The Helpless Babe

The natal day of the New Creation was a fulfillment of prophecy of a new thing. It came so quietly, so unobtrusively, it came as only God could come on a visit to the human.
    It was His first visit in a human body. It was His unveiling of His heart, His love heart to man.
    We know that a Babe is the fruit of human love. This Babe was the fruit of Divine Love.
    It was an unveiling of God's intense passion for man. We call it the lifting of the curtain on the drama of love. It was the showing forth of the love life, or the life that reveals itself in love.
    This Babe, born in that manger in the little town of Bethlehem, was a revelation of the love that had brought Creation into being.
   
     The Father now is unveiling Himself. He is identifying Himself with humanity for an eternity.
    He has come down in that place that Satan had made a hard place, into all the perplexities and cross-currents of human passion where hatred held carnival, where murder was the order of the day, where the animal creation was put to shame by the cruelty of the human.
    Into that, love came as a helpless Babe.
    You remember how they tried to slay Him. He should have been welcomed by Herod, but Herod revealed the world power manifestation toward Love. It has ever been the same.
    On the day of Pentecost, Christianity was a babe thrust into the unwelcome arms of the world. The nation that owned Him, didn't want Him.
    Jesus was an unwanted child in the world. He came as the rebuke to selfishness.
    That Babe, lying there in its mother's arms in that manger cradle, was a rebuke to selfishness. It showed us the utter helplessness of love, and yet love in all its helplessness is stronger and wiser than any knowledge or wisdom that has come from the Senses.
    Jesus as a Babe was the fulfillment of a prophecy of the New Creation. He was a type of the New Man that was to come.
    In love's weakness was unveiled the strength of God.
    That love man that was to come out of the Incarnation is graphically described by Paul as "created in Christ Jesus."
    In that Babe lying in a crude manger was a revelation of creative energy which brought the universe into being.
    How gentle, how helpless to natural reason was love that morning. For that Babe was a manifestation of love.
    God had manifested love, but the manifestation was not understood. It was a root out of dry ground then. It is still a root out of dry ground today to most.
    Yet we owe all our progress, our great mental and spiritual and material development to that Babe which was lying in the bosom of its mother.
    Those baby hands were to lift the hinges off the doors of history and swing wide a New Way into an untrod future. His baby hands, unconscious to men, were pointing to a New Creation, a New Heaven and a New Earth, yes, to a New Man that would not be a slave to the forces of nature, to the environment of love. That Babe would produce a race of supermen, conquerors where humanity had been defeated,, victors where slavery had held sway. We are glad for every memory of Christmas. We are glad for the fragrance that comes from the Babe that lay in swaddling clothes in that stable.
    Christmas was His birthday. The Cross and Resurrection was our birthday.
    His birthday was Heaven breaking into the realm of selfishness to unveil Love.
    He knew why He came. He knew what the end would mean, yet Love drove Him as a leaf upon a stream.
    It was Love incarnate in that manger cradle. How little Israel realized that the Jehovah of their Covenant, the Abrahamic Covenant, had become incarnate. The Babe that lay upon that mother's breast was the author of the Abrahamic Covenant, and a partner to it. He had come to fulfill God's part of the Covenant.
    As we meditate upon this, how it thrills our hearts. We can hear Him whisper, "It is finished." We can hear the rending of the temple veil. We can see the dissolution of the temple worship. We can see a New Creation coming into being with a New Covenant.
    The other Covenant had a Law of Death. This was a Law of Love.
    The first Covenant was with spiritually dead men. The New Covenant is with New Creation men.
    How few of us realize what it means, this glad Christmas day. I call it the Incarnation Day, the New Creation Day. It was the coming into being of a new plan, a new concept of life. It is all wrapped up in the sentence of the Master, "I am the light of the world. He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness but shall have the light of life."
    It is really the light of Love. Love had come to the earth. Selfishness had reigned ever since the Fall, but now Love had come.
    The reason we give gifts on this day is because Love came... a new kind of Love. For the first time in human history, men found that giving is a part of their very being. They gave themselves first to the Lord, then they gave themselves to the ministry of Love.
    Love had never been before. All actions sprang from the common stem of selfishness. Selfishness was born in the human heart in the Garden when man fell.
    New Creation Love was born in that Upper Room, in the human heart.
    Jesus lived it, demonstrated it. Now it is imparted to the very heart life of a group of men and women in the Upper Room.
    Today we give, because He gave to us. Today we love, because He shed His Love in our hearts.
    We are celebrating Love's natal day. Love's birthday into the realm of selfishness.