God
with Us

Think you have a firm understanding of God, His ways, normalcy, what is the ‘right’ way to get God’s will done? Now, imagine you are a carpenter settling into your life in the Roman era in the region of Galilee, northern Israel. You are a godly man, trained in the Jewish scriptures and looking forward to a quiet life with the younger woman you are engaged to marry sometime future. Life is predictable, consistent, stable.

Then your world turns sideways—even though you have been circumspect to your espoused and have not had any form of intimacy with her, she comes to you and tells you she is ‘with child’ and admits it is not yours. You love her deeply, have been committed to her, faithful to her but… Then, as you struggle with the news, she continues to say the child is God’s!

You withdraw and consider how to move forward. You love her but the child to come is not yours. You determine to quietly end the formal relationship, to end the espousal and let her fade away from you and your future together.

Then you have another unexpected experience likely even more dramatic: 

But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” ¹ 

Wow. Surprised? Shocked? Nothing like this in your experience, a ‘once-in-time’ event? Yes but there is something about the angel’s message that sounds familiar albeit unexpected as part of your carpenter existence. Yes, you knew the Scripture of hope to your beliefs from childhood, spoken through Isaiah hundreds of years before that,

“Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us). ²

Not only is your espoused pregnant by God but the angel tells you this is in fulfillment of the long-awaited prophesy and that you are not to ‘put her away’ but rather honor what God is doing. You, the small town carpenter, have been chosen to shelter and honor and protect the infant’s mother and be part of his upbringing. Everything you feel says “No!” but everything you now believe says “Yes.” And so it is.

God is not only ‘for’ those who believe Him but is coming ‘with’ and into the midst of those who will believe and He is coming as God yet wholly Man, a Man entirely dependent upon God to guide him through life. Incarnate, ‘in the flesh’, is our characterization of Jesus, God the Son, living among us to do what we could not do for ourselves and that God desired to do but was limited by His separation from our sinfulness.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. ³

Can you believe the unbelievable? Can you, like Joseph, take God at His Word? Can you live out the consequences of God’s revelation of what He desires to do in Life?