Posted December 17, 2025

The birth of Jesus is the Good News that "heralds" the promise of Salvation for a fallen and sinful world. His birth ushers in the New Covenant of Grace, promised in the Old Testament to a people who had proven over and over they just “couldn’t get it right”. God loves us more than we can ever think or imagine. His desire has always been that we will be His people, and He will be our God, even as we disappoint Him time after time. Jeremiah 31:31 is a foreshadowing of the Christmas Story: “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah”. That new covenant is one of Grace and forgiveness, not Law and condemnation. Immanuel - "God with us" -came into the world to repair our relationship with God. 

From the time mankind submitted to Satan’s trickery in the Garden of Eden and fell from God’s favor, sin has influenced much of man’s decisions. As a result, God made Adam and Eve leave the Garden of Eden – because they disobeyed God, we lost our original place in Paradise. "Unholy” behavior could not co-exist with a Holy God. (Gen. 3:22-23). As people multiplied and intermingled with "fallen angels" (Genesis 6:2), God observed even more wickedness on the earth: "...everything people thought or imagined was consistently and totally evil….(He) was sorry He had ever made them…..it broke His heart.” (Genesis 6:5-6). God destroyed everything with a flood – all except faithful Noah (Genesis 7:23). God never stopped loving his creation. The story of Exodus says God took them by the hand "as a husband" out of Egypt, fed them manna and provided water from a rock in the wilderness. In spite of all the “goodness” of the Lord, the Israelites still murmured and complained and did not follow God's commandments and the Law He had given to them, written on stone tablets.

Back to the prophet Jeremiah, God chose him to prophesy this future new covenant to Israel during one of their darkest times, captivity in Babylon. God tells Jeremiah, “I will put my Law in their minds, and I will write (my law) in their hearts….I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:33-34). Now, that's Love! God never stopped loving His creation. He had a new plan to bring them into fellowship with Him.

Jesus Christ is the Lamb of God. His Birth and Death are symbolic of the Old Testament sacrificial lamb, born in a barn, and later His blood shed for the forgiveness of our sin, but now once and for all: “we have been made Holy (acceptable) through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ” (Hebrews 10:10). Jesus, our “Second Adam from above, Reinstate us in thy Love!” (Charles Wesley, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing). Because He came, lived and died, we can face tomorrow!

 “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that Whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” is a familiar memory verse (John 3:16), but do we teach it with “conditions”? Romans 8:1 says, “Therefore, there is now No condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Pastor Joseph Prince asks, is the pulpit the place to tell people how bad they are, or is the pulpit the place to tell people how glorious Jesus is and the new covenant of Grace, the "new thing" that God promised, is?

What will it look like, when earth “receives” her King?

“Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” (John 17:3)