Isaiah 9
Greetings from our wondrous Father in heaven and His precious Son Jesus Christ.
Are you saved?
Are you saved?
You may think that is a strange question to ask on Christmas Eve. In some parts of this country that is a question you may be confronted with at anytime or any place. Depending on your answer the questioner would know if you are in or out so to speak.
As you may know the question comes from a different Christian tradition. If you said yes the questioner would be assured of two things. You are saved and you know the exact day and possibly the exact time that you invited Christ into your life.
We answer yes because we know at baptism we are saved. Our sins are washed away by water commingled with the Word, and the Holy Spirit is present to mark us as a child of God. As Jesus said to the disciples in the gospel of John:
16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit-fruit that will last…
So we can confidently answer yes we are saved.
Likewise we did not choose for a child to come into the world to be our savior, God chose to send Him. God chose to send His own son into a cruel world in order to raise us up to a new life.
Before we can circle back to the original question here are some other points to ponder.
The 6th verse of Isaiah 9 says:
6 For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty
God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Did you notice anything unusual about this verse? Or for that matter nearly every verse in our reading from Isaiah?
You might have noticed that Isaiah is speaking in a present and a future tense about the miraculous child Jesus. He speaks of the child that is born, as though it was that very day, yet Isaiah lived 700 years before the birth of Jesus.
Theologians call this "now, but not yet". Prophesies spoken in present tense but have not yet occurred. As though the prophet were projected into a future time and was witnessing the events as they happen. We see this in other places in scripture.
In similar fashion Zechariah prophesied after the birth of John the Baptist about events 30 years in the future as if he had already witnessed it. And of course there are the visions of John in the Book of Revelation.
What does "now, but not yet" mean for us?
Now.
Now, we are saved because God chose to send a child into the world. A child that grew up to share His message of hope and mercy. He reached out to the poor, weak, and downtrodden with a message of hope and forgiveness. He preached a means to enter into the kingdom of heaven without the heavy burden of the Law weighing them down. A burden they could not overcome. The grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all people. He was a bright light in their shadowy world.
He went on to suffer, to die, and to be raised up in glory to defeat death and purge the sins of all people for all time.
If we look to Jesus as anything other than our Savior we are resigned to see His efforts as that of any other man trying to define ethical and moral codes. We continue to be the people walking in darkness. People with no hope. People who don't know about or believe in the resurrection. People who only have rules to live by.
The good news is that our confidence is in Jesus as our Savior. We are able to walk in the light. And we are able to share that light with others still walking in darkness.
He still reaches out to all people today in many ways including through us.
Not yet.
Yet we live in a shadowy world full of temptation and full of evil. We are still challenged each in our own ways. Everyday we are here in this world we are under attack. Each of us has at least one sin that just won't leave us alone. At least one temptation that is always waiting in the shadows for us to drop our defenses.
In this respect our times are little different than that night long ago in Bethlehem. A world where death tries to cast a shadow over us. A world where death tried to overshadow a child born in a stable, to a young Jewish girl, in a remote part of a cruel empire that overshadowed many peoples. A world where at the news of the birth of the King of the Jews, an evil king claiming the same title sent soldiers to kill all of the male babies in Bethlehem.
Death could not overshadow this baby and through Him it can not overshadow us.
Now, but not yet.
Now we are saved through this miraculous birth and our baptism but not yet as we look to Jesus to help us with our struggles in this world.
Are you saved? Are we saved?
Confidently we can answer "Yes" because a child was born to remove the burden of sin from a dieing world. And we can Rejoice that He is with us through the resurrection to help us in every trial this world has to offer.
Rejoice! In the Name of Jesus Christ our Savior now and forever, Amen.
