God has given His creation over to the men and women He created out of the earth, the humus. He provided the first humans us with everything good and it says that God was very pleased with His work. We read that God gave authority to the man and woman to control the Creation He had provided.
This authority to the humans is real and true. God has decreed that this is so and so it stands to this day.
But the humans surrendered this authority and power and control to the evil being who deceived the humans into believing their Creator was not acting in their best interests so that they trusted in the dark side instead of the light.
And we have suffered ever since.
And He has pursued us ever since to woo us back—to change our thinking and say ‘yes’.
So complete and final was God’s declaration of the transfer of control upon His Creation to the humans that God did not, could not, intervene in the drama of the Garden. If He had stepped in to reverse what the humans were about to do—turning from love, light and life—His promise, His word of what shall be, in this momentous act of rendering to humans such privileges and sonship, would have been exposed as a sham. His humans would not have free will.
Nevertheless, the great love of God and His desire for fellowship with humans set in motion a plan which would mean finding humans to fully cooperate with Him—to hear His voice and agree to do His will—to put Him first and love Him, pleasing Him, in the great drama of the progress of redemption.
This was—and still is God’s Great Mission: to find us lost ones, us humans, who had been destined to walk with Him in abundance and creativity, but who, as a whole human race, elected to embrace lies and turn from the great Lover into the hands of the great hater, destroyer, deceiver.
The biblical accounts tell an amazing story of this progress of God’s Mission, in which He woos us, seeking those who will walk with Him in His Great Work.
For any work to be done in His Creation, it has to be done—it had to be done—by a fully human person. It could not be done by a half-god-half-man. It had to be done by one of us; born like us; raised as any helpless infant by parents as we are, taught and trained to fit in this world, exposed to suffering, educated by the flawed community into which he was born, subject to every possible test and temptation and privation, weakness and even death.
So in the fullness of time God found a willing woman, a mere peasant girl to give us all a human who would not need forgiveness as we do, and who allowed Him to use her body to bring a man who was the very image of the invisible God, who could be handled, heard, seen doing the works of God for all in his generation to see.
She said ‘yes’ to the will of God.
She was from a very imperfect race of people who struggled with God their Lover and Protector in belief and unbelief. Yet there was “a great cloud of witnesses” in the Hebrew history who in varying degrees of faithfulness had said ‘yes’ to their Creator, the great I AM.
She had said ‘yes’ in contrast to the first woman who had listened to the dark one. What an example she has shown! Her firstborn child we are told followed her example and continued saying “yes, I will to do Your will and that is why I have come.”
This amazing human allowed God to fill him with the Holy Spirit—he said ‘yes’ and God said ‘yes’ and the Kingdom of God could at last be clearly seen and experienced. He said ‘yes’ to the awful death on the stake—the climax of God’s Great Mission to bring us back into friendship and oneness with God Almighty.
God still waits for us to say ‘yes’ to Him—“yes I will do Your will so that You can use my body, my mind, my spirit” partnering with You in Your Stupendous Work.
This festive season and beyond, will we allow Him to do in us what He did in Mary’s spirit, and most of all, what he did in Jesus? Will we accept His love and companionship?
He waits, with infinite patience and love, for you and me to say ‘yes, I will’.
And that is Christmas.
Ian Thomson 