Week 5 December 2025, Impromptu Devotion

Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.  John 8:58

If we bring our inborn naivety as “world view” to Christ’s Nativity, we readily concede that the baby lying in a manger in Mozambique should be dark-skinned. Chinese Christians should not have to travel west for a white infant. We are fine with people in the north who lay their Inuit baby Jesus on a seal skin. Most newborns turn red as a beet when they scream. Some show up bald and wrinkled; some emerge with a full head of unruly hair that screams for a cute cover. Not a single baby smiles at birth or anytime soon thereafter. As Dr. Spock explained to us new parents in the sixties, it is nothing more than the passing of gas. Similarly, no infant sports golden locks as many smitten artists dating back to the Renaissance would have us believe. The baby Jesus of our biblically informed preference is definitely of Palestinian ancestry, but does not look like a scowling mini rabbi.

Remonstrating rabbis were not to our Lord’s liking either; their ilk even labeled him a demonized Samaritan. Indeed, the Jewish authorities were growing fanatically hostile toward Jesus because He torpedoed their warped world view with eternal truth. It was rooted in the Father’s glory, which He freely shared with His beloved Son. The irked Pharisees saw themselves as true sons of Father Abraham and took inordinate pride in their impeccable religious pedigree. More tellingly still, some ancient Jews venerated Abraham. His name was invoked in many ways that bordered on the superstitious. When Jesus said, “Your father Abraham rejoiced that he was to see my day; he saw it and was glad,” his listeners sought to stone him as a blasphemer. But first they scoffed,  “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” Can we picture the odd look Christ gave them when He calmly replied, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am”? God had revealed His name to Moses as I AM WHO I AM. “Say this to the people of Israel,” He emphasized, “‘I AM has sent me to you’” (Exodus 3:13-14). Seven centuries before Christ’s birth Isaiah perceived that we would look into the very face of the I AM of the “only begotten Son. Babies worldwide come across as adorable. A cross awaited this infant and the prophet wrote, “He had no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men…as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (Isaiah 53:2-3). Ordinary babies, adorable or not, do get picked up and changed. Bethlehem’s Child wants to be lifted up in order to change us and our warped world view.  “And I, when I am lifted up…will draw all men to myself” (John 12:32). “Joy to the world! The Lord is come, let earth receive her King…” The famous English hymnwriter Isaac Watts wrote the lyrics for one of our best loved Christmas songs.  The hymn was a paraphrase of Psalm 98 and originally intended to be about Jesus Christ’s triumphant Second Coming. What if we, on the last day of 2025, embraced His very last promise in Revelation 22:20? “’Surely I am coming soon.’ Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!”  John 8