A Word in Season: God With Ws (Matthew 1:23)

For many people, Christmas is a time for getting together, a gathering of family or friends. But it may be that this year, Christmas may feel more about who is not there than who.

Is.

We may have lost people over the course of the last few months. Other circumstances might mean that we're not able to gather together as family or with friends as we might once have done or would wish to do, and so there are empty places around the table, there are empty seats in the house.

Perhaps there are tensions and troubles that mean that there's distance or division. Perhaps you yourself are isolated in some way. And under those circumstances, it is good for us to remember that there is one who is with us even when no one else can be, one who has come for us in order to bless us, one who is marked by love and mercy and kindness beyond anything that this world in itself has to offer.

At the beginning of Matthew's Gospel, the historian records what is promised by God to Mary and to Joseph, and then he tells us that all this was done, all these revelations coming through Gabriel to this family in Nazareth, so that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying, Behold, the virgin shall be with child and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel, which is translated God with us.

And in that name, Immanuel, God with us, is all the joy and all the comfort that we might need on this or any other day. Here you have matchless mystery. It has to be revealed from heaven because no one would have dared to come up with it.

No one would have dared to suggest it. No one would have dared to dream it otherwise, that God should be with man, that God should come and take our nature and dwell among us. It's also matchless condescension because the eternal God takes the nature of a man, takes the true form of a creature.

Without ceasing to be God, he becomes man. He is one of us and he is truly among us. And it's impossible for us to properly calculate the span that he crossed for the eternal Lord of glory to take up our flesh and blood.

And then it's a matchless honor that Christ should take our frame, that the Son of God should become one of us with all that that means for his suffering like us and his sympathy with us and his work on behalf of us, because it's also matchless mercy, because the reason why he is with us is that he might save us.

Matthew already told us that his name would be Jesus because he would save his people from their sins. But in order to be Jesus, he must be Emmanuel. He must be God with us, God among us, God for us. He must be God to answer to God and man to represent man.

He must be the one mediator between God and men, the man, Christ Jesus. He must be truly divine. He must be truly human. He must be both of those things all the time. And he must live in that one person with those two natures.

He must live a life of sinless obedience. He must lay down his life for us, suffering and dying in the place of the ungodly, and then must rise again from the dead on the third day. From the womb to the tomb, we have an Emmanuel.

We have God with us. And God with us in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ, is God for us. So whoever else might be missing, from whomever else we might be cut off, from whoever else we might be at a distance, whatever other tensions or troubles there might be, whatever other isolation may be pressing in upon you, if you have Christ Jesus, you have God with.

You.

God with mankind, yes, and God with each one of his people, loving us, living for us, dying on our behalf, rising again for our justification, always living to make intercession for us, who will never leave us or forsake us.

So whoever else may be missing, I trust that you have God with us.