Three Words You Need in Your Life This Christmas
A lot of people think of Christmas as a time of peace, tranquility, and beauty. And it can be. But the first person to learn about the birth of Jesus—his mother Mary—offers us a different angle on the holiday. As she put it, “For he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name, and his mercy is for those who fear him” (Luke 1:49–50, emphasis added).
Mary reveals three aspects of God that she knew in her head and her heart. This Christmas, you can experience personally a God who is mighty, holy, and merciful. Not what you might be asking for, but 100% what you need.
1. God Is Mighty.
Sometimes, I think it’s helpful just to stop and think about the sheer size and might of God. The first place we usually get a sense of this is by looking up at the night sky. Psalm 8 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the skies above display his handiwork.” The size of the night sky is overwhelming, and the more we know about it, the more amazing it becomes.
Most of the stars we see when we look upward are from our own Milky Way galaxy. Scientists say that if the Milky Way were the size of the entire continent of North America, our solar system would be like one coffee cup, and Earth would be the size of one speck of dust inside the cup. That means you and I are like a microscopic speck of dust on that speck of dust. And if Earth were the size of a golf ball, our sun would be 15 feet in diameter. You could fit 960,000 Earths inside the sun. That’s enough golf balls to fill up an entire school bus. (It’s also, incidentally, the number of golf balls I’ve lost in the woods in the half dozen or so times I’ve tried to play golf in the last couple of years.)
And now I think of Mary, looking up into the night sky, not understanding all this, of course, but still overwhelmed by the sheer size and majesty of the heavens, and thinking that the God who created all this is the baby she now carries in her womb.
A few years ago, there was a NYT bestselling author who explained that the primary objection he had to the Christian faith was the idea that a first-century carpenter living in poverty, under oppression, could have been “the uncreated Creator.” I get that. Mary got that. In fact, I’d say to this skeptic, Mary beat you by 2,000 years. Mary’s response to all this, in verse 34, was “How can these things be?” It’s mind-boggling now; it was mind-boggling then.
For those of you who struggle with belief, there’s actually some help for you in this, I think: If God really is that big, can’t you leave him some space to do some things you may not entirely grasp yet? The number one reason people struggle with faith is that there is all this seemingly pointless evil in the world. If there’s a loving God, they ask, how could there be so much pain and suffering?
But if God is all-powerful and all-loving, it follows that he is all-wise, too. If God’s wisdom compares to our wisdom to the same extent that his power compares to our power, why wouldn’t we allow that there are things he is doing we may not quite understand yet?
Think for a minute about how much greater God’s power is than yours. He created stars like Canis Majoris that put out the energy of 2 million billion atom bombs every second. Meanwhile, the other day, I spent 10 solid minutes trying to open up a salsa jar and never succeeded. I used the little rubber grippy thing. I banged the edge with a knife. I ran it under hot water for a while. I was so mad; I didn’t know whether to throw it away or what. I even thought, Can I shatter the top in a way where I can still eat the salsa?God created Canis Majoris with a word; I can’t open the salsa jar.
(Side bar: I eventually succeeded by using a bottle cap opener to break the seal of the lid. Took a while, though.)
Consider this: If God’s wisdom is as high above mine as his power is above mine, isn’t it a reasonable assumption that there are going to be a lot of things beyond my immediate ability to understand? I would submit to you that it is entirely possible that God has beautiful purposes he is working out that we just can’t see yet.
I love how Sally Lloyd-Jones, the author of the kids book The Jesus Storybook Bible, says it:
When God promises to bless you, he is saying, ‘I’m going to make you into everything I’ve ever meant for you to be. It means that God is taking every day and every single thing that happens in it—good or bad—to make you stronger, to mend whatever is broken inside, to change you into the person you were always meant to be.’
That’s the hope you have, even in your suffering. God has not, and will not ever, fail in doing this.
2. God Is Holy.
To Jewish people, holy meant “perfect.” Completely trustworthy. We even get our English word “holy” from the word “whole.” God is whole, complete, without imperfection. Pagan gods of the time were not holy; Greek and Roman gods were notorious for their self-serving behavior. Zeus, for example, often took on human form so he could seduce women. And Juno, his wife, was capricious and vindictive: She inflicted plagues on the earth because she was mad that Zeus had cheated on her.
The true God isn’t like that. Mary said. “He’s holy. He’s totally free from selfishness or vindictiveness. He’s faithful and pure and always keeps his promises; he always acts out of love, and so I can trust him!” The holiness of God is the foundation of our hope; a God of immeasurable power always acts faithfully, always from love, and always keeps his promises.
But God’s holiness also presents a problem for us because we’re not holy; we’re more like Zeus and Juno. Our lives are filled with selfishness and anger and vindictiveness and greed. And that presents the greatest dilemma of the Bible. We long to be known and loved by a holy God, but how can a completely holy God have real fellowship, real connection, with unholy people?
The prophet Habakkuk says, “You who are of purer eyes than to see evil and you cannot look at wrong” (Habakkuk 1:13). This verse doesn’t mean that God can’t physically see sin, of course. The word here for “see” means to dwell on it, to fellowship with it. Think of it like you being forced to watch something morally repulsive, like the abuse of a child or something. It’s not that you can’t see it; you just have to turn away from it. It’s repulsive.
God cannot fellowship with our sin and we are filled with it. I mean, think about how frequently impurity, selfishness, and vindictiveness drive our behavior. Imagine that you had a little monitor attached to the side of your head that displayed whatever you were thinking at any given moment so that people could see exactly what you were thinking. How many of you would have any friends left by the end of the day?
How can a holy God live inside Mary? How can a holy God unite himself to humanity? How can the Spirit of that God live inside of us and fellowship with us and make us his forever? The answer comes in our last point: God is merciful.
3. God Is Merciful.
The word for “mercy” in Hebrew is “racham,” and we often translate it as “compassion.” With Moses, God used the word like this: “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exodus 34:6). Notice that God doesn’t say he only feels mercy. No, he’s really clear: God felt two conflicting emotions with respect to us. The first was righteous anger, the kind of disgust we’d feel looking at something morally repulsive. The second was mercy. One of those emotions had to win out. And according to God, he chose to let his compassion overpower his wrath.
In Psalm 103:13, King David said, “As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him.” That word translated “compassion” is “racham,” the same word for mercy. When I see one of my kids suffer, there’s an emotion that takes over, where if I could take their pain from them into myself, I would. Even, and especially, if their suffering is their own fault.
This is how God feels about his children. He chose to take our pain into himself, and so in mercy he sent Jesus, his Son, to unite himself to fallen humanity and literally absorb into himself the guilt of our sin, so that we could be delivered from it. On the cross, God made him who knew no sin to become sin for us. The one who was perfectly holy took into his own body our sin, so that we could be delivered from it.
Mighty, holy, and merciful. Mary says, I know this God; he is mine and I am his—a God of infinite might, perfect holiness, and extravagant mercy. This is the God who has united himself to me, and his presence and promise are enough for me. In him, I have enough and I am enough. And that is my blessing.
Photo Credit: SWN Design
Pastor J.D. completed his Ph.D. in Theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of Chick-fil-A, serves as a Council member for The Gospel Coalition, and recently served as the 62nd president of the Southern Baptist Convention. Pastor J.D. and his wife Veronica are raising four awesome kids.
"Editor's Note: Pastor JD Greear's "Ask the Pastor" column regularly appears at Christianity.com, providing biblical, relatable, and reliable answers to your everyday questions about faith and life. Email him your questions at requests@jdgreear.com."
