Emmanuel – God With Us

I love the carols. The traditional ones that remind me of childhood Christmases. And at this time of year many of us enjoy hearing Christmas songs from the charts as well as the traditional Christmas carols.

We probably don’t even think about the words half of the time, and the feeling we get, feeling ‘Christmas-y’ possibly comes from nostalgia.

It’s actually probably a good thing we don’t think too much about the words in some ways because so many of them just don’t tie in with reality!

“In the bleak midwinter” – no it wasn’t. I don’t believe there was any snow at all, never mind snow on snow.

“Little Lord Jesus no crying he makes” – are you sure about that?

“Radiant beams from thy holy face” – well if that’s true it’s not recorded in the bible.

But within these carols there are some incredible truths, perhaps wrapped up in nostalgia.

Let me just pick up on one line. We have just sung these words:

“O come to us, abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel.”

In the bible there are many names for God, and Jesus too has more than one title. Immanuel is one of them. And this would have been no surprise at that first Christmas to those who were following the scriptures and waiting for Jesus to be born.

Isaiah 7:14 (c.700BC)

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.

Matthew 1:22-23

²² All this took place to fulfil what the Lord had said through the prophet: ²³ ‘The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel’ (which means ‘God with us’).

And this is why we have that line in the carol we just sang. Immanuel means God with us. God is with us because of Jesus.

But God was already with humanity, wasn’t he?

If you know your bible you’ll know that…

He walked with Adam in the garden of Eden,

He was with Noah when everybody else had forgotten him

He was with Abraham when he sent him to a foreign land

He was with Isaac, Jacob and then Joseph who went from his earthly father’s favour to the prison and eventually to the palace. In Genesis 39 v 2 it says that “The LORD was with Joseph and he prospered.” God was with his people.

He was with Moses at the burning bush and through the desert.

He was with Joshua and Caleb as they entered the promised land.

He was with Samson when he fought for Israel with supernatural strength.

He was with David, a man after God’s own heart who spoke in poetry about God’s ever present help in times of trouble.

Surely God was with us already as shown through the example of all these people.

He was with Solomon as he built him a temple.

He was with Daniel in the lions’ den, and Esther in exile.

He was with all the prophets who declared his word.

Why did we need an Immanuel, a God with us?

Those prophets themselves spoke of a time when God would visit us in a new way.

All these people who knew that God was with them only experienced his presence to a degree.

Their mistakes and missing the mark of God’s perfection constantly built a barrier between themselves and God. Sacrifices had to be made on a regular basis to deal with this sin.

However close God was to Moses, Elijah, or anyone in the past, to meet with Jesus was to see God in the flesh.

None of these people had received in full the things that had been promised; they only saw them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth, longing for God’s presence.

But Jesus, the greatest prophet, our priest and our king, the ultimate stranger on earth, was truly God with us.

He was God in the flesh. He lived a perfect life. He was tempted in every way that we are and tested to the limit. He knows what it’s like to be human. He is God with us.

When John the Baptist saw Jesus he said, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

God had come to dwell with us, to do more than be with us but to be with us in person and fix humanity’s greatest problem.

The Lamb of God came not just to be God in the flesh, God with us because it was a nice idea to be one of the people, but to become the ultimate sacrifice for all our sin, for every moment we miss the mark of God’s glory.

God with us went to the cross because he loved you. He saw you before you were even thought of by your parents, whoever they were. And he wanted you in his kingdom with him but knew you’d need a saviour.

So he died.

He took your punishment and mine. He died that we might live.

But what of this God with us now?

Over the year as Paul has been teaching us, we’ve been thinking about another name found in the Old Testament for God: Yahweh.

This name is special in the bible because it is the first time God revealed his name to anyone. We think of it as meaning, “The God who was, the God who is and the God who is to come.”

And if we think of Jesus as God in human form, we realise that he cannot have just died on the cross and ended his story there.

Jesus was, but he also is, because God raised him from the dead on the third day and he appeared to many witnesses. He then miraculously ascended into heaven and is still there today.

So Jesus was, and he is, and he is to come. His kingdom and rule will never end. We read that in the Christmas story. When the angel visited Mary to tell her that she would have a son, he said that Jesus’ kingdom will never end.

Jesus is alive today. He was, he is and he is to come. He will return. It could be soon. And when he returns he will judge the world – every human being that ever lived.

Sounds harsh, but the good news is, because of Jesus, we don’t have to be afraid of judgement.

In fact we don’t have to be afraid of anything.

The message of Jesus is that he is our Immanuel right now. He can come and live with us, abide in us, be our comforter, Lord, friend, saviour.

Why don’t you invite him into your life right now.