Who’s the Baby in the Feedbox?

I closed yesterday’s post by saying that Christmas is all about the baby in the feedbox. Because that Baby was Someone special. God incarnate, come to tread on the soil of His creation, to rectify the wrongs done by the creatures He’d created, and restore them to fellowship with Him. Do you know that story? I mean, really know it?

God made a world. It was a good world — God said so, and God doesn’t lie. God made people and put them in the world. And he made a garden and put two special people in that garden. There was only one rule for the people in the garden — don’t eat the fruit off this one tree. But the people, being people, chose to break the rule. And the breaking of that rule broke the beautiful, good world that God had made.

Until the rule was broken, God was good friends with the people. He would visit them and talk with them and walk with them in the garden. But once the rule was broken, problems entered the friendship. Suddenly, the people felt uncomfortable around God, and found themselves afraid of Him. This made God sad, because He loved the people and had enjoyed the friendship with them, and He wanted to be able to enjoy their company again.

But rules have consequences when they are broken, and the rule about the fruit tree was no different. God had told the people that if they ate that particular fruit, they would die. Now, this death takes two forms. The physical death that we all have to face and deal with, and a spiritual death that is separation from God’s friendship forever. So the people didn’t physically die right away, but the story makes it quite clear that the people were spiritually separated from God the instant they broke the rule and ate the fruit. Because suddenly, they were afraid of Him. They had never been afraid before.

So the situation was very bad. Because the only way to pay the price for the fruit was for someone to die. But the someone who died had to be a perfect person, and there were no perfect people. All people were just as headstrong and willful as the fruit-eaters had been. Different people, presented with a different rule, still chose to break the rule rather than to obey.

God knew that only He could fix the problem, pay the price of the stolen fruit, and make it possible for the people to be His friends again — because only He is perfect. So …

He condescended to become a man, so that He could be a perfect man and offer Himself as the perfect sacrifice to pay the price.

And that Baby in the feedbox is Him. It’s God. He thought it would be best if He actually lived the whole human experience, so He set aside His glory, left the gold-paved streets of Heaven and became a baby whose first bed was a pile of mouldering hay in a feedbox in the stable of a second-rate hotel in a dusty farm town in Israel.

We like the “rags to riches” story, because it gives us hope that by hard work and diligent effort, we can better our situation. But the story of that Baby in the feedbox is a “riches to rags” story. Because God Himself, Creator of the Universe, chose to leave His throne and His mansions and His glory behind, and chose to become the child of a poor village carpenter and his wife, in one of the smallest, most persecuted nations on the planet. And His first bed was a feedbox.

Tags: Christianity, Christmas, holidays, Jesus, nativity, Religion, True Stories