our Lord, Jesus Christ, who was lying in a feeding trough. It was His
righteousness that was sinned against.
It was His just and righteous wrath in the face of iniquity, our
iniquities, that made the shepherds and Israel and the Gentiles needy.
He’s the one we have sinned against and yet we cannot save ourselves, and
He sent the Savior. He sent His own
Son, the second person of the Godhead, and so He deserves praise.
And the angels worship Him.
This is their response. The angels,
in a way, have tickets kind of on the fifty yard line, or maybe more like the
commentators in a football game who see everything going on but aren’t taking
part in it themselves in some sense.
Or maybe a better picture is, I remember when I was in the navy, this would have
been in 2003 probably, and we were in the Gulf of Aden, which is, when you come
to the bottom of the Red Sea there’s a little strait there named Bab el Mandeb
Strait and you’re in the Gulf of Aden.
And Yemen is to the north of you, the city Aiden is right there, and to
the south of you is Somalia and one of the things that our navy does is
intercept small boats called dhows as they’re traveling back and forth between
Yemen and Somalia. Usually we’re
looking for boats that have guns or money or drugs that are being used to help
out terrorism. And as you’re in
this, you know the boarding team leads the ship in a small boat and our ship
had, as a helicopter, a helicopter called an SH-60 Bravo.
And the helicopter would take off, and we’d always do this at night
because those people in the dhows, we wanted them to have as little advantage as
possible. I was the navigator so I
never got to leave the ship as the boarding party; I had to stay on the ship.
But you would watch and you would see the screens as they had night
vision on and you’d see the helicopter giving you kind of a picture of
everything that was going on. And these small boats would be coming alongside
this dhow that we sent out and these sailors would rush aboard and the men on
the dhow had no idea what was coming.
And you’d be back on the ship watching the whole thing, amazed at what
technology and training and skill allow you to do.
And that’s what the angels are experiencing.
You know, 1 Peter 1 tells us the angels looked into the truths of the
Gospel, or they longed to look into the truths of the Gospel.
They were in awe of the salvation that God was bringing and so they’re
standing back and they’re watching the salvation, they’re seeing what the Lord
is doing to a people who have sinned and yet who are just completely unaware of
the depths of their sin. They’re
sitting there in the presence of God knowing the depths of the human sin and yet
they watch and they see God send His own Son, they see God respond with a mercy
and a love that is just flabbergasting.
And their only response is worship.
And the shepherds respond in the same way.
The shepherds found Mary and Joseph and the baby, lying in a manger, and
they tell everybody immediately, “This is exactly what the angels told us was
going to happen.” This isn’t a
surprise to them. They didn’t stand
around after the angels left and say, “Was this a vision?
Do you think there’s really a baby in a manger?”
They immediately, it looked like in the passage, got up and went exactly
where the angels told them to go, looking for this sign they’d been told about.
And so they left immediately.
And they get there and they see the signs they’d been told about and they start
telling people and they realize that it’s just as the angels told them that it
was going to be. And so as they
return, and the passage tells us that they are glorifying and praising God; it
was as marvelous as the heavenly host had told them it would be.
And so they response in the same way that the heavenly host responded —
by glorying and praising God.
So how do we respond to this truth 2000 years later?
Well, we learned last week in Mark 1 we respond with repentance, which is
a picture of recognizing this neediness.
We look to Christ as our only hope in the midst of our sin, in the midst
of our neediness, in the midst of our inability to save ourselves.
But there’s another picture, another response that we see in this
passage. And that response is that
we praise God. We sing hymns of
praise to Christ for what He has done, hymns of praise to Christ for His
humiliation, but what we see here is that the angels and the shepherds praised
the Father in heaven who sent His Son as the Savior for the world and we respond
in the same way, just as we did this morning when we sang, “Gloria in excelsis
deo,” which means, “Glory to God in the highest,” just as the angels sang.
He has brought peace among those with whom He is pleased.
He has done this through Christ the Lord.
We hear this message year in and year out.
Maybe you love, as I do, the movie, A Christmas Carol, or the
book, even. Maybe you enjoy that
story but the thing is, we hear, as we get to the end, that the problem that
Scrooge has is that he’s not carrying the Christmas spirit with him through the
whole year. This is what he needs to
learn from all this experience. Now
Brister told us last Sunday night of the fact from the Scriptures that if they
didn’t believe Moses and the prophets, how were they going to believe someone
who came back from the dead? Well,
Scrooge’s problem, apparently, isn’t that he isn’t glorifying God, his problem
is just that he’s not carrying the spirit of Christmas with him.
And somebody comes back from the dead and all of a sudden he does fix
himself, but that’s not what we see in the Scriptures, is it?
Our problem is not that we’re not carrying the spirit of Christmas with
us through the year. Our problem is
that we are not so astounded by this truth that we’re falling on our knees every
moment, praising and worshiping God the Father for sending His Son as our
Savior. We’re called to constantly
praise God. If we sit here today
trusting in Christ, if we sit here with lives that have been transformed by the
Spirit of God then we have peace with God, and only because He sent His Son to
live and die in our place because the power of the resurrection has been
realized in our lives as we place faith in Christ.
And this is something that God the Father has done in our lives, that He
has brought us to, and so this should be something that elicits a response of
praise.
So as we look at this story that I’m quite certain you’ll probably hear again in
the coming week at some point, we need to realize that this story, this truth
from the Scriptures is something that should make us aware of our neediness, it
should make us aware of our sin, just remembering who the angel came to.
Second, it should drive us to Christ, recognizing that He is the Savior
and He is the only hope. And last,
it should cause us to fall down on our knees and praise God.
Next Sunday morning we’ll be praising God because we’re here at church
but we should also be praising God primarily because He sent His Son and He sent
His Son to die. And every person
enters the world knowing that someday they’ll die, but Christ entered the world
knowing that He was going to die a death of punishment, capital punishment, for
others’ sins. And that’s something
for which God deserves glory.
Let us close in prayer.
Heavenly Father, we are so very grateful for the mercy and the love that You
have shown us. And God, we know that
our hearts are deceitfully wicked, desperately wicked, deceitful above all else,
Lord, and we know that we do not even grasp the depths of our own sin against
You. We don’t grasp the depths of
our need of Christ. But Lord, we ask
that You would help us to grasp for Christ, knowing that He is our only hope,
that He would be the greatest treasure that we seek.
He would be the treasure that we are willing to sell all else for, and
that Lord, in response to that, we would glorify and praise You with our lives
on Sundays, as we have a day set aside to worship You, but also every day as we
live out a spiritual act of worship.
We pray that this passage and this season would have the effect on our lives
that You call it to have as the angels praised, as the shepherds praised, Lord,
that we also would praise. In Jesus’
name, amen.
Now if you would respond with me by opening your hymnals to hymn number 218 and
we will sing about the angels who worshiped God.
Now receive the Lord’s benediction.
May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of the Father, and the
fellowship of the Spirit be with you all.
Amen.