A Child is Born!...Continued from page 3

This is why, “when the time was right, God sent his Son, and a woman gave birth to him” (Gal. 4:4). In Gal. 4, Paul seized the moment with an early confession of faith drawn from the worship and proclamation, including baptism, in the Christian congregations of the mid first century AD. When the time was exactly right, a child was born. A son was given. And He was given the name Everlasting Father.

Did you hear the “father” language throughout this text? Emphatically Paul asserts, “…that God is our Father” (v.6b). Did you grasp the fact that in Jesus Christ we are children of a God who is a Father, a Father who is a God? A literal God-Father as well as a Father-God. He is Everlasting. This is so paradoxical. In the Manger is a Baby who is a Father. Unbelievable! And this Father is “everlasting to everlasting,” to borrow language from the Psalms.

What Do You Need This Christmas?

Through this Child we are granted what we need. And what we really need is life as it comes to us from a Father who lasts forever.  So the question I posed at the outset, “Can a father last forever?” is thus answered in the affirmative. Yes, at least one Father can. All of our toys, gadgets, clothes, all the things of this earthly life, let’s face it: they aren’t going to last forever. But a relationship with Bethlehem’s Child does. This Child introduces us to an Eternal Father who always provides what we need, not what want, but what we need.

In fact, our relationship with this Everlasting Father is such that we, His adopted children, can come into His presence just as if we weren’t adopted at all. So I really am a son of God. Jackie really is a daughter of God. All of us, who are in Christ, are children of God. We aren’t orphaned! He really is our Daddy. He really does embody what parenthood concerns. He is the kind of parent that wants us to come to Him with our grief, our trouble, our anxiety and our hopelessness as we confront the reality of things not lasting forever.

While editing notes in The Quest Study Bible, Marshall Shelley underwent a test of faith. His wife gave birth to their first child, a daughter severely retarded and completely invalid. Eighteen months later, a second child was born who lived for only one minute. Six months after that, their first child died. Shelley said he was obligated to ask God his most honest questions. He said, “God’s not offended by that. In fact, He invites it!”

Only an “Everlasting Father” could invite us to bring to Him all the emotional and spiritual junk that we’ve been carting around for years. This Everlasting Father born in Bethlehem’s barn grew to die and be resurrected from the dead so we could make it through this earthly life, a life that is cruel where children are sometimes born retarded, where children sometimes die from hunger and disease, where children are abused by earthly parents and the system of slick and sick greed and exploita­tion. It’s a world in which we big children have gotten our priorities all fouled up, thinking we really need something, when, in reality, we know we don’t need it at all. Each of us suffers from the harshness of this earthly life.