Faithbase

Hello and welcome to this edition of Thinking About the Bible, and we're going to look at Luke chapter 2. We've already talked about this, looked at it a couple times over the Advent season, but I want to read this passage and discuss something that we haven't talked about. It came to pass in those days, chapter 2 verse 1, that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This census first took place while Cornelius was governing Syria. So all went to be registered, everyone to his own city. Joseph also went up from Galilee out of the city of Nazareth into Judea to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary his betrothed wife, who was with child. So it was that while they were there, the days were completed for her to be delivered and so forth. So the question is, why did God choose to do things that way? Why was there a decree that went out in the days of Caesar Augustus about this registration? Why not do something like he had done when he had an angel come to Joseph in a dream, twice actually that we have a record of, for instance, when when he was thinking about putting Mary away when he found out she was pregnant. Later, when it was determined by, that Herod had determined to destroy all the baby boys in in Bethlehem, an angel again appeared to Joseph in a dream. Why not do something like that? Why not an angel coming to Joseph in a dream and saying, hey you need to go to Bethlehem? Well, I think the answer is found in the fact that our God is an artistic God. He has a tremendous imagination and like an artist who has a canvas before him, using several different kinds of brushes to bring texture and life to the canvas, so it is with Yahweh our God. Or to change the analogy, in this great cosmic drama that we're part of, God introduced characters to give a richness and a depth to the story, because God is the great storyteller. He's the one who is interested in not simply having history unfold, but have it unfold in a way that has meaning and is, I guess I could say, entertaining, frankly. The scripture tells us that even the wicked are prepared for the day of evil, that for the day of calamity can be translated that God uses people in their circumstance for his own purposes. Paul talks about a great house with articles of clay and articles of other substance that are used for either common purposes or something special, in other words there's a variety of different purposes for God's creation. So I think it can be boiled down, frankly I think, to simply that, that God in this cosmic drama was bringing a richness and depth to the story and unfolding things in a way that would be more artistically expressive, shall we say. And of course the characters that are introduced there had more than simply that part to play in this drama. So I think that's what it is, I think that's how God does things. He could have done things the, quote, easy way, but he decided to do it this way and we can learn from that, that our God, the creator of all things, uses his creation to bring about his purposes and his will and his will shall not be thwarted. Think about that this Christmas season as we consider how God unfolds history according to his plan.