Redemption.

Redemption came.

Redemption vacated His throne where the angels cry, “Holy, Holy, Holy” and chose the silence of an earthly womb.

What King removes His crown for grave clothes?

What Lion sheds His skin and becomes a Lamb?

This God Man who wraps the winds in His robes and has storehouses of hail; who speaks as thunder and burns, but is never consumed, is now crying as He enters the world helpless.

The One who does not tell His children of His hunger because the cattle on the thousands upon thousands of hills belongs to Him — yet He nursed at the bosom of a young girl.

The Creator of humanity became human that we might have redemption in a form we could see.

A name and a face, He has.

A day He was born and a day He died.

A Lamb and a Lion. A King and a Priest. A Master and a Servant. The One who receives sacrifices and the One who was sacrificed.

A God in whose image we are made in and yet He took on ours.

How do we dissect the dichotomy of this God Man?

The Holy One of Israel and yet He was not received by His own. The One the patriarchs and prophets foretold and yet they did not know Him.

Maybe that is why the entry of Jesus Christ, a Nazarene by birth, who finds His origins before heaven, is so wonderfully mysterious. So palpably divine.

Because only a King who is secure in His regality could do such a thing.

Only that which is truly divine could be that vulnerably redemptive. To execute the greatest takeover known in the history of the earth…with love. To secure the greatest victory ever found in the annals of any king…with death.

Joshua took the Promised Land in a single campaign, but Jesus Christ secured eternity in His.

So you see, this isn’t just a birth.

It’s Christ choosing a womb as His conduit to the tomb. The finished work that would purchase you as a gift for the Father, that He may never live one day without you.

It’s this baby of Bethlehem that allows us to be secure in our identity as a bride.

You see, without Him — there is no us.

Without His birth, there is no victory in death.

He became one of us, that we might enter into glory, becoming like Him.

This is different.

This redemption is not a verb. It has always been a person. And that person is Jesus.

The Nazarene. The Bright Morning Star. The Man from Galilee. The One who was foretold.

The greatest love story that ever lived.

The One who was, the One who is and the One who is to come.

The only One who could turn a manger into an altar.

What hope. What victory. What love. What redemption.

May we never forget Him and how for a brief moment, He was one of us.

And now our charge is clear. It is our turn to lay down in unbridled surrender to the One who became like us. Now is our time to be wrapped in the bloodstained beauty of the cross, becoming like Him.