There are three times the expression “fear not” is used in connection with the birth of
the Lord Jesus Christ. First it's the angel who comforts Joseph in a dream with, “Joseph, thou son of
David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in
her is of the Holy Ghost.”
Under Israel’s Old Testament economy, an “espousal”
was more than being engaged; it was equal to being married. Mary was Joseph’s
intended wife, it’s just that their commitment hadn’t been consummated yet, and
the fact she was “found with child” was a crime punishable by stoning death by
Israeli law.
“Now, you got to think about Joseph’s perspective in
all of this,” says Jordan. “He’s usually rather ignored (in the nativity story),
but he was quite somebody. Joseph’s got this young girl, he’s looking forward
to marrying her, they’ve fallen in love; she’s won his heart and he’s won her
hand. Everybody knows they’ve already gone through the formalities (the
announcements and the invitations are out) but she comes up pregnant.
“Joseph’s in the dark about why. He doesn’t have ANY
idea what’s happened. He doesn’t know HOW she got pregnant! I guess maybe he
has an idea about how she can get pregnant, but he’s completely in the dark. He
doesn’t know this is something God is going to do to fulfill Isaiah 14. He just
gets the news she’s pregnant.
*****
Matthew 1:19 says, “Then Joseph her husband,
being a just man, and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to
put her away privily.”
Jordan explains, “That verse is fascinating about Joseph.
He’s in a tough situation. He wants to do what’s right. He’s not going to sweep
this under the rug and act like it didn’t happen. He’s a just man.
“He wants to deal with it properly, but in Israel’s
economy, if she’s found with a child, legally in the law they could stone her;
give her the death penalty. At the very least it would be publicly shameful!
“It says Joseph wasn’t willing to make her a public
example. The guy’s got a kind spirit; he’s got a loving heart and so it says ‘he
was mindful to put her away privily.’ That word ‘minded’ there it’s not just ‘the
thought occurred to him.’ It’s the idea that he sat down and gave some serious
thought to what was going on and he thought it through and came to a selfless
decision to just handle this quietly between her and him.
“I don’t know about you, but my mind kind of imagines
things like that. I sit around sometimes thinking about these verses. You can just
see Joseph wondering, ‘Why did something like this happen?!’
“He’s having to deal with the hurt of the betrayal and
the disillusionment that would come from this kind of thing. You can just see
him sitting there trying to figure out exactly how to get out of the mess that
Mary’s gotten him into. You can see his heart all filled with turmoil. ‘How am
I gonna fix this mess?! How are we ever going to get beyond this?!’
“There’s Joseph in this impossible situation. The
things he’s thinking about are testing his mettle; his goodness. And in the
midst of all that, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in his sleep.
“Suddenly God broke into Joseph’s predicament and the
explanation He gave him was a doozie! If you think it’s unbelievable that an
angel would show up, that kind of message from an angel even sounds stranger!
Here’s something that’s never happened before!
“He’s told, “And she shall bring forth a son,
and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their
sins.’ It even gets stranger but then the angel gives Joseph something he can
hang onto: ‘Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son,
and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.’
(Matt. 1:23)
“You see what that angel really did for Joseph was he
said, ‘Here’s a verse of Scripture that’s God’s fulfilling in YOUR life right
now! You don’t need to be afraid! I know it’s outrageous! Here’s what God’s Word
says, though.’
“The message was ‘fear not for God said.’ The message
is you can hang your life on God’s Word and you’re never going to get rid of
fear in your life except that way.”
*****
The
other two times the angel-sent encouragement of “fear not” shows up in
relationship to the birth of Christ is in Luke 1:13 (‘But the angel said unto
him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall
bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John) and in Luke 1:30 (‘And the
angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God.’)
Jordan says, “Now,
if you think Joseph was little upset, can you imagine how shocked Mary must
have been when the angel Gabriel started talking to her!
“Luke 1:26 tells us, ‘And in the sixth month the angel
Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth.’ That’s six
months after John the Baptist had been conceived. In the 6th month
in the pregnancy of Elisabeth, John the Baptist’s mother, the angel Gabriel was
sent from God to the city of Galilee named Nazareth.
“By the way, Luke was a medical doctor, so the
specificity of terminology here is not being used casually. It’s being used
very specific with precise meanings. Luke starts out his book saying, ‘I’m a
good historian.’
“In the first four verses, the little preface to his
book, if you wanted to capsulate in one sentence, Luke was saying, ‘I was a
good first-hand researcher and historian; I went and talked to the
eyewitnesses; the people who were there.’
“There’s this little thing he writes in Chapter 2 that
I’ve always been touched by. Luke says, ‘But Mary kept all these things, and
pondered them in her heart.’
“I think, here’s a little mother that when Luke met
her, recounts the nativity and the birth of the child, and there’s certain
things that she never told anybody else. She just kept them hid and thought
about them and pondered them in her heart.
“I don’t know about you but I think, ‘How’d Luke get
her to tell him that! He must have had a wonderful bedside manner.’ Because
when you read his book, you can tell he’s talked to these people and he’s
picked up all these little details.
“In fact, you ever heard anybody say you can’t know
the date of the birth of Christ? If you just read Luke 1, you can literally
figure out within a three to five-day time period the date of the birth of the
Lord Jesus Christ! It’s not December, by the way, but there is something that
took place in late December in this chapter.
“The real miracle of Christmas was not the nativity;
it was the conception. By the way, if you look at the first verse in Chapter 2,
it says, ‘And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from
Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.’
“Those kinds of references are often located in the
Book of Luke. They are historically verifiable data that you can go into
secular history and find.
“Sometimes people give you the idea that the Bible is
just a willy-nilly book concocted by a bunch of guys who along the way
somewhere just wrote books and made all this stuff up.
“Well, you certainly can’t believe that when you read
the Book of Luke! You see this is put together by men who thought carefully who
researched thoroughly and who documented what they were saying in such a way
that you could go behind them and check the footnotes.
“Luke 1:27-30 is a great illustration of Luke’s
penetrating thinking and looking. Can I recommend to you, when you read the
book, read it slowly and let those kinds of things into your mind.
“Here’s something Mary shared with Luke about what was
going on in her mind. I have a hard time putting myself in her situation. The
questions that must have been in this little girl’s mind at the time!
“She’s told, ‘Hey Mary, you’re going to be the mother
of the Messiah!’ Whoa! I mean, what a privilege, but what a shock! Mary asked the
logical question: ‘How shall this be, seeing as how I know not a man?’
“In the presence of something that’s obviously going
to be supernatural that can’t be understood in human terms, you can just
imagine . . . but verse 37 is the
answer: ‘For with God nothing shall be impossible.’
“Mary’s fear turned to faith in what God’s Word said.
So Mary, like Joseph, trusted God’s Word. When it says she found ‘favor with
God,’ that’s undeserved favor. That’s a definition of grace: ‘Mary you’ve got
nothing to be afraid of; you are perfectly loved.’
“Come down to Luke 2 and you’ll see this time he says
it to the shepherds. It’s one of those fascinating chapters in scripture. The
first seven verses explain how God was going to fill Micah 5:2.
“Seven hundred years before the birth of Jesus Christ,
God through a little prophet . . . Micah and Isaiah were contemporaries. Isaiah
wrote 66 chapters; he’s a big dude. Micah got to write seven and significant
portions of the Book of Micah are repeats or echoes of the Book of Isaiah.
“Somebody reads Micah and says, ‘He hardly had an
original thought. He’s just working with Isaiah.’ But God takes that ‘little
insignificant prophet,’ as it were, and reached into his ‘little book,’ and in
Micah 5:2 writes down 700 years before the event the town in which the Messiah
is going to be born in: Bethlehem Ephratah.
“There were two Bethlehems in Israel at that time. One
was in the tribe of Zebulun. One’s down in the tribe of Judah. So Bethlehem
Ephratah, that’s Bethlehem in Judah. That’s the one were talking about.
“That little town in Judah is so insignificant that if
you go back to the Book of Joshua, when they polled the tribes of Israel to get
soldiers to man the armies of Israel, Bethlehem and Zebulun are mentioned and
the one in Judah isn’t.
“But God says that’s where my Messiah is gonna be
born! Where did you read back in Luke 1:26 that Mary lived? She didn’t live in
Bethlehem. She lived in Nazareth up in Galilee over a 100 miles north.
“The week before Jesus was born, you know where Mary
was? She was at home in Nazareth. Now, you people that have had babies, you can
understand in that verse when it says she was ‘great with child.’ That last
week before the baby’s born, it’s just get around the best you can.
“Her husband, he don’t even know it yet, but he’s got
to get her from Nazareth to Bethlehem. Can you imagine she says, ‘How we gonna
get there?! Donkey Express?!’
“You
think about it, if you’re down to the last week of your pregnancy and your
husband is putting you on a donkey and walking you a hundred miles . . .
“What God does is He uses a pagan emperor who had no
thought of what was going on . . . if Caesar Augustus had known what was going to happen as a
result of what he did, he’d have never done it! The last thing he would have
wanted is to work out the birth of Israel’s Messiah! But it turns out to be Caesar
Augustus’ fault that they have to move from Nazareth down to Bethlehem!
“The message is the God of history works through
history. You see, God can take care of His Word; you don’t have to worry about
it. The God of history isn’t just going to come to reside in humanity; He works
out the circumstances so, at exactly the right moment, that young couple is
moved from Nazareth to Bethlehem where He had said 700 years before He was
going to be born.”
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