CONTINUED~~

A little more on 'Jesus' Birth in Bethlehem'. It's already been clarified that Jesus is God, come down to earth to save the people (you and I) from our sins, so that we would not be condemned to Hell.

John MacArthur continues:
This would have been an overcrowded situation, I already told you the Romans would have probably taken up most of the spots, as well as some Jewish officials. And then the people coming back to their hometown to register, the place became very, very crowded. The rooms were all taken. Again it was probably, as I said, public shelter. They wound up, this little couple, just staying with the animals outside the appropriate quarters.

Now if you were in that condition you probably had to carry your own bedding. If there was no place for you in the guest room, they might have provided some, you know, rough place to lie on a straw mattress and maybe a straw pillow or a blanket. But if you were on the outside, you had to have your own blanket and your own pillow. And if you had no blanket, you'd wind up wrapping yourself in your own robe and trying to find a place out of the wind cause it could be very cold. You would be down there probably on the ground floor where the animals were kept in the middle, pack animals, camels, donkeys. Here you would find your rest for the night. For days, we don't know how many days, Joseph and Mary were huddled in that kind of a place. We don't know when they registered or if they had to wait a long time to get to the head of the line to register. We don't know whether they had already registered and Joseph didn't want to take her back because he knew she was going to give birth at any day. They were going to wait there until the birth came. It may well have been that they even knew the prophet Micah had said Bethlehem and they wanted to be sure they stayed there. None of those details are given for us. The downstairs guest rooms, the upstairs loft, whatever kind of facility it was to house these people was full and they were bedded down with the animals.

So there probably wasn't any kind of inn keeper who shut them out. It was just the nature of the situation. The tradition, as I said, goes back to about the second century that this all happened in a cave, or that there was a cave nearby. This caused Helena, the mother of Constantine to build a church on top of some cave that was presumed to be the site. If you go to Bethlehem today you will go to a church, you'll go into that church and it's a horrible place, frankly, it's an awful place full of smells and bells and hanging stuff and clutter and you wander down into this hole and they'll be a star in a hole and that's supposed to be the cave. That is not, of course, known by us. It's the traditional site that the church you see there today is not the one built by the mother of Constantine, it's the one built by Justinian. But the glitter and the trappings of that thing certainly wouldn't be anything like the stench and the smell and the odor and the crowd and all that was going on in the place where Joseph and Mary were.

When Jesus came into the world then He came in the most comfortless conditions...smelly, filthy...this is the wonder of grace though, isn't it? And this is part of the story that when God came down He came all the way down. He thought His equality with God not something to be held on to but He gave it up and humbled Himself and He humbled Himself all the way down...not just to a stinking stable but to become a substitute for stinking sinners and bear the stench of our guilt in His own body. He came down to the poor and the lowly and the humble and the base and the wicked. He came down to the common people to bring His glorious salvation. It was fitting, in a sense, then that He was born in a stinking, smelly stable because what was smelled far worse to the nostrils of God than the odor of animals is the odor of sinners. He sent the Savior all the way down into the lives of the lowly and the whole picture of that scene is a metaphor for the stench of sin which Jesus bore in His own body.

His little cloths wrapped and His little body must have collected the smell. It would have been the smell of animals, the stench of animals, the smell of fires burning there to keep people warm, the smell of the humanity that milled around in that place, the filthiest place imaginable. Unthinkable entrance for the...into the world for God's Son...sweat and pain and blood and coldness and manure and straw and odors...but He came all the way down to the stench of sin to bear in His own body our sins on the cross. And this was a picture and metaphor of the condescension of God. He came all the way down, all the way down...all the way down to the smell of a stable, all the way down to the smell of a sinner like you and like me. They had no room for Him then, they still don't have any room for Him.

- The writer John says He was in the world, the world was made by Him, the world knew Him not. He came unto His own, His own received Him not. But He came for sinners. He came all the way down to bear in His own body the wretched, wicked sin that belongs to us. The smelly stable was simply a metaphor for sin and its wretchedness. What a picture.

So we come from the world's setting to the national setting and the fulfillment of a Hebrew prophet's statement that He would be born in Bethlehem...all the way down to the circumstances of His birth which speak of His lowliness. He controls, does God, the great kings of the world. He fulfills the prophecies of Scripture and He comes all the way to the lowly sinner. Sovereign God, God of Scripture, God of the humble sinner coming all the way down.

Well, it was in some ways a sad moment because of the obscurity of it all. But that didn't last. At that same time some angels began to tell what was going on to some shepherds, and we'll look at that next time.

Father, thank You for this wonderful, wonderful portion of Your great Word. We grieve that as the centuries have passed, the Savior has been treated pretty much in the same way. But we're also glad, Lord, that He came all the way down, all the way down to the wretched, smell of a stable and even farther...far farther down to the wretched smell of a sinner. He came into the world, He came to the lowly and the humble and the base and the wicked, the vile to take our place on the cross and bear Your judgment on our sins. O what a wondrous scene it is. You control the great movements of history, You control the fulfillment of prophecy. You brought Your Son all the way down to touch the lives of wicked sinners. Thank You for this grace, this condescension, this salvation. Amen.
----
Yes, Lord Jesus, God in human flesh, Creator of this Universe, THANK YOU! for coming to show us the way to salvation, found only in You.
We bless You, Lord. Amen

[You can go online and log into "John MacArthur/ 'Jesus' Birth in Bethlehem", to read more on this topic]