God So Loved the World

You could more easily catch a hurricane in a shrimp net that you can understand the wild, relentless, passionate, uncompromising, pursuing the love of God made present in the manger.

- Brennan Manning

We talk a lot about the omnipotence of the nativity; God’s amazing plan coming together under the bright twinkling light of that Bethlehem star. But do we recognize the love God poured out to make all these things take place?

Some of the most-memorized verses in the Bible, John 3:16-17, say,

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

He gave up Himself. For us. For you. For me.

And in order for us to be saved through Him, God chose that Jesus would died a human death. But first, He needed to have a human life. Jesus needed to be one of us, in order to show us the way. Like the allegory of the birds stuck out in the snow (see post from December 22, 2011), God loved us so much that he could not leave us alone in our own flailing. This is the Gospel 101, yet during Advent, it is easy to focus on the details of the Christmas story rather than the reason that it happened at all.

We will never understand the mystery of the Incarnation; nor will we ever understand the mind of God. But what we can grasp is the narrative. God shaped the Wisdom of cosmos into a tiny babe. It is His story we can know. It is His story we should know.

If, like me, God’s love sometimes feels distant, take this Advent season to recount the way God showed His love and faithfulness to His people recorded in Scripture. Before too long, you will see yourself in the faces of God’s beloved.

The manger didn’t have to happen. But that’s what the Lord of all Creation chose. And that was love.