LifeLink Devotions

Tuesday, December 5, 2023

Deuteronomy 18:15 – 16 “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers. You must listen to him. For this is what you asked of the LORD your God…”

When the Israelites escaped from Egypt under the leadership of Moses, they experienced for the first time in their lives the physical presence of Almighty God. They heard His voice from the mountain where Moses met with Him, and they saw His holiness and His power in the fire that encompassed the mountain. They were suddenly aware of their vulnerability. They realized that their sin could not stand in the presence of God, and God was present. Knowing their precarious position and desiring to live, they asked if God would remove Himself from their presence. How do you think God responded? At first, I focused on the selfishness of the people, and thought God should respond by punishing them. But look at what God did. “The LORD said to Moses: “What they say is good.”

Why would God call good someone’s request to not have Him present? I can think of only one logical reason – it’s because God saw that the people were asking for the right reason. They were not asking because they valued their lives more than God. They were asking because they had become aware of the true nature of God and had realized the true nature of their own lives. In essence they were saying this – “We are sinners, and we cannot stand in the Holy Presence of God. We are deserving of death. We want to know you, God, but we can’t know you this way. Is there another option?” The people were begging for a touchable God.

God responds with another option. He says, “I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers; I will put my words in his mouth, and he will tell them everything I command him.” Up until this time Moses had been the mouthpiece of God, speaking His truth with His authority. But in this great prophetic promise of Jesus, God tells the people that one day there would be another prophet who would come and speak all the truth of God so that we could know Him and have a personal and intimate relationship with Him. That promise is fulfilled in Jesus Christ, God’s final prophet. The author of Hebrews puts is this way – “In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.” 

None of us is worthy to approach God. None of us is able from our own merit to communicate with God. We are all insecure humans, incapable of having personal contact with the Hero of Heaven. But God wants to have contact with us. So, He provided a Prophet to us who is His exact representation but in touchable form. Through Him we have a personal and intimate relationship with Almighty God. In Jesus God became touchable.

A touchable God. It’s not only what we want, but it is what we need. This Christmas, and every day before and after, praise the God who became touchable.

If you have the time, here’s my favorite story to illustrate this truth. I’m sure you’ve heard it many times before, but it’s simple message never grows old, and it fits this prophecy of Christ perfectly. It is Paul Harvey’s story of the man and the birds.

Unable to trace its proper parentage, I have designated this as my Christmas Story of the Man and the Birds. You know, THE Christmas Story, the God born a man in a manger and all that escapes some moderns, mostly, I think, because they seek complex answers to their questions and this one is so utterly simple. So for the cynics and the skeptics and the unconvinced I submit a modern parable.

Now the man to whom I’m going to introduce you was not a scrooge, he was a kind, decent, mostly good man. Generous to his family, upright in his dealings with other men. But he just didn’t believe all that incarnation stuff which the churches proclaim at Christmas Time. It just didn’t make sense and he was too honest to pretend otherwise. He just couldn’t swallow the Jesus Story, about God coming to Earth as a man. “I’m truly sorry to distress you,” he told his wife, “but I’m not going with you to church this Christmas Eve.” He said he’d feel like a hypocrite. That he’d much rather just stay at home, but that he would wait up for them. And so he stayed and they went to the midnight service.

Shortly after the family drove away in the car, snow began to fall. He went to the window to watch the flurries getting heavier and heavier and then went back to his fireside chair and began to read his newspaper. Minutes later he was startled by a thudding sound. Then another, and then another. Sort of a thump or a thud. At first he thought someone must be throwing snowballs against his living room window. But when he went to the front door to investigate he found a flock of birds huddled miserably in the snow. They’d been caught in the storm and, in a desperate search for shelter, had tried to fly through his large landscape window.

Well, he couldn’t let the poor creatures lie there and freeze, so he remembered the barn where his children stabled their pony. That would provide a warm shelter, if he could direct the birds to it. Quickly he put on a coat, galoshes, tramped through the deepening snow to the barn. He opened the doors wide and turned on a light, but the birds did not come in. He figured food would entice them in. So he hurried back to the house, fetched bread crumbs, sprinkled them on the snow, making a trail to the yellow-lighted wide open doorway of the stable. But to his dismay, the birds ignored the bread crumbs, and continued to flap around helplessly in the snow. He tried catching them. He tried shooing them into the barn by walking around them waving his arms. Instead, they scattered in every direction, except into the warm, lighted barn.

And then, he realized, that they were afraid of him. To them, he reasoned, I am a strange and terrifying creature. If only I could think of some way to let them know that they can trust me. That I am not trying to hurt them, but to help them. But how? Because any move he made tended to frighten them, confuse them. They just would not follow. They would not be led or shooed because they feared him. “If only I could be a bird,” he thought to himself, “and mingle with them and speak their language. Then I could tell them not to be afraid. Then I could show them the way to safe, warm …to the safe warm barn. But I would have to be one of them so they could see, and hear and understand.”

At that moment the church bells began to ring. The sound reached his ears above the sounds of the wind. And he stood there listening to the bells – Adeste Fidelis – listening to the bells pealing the glad tidings of Christmas. And he sank to his knees in the snow.

Pastor John