God Contracted to a Span

‘Twas much that man
was made like God before,
But that God should be made like man—
much more.
—JOHN DONNE

WARM-UP: Micah 4:6–8; Luke 2:8–20

Micah predicted that the announcement of Messiah’s birth would be delivered at Migdol-Eder (“The Watch Tower of the Flock”), traditionally identified as the Shepherd’s Field a few thousand yards north of Bethlehem.

The heavenly messenger passed by Jerusalem, where the scholars and clergy of the day were ensconced. He passed by the Herodium, Herod’s hilltop villa near Bethlehem. He bypassed all the elite and appeared instead to a group of shepherds squatting around a campfire, telling lies, passing a wineskin and passing the long, cold night.

Back then no one would have thought that God would be interested in shepherds, or that shepherds would be interested in God. Shepherds were notoriously irreligious and unbothered with spiritual things. They were more like Owyhee County buckaroos, the old-time cowboys who work the desert near our home in Boise, than the sanitized sheepherders we associate with the story these days.Ranked by the rabbis with prostitutes and other “habitual sinners,” shepherds were outcasts, rejects, pariahs, barred from synagogue and polite society. One rabbi declared: “In the whole world you will find no occupation more despised than the shepherd.”30 Shepherds assumed that God would never take a liking to the likes of them, and feared Him in the worst possible way.

But God never wastes His words, and He speaks only to those who want to hear what He has to say. He knew that these shepherds, underneath their seeming indifference and ever-hardening crust, were incurably religious men who, in desperation, quietly longed for God.

Such longing haunts all of us, no matter how hard and tough we try to be. Sooner or later we run out of something essential—love, money, time, or life. Isolation, loneliness, impotence, and fear of death lead us to acknowledge our need for a Savior. But— where can we find Him?

The angel’s words were simple and direct: “Today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in cloths, and lying in a manger” (Luke 2:11–12 NASB).

A Savior “born for you.” This was the good news that brought the shepherds great joy! And what was the sign? They would find Him “in a manger”—in a feed trough.

And so the shepherds hurried off in search of their Savior. They didn’t bother to look in Herod’s villa, for there were no feed troughs up there. They skirted the resorts, the spas, the lodges of the rich and famous and went looking instead for a feedlot, a stockyard, or one of the damp and dirty caves into which they drove their own flocks at night. And there, in the mud and dung, where Joseph and Mary had crept to find shelter from the cold, they found a helpless infant, with unfocused eyes and uncontrolled limbs, needing to be cuddled and cared for, made terribly vulnerable, humble, and exceedingly small. The God-baby in the straw. God in a form no one could possibly fear.

The feed trough was no afterthought. All along God has been doing His best to get next to us, humbling Himself to reach out to us. But nothing can match what happened that night in that Bethlehem cave. There a child was born among “the sweet breath and steaming dung of beasts and nothing is ever the same again . . . Once [we] have seen him in a stable, [we] can never be sure where he will appear, or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of man.”31

“Wild pursuit” indeed! Which is Micah’s point exactly: “In that day,” declares the LORD, “I will . . . gather the outcasts” (Micah 4:6 NASB, italics added).

Taken from Out of the Ordinary, ©2003 by David Roper. Used by permission of Discovery House Publishers, Box 3566 Grand Rapids, MI 49501. All rights reserved.