Immanuel

Immanuel

"All this took place to fulfil what the Lord had said through the prophet: .

'The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel'--which means, 'God with us.'" (Matthew 1:22-23)

A couple lost one of their child on a tour.

They were walking through a crowded tourist town where the streets were lined with shops. It was evening, the crowds were dense.

Suddenly they noticed that neither the wife nor the husband had their eight-year-old daughter by the hand. A quick scan didn't reveal her.

Then the husband remembered she had skipped along into a toy store, but they had just passed a side street which was also lined with shops and throngs of people. She could be anywhere.

A few minutes of running around, and somehow he spotted her, way down the side street. The look on the face was unforgettable: "Where were you?" were the words, but the eyes said, "Thank God, you are with us now. They were never going to leave the side again."  you will be With us."

 There is hardly a more central promise that God has ever made to human beings. The alternatives are just too horrifying to imagine.

If God has abandoned us, and that is why so many bad things happen in life, then what does that say about God, and what does it say about our destiny?

 If God has not decided  willingly  to be "with us “and only coming and going like a father who keeps giving up on being a father, where does that leave us?

If God is incapable of being with us, then we have to conclude that we will never reap the benefits of divine presence, and words like grace, mercy, love, and truth have no meaning. Isaiah was the prophet who was given the message.

In a time when Israel's enemies where bearing down on them, he gave this startling oracle about the Lord giving a sign, a virgin would conceive and give birth, and the promise in the child: Immanuel; God will be with us.

Jesus was born, but he was sent, and Immanuel was one of his names. God with us. That was why so many people didn't understand him.

His voice came from a different place. He turned life upside down with the truths he presented.

But he also left people with the sense that they had never been closer to God than when they were with him. We don't need to stay lost.

God is not indifferent to our conditions.

And he came to us in the most radical way, by taking our flesh, our humanity, on himself.

Prayer: Dear Lord, I need to know you are with us. Help me this Christmas to know more than I have ever known before that you have come and that we can always live in the conscious enjoyment of your presence.