Christmas Day: The Savior of the World Has Come

A few years back, my mother-in-law showed me pictures she took of a first-century manger in Israel. Surprisingly, they were large and carved out of stone. These mangers were meant to hold water or food for animals, not tiny newborn babies. And yet this was where Jesus’s humble life began—tightly wrapped in swaddling cloth, lying in stone. 

These are the intricacies and details in the physician Luke’s Gospel: We see a young Mary who wrapped Jesus “tightly in cloth and laid him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them” (Luke 2:7). When the angel told the shepherds to look for the Messiah, he said, “This will be the sign for you: You will find a baby wrapped tightly in cloth and lying in a manger” (Luke 2:12). And in Luke 23, after Jesus died on the cross, they took His body down and “wrapped it in fine linen and placed it in a tomb cut into the rock, where no one had ever been placed” (Luke 23:53). There was the Redeemer, wrapped in cloth, laying in stone, where no one had ever been placed.

In Scripture, God is present in all of human history as He cares for each and every detail. Jesus’s time on earth ended the same way it began, wrapped in cloth, laying in stone—a manger and a tomb, two unlikely places for God’s begotten Son.

Laying in that stable manger in the city of David over two thousand years ago, the Lamb of God was “born that man no more may die.” He was born to be sacrificed so that even the vilest of sinners could receive adoption as children of God, if they would repent and put their trust in Him. And if “He did not even spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him grant us everything?” (Romans 8:32).

When life doesn’t make sense or things seem random, remember there are no “oops” with God. The nativity story in Luke 2 reminds us that every detail of human history is under God’s sovereign care for our good and His glory. Even when we can’t see the full picture, we can trace His handiwork and trust His heart for us—fulfilled in the person of Jesus, our Savior and Redeemer. 

As we celebrate Christ’s birth today, let’s join the shepherds, “glorifying and praising God for all the things they had seen and heard, which were just as they had been told” (Luke 2:20). Merry Christmas!