Highly Exalted

As we begin the month of December, we will be turning our hearts’ attention to the coming of the long expected King.  As we prepare our minds and hearts for worship, please remember that even though we celebrate Jesus’ incarnation at Christmas, it certainly is not limited to December.  Jesus’ birth is a significant in God’s redemptive plan, and it must be understood in light of the larger narrative.  As we look through the Old Testament, we see God’s providential hand guiding His chosen ones and bringing them to the point of seeing and observing God in flesh. 

As a New Testament church, we are tempted to focus solely on New Testament matters, but ignoring the forerunners is ignoring God’s gracious plan.  That may be the reason Matthew begins his account (and the New Testament) with a seemingly dull rescitation of the Old Testament’s good guys and bad guys.  However, Matthew’s focus is not on boring the readers, it is showing God’s glory throughout the history of His people.  Each of these men and women mentioned in the first 17 verses of the New Testament point to how God has guided history to the then advent of Jesus’ birth.  Each generation is mentioned to showcase how God has used sinners to bring about His will. 

This week we begin in Matthew 1 as we celebrate the Christmas season.  I pray that as we journey through Matthew 1 and 2 this month that God will mold our hearts and minds to better understand the significance of the Incarnation apart from the trimmings of the season that so easily captivate our attention every December.  Let us rejoice in the coming of the King of all the ages for He does not come alone; He comes with a cross ready to atone for the sins of His people and to point to the glory of the most high God.

The air is distinctly cooler and the sun’s time is increasingly more brief.  The autumnal equinox has been reached, and we who experience the changing of seasons take notice of the times.  This is a time when we focus our attention on giving thanks for that with which we have been blessed.  During November we are looking at a series of Psalms that articulate the thankfulness of the psalmist to the “Most High.”  This week we consider Psalm 9 and the call to worship the God who is divinely sovereign over the world and passes judgment on those who would oppress the elect.  Psalm 9 reminds us that the God we serve is a righteous and holy God who is our divine protector (v13) and the author of the salvation in which we will rejoice (v14). 

This Psalm makes much of the Lord and in so doing, makes little of the nations.  Indeed, the Lord is sovereign and nothing escapes His notice.  And so when verse 15 says, “The nations have sunk down in the pit which they have made; in the net which they hid, their own foot has been caught,” we can conclude that God’s judgment will be carried out according to His purposes even using the folly of the nations including our own.  The psalmist ends with a prayer to God asking that the “nations know that they are but men.”  In this time of Thanksgiving, let us remember the One called “Most High,” and remember where we fall in relation to His holiness and let us rejoice in the grace that has been afforded us in the cross that bore the Christ who bore our iniquities.  Let us give thanks for a sovereign God.