Luke 2:12-14 “This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in strips of cloth and lying in a manger. Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.”

The only thing extraordinary about the angel’s sign is the ordinariness and humility of it all. There isn’t anything special about strips of cloth and feeding troughs.

Except that it’s not where you expect to find your God! It’s not where you expect the salvation of the world to begin. It’s not the sort of place you expect to find the foundation for your only hope of eternal life in heaven. Who would have believed such a thing if it didn’t come from the mouth of an angel sent by God? If a quiet stranger had stopped and said this to the Shepherds, would they have believed him?

But for those who, like the shepherds, have come to believe that it is so, they understand just a little bit better the astounding love that God must have for them. He stoops so low. He is born in a stable. Here is Godhood and Divinity in a form that we can approach. Here we get a brief glimpse of heaven, when we are looking at our God, lying in the manger.

The wonder of such love certainly begs his creatures to give him glory. “Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.’”

God’s glory clearly shines in Jesus’ humble birth. We often say that you can’t find heaven on earth, and rightly so. This world and its things can never be heaven. But on this day the Lord took a little bit of heaven’s glory, and he brought it down to earth for just a little while so that we might know him as he truly is. He did it so that someday he might take us back to heaven to bask in his glory forever.

This is possible only because Jesus is our peace. He came to end the war between earth and heaven, between us and God. He has paid for our sin and atoned for our guilt. He has led us to faith and comforted us with his love. He accomplished it all at the cross, and confirmed it at his empty tomb. But already in the stable, in the manger, we see him coming as our peace.

So, God’s favor rests on you, and me, and a world of sinners. We look into his smiling face, and his good news grants a little taste, a little glimpse of heaven, even as we live on earth.

Luke 2:8-11 “And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord”

Let’s not misunderstand the angels. They are more than cute and cuddly figures, the chubby little cherubs of Renaissance art and so many Christmas decorations. The angels are holy, powerful, even frightening. When this angel appeared, the glory of the Lord shone around the shepherds. Night became like day. Like everyone else who ever saw an angel in Scripture, the shepherds were terrified.

Does that surprise you, that it scares them out of their wits? It shouldn’t. When we are first confronted by perfect holiness, and perfect love, it condemns us. You may have seen a pious, yet sinful, Christian walk into a room where people were using off-color language. The people often become uncomfortable and quiet and change the conversation. That effect is heightened a thousand times when any sinful mortal finds himself in the presence of a holy being who reflects God’s glory. The glorious perfection makes our imperfection painfully clear. See the angel, and deceive yourselves no more!

So it is that this most enviable sight, this vision of glory, only drives home how far we are from heaven by nature. The streets on which we travel are paved with asphalt, not with gold. The future here, in this world, holds only death, not eternal life. From here, with the shepherds of Bethlehem, you can almost see heaven in the presence of the angel, and the sight before us terrifies.

But the angel had come with only good in mind for these men, and we get a little glimpse of heaven in his preaching. “But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.”

“Don’t be afraid!” In the Greek, his words say even more. “You can stop being afraid–forever!” “You don’t ever have to be afraid again!” Why such confidence? The answer lay in the angel’s message. “I bring you good news of great joy…” What follows was not a message merely to calm them down. This was a message of joy. It would inspire them to celebrate and worship and tell others, just as it moves us to do each Christmas. We may bemoan the secularization of Christmas. So much materialism has crept into the holiday. But let no one tell you that it is wrong to celebrate–to sing and to decorate and to feast and to pull out all the stops. When God gives us reason to feel joy, it is only right that we respond in every way we know how.

And reason for joy he has given us. “Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.” The angels did not go into a lengthy discourse about who this Savior is, but the Shepherds didn’t need one. They knew what the Christ, the Lord was coming to do. For men who moments earlier had been scared nearly to death by this heavenly holiness, there would be no joy in hearing that here was a Savior from Caesar or Herod. They would not find a Savior from war, poverty, or sickness, to be good news. God had given them a Savior from sin: someone who could bring them forgiveness, rescue them from death, and make their vision of heaven happy once again.

Dear Friends, God has given us a Savior.  For troubled consciences, for hearts heavy with sin, there is no better and more joyful news to be had. He has not sent us great example, to show us the way, but a Savior, who himself picks us up and carries us out of our awful mess. He has not sent us a helper, to help us be a little better, but a Savior, who has made all of our work his own. He has not sent us a task master, to whip us into shape, but a Savior, who frees us from our slavery to sin and makes us members of God’s own family.              

Can you see it? Do you see the gates of heaven flinging open wide and the Father stretching out his arms in welcome? Can you almost see heaven in the angel’s preaching?

Jeremiah 33:16 “In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. This is the name by which it will be called: The Lord our Righteousness.”

Judah’s real problem was never so much the hostile neighbors who kept invading–the Egyptians, the Philistines, the Assyrians, the Babylonians. They made life miserable, but the problem ran deeper.

Their problem wasn’t even so much in their own wicked kings. People like to blame bad politicians when things go wrong. But nobody put a gun to the citizen’s heads and made them imitate their leaders. They still had God’s prophets to teach them what was right. They knew better.

Israel’s real problem lay in their own rebellious souls. They had been resisting God’s ways from the days of Moses. They were quick to forget his goodness. They were quick to turn to the disgusting practices of the gods of their neighbors. In the end they had no one to blame for their misery, their spiritual bankruptcy, or the judgments God visited on them but themselves.

We’re not so different. We would like to believe that the blame for our misery rests on someone else’s shoulders. We wouldn’t be so grumpy if others treated us better. We would behave ourselves if it weren’t for the terrible influence of our peers, or the failure of our parents to nurture us in a more loving and godly way.

But in the end, it’s our life. Our reactions are our reactions. Our sins are our sins, and we will personally own the consequences, too.

That is why this picture of days to come is such great news. Jeremiah couches God’s promise in pictures the people of his day would understand, but he is describing a salvation that’s spiritual. “Judah will be saved.” Jesus’ coming has saved us, not from foreign powers, but from guilt and distress over our sin. Here’s the picture wrapped in Jeremiah’s Hebrew: We no longer must live like a city under siege, squeezed and choked until we are spiritually starving to death.  Our consciences no longer bombard us with guilt; Satan can’t torture us with fear. We are free from all that, free to live and breathe, free to trust God and love him, with no enemy and no threats anywhere to be seen. This is what it is like to live under this King.

“Jerusalem will live in safety.” Here is the second picture: Our coming King faithfully protects us. Death has been arrested, found guilty, and securely locked away in prison. Only a faint resemblance of it still goes free–not to murder us, but to escort us to the door of a new home. There we are safe and secure with the rest of God’s family around us. Whether we are still on our journey home, or whether we have reached our final destination, we are safe under our new King’s rule.

This is all true because the King has dressed us up to look like himself. “This is the name by which it will be called: The Lord our Righteousness.” In an earlier chapter of Jeremiah, “The Lord our Righteousness” is a name given to Jesus (23:6). Here the “it” to which the name refers is the people of God represented by Judah and Jerusalem.

Either way, the name tells the story: Our Lord Jesus has given us his righteousness–the righteousness of his life, and the righteousness of his death. We wear it as our own in place of the rags of our sin. He has come not only to be near us. He traded identities with us, and dressed in his righteousness we have nothing to fear. Our sin is removed, replaced. Our salvation is sure. We are safe in the royal robes of our King.

Jeremiah 33:15 “In those days and at that time I will make a righteous Branch sprout from David’s line; he will do what is just and right in the land.”

There are many miracles surrounding the birth of our Savior. We will marvel again at the faith of Mary and Joseph, the virgin birth, the appearance of angels, miraculous stars. Jeremiah mentions one here that gets little attention most Christmas seasons. We are familiar with the picture of Jesus as the Branch growing from David’s line. We are less familiar with the striking wonder of God this proclaims.

Jeremiah was prophesying at the time of the last Jewish King from David’s line to rule over an independent Jerusalem. That king was Zedekiah. He was ruling in Jerusalem when Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon laid siege to the city, broke through its walls, and captured him while he was trying to flee to the East. Nebuchadnezzar made Zedekiah watch while each of his sons was killed in front of him, then his friends and advisors. Then Nebuchadnezzar put out Zedekiah’s eyes. The last thing King Zedekiah ever saw was the death of his children and his friends.

This is why the Bible refers to David’s line as a stump. For many it must have appeared as though the family of David, and the promises of a great Savior King from it, had been cut off. The family of David, his royal dynasty, was dead. Nebuchadnezzar made it nothing but a lifeless stump. If this were the history of any other nation or dynasty, the story ends here. And if the story ends here, then we lose…everything.

But underneath the surface there was life left in that royal line. Survivors from David’s family carried on the name and the promises. Among the many miracles at Christmas is the miraculous life God gives to the royal family of David. He kept a seed of life alive in that family through exile in a foreign land and hundreds of years in obscurity. Jesus is the new royal Branch who sprouted and grew to become our Savior.

Jeremiah 33:14 “‘The days are coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will fulfill the gracious promises I made to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah.’”

To many people, the very idea of religion seems dry and unexciting. Since God isn’t someone we visibly encounter every day, he can seem distant. More and more people are turning to a do-it-yourself spirituality and avoiding the organized religions, denominations, and churches. That kind of spirituality focuses less on the person of God. It is more concerned with developing a sense of right and wrong and becoming a kinder, more loving person.

Perhaps you have found a similar reaction within yourself. Sometimes the Christian faith doesn’t seem inpiring or uplifting. It feels more like a set of theoretical propositions. The preaching, the teaching, even the music, all seem dry and unexciting.

Is it possible we have forgotten? Our God is the God who steps through the door between heaven and earth to become part of our world, part of our lives, part of our times. He does it time and time again. Our Christian faith is about more than detailed standards for human behavior. God is not a divine quality control inspector. He is the God who rolls up his sleeves and gets his hands dirty in the story of our lives.

“The days are coming when I will fulfill the gracious promises I made…” he says. Christmas, and just about every other Christian holiday, doesn’t celebrate an idea. It celebrates an event, a promise kept, a day when God came and did wonderful, gracious things for us. Maybe it happened a long time ago, but we can still live in the excitement that God was here. He was here for us, and he was here doing amazing things to give us his grace.

Nor is he finished keeping such promises to his people. He hasn’t left us, but he still steps through that door between heaven and earth. He comes to us. We know this if we tune our ears to hear his voice in his Word. We experience this when we grasp his promise to be with us in his supper. He promises the days are coming when he will step through that door between heaven and earth one last time, not in obscurity as he did at his birth; not under cover of word, water, or wine; but in glory to lead us through that same door from earth to heaven.

He can seem agonizingly slow in keeping these promises. Jeremiah lived about 600 B.C. At his time these promises “to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah” were already hundreds of years old. The house of Israel barely even existed. Most of its people were taken away to exile a century earlier and never returned. It would be 600 more years before the things Jeremiah promised came to fulfillment.

We don’t do so well when we have to wait long times for things, do we. When our parents told us we couldn’t have anything to eat until supper, when we had to wait our place in line for some event, even 10 or 15 minute delays seemed unbearable to us as children. When someone we love is in surgery and the surgery goes long, we worry and expect the worst. Waiting drains our hope and tests our faith. That isn’t because things tend to take a negative turn when they take a long time. Slow is often better, but we are short on patience.

Abraham and Sarah struggled to wait the decades God took to give them a child. King Saul couldn’t wait a few days for Samuel to come and offer a sacrifice. The children of Israel grumbled when the Lord made them wait for food or water in the wilderness. We get tired of waiting for God to answer our prayers. God’s people had been waiting for the promised Savior to appear since the beginning of time. By Jeremiah’s day many of them had lost interest or found some other religion to follow.

But God has kept this gracious promise. The Savior he promised has come.  Christmas reassures us that God will keep every good promise he has made to us in his own good time.

Isaiah 9:6 “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…Prince of Peace.”

We have every reason to respect and love Jesus as our Counselor, Mighty Hero, and Everlasting Father.  In the end, we also bow to him as King. Jesus is royalty. He was the King of Israel as rightful heir and descendant of King David. But more importantly, he is the King of kings. He reigns as King of the universe, the Son and rightful heir of God the Father in heaven.

But this King does not come to bow our heads in terror, or enslave us in servile fear. His name is the Prince of Peace. His peace is not the kind the world so desperately seeks: peace from wars, relief from crime and violence. He didn’t come to make it possible to build a kind of counterfeit heaven on earth. Many times Jesus himself has been the cause of conflict, not just between nations, but even between individual members or our earthly families. He predicted it would be this way.

None of this contradicts the fact that he is the Prince of Peace, however. He came to bring peace in the BIG war, the one between you and me and our God. When we turned against God with our sin, he had no choice but to turn against us with his judgment. When people are at war with God, there is no peace.

But Jesus has turned God’s judgment away. He has made our sin invisible to God by his death in our place. He has given us real peace with him by leading us back to faith. Our consciences can rest. We don’t need to live our lives constantly looking over our shoulders to see if today God is coming to get us. We may not always be safe in an earthly sense, but we have peace.

Our lives may not be free from struggles with other people, free from struggles with temptation, free from struggles to make it through another day, but God’s peace stretches over us in the middle of these struggles. When we have peace with him, our life is whole. God grants us a sense of security, a sense of contentment even when outwardly our lives are a total disaster. This is the peace that comes with faith.

We possess true peace flowing beneath the rushing adrenalin, the sweating anxiety, the streaming tears, and the overwhelming grief of our messed up existence here. It’s the gift Jesus brings us because he is our Prince of Peace.

Isaiah 9:6 “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… Everlasting Father….”

We’re not used to hearing the name “Father” applied to Jesus. Scripture teaches us to know him as the “Son of the Father.” In other places the Bible refers to Jesus as our brother. “Father” sounds foreign to our ears when we are speaking of the second person of the Trinity. Isaiah isn’t confusing the Father and the Son in this description. They remain distinct, and their relationship unchanged. Rather, he is illustrating important features of the way Jesus relates to you and me.

A few moments consideration will reveal what a fitting name Father is for him in relation to us. A father gives life to his children. Children trace their origin back to their parents. Jesus has given us spiritual life. He made it possible for us by giving his life for our sins. Then he made it happen to us by sending us his word and his Holy Spirit. We would have no spiritual existence if he were not our spiritual Father.

He also sustains our spiritual life just like a Father provides for the needs of his family. It is Jesus himself who continues to meet us in his word. He continues to breathe life into us there as he confronts our sin and promises us his grace. He feeds the family with his own body and blood at the Lord’s Supper. The forgiveness it pronounces provides just the nourishment our faith needs. He hasn’t left us here as orphans. He takes care of our spiritual needs.

In our day fatherhood has gotten a bad name. Many fathers abandon their responsibilities. They fail to nurture and provide for their families. Human fathers may forget (or just don’t care) that there is more to fatherhood than begetting children.

But Jesus will never be a “dead beat dad.” He is the Everlasting Father, and his loving nurture and care for us will never end.

Isaiah 9:6 “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…Mighty God…”

Do you know what Isaiah is really saying about Jesus when he calls him our MIGHTY God? He is saying that Jesus is our hero!

The prophet does not mean that Jesus is merely someone for whom we have a great deal of respect, like our favorite celebrity, president, or sports star. This kind of hero was a mighty man and deliverer such as Samson, whom God used as a one-man army; or David, who killed the giant Goliath. From time to time God gave his Old Testament people such “mighty men,” warrior heroes. They did the work of many soldiers. They inspired entire armies to fight to victory. The Lord used them to protect his chosen people from their enemies. That is what Isaiah means when he calls the coming Christ “Mighty.”

If Jesus is such a mighty warrior for us, such a hero, that suggests something about us, too. We would not need him to be so mighty, if we were not so weak. That isn’t something we like to admit. We prefer to picture ourselves as strong, independent, self-sufficient types. We may teach our children to sing Jesus Loves Me This I Know, and the humble self-description it confesses: “Little ones to him belong, they are weak, but he is strong.” That doesn’t mean we like to think of ourselves that way.

However, that confession is just as true of us as it is of our children. Spiritually, we are all little ones. We are weak-willed when it comes to temptation. We give in to it often and easily.

Our love for God is weak. We have trouble maintaining our zeal and excitement for his work. It is not uncommon to feel as though the Lord, his word, and his work are getting in the way of what we really love: taking care of ourselves and indulging our personal pleasures.

Truth be told, left alone against the devil and his tricks, we are little more than his playthings. When he tires of playing with us, he may devour us whole, like the cat who finished playing with the mouse he caught and now is ready for dinner.

What we need is a hero, a mighty warrior, a great champion who will fight our battles and win. That is exactly what Jesus came to be. That is what he did. With his perfect life, he resisted temptation. He took Satan’s best shot and he didn’t even flinch. When he gave up his life in death, it wasn’t a defeat. His death crushed the enemy, set us free from sin and death, and destroyed the devil’s power. With Jesus on our side, they don’t push us around anymore.

Do you know what is even more encouraging? Our Hero is not just a mighty man. He is the Mighty God. Psalm 146 warns us, “Do not put your trust in princes, in mortal men who cannot save…Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God.” That is exactly the help and hope God gives in the child and son of Isaiah’s prophecy. He is the Mighty God, and that makes us confident he is the Hero who can help and deliver us.

Isaiah 9:6 “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…”

When Jesus speaks to us, his words are “wonderful.” By “wonderful” the prophet means more than “very good,” or “great,” or even “nice.” He means that Jesus and his words are actually “full of wonder.” When Jesus speaks to us, his words fill us with amazement. We can hardly believe what he is saying–our eyes open wide, our jaws hit the floor–so astounding are the things he has to say.

Think of how people reacted to him during his earthly ministry. The crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught like one who had authority, and not as the teachers of the law. Jesus’ enemies were amazed at his words when he escaped the traps they had set for him. His own disciples were amazed when he told them how hard it is for the rich to enter heaven, or when he showed them that he knew more about catching fish than they did.

Are we amazed by Jesus’ words? Even much of the Christian church seems set on softening God’s law, toning down his perfectly holy standards so that we can justify ourselves. We want to consider ourselves “good people.” Are we amazed when Jesus reveals to us that even the most secret and momentary lusts or resentments are damning sin? On the other hand, does it fill us with wonder–just knock our socks off–when he has a promise of God’s love, a word of forgiveness, an assurance of God’s continuing grace for wicked rascals like me and you, as he did for the prostitutes, the cheats, and the thieves, after he has led us to repentance?

This is what it means that Jesus is our “Wonderful Counselor:” his words are so unique, so perfectly true, so deeply caring and gracious that they simply overwhelm us with the wonder of what they tell us.

And note that the prophet does not call Jesus our teacher, our preacher, or our prophet here (though he certainly is all these things). Isaiah specifically identifies him as our Counselor. A Counselor is someone whom we have come to trust, someone in whom we know we can confide. A Counselor is someone who has taken a personal and individual interest in us, and his words are meant to apply to our unique and individual situation.

So it is with Jesus. He assures us, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” While his words have something to say to everyone, he wants us to be sure he intends every one of his words to be believed, treasured, and followed just by you. Our Savior has no ordinary name. He is our Wonderful Counselor. Perhaps we will want to hear what he has to say.