‘Behold, the Lamb
of God’
ide
o amnos tou theou
College Study
99th teaching
2.9.2015
“Shepherd of
shepherds”
Luke
2:8-20
“Now there were in the same country shepherds living out in the fields,
keeping watch over their flock by night. And behold, an angel of the Lord stood
before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were greatly
afraid. Then the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you
good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For there is born to you
this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will
be the sign to you: You will find a Babe wrapped in swaddling cloths, lying in
a manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly
host praising God and saying: ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace,
goodwill toward men!’ So it was, when the angels had gone away from them into
heaven, that the shepherds said to one another, ‘Let us now go to Bethlehem and
see this thing that has come to pass, which the Lord has made known to us.’ And
they came with haste and found Mary and Joseph and the Babe lying in a manger.
Now when they had seen Him, they made widely known the saying which was told
them concerning this Child. And all those who heard it marveled at those things
which were told them by the shepherds. But Mary kept all these things and
pondered them in her heart. Then the shepherds returned, glorifying and
praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told
them.”
Tonight’s study is entitled: “Shepherd
of shepherds”.
The first thing I want us to ask
in looking at this story is this: Why does this matter?
Last week we talked about how we have
the unusual opportunity to take a step back from the Christmas holiday and
examine the Christmas story of the birth of Christ without all of the fluff and stuff that comes with the long years
of sedimentary tradition which surrounds Christmas. And we get that. We
understand that the birth of the Savior is for more than just Christmas. It
remains accessible year-round, as we saw last week.
But what about this story? Here we’ve
just read about a group of dirty shepherds living in a land none of us have
been to, living in a time far removed from our own, and they get this message
from these angels, the words of which we’ve heard in hundreds of songs and
hymns and carols, and we might wonder: What does this really have to do with
me.
In preparing for tonight, I asked
myself something I usually ask myself when I prepare a study: What can I say to
this group of people who have gathered to hear the Word that will actually
breach the barrier of tradition and heard-it-before “church talk” and really
impact the heart and the life each of you represent? But then I’m confronted
with this story about shepherds. And I’m confronted with this message by these
angels that we know well enough to recite in our sleep.
Now don’t get me wrong. I believe the
Word of God, more than anything else in our world, has the capacity to attack
our lives and impact us dramatically… if we allow it to. Ah, and there’s the
rub. “If we allow it to”. The problem that automatically arises when we’re
confronted by all-too-familiar Scriptures is we can immediately write them off,
allow the words to pass silently beneath our eyes and filter quickly through
our ears, so quickly in fact that we may miss what is really being said here,
the magnitude of what is being said here. But even if what we see here is
something we know like the proverbial backs of our hands, along with the usual
applications of humility and purity and evangelism and so on, we are doing
ourselves a disservice if we disallow God to speak by dismissing His Word for
our familiarity with it.
I hope you know this story well. But I
hope you never cease to learn from it. I pray that each one of these studies
will provide some new and fresh insight on some very old words. I always pray
that this book would come alive to us. But note that even if what you hear is
something familiar, maybe it is simply because you need to hear it again.
As children, how many times did we
need to be told to keep our hands out of the cookie jar? How many times did we
have to be told not to touch the stove, not to stick our fingers in electrical
outlets, not to run with scissors, not to talk back to our parents before we
understood? For some of us, it took the reinforcement of divine parental
justice (a good swat on the behind) before we understood. For others of us, it
took finding out that the stove can burn you, or that running with scissors is
a fine way to end up with an eye-patch, before we understood the necessity of
obedience.
But you know how much sadder that is
when you’re dealing with an adult who needs to be told the same thing over and
over again? At work sometimes that can be the most frustrating thing for me:
“Careful, don’t touch the oven, it’s hot and I told you that yesterday! Don’t
talk on your phone on the clock, I caught you doing that yesterday! Don’t mix
those chemicals together, you almost blew up the place yesterday!” And then I
have to show them the necessity of obedience.
Let’s not be adults that don’t get it.
Do you understand the necessity of obedience? Maybe it’s time you take a closer
look at this familiar passage, removed from the traditionalization of Christmas-time,
and get the message, if not the first time then the second or third time
through.
It seems to me that I harp on a lot of
the same points week after week: the importance of Christian service and
ministry, knowing your Bibles, maturity and purity, struggling with doubts,
utilizing Christian community, sharing with others. Whether that’s intentional
or not, I think we cannot let another week pass by without addressing changes
that need to take place in our Christian lives. We must do these things. And if we aren’t, then why? Why aren’t we?
One of the most frightening bits of
wisdom I’ve ever heard about the Christian walk is this: “Either you are moving
forward, or you are falling back. There is no neutral ground.” Either you are
reading, praying, fellowshipping and growing, or your growth is being stunted,
you’re becoming stagnant, bitter against other Christians, hardened against the
Word of God, steadily becoming more and more inefficient and eventually
tragically useless to the Lord who bought you. Either you’re moving forward or
you’re falling back.
I hope that you can look back at last
year, at last month, and see some changes God has worked into your life, see
some growth, see some maturity. Because if anything that is living doesn’t grow
and mature naturally, then there’s something wrong. And our Christian lives are
just that: live, they are living.
This reminds me of the words of James:
“But be doers of the word, and not
hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and
not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; for he
observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was.
But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not
a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he
does” (James 1:22-25).
God is gracious, ladies and gentlemen,
and you can thank Him for it. He does not become frustrated with us. He will
always say in His grace: “Alright, let’s try again”, and He will take you by
the hand and lead you down the path and teach you the same lesson, that you may
have heard before, but that you missed the last time and the time before that
too. So let’s approach the Word of God as doers and not hearers only.
v.1,
this is on the same night as the birth of Christ but in a different area of the
country, and we begin with a group of people. Consider that this group of
people is to literally be the first people to hear about the newborn Christ.
They are to be the first people to inherit the good news, straight from the
horse’s mouth, as it were.
But look who they are: not priests
like Zechariah, not rulers like Augustus or Herod, not rabbis or politicians or
even ordinary working men, like Joseph. They are shepherds.
Understand that in this day and age
the occupation of shepherd was necessary in ancient Israel, since the country
survived largely off of agricultural and livestock. What’s more, the shepherds
were the ones who guarded a precious element at the very center of the Jewish
religion: the sacrificial lambs for the Temple. So shepherds were necessary.
But they were considered a necessary evil. They were outcasts. They were often
despised. And no doubt, since they probably smelled like sheep wool, sheep
food, and sheep feces. It says here they were “living out in the fields”.
They were practically homeless, wandering from place to place, pasture to
pasture, across hillsides and mountains and streams. They were not the most
handsome of folk.
And they did not have the most
handsome reputations, either. In the first century, shepherds—specifically
shepherds who were hired to watch the sheep and did not own them themselves—had
awful reputations. A rabbinic source I found said “most of the time they [shepherds]
were dishonest and thieving; they led their herds onto other people’s land and
pilfered the produce of the land”. A midrash commentary on Psalm 23 says “There is no more disreputable occupation than that
of a shepherd.” Philo of Alexandria, a first century philosopher wrote of
looking after sheep and goats that “Such pursuits are held mean and
inglorious.”
Even Christ Himself spoke in John 10 of hireling shepherds, thieves
and cowards, abandoning their flocks when danger comes. Jesus called Himself
the Good Shepherd, the active
differentiation being the word “good” as opposed to what people normally
expected from shepherds.
So there was early century contempt
for shepherds. They were dirty. They smelled bad. They had bad reputations. See
how bizarrely incorrect the traditional Christmas portrayal of shepherds is?
When seen objectively, we have no reason to think that these shepherds weren’t
unworthy and unseemly men with very poor reputations. And not only that but
they smelled like sheep poop.
Here is the logical question that
arises then: Why appear to these
people? Why appear to one of the worst classes of people in 1st
century Israel? It could have hardly been worse if the angels had appeared to a
group of drunkards or a group of prostitutes! Why appear to shepherds? Who
would ever believe them?
Why not appear to the priests
worshiping at the altars in the Temple? Why not appear to the scribes that
poured over the Scriptures? Why not appear to the religious leaders, the
Pharisees, the Sadducees, who made the decisions for the nation? Why not appear
to the regular, respectable working-class men and women? Why not appear to the
soldiers who had the strength to enforce this message? Why not appear to the
Magi and the mystics who searched the heavens? Why not appear to Caesar or
Herod who had all the power to make this message known to everyone?
Simply because Caesar and Herod were
too busy worshiping themselves, the mystics were too busy searching the stars,
the soldiers were too busy enforcing, the working-class was too busy working,
the religious leaders were too busy making decisions, the scribes were too busy
studying and the priests—and this one gets me—were too busy worshiping. They
were all too busy with whatever it was. Even the scribes were too busy laboring
over the Scriptures to listen to the words speak to them, and the priests were
too busy ritualistically worshiping to hear the voice of God. I find that an
incredible challenge to my soul.
You want to hear the voice of God?
Then slow it down. There is no such thing as a Christian life in the fast lane.
If you are too busy to hear from God than you are too busy, certainly too busy
to be a Christian, for what kind of son is too busy to hear from their Father,
or what kind of servant is too busy to hear from their master. You might be too
busy making decisions, too busy working, too busy studying, too busy even doing
good things like worshiping God, but you’ve got to allow Him time to speak.
I’ve been to some worship services in
the past where the leader will play a few songs and then say “okay now we’re
going to have a time where we just wait on the Lord and let Him speak to us”
but then he’ll go on and just play some more songs. What is that? Is that being
still and waiting on the voice of God? Or is that Christian-multitasking?
You’ve got to free up time for the voice of your Master.
And that’s what the shepherds had
going for them. They were doing nothing. Sheep do not need too much attention,
I can imagine. Besides for shearing-season, fending off the occasional predator
and chasing after the occasional renegade runaway sheep, there’s probably not
much to a shepherd’s life other than sitting around and hey, staring at the
stars at night. And I wonder if one of these shepherds was doing just that.
You know how staring at the stars at
night can really make you get all profound and philosophical about life? I look
at the stars and have some crazy thoughts sometimes. Maybe they were looking at
the stars and wondering how much longer those stars would look down and just
passively watch the suffering their nation was going through. Maybe they were
looking at the stars and yearning to know the One who made those stars. Or
maybe one of them in his heart of hearts was crying out for more than just the
mere motionless existence of his meaningless shepherd-life.
That was when everything changed…
v.2,
there was a time growing up when we lived in a house we had built on a plot of
land, three acres I think it was, in the middle of the thick Hawaiian
rainforest. We got our electricity from a generator and when that generator
went out, man it got quiet. No city lights. No sounds of cars. Not even a neighbor’s
dog. Even the birds went to sleep for the night. It was pitch blackness and
absolute silence.
To have that suddenly interrupted by a
massive white-hot Presence, the radiant, effulgent, terrifying beauty of God
coming at you in a moment would be unspeakably terrifying. The phrase here “greatly afraid” hardly does the
sensation justice. It’s too polite of English.
They were afraid, and I like what the
Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary says: “So it ever was”. They were frightened
of the aw-full glory of God, and so it ever was. It had always been that way,
not just for shepherds, but for everyone who ever encountered the searing,
awesome purity of God’s radiance. Some of the holiest men who ever lived, by
our reckoning, were terrorized into paralysis by the glory of God. Abraham.
Moses. Daniel. Ezekiel. Isaiah. Paul. Peter. John. They were all confronted by
the massive, unspeakable and incomprehensible glorious Presence and their
immediate response was always abject horror.
How could it be anything otherwise? We
approach God today as we approach a kitty cat, if even that. Some of us
approach God with such dismissive indifference as if He’s a hobo begging for
change on a street-corner. But when we realize that outside of our perception
lies an immense and dare I say intensely alien form of infinite Life, with
enough power to think you out of existence, or put you through unimaginable
pain, with a Mind that knows you better than you could possibly even know
yourself, and most dangerously, with a perfect holiness such as has every right
to annihilate you at the slightest whim should you show your immorality before
it.
One of the most intense things about
God is His extreme holiness, a kind of holiness that cannot even tolerate the
mere abiding Presence of sin. I think of the rampant storms of Jupiter that are
so powerful and so intense that they could shred you molecule by molecule and
crush you into nothing. Heck, just one great storm of that planet could swallow
the entire earth. How much more so the God who made the king of the planets,
who is intensely holy and pure and just and righteous and we are anything but?
Therefore, this terror whenever men
came into direct contact with the glory of God. In light of their sin, and in
light of God’s holiness, this light was a light of nightmares. They were having
a nightmare now.
v.10-11,
“Bow down and kneel before the wrath of
God, ye sinners! Quake before the awesome power of Almighty God! Do not
approach the fire of His anger and justice!”
Do you read that here? No.
Surprisingly no. That was Mount Sinai. That was the giving of the Law. This is
not the giving of condemnation. This is the giving of grace.
The angel says not to be afraid, why?
Because there is good news. A Savior is born. This Savior would save mankind
from our sins, the sins that prevent us from coming into the Presence of God,
the very sins that make the glory of God terrifying, the sins that would make
us smoldering craters under the righteousness of God’s holy anger. But this
Savior would make peace between God and man. He would put away that barrier of
our sin and God’s holiness by removing our sin and by making us holy, so that
God’s presence would be a comfort and not a paralysis nightmare.
Sorry to bring it up, because I said
we’d stand back from Christmas, but I’ve got to give an honorable mention to my
favorite Christmas song: “Hark the herald angels sing: Glory to the Newborn
King! Peace on Earth and mercy mild, God and sinners reconciled.” This reconciliation, this peace between God and
sinner, is what this Savior would accomplish, to usher us into the Presence of
God no longer as the terrible fire of Sinai but now as our loving Father.
You’ve got to be thankful for that.
God is no longer a holy-monster out to get you because you’re an
immoral-monster. God has become our loving Father, protector, guide, comforter,
provider.
v.12,
how would they find one Child among all the people of the city of David?
Because this one Child would be like them: alone, dirty, humiliated, outcast.
He was born, you remember, where children were never born, not among people but
among animals, lying in a dirty feeding-trough, so humble.
The shepherds could find them because
He was like them. Jesus came not to become a tyrant, or a rich man, or a
prince. He came to be with the sheep and smell like the sheep. He came to be
dirty like real human beings get dirty. He came to experience real human
suffering and tragedy and have compassion on it. He came to be a Shepherd to
shepherds, to outcasts, to leaderless people.
I think one of the most profound
statements ever made about the heart of Jesus is found in Matthew 9:36, “But when He
saw the crowds, He was moved with compassion for them, because they were weary
and scattered, like sheep without a shepherd.”
This is how Jesus, the Good Shepherd,
looked at people. He didn’t take in first glances and construct a whole theory
of what kind of person that was. He wasn’t judgmental of the way they spoke or
dressed. He wasn’t bitter at people who fit into certain categories. He didn’t
stereotype others. He wasn’t frightened or intimidated by them. He never looked
upon these people with a kind of hopeless misery that He had to serve them.
No, He looked at them with compassion.
And I wonder if you and I can even learn a small portion of what that means, to
look at others and not write them off, not judge them, not place them in
categories, but to weep for their souls, to feel pity for the lost and to be
moved to help them? So many times we fall into the temptation of thinking we’ve
got somebody figured out, like we can read them like an open book, but what
that does is diminish and compartmentalize a human being and take a person,
strip them of their personhood, and turn them into a mere idea, a stereotype, a
certain class, or just somebody who has that
problem. “Here comes Henry. He’s a complainer” or “Oh great, there’s Judy.
Her neediness really irritates me.” Or “Ugh it’s Pete. He’s really immature.”
Jesus Christ omnisciently took in all
the immaturity, all the neediness, all of the poor character of everyone in
that crowd and still He looked upon them with compassion. How? Well, ‘cause He
was God. Ah, but don’t be tempted to stop there and dismiss yourself, because
this same Jesus, His Spirit lives in you and I as Christians, His eyes look
through our own, and all we need to do is look at others as Jesus looked at
others by abiding with Him and walking in His Spirit, by thinking of people as
the Good Shepherd thinks of them.
v.13-14,
suddenly there’s more than just one angel speaking to them. Suddenly there is a
whole “host”, that is, an army of angels surrounding them and crying out these
words, the anthem of heaven: “Glory to
God in the highest!”
And here’s yet another reason why the
angels came to shepherds: because God would get the glory through them sharing
this heavenly message. They had the privilege of being the earliest Christian
evangelists and sharing the good news of the birth of the Savior, but look at
their reputation: thieves and cowards and inglorious men! Ah but then nobody
could take the glory for the message, certainly not them. God would get the
glory for it when they made their rounds and told everyone about the newborn
King.
The message also includes the phrase:
“on earth peace, goodwill toward men!”
You get the sense, again from a certain winter holiday that shall henceforth
remain nameless, that this is about peace on
earth, or peace for earth, that is
peace between the nations. The end of war. Every sappy special you’ve seen on
tv urges for peace for earth. And there have been great stories throughout
history, heck there’s the famous World War I Christmas truce of 1914 when German and British front-line soldiers
put down their arms for the holiday and sang carols, exchanged gifts and played
soccer with each other.
I found this little blurb about the
event on snopes.com: “For a few precious moments there was peace on earth good
will toward men. All because the focus was on Christmas. Happens every time.
There's something about Christmas that changes people. It happened over 2000
years ago in a little town called Bethlehem. It's been happening over and over
again down through the years of time.”
That makes you feel good, but that’s
not really what this passage is talking about. Political and military peace?
Can’t be.
Ask yourself the simple question: Did
Jesus bring political or military peace? He will someday but He didn’t then.
Rome still dominated after His resurrection and ascension into heaven. Wars
were still fought among the Jews and across the world.
Jesus Himself said: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring
peace on the earth…” What? But the angels said… No, “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man
against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law
against her mother-in-law, and a man’s enemies will be those of his own
household.”
Why? Because the gospel is a choice.
And choices divide families. The gospel divides families and friendships,
lovers and parents and spouses and siblings.
So if Jesus didn’t bring political or
military peace, or even relational peace with families and friends, then what
is this talking about? It’s not peace between earth and earth, it’s peace
between God and earth. It is reconciliation. And you know what? That will bring
peace, though not in the way we often think of it.
v.15-20,
there are two responses here.
Mary stored up all this information to
ponder it. She had taken in her own announcement of the birth of Christ by
Gabriel, the story of Zechariah’s vision in the Temple, Elizabeth’s and
Zechariah’s prophecy, the latter of which she may have been present for. That’s
a lot to take in.
Point being that Mary took it in and
retained it. She didn’t let it pass through her. She thought about it and
looked forward with excitement and anticipation for what God would do with all
of these promises and prophecies.
The shepherds on the other hand went
out and shared the message of the angels. They were the first evangelists.
They had seen the glory of God and had
heard the good news of the Savior who could welcome them into that divine
glory, thus they went out glorifying God for what they had seen. Note that
their experience changed them. They did not walk away from the message of the
angels, literally the words from God, and forget. They walked away changed. It
affected the way they talked and what they talked about.
The Greek word for “glory” is doxa, and the word for “glorifying” is doxazo, the verb form of doxa. To see the glory of God, doxa, leads to the glorifying of God, doxazo. When you really truly see and
realize who God is, then that will be who and what you talk about and you will
talk about Him to glorify Him.
You can learn a lot about a man from
the things he talks about. The same thing is true for a woman. And what is it
that you and I talk about? What are the interests that we most often bring up?
If you could share one message with a perfect stranger, what would it be?
My hope for this college group has
always been what is summed up in the title of the group: “Behold, the Lamb of
God”. I want you just to see Jesus. Because I think that if you look in
Scripture, you find that people were tremendously changed whenever they met
Him, whenever they heard His voice, whenever they spent time with Him, whenever
they realized who He was.
I don’t want this to be just another
bible study in a town in a county in a country in a world that is already full
of many millions of bible studies. I want it to be a place where you really,
truly and finally see the Son of God, realize who He is and be impacted by His
life.
Challenge yourself this week to talk
about Him, to glorify Him, not just among your own little group of shepherds
but among the townsfolk, the scribes, the soldiers, the Phariees… your
classmates, coworkers, friends and acquaintances, and families. We are these
shepherds. The gospel has come to you and me. We may find ourselves uneducated,
despised, alone, rejects or outcasts, but the gospel has come to you and to me.
What are we going to do with it?
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