I do love Christmas. I love everything about it. I love the warmth of the fireplace, as long as we don’t have a warm front move through and it is 80 degrees. I love our Christmas tree, even though we finally broke down and bought an artificial one. It is easier to set up, and you can form the limbs any way you want to hold the ornaments, especially the heavy ones. But it doesn’t have the pine tree smell of a real one, and it just seems weird getting a tree out of the attic. I love our decorations. We have nativity sets from some of our travels—Mexico, Kenya, Israel, Hawaii, and even here in northeast Georgia. And I love decorating the outside of the house. My dad and I built a wood rail fence this fall, and it looks quite festive with lights draped from post to post.

At the same time, it can be easy to let these joys overshadow what really happened in Bethlehem that night. We know what happened. A baby was born, a baby that would live a perfect life and then die a sacrificial death. This baby would grow up to be our Savior, our substitute in life and in death, our Lord and King. But I don’t think we have grappled very well with this thing called the incarnation.

Somehow, the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, became a man. Let that sink in. God became a man. God, almighty God, all-powerful, all-knowing, the Creator of all that is, entered into the womb of a woman, by the power and work of the Holy Spirit (the third person of the Trinity), and was born as an infant, just like any other human.

Philippians chapter 2 gives us some information (v. 5-8). There the Apostle Paul says that though Jesus was God, he didn’t consider equality with God a thing to be grasped. One author states it this way: Jesus did not consider equality with God a treasure to be clutched and retained at all costs. The point is this. Jesus chose, voluntarily, to leave the glories of Heaven, where he had been sitting on his throne reigning as King from all of eternity past, surrounded by angels, seraphim and cherubim, singing his praises, and come to earth, the very earth he himself created, and limit himself to a human body.

What could that have been like for Jesus!? As a baby, he experienced need and want and hunger. He needed care and cleaning, like any other newborn. The Son of God, this second person of the Trinity, was suddenly dependent, and dependent on a human, a human that he, as Creator, created. God, the infinite God, the eternal God, the God who controls all things, plans all things, does all things, became a human, a person, a man.

In Colossians, the Apostle Paul says that all things were created by Jesus and through Jesus and for Jesus, and that in Jesus all things hold together—all things hold together (1:15-17)! Everything in the universe is held together, sustained, upheld, caused to operate appropriately and according to plan, by Jesus. And yet it was this same Jesus that went to sleep that first night in a trough out of which animals eat, needed a human, his mother, to feed him and keep him warm, and cried. Jesus, the creator and sustainer of all things, cried.

Jesus, in the arms of his mother Mary, felt limitations for the very first time, and he did it for us. He didn’t consider equality with God something he had to have. He could let it go for a season for our sake. The Apostle Paul says more about this in Philippians 2. Jesus made himself nothing by taking on the form of a servant and humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death. The one who had everything made himself nothing. The one who was King and Master, became a servant. The one who began life and sustains life came to die.

This is the wonder of Christmas. Decorations and parties and Christmas cookies are nice and full of fun and cheer, but we should stand amazed, astounded, shocked into fear and awe that God, the eternal God, the one who stands above all time and who holds all things in his hands, the Creator of all that is, became a man. He entered our world so that we as his fallen and desperately lost people could enter his.