How do we get to know someone?
Firstly, we speak with them listening to the things that they say. We also see the things that they do – and these actions usually validate the things that they say.
This is also true with the Lord Jesus Christ. We listen to the things that He says (in the Bible), and we are also especially blessed to be able to see the things that He does within the Gospel narratives and in His entire work of salvation.
As if this wasn’t enough, the Bible gives us various names and titles for Jesus Christ, all of which reveal something about His Person or about His saving work, or both. We find 50 of these names and titles given to Jesus and as many as 950 names and titles (including the ones given to Jesus) given to God!
At Christmas, one of the most well-known names that was given to Jesus is the name, ‘Immanuel’. First given as a prophecy in Isaiah 7:14, this name was repeated by the angel giving the news of Mary’s special pregnancy to Joseph in Matthew 1:23, where Matthew helpfully explains that this name is translated as “God With Us”. An exploration of this name reveals its wonderful preciousness.
God came to us in Jesus Christ to save us where we are
Jesus Christ is God with us. He is God come to us for our salvation.
God wanted there to be no doubt in our minds about this. God could have asked His Son to carry around with Him a huge sign made up of flashing neon lights that pointed to Him and that said, “THIS IS THE SAVIOUR”, but that wouldn’t have been particularly practical! Instead, God ensured that His Son would be given the name ‘Jesus’ – “for He will save His people from their sins” (Matt 1:21). Every time that we speak or hear Jesus’ name we ought to be reminded that Jesus Christ is the Saviour.
The name ‘Jesus’ literally means ‘God saves’ – and so ‘Immanuel’ reveals to us that God came to us to save us in the Person of His Son, Jesus Christ.
God did not come near to us to save us. Neither did God merely make a significant contribution for our salvation leaving us needing to make up just a little bit of ground for its completion.
The salvation that God provided is not like we were drowning in a lake, and God was stood at the side with a huge stick, reaching out to us as much as He could, if only we could get close enough to reach out and grab the stick.
Instead, it is more like what we find in the parable that Jesus told about the Lost Sheep (Matt 18:10-14, Luke 15:1-7): We are the lost sheep. We have gone astray and have left ourselves in perilous danger where we are trapped, unable to save ourselves. The shepherd is God in Jesus Christ, who has come all of the way to save us so that He can now carry us back home to safety on His shoulders.
We, as humanity, are trapped in our sins, and the wages of sin is death (Rom 6:23), so God (in Jesus Christ) joined Himself to our humanity to save us from that bondage – yes, Jesus Christ came to us to save us where we are; in our weakness, at the point that we needing saving, in our humanity.
God came to us in Jesus Christ to save us to remain with us
In Jesus Christ we find our God, our King and our Lord… but He is also our Friend, our Brother and our Companion.
When Jesus completed His work of salvation (in living a perfect life and in dying a sacrificial death on Calvary’s Cross) He returned to heaven. One day, Jesus Christ will return a second time, this time to bring an end to this age. But, in the meantime, Jesus’ work with His people is not quite finished with.
Jesus promised that while His physical being was in heaven, He would still be with us through the Holy Spirit (John 14:15-18), so that although in one sense Jesus is separated from us, yet He remains with us in an incredibly intimate way.
Have you ever felt pain, weakness, tiredness, loneliness, betrayal, mocking, sadness..? So has Jesus, and He has felt these things in incredibly deep ways. That means that Jesus is able to understand how we are feeling and is able to treat us empathetically rather than just sympathetically.
I have suffered from a neurological chronic pain disorder for several years. Now, when someone says to me, “This pain I am experiencing is just too much to bear!”, I know exactly how they are feeling. I have learnt that to offer misguided and superficial responses, such as, “You’ll be alright! Just try and be positive!” is not only unhelpful but will often cause extra sadness to the sufferer too. I am now able to empathise, and if there is anything at all that might be helpful (there isn’t always, except for kind words) then I will offer that help.
We can now, as Christians, go to Jesus knowing that He is with us and is able to empathise with us in our difficult and painful experiences. He is able to help us as we (quite often struggle to) try to serve Him and honour Him with our lives.
He is, quite simply, a wonderful Companion to have! He is God with us!
God came to us in Jesus Christ to save us to share with us in every aspect of our lives
For Jesus Christ to be with us, always, is to be extremely blessed – but His relationship with us goes even deeper than that, and we miss out on much of that blessedness if we remain unaware of it.
This relates to Matthew’s interpretation of ‘Immanuel’ – ‘God with us’. The word that Matthew used for “with” wasn’t the usual, standard Greek word for ‘with’. Rather, Μεθ’, the word that Matthew used, goes much deeper than the word we simply translated it, which is ‘with’.
Μεθ’ means ‘together with’, or ‘shares with’, and it teaches us that when Jesus is with us He shares with us in all that we experience.
If, at Christmas, we are able to have a time of joy and celebration (Covid permitting) with our families – Jesus shares with us in this joy and gladness (having experienced good things such as these for Himself, as well having celebrated the many bad things!)
However, for many, Christmas can be a time of sadness, of loneliness and of pain. Well, Jesus shares with us in these things too!
Jesus Christ is ‘God with us’, sharing with us in everything we go through – knowing what’s its like – in every single aspect of our lives! Isn’t that a wonderful thought?
Whilst studying these things I was granted the opportunity to put them into practice and experience them with a quite heightened demonstration!
My pain rose to levels that I had not experienced for a fair amount of time – levels that (for me, at least) would most certainly rest in the ‘unbearable’ category! These thoughts relating to 'Immanuel' were fresh in my mind, and, in my suffering, I was able to continue thinking through them, particularly of how Jesus was sharing with me in these pains. My mind went to Calvary, and of the unimaginable pain that Jesus suffered there, and while my pain wasn’t eased at all, and the experience wasn’t any less unbearable, yet I was allowed to feel an incredible closeness and connectedness to my Lord and my God. I felt Him reaching out to me, and holding onto me, and sharing with me in my pain.
A couple of weeks have now passed since then, and thankfully my pain has reduced quite significantly, yet the intimacy with which I felt with My Saviour still leaves me feeling overwhelmed. A time of unbearable pain became for me a time of holy blessedness as well.
Paul’s prayer for the Ephesian church was that “God would grant [them] according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in [their] hearts through faith; that [they], being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height— to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that [they] may be filled with all the fullness of God (Eph 3:14-19).
I had also prayed that prayer, multiple times this past year, for myself and for my Christian brothers and sisters. Toward the end of the year, within a period of extreme, excruciating pain, I felt that prayer answered in a way that truly was “exceedingly above all that [I could] ask or think” (Eph 3:20)!
Whilst I do not wish for anyone to feel the pain I felt, I pray that the Lord would be pleased to reveal His love in amazing ways for His church through a heightened appreciation for the intimate closeness and connectedness that we have with our Lord Jesus Christ. This is something that would surely make a huge different to our personal and corporate lives. What that difference would be and would look like I will quite happily leave to the Lord to answer!