Now keep your Bibles in hand please as we continue to consider its message, this time from the gospel of Luke. We have been tracing in our Advent series on Sunday mornings here at First Presbyterian Church the narrative of the first coming of Jesus, largely from the perspective of His adoptive father, Joseph. This morning we are going to consider the account that Luke provides of the birth of Christ itself. And so please take your Bibles, turn to Luke chapter 2, verses 1 through 7. You can find that on page 857 if you’re using one of our church Bibles.
And I want you to think about two very simple themes in these opening seven verses of the second chapter of Luke. First of all, the events recorded here give us a reliable Gospel. That is part of Luke’s great concern is that we would know that the message about Jesus can be trusted. A reliable Gospel. And secondly, these seven verses tell us about an ordinary Christ. A reliable gospel and an ordinary Christ. And we’ll see how he does that in just a moment. Before we do, would you bow your heads with me one more time as we pray together? Let us pray.
Our God and Father, we very much need the illuminating ministry of the Holy Spirit. Your Word is open before us. Our hearts, our lives are open to Your gaze, but our minds often closed, distracted, prone to wander, prone to distort the truth, prone to suppress the truth in unrighteousness. And so we ask You, please, to shine the light of Christ from this portion of holy Scripture into our understanding and into our hearts, enabling us to understand, to see, and to believe, to receive and rest upon Christ as He is offered to us in the Gospel. For Jesus’ sake, amen.
Luke’s gospel, chapter 2 at verse 1. This is the Word of God:
“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.”
Amen, and we praise God that He has spoken in His holy, inerrant Word.
The Reliability of The Gospel
Well Luke 2:1-7 is the, it is the Christmas text, isn’t it? It is, after all, the only account of Jesus’ birth in the Scriptures. This right here is what we are celebrating at Christmas time. This is the text. And yet the most Christmassy text in the Bible actually begins by talking about what is possibly the least Christmassy subject on earth. Luke chapter 2, 1 through 7, is about taxes! We know from the Roman historians, Tacitus and Suetonius, that the emperor, Augustus, had a policy of keeping meticulous records for taxation purposes, records maintained by census. And the whole empire, for the first time in history, was registered in a census under Augustus. So that’s what’s going on here. Verses 1 and 2 are about Roman imperial tax policy – Merry Christmas! Maybe Luke 2:1-2 could be the verses on a Christmas card from the IRS, but for everybody else they don’t really evoke much in the way of festive cheer. Maybe the tax man likes them; not the rest of us, I’m sure.
That’s a sentiment I rather suspect that Joseph wholeheartedly would have shared at this point in the story at least. You can imagine him opening his letter from the Imperial Revenue Service – IRS! “Dear Mr. Joseph ben Jacob, we write to inform you that in accordance with recent changed imperial tax law, you are required to present yourself in person, along with your dependents, within five working days, at the tax office in Bethlehem, Judea, to be registered. Should you have any questions, please call this convenient 1-800 number and so on.” And so now his heavily pregnant wife and he must now make the journey, about 85 challenging, hazardous miles, from Nazareth to Bethlehem, likely on foot – there’s no mention of a little donkey, by the way. This is not at all, I’m sure, how Joseph intended for the final days of Mary’s pregnancy to go. Thank you very much, Mr. Tax Man.
And while we can no doubt sympathize with Joseph and Mary as they deal with the inconveniences of this recent change to the imperial tax code, we mustn’t miss Luke’s bigger agenda. This is the reason Luke is bringing all this up. You see, Luke’s concern, actually stated right up front at the very beginning of his book, Luke’s concern is to help his readers grasp the reliability of the Gospel. The reliability, the trustworthiness of the Gospel. And that’s the first thing I want you to see here – the reliability of the Gospel. Listen to how Luke puts it in the opening verses of his gospel. “In as much,” he says, “In as much as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitness and ministers of the Word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught.” So Luke is writing in Luke’s gospel an orderly account based on eyewitness testimony so that Theophilus, to whom he is writing, may have certainty concerning the things he has been taught. Luke’s burden is to demonstrate the historical, reliability of the gospel about Jesus so that our faith might rest on solid, assured foundations. He wants Theophilus, he wants us to have some certainty.
And that focus of Luke’s comes out clearly here, doesn’t it, in his account of the nativity in these opening verses of chapter 2. At this most holy moment, when God becomes man in the baby of Bethlehem, all his theological commentary drops away and instead, Jesus’ birth is located historically. “In those days,” Luke says. Which days? Well in the days when Augustus ordered a census. In the days when Quirinius was governor of Syria. The Jewish historian, Josephus, tells us of a provincial census undertaken by Quirinius in 6 AD. Now censuses typically occurred every 14 years, which means that another one prior to this took place in 8 BC.
Now skeptics of the credibility of the Bible quickly point out that Quirinius did not become governor of Syria until 6 AD. But we actually have inscriptions on public buildings that tell us that Quirinius was a Roman military commander in Syria from 10 BC through 7 BC, and then he returned to become governor later. And the Greek of Luke 2:2 is unusual. So one scholar says this about it. “Grammatically, it is quite possible to translate Luke’s statement in Luke 2:2 as ‘This census took place before Quirinius actually became governor of Syria.’” In other words, Luke is very carefully locating the birth of Jesus in the world of geopolitical realities, with names and places and events like this census, like the rise of Quirinius from military commander to become eventual governor of the Roman province. He is very carefully locating Jesus’ arrival in this real, true historical context. We know exactly when and where they were all in operation and what these censuses were for.
To be sure, the theological significance of the birth of Jesus Christ cannot be overstated. It is the single most important fact of the Christian Gospel – that God became man in Christ. You can’t overstate the significance of that. But let’s be clear. It has absolutely no theological significance at all if it is not also historically true. Jesus was a real baby, born to a real Mary, led by a real Joseph, to the real Bethlehem, where people from all over the region gathered to be counted in the real census that Augustus ordered. Not the census after Quirinius became governor, but the earlier census, before that happened. We are dealing with facts, not with unfounded blind beliefs. The claim of the Christian Gospel is that God Himself really did become man and step onto the dusty streets of Palestine. And this claim to historical fact is the bedrock of the good news. There is no Christianity without it.
And the apostle Paul, the apostle Paul is just as insistent on that same note as Luke is here. The apostle Paul focuses not on the birth of Christ but actually on the resurrection of Christ, but he makes the same claim. This does not belong to the realm of metaphor or fantasy but to the realm of fact. So he says, for example, in 1 Corinthians 15 at the fourteenth verse, “If Christ has not been raised then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God because we testified about God that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. What if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised? And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. And those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied. But,” he adds with absolute certainty, “in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead.” In fact, Christ has been raised. In fact, He was born of the virgin. In fact, He lived and bled and died and rose. In fact, He now lives and reigns at the Father’s right hand from whence He shall come to judge the living and the dead one day. The Christian Gospel is a matter of fact.
C.S. Lewis once wrote, “If Christianity only means one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice for the last 4,000 years; a bit more makes no difference.” One more piece of good advice is not the Christian Gospel. All our hope rests on this. That on that first Christmas, the one, true and living God really did become a man, and so was and continues to be both God and man in two distinct natures and one person forever. All our hope depends on it – that Jesus was born of the virgin, wrapped in swaddling cloths and laid in a manger, all while Caesar Augustus glutted himself on the fat of imperial riches and Quirinius commanded the Roman military machine in Syria. If that is not true, we should close our Bibles, switch off the lights right now, and go home. What a waste of time this all would be.
But Christmas is full of joy for us, precisely because it is true! Christ has come! Jesus was born! He stood on the same ground our feet tread. He breathed the same air that fills our lungs. God really was, in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself. “So, most excellent Theophilus,” so, brothers and sisters in Christ, you may indeed “have certainty concerning the things you have been taught.” The first thing Luke is reminding us about here is the reliability of the Gospel. You have not staked your eternity on make believe but on fact, solid and sure and utterly dependable.
The Ordinariness of The Christ
Then the second thing I want you to see – the reliability of the Gospel, secondly, the ordinariness of the Christ. The reliability of the Gospel and the ordinariness of the Christ. We remarked earlier, didn’t we, that these opening seven verses narrating the most astounding event in human history, the incarnation of God as a man in Jesus Christ, the most astounding event in human history, these opening seven verses, don’t you find them jarring in their plainness? That the tension and the expectation of something spectacular has been building and building in Luke chapter 1. There are angelic announcements of the birth of John the Baptist and then of Jesus Himself. Both Mary and Zechariah, they erupt into song recorded by Luke for us in his opening chapter, Mary’s magnificat, Zechariah’s benedictus, both of which celebrate the great idea that ancient, covenant promises that no doubt seemed to God’s people to be long in abeyance, those ancient promises right now were being fulfilled right before our very eyes. Something revolutionary, something epoch-making was happening in the birth of Mary’s baby.
Similarly, the account that follows these seven verses, the narrative of Jesus’ birth, is jaw dropping in the scale and wonder and grandeur of the events it describes. We imagine, don’t we, the humble shepherds blinking in terrified astonishment at the midnight sky, suddenly blazing brighter than midday with the angelic choirs as they erupt into praise at the arrival of the Messiah.
Given all of that, when we turn to consider the actual birth narrative itself, the first seven verses of Luke chapter 2 are rather disappointing, aren’ they? They are mundane. Just the facts. There was a census. Joseph took Mary to Bethlehem to be registered. There she had Jesus. That’s it. The center of the greatest story ever told, the climactic moment, and Luke’s account is shorn of all embellishment, all commentary, all wonder. The prose is not elevated in any way. In verse 14, the angels are singing, “Glory to God in the highest!” but here all we have is – this happened, and then this happened, and then Jesus was born. The plainness of Luke’s account is actually rather stunning, isn’t it?
Or hold that thought for a minute and consider this. Maybe you noticed as we read it through that the descending significance of the individuals mentioned in the passage. Did you see that when we read it? It starts with Caesar Augustus, the celebrated emperor of the known world. A step down from there, Quirinius, the powerful military commander who will soon rise to become governor of the Roman province of Syria. And then lower in status by quite some margin, next is mentioned Joseph, just a rather ordinary carpenter from the sleepy Jewish backwater of Nazareth. Lower still, according to the social conventions of their time and place, came Mary, just a young woman. Until finally, in verses 6 and 7, we reach Jesus. And you will notice He isn’t even named; He is simply “the baby, Mary’s firstborn son.”
Now think about the contrast between Caesar at the top of Luke’s list in verse 1 and Jesus at the bottom of that list in verse 7. And as you do, listen to the kind of things people said about Augustus. In 9 BC, the proconsul of Asia wrote an inscription in celebration of the birthday of Caesar Augustus. “It is a day which we may justly count as the beginning of everything and the benefit it brings. The providence which has ordered the whole of our life has ordained the most perfect consummation of human life by giving it to Augustus, by filling him with virtue for doing the work of a benefactor among men and by sending in him, as it were” – listen to this language – “by sending in him, as it were, a savior for us and for those who came after us. The birthday of the god Augustus was the beginning for the world of glad tidings.” That word is “euangelion,” – “gospel.” The beginning of the gospel. The birth of the Roman emperor. That’s what people were saying about Augustus. No one was saying it about Jesus, about this baby lying in a cattle trough. No one. “He’s just an infant,” writes James Boice, “the poorest of the poor is as far from Caesar as anyone could possibly be.”
So we have this sparse, factual reportage of Luke, we have the stark contrast between Caesar and Jesus, and then there are the details surrounding the birth itself that Luke is so very careful to record for us. Do you see the details? Look at the story. While Joseph and Mary are in Bethlehem, “the time came for her,” Luke says, “to give birth, and she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths.” Now all that would have been perfectly customary and mundane. The local NICU was full of baby boys wrapped in swaddling cloths just like Jesus. But Luke saves his shock for the end, doesn’t he? “She gave birth to her firstborn son, wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger because there was no room for him in the inn.” You might know that the inn there doesn’t refer to a hotel. Luke is not talking about the Bethlehem Hampton Inn being fully booked. Most likely, the word translated here as “inn” refers to the guestroom of the house, maybe the home of a relative, in which Mary and Joseph were lodging. But it’s crowded because of the census. There’s certainly no room for the delivery of Mary’s first child, and so this poor couple have to improvise. Jesus was born in the place where the animals were stabled and fed and a feeding trough is His bed.
It’s actually almost too much to take in. If you read the gospel through from the beginning and you hear the expectation of chapter 1 and the almost fever-pitch anticipation of God’s own Son stepping onto the scene and then you find Him here, it’s almost too much, it’s almost too much to take in. The plainness of the reporting, the matter of fact style – it all makes the shock of the scene even more profound. Luke 1:3-33, the angel Gabriel told Mary her child would be son of the Most High, to whom God would give the throne of his father, David, who will reign over the house of Jacob forever, of whose kingdom there will be no end. And here He is. This is the one. No one would have guessed it. “He came down to earth from heaven who is God and Lord of all, and His shelter was a stable and His cradle was a stall. With the poor and meek and lowly, lived on earth our Savior holy.” That is Luke’s point, isn’t it? As low born as the lowest of us, you can go to this one, you can approach a Savior like this, couldn’t you? We might tremble to come to Caesar Augustus sitting on his throne in his imperial palace, but who would hesitate to come to Jesus born in Bethlehem lying in a manger?
In Philippians 2:5, Paul says that Jesus is the one who, “though in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men, and being found in human form, He humbled Himself.” He is literally the one who was in form, God. God’s form is His form. The contours of deity are the contours of the Christ. That’s who He is. “God and Lord of all,” as Wesley’s hymn puts it. And He humbled Himself, Paul says, taking the form of a servant. Actually, that’s a rather sanitized translation. The word is “dulos” – taking the form of a slave. He was born the lowest of us all, a mere man born to serve us, a willing slave, as it were, to the will of God His Father, to the deepest need of the human heart. That’s who He is, and His whole life was like that.
He humbled Himself, Paul says, but how far did He take it? How deeply did He humble Himself? “He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” The lowliness of the Bethlehem cattle trough presages the humiliation of Calvary’s cross, do you see? The lowliness of Bethlehem’s cattle trough, anticipates the humiliation of Calvary’s cross. He serves us by taking our place. One of us, in place of us, under the wrath and curse of God. That’s why He came – humble, lowly, ordinary one of us. He came for people like us. He understands people like us. He lived and died to rescue people like us. Caesar Augustus – think about this – Caesar Augustus counts his citizens in the census in order to take from them their material wealth; it was about taxes. But here in the manger in Bethlehem, the great King, the Lord Jesus, unlike Caesar, He is counted among His citizens as one of us. And He hasn’t come to take from us, has He? He has come in order to give us everything that He has, even His very life, that we, by His poverty, might become rich.
It’s not just the humiliation and humility of Christ that Luke is emphasizing of course. The note of exclusion – there was no room for them in the inn. That note of exclusion, it’s really only introduced here; it’s barely an illusion here. Though like the baby in the manger who will grow, that note of exclusion will grow and grow to become a major, melodic line running through the whole life of Christ. The exclusion of Jesus is also a significant point to notice. Isaiah, you remember Isaiah’s prophecy about Jesus? “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him; no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised and we esteemed him not.” Or as John puts it in John chapter 1, “He came to His own and His own people did not receive Him.”
That, right here in Luke 2:7, this is the start of that. Here He is, coming to His own, and His own people did not receive Him. No room. No room for Jesus – not in His birth, not in His preaching ministry, not when He healed the sick. No room for Jesus in the precincts of the temple among the religious elites. No room for Jesus in the halls of power. No room for Jesus in the hearts of His own people. No room for Jesus, so they nailed Him to the cross, they hung Him among criminals outside the city walls. And yet John adds, not everyone responded to Jesus that way. He goes on to say, “To those who did receive Him, who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God, who were born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but born of God.” The Son of God, the son of Mary, born in the lowest, meanest conditions, came to bestow upon us the apex of grace and privilege, the highest blessings of which human beings are capable. When we receive Jesus, we receive the grace of adoption. You are welcomed into the family of Almighty God. You become an heir of God and a co-heir together with Christ.
“Hail the heaven born Prince of Peace! Hail the Son of Righteousness! Light and life to all He brings, risen with healing in His wings. Mild He lays His glory by. Born that man no more may die. Born to raise the sons of earth; born to give them second birth” – to make us children of God. Born of God. But please don’t miss that it is only “to those who receive Him, who believe in His name,” that He gives this status and privilege. And that’s the call of these verses in the end, isn’t it? What will you do with Jesus? What will you do with Jesus? Are you going to welcome Him or will you exclude Him? Are you drawn, perhaps, to power, to the trappings of outward glory so that you find yourself pinning all your hopes on the Caesar Augustuses of the world, or can you see in the lowly infant crying, sleeping in the cattle trough, the only Son of God and Savior of sinners? “Where meek souls will receive Him still, the dear Christ enters in.” “To those who received Him, He gave the right to become children of God.”
Are you saying today, “No room. No room. My life is crowded with ambition. It’s choked with fear. My heart is full of self. There is no room, no room for Jesus.” Is that your answer when Christ is offered to you? Or will you welcome Him who came to give all for you? “To all who received Him, who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God, who are born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but born of God.” May God give grace that this Christmas your highest joy might be found here, becoming a child of God, receiving Christ who came for you. Let’s pray together.
Lord our God, how we praise You that the Christian Gospel is not make believe, it’s not fantasy, it’s not religious wish fulfillment. It is history. It is fact. Jesus was born of the virgin, lived an obedient life, preached good news to the world, healed the sick, raised the dead, obeyed and bled and died in our place. On the third day, He rose again, He ascended into heaven, from whence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead. These are not mere convictions; they are declarations of facts and on the certainty of their factual character, we rest our confidence that Jesus has in fact been raised from the dead. We pray, as we face an uncertain 2024, that You would rivet our gaze upon Christ who reigns over history, who is the great King, who orders all our days, and in whose hands all His children are safe. We pray for those here who know nothing of what it means to be a child of God by grace through faith in Christ. Some here are busy saying, “No room, no room, no room for Jesus. I’m too busy. No room for Jesus, I have everything I need. No room for Jesus, I am full of self, full of fear, full of pride.” O God, would You show them how utterly bankrupt all of it is. May they be given grace to receive Him who was born as the lowest of the low to raise us to the highest heights. For we ask it all in Jesus’ holy name, amen.