The Christmas story begins with Caesar
Augustus. This is only his title. His name is Gaius Octavius. His rise
to power began in 44 B.C. when Julius Caesar was assassinated and he
surprisingly named Gaius Octavius as his sole heir. Though just a teenager he
proved himself to be ambitious and brutally cruel to all those who opposed him.
By the age of 32 he emerged to total power, and the senate proclaimed him
Caesar Augustus, which meant they proclaimed him a god.
Luke begins the story of the birth of Christ
with a few words about Caesar Augustus who issued a decree that a census should
be taken (Luke 2:1). Caesar wanted more money as all politicians do, and in
order to level another tax, he needed to know how many subjects he had. That
meant that people from the Rhine River to North Africa all the way to Palestine
would have to travel to their home towns. Mary was in her ninth month of
pregnancy, and even for her there was no exemption. Joseph and Mary must travel
the 90 miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem. After all, that is what Micah had
predicted 400 years earlier, "But you, Bethlehem though you are small
among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler
over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times" (Micah
5:1-2).
Caesar Augustus was the most important person
in the world…or at least that is what he thought, but in reality he was just a
piece of lint on the page of Biblical history. God was taking this little
couple to the exact place he wanted them. How appropriate are Solomon’s words:
“The king's heart is in the hand of the Lord; he directs it like a watercourse
wherever he pleases (Prov 21:1).
God’s polished arrow that had been sheathed
for eons was about to be unsheathed for all the world. Isaiah says that the
Christ child born in that lowly stable and laid in a feeding trough was indeed
God’s polished arrow: “He made my mouth like a sharpened sword, in the shadow
of his hand he hid me; he made me into a polished arrow and concealed me in his
quiver. He said to me, "You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will display
my splendor" (Isaiah 49:2-3).
The difference between Christ, our deliverer
and conqueror, and the world’ greatest conquerors is like night and day. Christ
does not come with physical weapons of destruction and intimidation but with
his word that is like a sharpened sword. Jesus was hidden like an arrow until
the precise moment, then God sent his son into the world with divine accuracy.
God’s chosen servant displayed the splendor of God. As the Apostle Paul says,
Jesus truly “made himself nothing” (Phil 2:7). Philip Yancey writes:
…almost
no pagan author used the word humble as a compliment before Jesus. The God who
came to earth came not in a raging whirlwind nor in a devouring fire.
Unimaginably, the Maker of all things shrank down, down, down, so small as to
become an ovum, a single fertilized egg barely visible to the naked eye, an egg
that would divide and re-divide until a fetus took shape, enlarging cell by
cell inside a nervous teenager. Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb,”
marveled the poet John Donne or as the Apostle said He made himself nothing…he
humbled himself and was made in human likeness.[i]
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