Different.

Last week we talked about how God does things differently to what we expect. At the time when Jesus was born, the Israelites were under the rule of the Roman Empire and under military dictatorship. Life was hard, taxes were high, the cost of living was astronomical, and the political climate was tenuous. Sound familiar?

When the average Jew would look at the Old Testament prophecies about a Saviour who would come to rescue them, they had some ideas of what that Saviour would look like, and it wasn’t Jesus.

The Old Testament prophecies said this about Jesus, Isaiah 9:7, “Great and vast is his dominion. He will bring immeasurable peace and prosperity. He will rule on David’s throne and over David’s kingdom to establish and uphold it by promoting justice and righteousness from this time forward and forevermore. The marvelous passion that the Lord Yahweh, Commander of Angel Armies, has for his people will ensure that it is finished!”

Isaiah 11:4-5 said this, “With righteousness he will uphold justice for the poor and defend the lowly of the earth. His words will be like a scepter of power that conquers the world, and with his breath he will slay the lawless one. Righteousness will be his warrior’s sash and faithfulness his belt.”

So the Jews fully expected that the Messiah, the Savior would be a warrior King like David, that He would break the yoke of oppression from Roman dictatorship and re-establish Israel as a great and mighty people. But God sent them a baby. They expected Jesus to come and overthrow the Roman rule and reign, but He came instead as the Prince of peace.

Jesus did not come to wage war on the Roman empire. The Jews had a limited view of what Jesus had come to do. Don’t we do this with God all the time? We only see how what He does affects us, but we seldom see how it affects everyone else. God came with a big picture in mind. Yes, the situation the Jews found themselves in was unfair. In comes Jesus, not to fix the symptoms, but the root of the problem. With humanity, the root of our problems was sin and separation from God.

I remember I spent a few years when I was younger and I decided to go “seeing for myself” and thought I could wing life without God. Those were the saddest and most anxious years of my life! We were never meant to live disconnected from God. God is our life source, our reason for breathing, our everything! Outside of Him there is only death and destruction. It may not happen instantly, but it will happen.

So Jesus came to the world, not to judge or condemn it, John 12:47, but to save it. He came to save us. I can imagine how frustrated and disappointed the Jews must have been when they were told, “Hey, the Messiah is here! He was born in Bethlehem as prophesied”. And they held their breaths in anticipation, year after year waiting for Jesus to take His rightful place as King but instead watching His life end with death on the cross.

Jesus was not who they expected. His life was not what they expected. Everything about Him seemed ordinary. But there was nothing ordinary about our Jesus. When Jesus was born in that manger, I imagine hell trembled because God, much like in the garden, came down to earth one more time. But this time, it was to eradicate sin and death and save people from the devil’s grip. What the Jews wanted would have been temporary relief, what God gave us is a permanent solution.

Christmas time is a reminder, that even when things do not look anything like we expect, God is working. When we start out our Christian journey, sometimes we expect our circumstances (symptoms) to change straight away but God always does a deep work and deals with the root, so the same problem does not keep showing its head.

Instead of being disappointed by how we see things, we should instead ask God to give us eyes to see things how He sees them. What is heaven’s perspective on my situation? God loves us and He works very hard to save us and heal us and help us in every way.

Isaiah 9:6 says, “A child has been born for us; a son has been given to us. The responsibility of complete dominion will rest on his shoulders, and his name will be: the Wonderful One, the Extraordinary Strategist, the Mighty God, the Father of Eternity, the Prince of Peace!”

Whatever you find yourself needing in this season, it is in Jesus.

Love and blessings,

Melissa Tsingano.