"Jesus: Oldest Baby Ever"

The Christmas season is a special time of the year for most people.

For many, it means friends, relatives, food and shopping malls.

Christmas shopping may have been stressful for some of you.

First, you need to find the right gifts for several people.

Then you put them in the shopping cart.

When you get to the checkout, you take them back out of the shopping cart and put them on the conveyer belt for the cashier.

Then after you pay for them, you put the bags back in your shopping cart and push the cart out to your car.

You put the bags in your car and return the shopping cart to one of those cart corrals.

When you get home, you have to unload all the bags from your car and bring them into the house where they will be wrapped.

There is one good thing about Christmas shopping.

It really toughens you up for the January sales.

Christmas means different things for different people.

For some mothers, it means receiving a visit from a jolly fellow with a big bag over his shoulder.

And I’m not talking about Santa Claus.

I’m talking about a son coming home from college with his dirty laundry.

I think Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year for many people.

But I am sure that there are people in the world who wonder how Baby Jesus fits into this holiday season.

The world is content with letting Jesus be a baby in a manger.

But the world does not want to let Jesus be the sovereign King and Lord that He is.

Yet, that is the central truth of the Christmas story: The Child of Christmas is God.

Many do not mind celebrating the birth of a baby.

But they do not want to hear about the Lord of lords.

They may sing of His nativity but reject His authority.

They adore Him as an infant but will not honor Him as God.

They tolerate the manger, the shepherds, the wise men and Joseph and Mary.

But they cannot bear the appearance of God in human flesh.

Satan loves the way much of the world celebrates Christmas.

He must glory in the way people inoculate themselves against the truth of Christ.

They commemorate His birth with lip service while ignoring the point of it all – that Jesus is God Almighty.

That little baby in that manger in Bethlehem was Baby God, the oldest baby ever to be born.

I. The Birth of Christ: God Becoming Flesh

Christmas is not so much about the Savior’s infancy as it is about His deity.

The humble birth of Jesus was never intended to be a façade to conceal the fact that God was being born into the world.

But the world’s version of Christmas does just that.

We can not fathom what it means for God to be born in a stable.

How does one explain Almighty God stooping down to become a tiny infant?

It was the greatest condescension the world has ever known.

Our minds cannot begin to understand what was involved in God becoming a man.

He who was infinitely rich became poor.

He entered a world He knew would reject Him and kill Him.

Without forsaking His divine nature or diminishing His deity in any way, He was born into the world.

Some have wondered, “Did Jesus cry as a baby?”

I think He did, but I know He did not go through the terrible two’s and three’s.

Jesus was fully human with all the needs and emotions that are common to every human.

Yet, He was also fully God.

He didn’t give up being God but He willingly gave up the use of the privileges that were His as God.

Philippians 2:6-8 = Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made Himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death – even death on a cross!

He chose to submit His will to His Father’s will.

Through all that He remained fully God.

For 2,000 years, there has been debate about who Jesus really is.

Cults and skeptics have offered various explanations.

They have referred to Him as a good teacher and a prophet.

The problem with that theory is that they make Jesus less than God.

The Gospel of John begins with a clear statement that Jesus is God:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1)

Who is the Word spoken of in these verses?

John 1:14 tells us:

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

The Word refers to Jesus.

Jesus is the oldest baby ever to be born because he existed before He became flesh.

Baby Jesus is Baby God, the second person of the Trinity.

There is much biblical evidence that the child in the manger was God.

In John 14:11, Jesus said the following:

“Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves.”

Jesus turned water into wine,

            Healed people who were hopelessly ill,

            Gave a blind man his sight,

            Opened ears that had never heard,

            Restored hands and feet that were useless,

Raised the dead by simply commanding them to come forth from the grave.

There has never been another person like Jesus on this planet.

Much of the NT stresses the deity of Jesus or the fact that Jesus was God and is God.

But there is one passage in particular that captures the essence of Jesus’ divine nature.

This is the truth that makes Christmas truly wonderful.

II. The Supremacy of Christ: The Firstborn Over All Creation

Colossians 1:15-20

The Apostle Paul was writing to the Christians at Colossae.

The city was under the influence of a false teaching that later developed into what was known as Gnosticism.

The Gnostics were an elite, intellectual cult who thought that they were the only ones who had access to the truth.

They believed that truth was so complex that common people could not understand it.

They explained away the incarnation, God coming in the flesh, by saying that Jesus was a good angel whose body was only an illusion.

The Apostle John was attacking Gnosticism when he wrote the following in I John 4:1-3:

Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God.

If you hear anyone speaking of God but does not acknowledge that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, that individual is a false prophet.

Let’s go back to our main text for today in Colossians.

Colossians 1:15 = He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.

The term firstborn describes His rank.

In a royal Hebrew family, the firstborn had the right to rule.

Colossians 1:16

Christ is the Creator of everything.

Think of what that means.

The extent of creation is staggering.   

Do you ever reflect on the size of the universe?

The universe refers to all existing things.

A hollow ball the size of our sun would hold 1,200,000 planets the size of our earth.

And there would still be room for 4,300,000 planets the size of our moon.

The nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is 5 times larger than the sun.

What if you could travel at the speed of light which is 186,000 miles per second?

You could reach the moon in a second and a half.

You could reach Mercury in 4 ½ minutes.

Getting to Jupiter would take about 35 minutes.

You could get to Saturn in about an hour.

But it would take you 4 years and 4 months to get to the nearest star.

To reach the edge of our galaxy, which is the Milky Way, would take you about 100,000 years.

And apparently there are numerous galaxies in the universe.

Does this give you some idea of who Jesus is?

The Bible says, “By Him, all things were created.”

Not only did He create all things but in Him all things hold together according to verse 17.

There are some who think that Jesus made everything, wound it up like a clock and is letting it run on its own until time runs out.

But Jesus has not abandoned His creation.

On the contrary, He stepped into His creation as a little infant with only a manger for his bed.

Why did Jesus let men treat Him the way they did?

Why would He suffer the abuse He suffered and die such a painful death?

III. The Sacrifice of Christ: The Peacemaker of All Creation

Colossians 1:19, 20

Jesus did it to make peace between God the Father and humanity.

All of us have sinned and God hates sin.

We know that God is merciful and God is love, therefore, He does not want to punish us.

But God is also just, therefore he must punish sin.

God’s Word tells us that He will not leave the guilty unpunished.

So we have a problem.

But God solved this problem in the person of Jesus Christ.

Only Jesus, because He alone is both God and man, could ever resolve this conflict.

He lived as a man but without sin.

Though He was without sin, He died as a sacrifice, the spotless Lamb of God.

Jesus took upon Himself our sin when He died on the cross.

He takes the hand of a repentant, yielding sinner and the outstretched hand of a holy, loving God and He joins the two.

And so Christmas is a celebration of God’s love for us.

But all of this is meaningless until it becomes personal.

In order for us to:

truly experience Christmas,

            experience His love for us,

            receive the gift of eternal life,

            experience that peace that the Peacemaker gives,

we must respond in faith, turning from our sin to Him.

John 1:12 = . . . to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God . . .

God wants you to be His child.

[DVD: “He Came to Get Messy”]

God wants you to be His child.  

God is patient with us not wanting anyone to perish but for all to come to repentance.

Believe Him and trust Him with your life.

He who created everything will make you a new creature with new desires and a new heart.

Your life will never be the same again and this Christmas Day will truly be a time to celebrate.