Matthew 18:1-25 | God With Us
Let’s open the Bible now to Matthew 1:18-25.
It’s the Christmas season, so we’re taking a few weeks to look at the Christmas story. Today, we’re looking at one of the quintessential Christmas passages from Matthew’s gospel. And what Matthew tells us is that this baby born so long ago is both like and unlike every other baby ever born. He is like us in that he is human like us. But he is unlike us in that he is God. He’s God come down to us. That is, of course, what Christmas is all about.
So, today, I want us to consider what that means. I want to behold Jesus together, considering his might and glory, his humility and love, and his presence and peace.
So, let’s read the passage together now.
18 Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. 19 And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. 20 But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:
23 “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall call his name Immanuel”
(which means, God with us). 24 When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took his wife, 25 but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus.
This is God’s word.
INTRODUCTION
You know, it’s easy to get used to the Christmas story, isn’t it? Christmas is the most celebrated holiday in our culture. Even the most secular places play songs about Jesus this time of year. With all that familiarity, it’s not hard for the razor’s edge of Christmas to become dull to us. The story slips into the rest of the season’s sentimentality. I think that’s a tragedy. We need Christmas. We need this story. We need this truth. And we need to be sure we don’t miss it.
Christmas is the answer to our deepest problems, most wicked sins, and most profound longings. We need Christmas because we are not who we should be, and we don’t know how to get where we need to be. We need Christmas because, if we’re completely honest with ourselves, we need a hope from beyond. We need someone to save us from what we’ve done and who we’ve become.
Christmas is the answer to that deep problem. All of history pivots at the birth of Jesus, from anticipating the Savior to accepting the Savior. It changes everything. It preaches good news to sinners and sufferers. As Tim Keller said, “To understand Christmas is to understand basic Christianity, the Gospel.”
And, oh, how we need the gospel! Christmas comes to us each year as a fresh pronouncement of the Savior’s birth, the Savior’s mission, the Savior’s love, the Savior’s saving. Christmas is heaven’s cry that though we are profoundly sinful and undeserving, God has not abandoned us. He has come to be with us. The gospel is a paradox. The holy God cannot abide with sinners, but in Christ, he does, not by giving up his holiness but by giving his holiness to us in Christ. Jesus, being born like us, became the perfect us through his perfect life. And in his substitutionary death and glorious resurrection, he both paid for all our sins and gave us all his righteousness. In Christ, the Holy God is with us—he could not be closer.
This is the amazing story of Christmas. When this world, by its sin, declared war on God, the Lord of Armies sent a baby who lived and died and rose again to usher in a kingdom that cannot fail and cannot fade, where tomorrow is better than today, and the future consists of an increase of glory and hope and joy because Jesus, our Savior, has redeemed us.
So, let’s look at this Savior now. He’s more than we bargained for, but he’s all that we need. He’s God, he’s man, and he’s Immanuel—God with man. Let’s consider each of those truths.
JESUS IS GOD
Matthew tells us plainly who Jesus is. He gets right to the point. Jesus is God. Look at verse 18. “Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.” We hear the same again when the angel told Joseph in verse 20, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.”
The weight of these words is magnificent. From the Holy Spirit. Birth is always miraculous, but this was truly unique. Matthew is saying that the baby in Mary’s womb had no earthly father’s DNA. This child came from the Heavenly Father, from the Holy Spirit, from God himself. In no uncertain terms, Matthew is saying that Jesus is God.
Now, that statement has always been controversial, no less in our day than in any other. But this isn’t a one-off. Go to any New Testament writer, and you will find them talking about the divinity of Jesus. They all treat him and worship him and follow him as God. The divinity of Jesus is a basic tenant of biblical Christianity. The Bible tells us of this Triune God, this one God in three persons. This is why Christmas demands as much as it comforts. It demands that we treat Jesus as God. We laugh at Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights around the dinner table praying to baby Jesus because he likes the Christmas Jesus the best, but the Christmas Jesus isn’t a sweet little harmless baby. He’s the one who upholds the universe by the word of his power. He’s the one who conquered sin, death, and Satan. He’s the mighty God. Christmas is not just a nice holiday that gives families and friends time to give gifts and be kind and eat good food and take a day off work. Christmas is a declaration. It’s a line in the sand. It’s a proclamation the God is here, his name is Jesus, and you can have him if you want him, but you have to take him whole. You have to take him as God. You can’t have him as only a teacher. You can’t have him as only a good example. You can only have him as God and Lord because that’s who he is. You can have him, but you must have him as God. There is simply no other way.
Now, I also want to point out that this couldn’t have been easy for Joseph to accept. Joseph was a Jew. Jews didn’t exactly have a category for God coming down to his people like this. If he were a Greek or Roman, he may have accepted it easier. Their religions included gods who often disguised themselves as humans and came into the world. But Jews did not have a category for that kind of thing. God was personal but also infinite. He was the Creator of all, the Sustainer of all, above everything and over everything, transcendent. The glory and majesty of God were so fearful that Jews wouldn’t even say his name because it was deemed so holy. Yet here is an angel telling Joseph in a dream that this transcendent God is coming down to earth in the form of a human baby.
To get an idea of the magnitude, we have to think of all that Scripture says about God. I love how Ray Ortlund put it.
Think of the names of God in the Bible: Yahweh, the one who is near; El Shaddai, the Almighty; El Elyon, the Most High; Adonai, Master; El Olam, the Everlasting God; El Qanna, the Jealous God; Jehovah Jireh, the Lord will provide; Jehovah Sebaoth, the Lord of Armies; Jehovah Ropheka (Rof-a-ka), the Lord who heals you; Jehovah Tsidkenu (Sid-ke-new), the Lord our righteousness.
Think of the images of God in the Bible: king, shepherd, warrior, rock, refuge, shield, father, maker, judge, lawgiver, comforter, savior, lion, lamb, and many more.
Think of the attributes of God in the Bible: living, powerful, shrewd, just, merciful, pure, honest, faithful, joyful, patient, rich, sovereign, kind, and above all, loving.
Christmas tells us that glorious God came down to us in Jesus. Perhaps it’s difficult to accept Jesus is God. It’s easier to think of him as semi-God, something like God but less than. I mean, could glory like that inhabit flesh like ours? But if we are to accept the Bible as it is, to swallow it whole, as it were, we must accept that Jesus is God. If we can’t accept Jesus’s divinity, it means our Jesus is just too small.
Let me say it one more time. Christmas is about the God of glory coming down from heaven to save his people from their sins. The Alpha and the Omega, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty (Revelation 1:8) has come down to us. In Jesus, God came into the world!
And Joseph was to be his father. Of course, not in the traditional sense. There is a reversal of sorts here. Notice Joseph didn’t choose to be the father of the incarnate God. He was told he would serve that role, making him the adoptive father. Joseph didn’t choose Jesus. Jesus chose him. The child adopted the father. That’s amazing. Jesus is the only baby in history that chose his family. And what a family he chose! Sinners, all of them. Unworthy, every one of them. Undeserving, each and all.
Now, why did God choose Joseph? Of all men at the time, why him? He didn’t seem particularly important. We don’t even hear much else from him after Jesus is born. To understand why he was chosen, we have to go back to the Old Testament. A long time ago, when David was king of Israel, in 2 Samuel 7, God promised David that one of his sons would rule forever. Years and years later, an angel came to Joseph and—look at verse 20—referred to him as who? “Son of David.” In other words, Joseph had the lineage God promised would rule. God’s promise was coming true. More was at stake with Joseph accepting God’s call than another child born into the world. This child was the everlasting ruler promised long ago, coming to reign as prophecied. God was fulfilling his promise.
It turned Joseph’s world upside down. It turned the whole world upside down. Christmas is good news of great joy for all the people. It’s the story of the baby born in a manger who is the Lord of lords and King of kings. The one for whom there was no room in the inn but made room in heaven for sinners. The child who was born like us to give us a new birth so that we may be like him. This boy in the barn was the glory of heaven. We have been visited not by a vision of God, not by an apparition of God, not even by a messenger of God, but by God himself, in Jesus.
This is the great hope in which we live. God has come. He stepped into our mess, into our lives, into our experience, into our hopelessness, into his promises, and brought life and hope and everything else. He came to us to bring us to himself. He did it not from heaven but from earth. Jesus is God, but Christmas tells us more. Jesus is also man.
JESUS IS MAN
In verse 21, the angel told Joseph that Mary would “Bear a son...” Sons are born every day. But that day was special. The glorious God became a humble man. We might be so used to this that it’s lost its edge, so let’s listen to a couple of men who thought this through.
C.S. Lewis tried to help us grasp the humility of Jesus.
The Eternal Being, who knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and before that a foetus inside a woman’s body. If you want to get the hang of it, think how you would like to become a slug or a crab.
J.I. Packer put it this way.
God became man; the divine Son became a Jew; the Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, unable to do more than lie and stare and wriggle and make noises, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child…The babyhood of the Son of God was a reality. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the Incarnation.
Jesus is God. He is also man. Just as Jesus is not something like but less than God, he is not something like but less than man. He is fully man even as he is fully God. He is profoundly and completely one of us. As the author of Hebrews put it, “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things.” Not similar things. The same things.
Jesus was born just like you were. He grew up just like you did. His body changed and developed and matured just like yours did. He had to learn how to walk, how to talk, how to do things for himself. He lived a human life just like you live. He ate food. He drank water. He laughed. He cried. He felt the coolness of the breeze on a summer day and the chill of night after the sun went down. He knew how good it felt to sit down and take your shoes off at the end of a long day’s work. He felt the comfort of friendship. He experienced the joy of life at weddings and parties.
He also experienced the pain of life. He got splinters in his hands. He lost friends to illness and death. He knew betrayal. He knew what it was like to have those close not trust him. He bled. He died. He went through it all. The only difference between your human life and his human life is that he never sinned. And if that difference weren’t there, we wouldn’t be here talking about him at all. But there is that difference. The sinlessness of the man Jesus Christ is the hinge upon which the door of Christmas opens and stays open. It’s the only way we could be saved. Jesus becoming man to become the perfect man to save sinful man was the whole point of Christmas. Christmas is God’s great rescue plan. It’s his great story.
As it always is with God, the deeper we go, the bigger the truth gets. The comfort of Christmas grows the more you consider it. Jesus is God. Jesus is also man. Fully both. That means that God has now been on the inside of man. He knows this life we live. He understands you. He’s been in your shoes. There is nothing you face that God doesn’t know intimately. There is nothing you face that God hasn’t conquered for you. There is nothing you face that can keep you from God.
We know this not only because of the story but also because of the name of this child born in Bethlehem. Look at verse 21. “And you shall call his name Jesus.” Now, I have four kids, and I think they have wonderful names. I named them. But their names don’t really mean anything. They’re labels. Nice labels, I think, but really just labels. It’s not that way with Jesus. His name isn’t a label. It’s a message. The name Jesus means “savior” or “God is salvation.” That’s why, in the phrase immediately after, the angel adds an explanatory note. “And you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” So, every time we say the name Jesus, we are proclaiming the gospel message: God is salvation.
Jesus’s name meant he had a mission. He had to live up to the name. He was to save his people. What was he to save them from? From their oppressors? God’s people had many throughout the ages. From their suffering? There is plenty of that in this world. Maybe he would save them from disease or accidents or storms or disasters? But it wasn’t any of those things. He was to save them from what? Look at verse 21 again. “He will save his people from their sins.”
Our greatest enemy is not anything outside of us. It is who we are, the sin we are born with, the sin we act out and think with. The most tragic thing about us is not what happens to us but what happens in us. That doesn’t mean terrible things don’t happen to us. They do. But it does mean that we, too, are guilty of our own sin. As much as we may need salvation from others, we need salvation from ourselves—from our sins.
So Jesus came on a mission with a purpose to save us from that. But why did God have to become man to save us from our sins? Couldn’t he save us without leaving heaven? In Hebrews 9:22, the author tells us, “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” In the Old Testament, God instituted the sacrificial system in Israel to give them a pathway to forgiveness of sins by sacrificing bulls and goats. But in Hebrews 10:4, the author says, “It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.” So what’s the deal? God gave a sacrificial system that wasn’t good enough? Yes. The truth remains—only blood atones—but not the blood of animals. It all pointed to what was to come in Jesus.
The Bible tells us the wages of sin is death. Our sin deserves the death penalty. God, in his mercy, provided a way of forgiveness in the sacrificial system, but it was only temporary. The blood of animals could never satisfy the penalty of our sins. Man’s sin requires man’s blood. So, as Paul says in Romans 3:25, God put forth Christ as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith. Jesus offered his blood for us. After living a perfect life we could never live, he died a guilty death he never deserved. On the cross, Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Of course, he knew the answer. The answer begins at Christmas. Jesus came to be the one on whom our sins were laid as a propitiatory sacrifice to take the judgment of God against us and set us free in him.
“You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” Here’s what that means: In Christ, you are free. You owe God nothing and you have in God everything. That’s the story of Christmas. That’s the great gift.
But, as hard as it may be to believe, there is even more in the gift. It’s kind of like Mary Poppins’s bag. How can it all fit in there? Jesus came not only to pay for our sins but to welcome us into his arms. He came not just to fix our problems but to give us peace. He came not just to save us but to redeem us. He came not just to deal with us but to be with us, and that’s our third point.
JESUS IS GOD WITH MAN
Look at verses 22 and 23. “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: ‘Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel’ (which means, God with us).” If Jesus is his name, Immanuel is his nature. He saves us, and he stays with us.
Here’s why this matters so much. I think most of us has realized by now just how hard life can be. For some of us, every day is a struggle. It might be physical pain. It might be emotional pain. It might be mental pain. It might be a combination of all three or any number of other things. Sins against us and sins we have committed harm and wound us. Our thoughts are not safe. We can go to dark places. Even Christians can. We might have been saved by Christ’s cross, but that’s 2,000 years ago. What about yesterday? What about today? What about tomorrow? When I face that hard thing I know is coming, who will be with me then? Christmas says Jesus will be.
You know, at some point, a question will arise: has God abandoned me? Sometimes, we suffer so profoundly that we wonder if God has forsaken us. Our Bedford Falls turns into Pottersville. Our childhood dreams of B.B. Guns never arrive on Christmas morning. Our Cousin Eddies are the only ones who show up, lugging their junk along with them, making our embarrassment greater and our seasons harder. Our Christmas is stolen, and there is no song around the tree in the morning because the Grinch actually knew how to strike our hopes. There is no miracle on 34th Street or any other street. We are left home alone, and no one is looking for us. We strike out to find our dad, only to find a cold city with a hard heart and no Christmas spirit. Life sometimes feels that way, doesn’t it?
What does Christmas say to those feelings? It says this, and it says it as loud as possible: God is with us!
That doesn’t mean life is easy. It doesn’t mean we don’t have to live through Pottersville. It doesn’t mean our hopes aren’t sometimes disappointed. It doesn’t mean others don’t cause us problems. It doesn’t mean what is precious to us isn’t stolen. But it does mean you aren’t alone. Your life is not limited to what this world can give. It’s not limited to what you can achieve. It’s not limited to what you can get through your hard work and sacrifice. It’s not limited to your own luck. Your life is defined by a miracle. God is with you!
It is so easy for us to believe God is against us. He has every reason to be, doesn’t he? Our sins are many. Our failures pile up. Our weaknesses shine brighter than our strengths. But Christmas says God is not against us. Not anymore. Not because of Christ.
I just want that to settle in your heart today. Christmas means God is with you. Jesus makes this a reality. He entered this very real world you and I live in right now. He came into this darkness. He came into this situation. He came into this difficulty. He came into this life of suffering. He came into this judgey world with its constant demands and never-ending criticisms and unwavering conflict. And though he died, he rose again, and this ehe ascended to the Father, he sent his Spirit. He’s still with us today. He’s here right now, and he’ll be there tomorrow when that thing you dread comes.
Perhaps the best thing of all is that none of this depends one bit on you. Jesus isn’t with you because you deserve him. He’s with you because of his grace. And God is so with you that there is not a single second that he turns from you. He never gets weary of you. He hears your cries. He knows your needs. He sees your sins, and instead of turning away, he comes to save you. He is your ally when you feel abandoned and alone. He is your defender when you are guilty. He is your justifier when you have no excuses. He is your surety when there is only uncertainty. He is the anchor of your soul when your life hangs in the balance. And he is the one you can turn to when life feels so sweet you just want to thank someone. He is personally involved with you. Jesus is more than what he did for you. He is a very real presence with you. Jesus came to be your savior and your friend. Receive that gift. Enjoy it. It’s yours in Christ.
All you need to have Jesus is need. Your sin and weakness that you believe disqualify you actually qualify you for his grace. Jesus came to the lowly for the lowly. He’s not just with the cool kids. He’s with all who are weary and need rest, all who mourn and long for comfort, all who feel anxious and yearn for peace, all who fail and desire strength, all who sin and need a Savior. He is Immanuel. God with you.
In Christ, you can have your life back. Pottersville is fading away. Bedford Falls is being restored.
Let’s pray.
