Jesus Arrived on Schedule

What Did Jesus Do?

But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, from you shall come forth for me
one who is to be ruler in Israel,
whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days.
Micah 5.2

Please don't take this the wrong way, but God is the founder of planned parenthood. No, not the organization which seems more interested getting people to terminate their unplanned or inconvenient pregnancy, than it does in actually helping anyone become a parent (When your chief services are abortion and birth control how many babies are you really planning for?). What I mean is that the Father is the one who planned with precision “from of old” (Which means even from before “In the beginning...”) every single detail of the birth of the Son.

While December 25 may not be the actual day that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the Bible is adamantly clear that the Savior's birth occurred the very day, hour, and minute that God had ordained, and in the one place in all the world where it had to happen. O sure, some may argue that Christ was born in Bethlehem because of an edict of Caesar that there should be a census, which resulted in Joseph and Mary being in Bethlehem when she went into labor and delivered her firstborn son. But the emperor of Rome only played his part, like an actor, in the divine drama scripted by God.

It wasn't that Nazareth, Joseph and Mary's home, wasn't a suitable place to give birth, Nazareth was a nice little village, the perfect place for Jesus to grow up in. But when your life is all about fulfilling the foretold (See WDJD 12/2/10), the words of Micah (Which in reality were the Word of God) are determinative as regards the place and time of your arrival.

Before you are tempted to dismiss the fact of the foretelling of the birth of the Savior as irrelevant, please consider the following two points. First and foremost, God is sovereign. His plans, or we might say his Will, is absolute and irresistible, nothing can stop it. What God says, goes. If, according to the Father's will, the Savior was to be born in Bethlehem, what do you think the chances were that he might have been born in Hoboken, or even in Nazareth? ZERO! This sovereignty of God's will is no small thing, because it means we can put complete trust in every promise contained in the Bible. THAT is security!

Secondly, knowing that God has a plan, and that everything he plans happens, know that he also has a plan for our life. While Micah and the prophets might never have said word one about your birth or mine, there are are no “accidental” births, regardless of what Planned Parenthood has to say on the matter. The date and place of our arrival is just as deliberate as that of the Savior. Who our parents are, where we are raised, are part of the Father's will for us. In fact, it is not just that God has a plan for our lives, the Father has a perfect plan for us. And the key to knowing and following the Father's perfect plan is knowing and obeying the Son.

You see, the one whose birth in Bethlehem had been foretold is the one who, against all the powers and principalities of the world, against even Satan, stood and shepherded his flock in the strength of the LORD. (Micah 5.4) In this, again, we can live secure, for Christ's greatness shall be to the ends, and to the end, of the earth.

One final thought about the relevance of all this to our lives. Everyone experiences anxiety, despair, depression, even desperation, at times in our lives when things seem to happen, or not happen, at the wrong time. Hope can be hard to hold on to when we have a pile of overdue bills in front of us and no money in our checking account, when recovery from an illness is taking a long, long time to come, when we look forward to having a child and the child never arrives. When our life, and our plans, are just a big mess, we need to remember that for us the Son was born in Bethlehem, right on schedule according to the Father's plans, and, in his time, the Father's perfect plans for our lives in Christ shall also surely be fulfilled.

S.D.G.

Jim
www.jimwilkenministries.org
Marion, NC
PS 37.4