“But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.”
                                                                                            Micah 5:2

Ever notice how God does things on a different economy than we would?  He needs someone to kill a giant that is demoralizing his people, so God brings a teenage boy into the arena.  The time comes to drive out the Midianites who have been terrorizing Israel, so he cuts Gideon’s army down from 30,000 to 300. Then there is the time when Israel is on the verge of extinction, and again, instead of an air raid, he raises up a peasant girl to be queen for ‘such a time as this’.

And so I guess it really is no surprise that He would choose as the birth place of his only Son, the great Prince Jesus, a small insignificant town on the outskirts of Judah.  It just seems to be consistent with the way that God operates, stripping away the physical to display his supernatural.

What gets me are all of the parallels between that Micah verse and what Jesus accomplished for me beginning with that first Christmas.  You see, like Bethlehem Ephrathah, I too often feel like the smallest of the clan.  Insignificance (at least from our vantage point) is everywhere.  I see it when my family doesn’t notice all of the sacrifices I make, when my paycheck is less than the toll that the job has taken on me, or when my grand and glorious plans fall face down on the field of unfulfilled dreams.

But the promice is that ‘though you are small’ yet out of you will come greatness, and that greatness is through ‘one’.  The mystery, Paul calls it in Colossians 1:27, is ‘Christ in you, the hope of Glory.’  We are not what we seem.  We are not what we appear to be.There really is a glory to our lives. 

We have become so scarred from the fall, so scarred from our enemies unrelenting attacks, that we have forgotten that ‘before the creation of the world’ we were chosen (Ephesians 1:4), chosen for a purpose, for a grand adventure.  That like Bethlehem, our ‘origins are from old, from ancient times’. That though we are small among the clans, out of us will come one who is truer than we ever imagined.

Sometimes I make the mistake of thinking Christmas is just the historical account of the birth of Jesus, another birthday to celebrate.  But it is so much more.  It is my story, and it is your story.  It is God accomplishing what only God can accomplish, both then and now.  It is not just the birth of a Savior, it is the birth of hope … for today.

To the King,

David