God Needed Chag HaMolad
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The story ofChag HaMolad, the story that we find in the New Testament, the details surrounding the birth of Yeshua, as an adult, coming into this story maybe for the first time or the first time in a long time, if you left your childhood faith, the events surrounding the birth of Yeshua, they're really pretty unbelievable.
It's unbelievable because there are things that just don't happen anymore. So you read these stories, and you're like, "I know this is supposed to be inspirational, the manger scene and the whole Chag HaMolad thing, but it's just unbelievable." But what we began to discover last week, as we launched into this series, "Who needs Chag HaMolad?", is that, what makes the event surrounding the birth of Yeshua believable is that the entire story is so unbelievably remarkable.
Unbeliavable and Remarkable
Because the Chag HaMolad story doesn't begin with a young couple trying to figure out where to have a baby, it begins with a serpent in a garden. It doesn't necessarily begin with a young couple who's trying to figure out how in the world they got pregnant, it begins with an old couple, Abraham and Sarah, that are pretty sure they're never gonna get pregnant, and yet God appears to this gentleman, Abraham, 2,000 years... This is the part where you just have to stop and go, "What?" 2,000 years before the birth of Messiah, and makes him a promise in the Book of Genesis, not Matthew, Luke, but all the way back in Genesis, and this promise is, that, "Through you, Abraham, every single nation, every single tribe, every single person is going to be blessed. The entire world is gonna be blessed through you", because apparently, God believed the world needed to be blessed. So God made this extraordinary, extraordinary promise, because the world needed Chag HaMolad.
But as it turns out, and here's what we're gonna talk about for the next few minutes, it wasn't just the world that needed Chag HaMolad, and this is gonna sound strange, but God needed Chag HaMolad as well. Let me try to explain that. Parents, you've had this feeling or this thought, and if you aren't a parent, your parents had this thought or this feeling, if you had good parents or even one good parent, and it goes like this, "I sure wish my kids understood how much I love them. I sure wish my kids understood how much I cared for them. I sure wish my kids would stop believing that I lay in bed at night trying to come up with ways to make their life miserable. I wish that my kids could hear what I ask them to do and not to do it within the context of the fact that I really do have their best interest in mind, because if they knew how I felt about them, they would trust me."
Every parent has had that internal conversation. We've even tried to explain it to our kids. Their eyes glaze over, and it's like, "Are you finished yet? Hey, Dad, you got something on your shirt right there."
It's that...
hen it's like, if only they could see themselves the way I see them. Well, apparently, God, your Heavenly Father, felt the same way.
But think about His challenge. It's challenging enough when I'm eyeball to eyeball with a middle schooler or a high school student, or a nine-year- old or a 10-year-old, trying to get them to trust me, and dad has your best interests in mind. What do you do if you're God, the Spirit? What do you do if you're the invisible spirit of God? What do you do if you're not tangible, you're almost seemingly unknowable? How does God, the creator of the heavens and the Earth, the spirit god, how does this spirit God communicate to you and communicate to me how He feels about us, His children, in a world, a material world, that has turned inward, and turned their back on God. And the answer to how in the world the spirit God communicates how much He loves this world and how much He loves you, is Chag HaMolad. It's Chag HaMolad.
Paul, who started off as a Messianic-hater, if you don't like Messianics, you should read what Paul wrote, he's with you, except, he actually arrested Messianics. Imagine having that much power. Wouldn't you like to... In fact, you've met some Messianics you'd like to have arrested, just because they're Messianics, right? The way they act. Anyway, the Apostle Paul had that power and then he became a Yeshua-follower. He was a pharisee, very educated, very bright guy. If you don't think he's bright, just read the letter he wrote to the Messianics in Rome. It's unbelievable. He's so smart.
And once he became a follower of Yeshua, he began to see the Jewish scriptures differently. And once he knew that God had sent Yeshua into the world, he realized that the whole Jewish scriptures, what we call the Old Testament, was like a cocoon. It was like God was birthing something brand new into the world, and the Old Testament was basically the story of how God did it. And so he has this 'a-ha' moment as a Yeshua-follower, where he recognizes, "Oh, my goodness, it's different." The story is different, there's a new phase, there was something unexpected. And so in a letter he writes to some Messianics living in a province of Rome, he says this, and it sets up what we're gonna talk about today. He writes this.
But when the fullness of time came, God sent out His Son, born of a woman and born under law—
He says, "But when the set time had fully come." In other words, when God had things exactly the way He wanted them, when God was ready, when enough history had gone by and God knew He could get the world's undivided attention. When an expanding empire, the empire of Rome, with its own that was exporting a language and a culture, and a civilization.
The Roman empire had their own great commission, they really did. The great commission of Rome was to Romanize and civilize the world, Romanize and civilize the world. They had a seaport system, a highway system. There was peace in a region in parts of the world there had never been peace, when God got to that part of history, where things were just the way He needed them to be.
And in addition to that, there was a failed temple system back in Jerusalem, where commerce became more important than morality, where corruption had replaced compassion, a temple system where they believed God was important but they weren't so sure the people that were important to God were all that important.
Cleanliness was more important than compassion. An empire built on violence. A temple system built on corruption. When God had things just the way He wanted them, Paul says, "He took His next step. But when the set time had fully come... " Let's go to that next verse. "When the set time had fully come, God sent His son." When we got to that place in history where He knew, and this is so important, that the story would not be forgotten. It wouldn't slip through the cracks of history. There wouldn't be so much going on that what happened in this corner of what we would call modern-day Israel, that somehow it would happen in such a way that the world would know it happened, it would be documented and declared all over the world.
Empire/Temple
But when the fullness of time came, God sent out His Son, born of a woman and born under law—
When the set time had fully come, God sent His son, but here's the question we're gonna wrestle with today, because this is the Chag HaMolad question. Why? Why did God have to send somebody? Why did God have to send a son? And why did God cram Himself into a body? Why God in a body? Why not just send us a messenger? Why not just send us another messenger? But it gets even more complicated.
But when the fullness of time came, God sent out His Son, born of a woman and born under law—
When the said time had fully come, God sent His son, born of a woman, born under the law. So now the question is not just why God in a body, but why God in a baby body? Why show up like all the rest of us, as one of us? And not as a law unto Himself, but He comes into this world as a baby under the law. He doesn't walk onto the pages of history and say, "Now that I'm here, everything's different." He was born under the law, accountable to the law. And then the Apostle Paul tells us as he's looking back, he's seeing his own scripture, his own history, everything he had been taught as a young boy suddenly he sees it different. And he says, "Now I realize what was going on."
to free those under law, so we might receive adoption as sons.
When the time was fully set, God sent His son, born of a woman, born under the law with a very specific purpose, to... Or in order that... So why did God send Yeshua? Why did God need Chag HaMolad? It was to do what laws and regulations could not do. It was to do what judges and prophets could not do. It was to do what exile and punishment could not do. It was to do what even sacred text could not accomplish. God was ready to do something personal, so God had to do something relational. God wanted to do something for you personally and a message or a messenger wouldn't get it done. He wanted to do something personal, so God needed to do something relational, and in order to get it done, God needed Chag HaMolad. To redeem those under the law that we might be received, that we might receive adoption to sonship, that God wanted to move not simply nations and tribes and groups of people, but move individual people into a personal relationship with Himself. And so at Chag HaMolad,
God took the first step to remove all the obstacles of unrestricted fellowship with God.
That all the barriers, all the boundaries would be removed.
This was personal, so He had to come. Think about it.
It was gonna be personal, so God had to come, in person. Think about it. How would we know? How would we know where we stood with God if God had not come to stand with us? How would we know where we stood with God if God had not come to stand with us?
Think about this.
How would you know where you stood with God if God had not come to stand with you?
A message wouldn't get it done. Another letter wouldn't get it done. Another prophet wouldn't get it done. Another miracle wouldn't get it done. So at just the right time, God staged a demonstration, because we know and God knows and we know because God knows, actions speak louder than words, even words written on a page. It had to be a demonstration that would be documented...
Again, going back to what I said a minute ago. It had to be a demonstration in history, on planet Earth, that could be documented in such a way that for hundreds and hundreds and thousands of years people would know about it. Now think about this. This is unbelievable. In fact, if you're a skeptic or you're not a Messianic or you've put the whole thing off or it just seems like fairy tales to you, I just don't want you to miss the gravity of the history of the story of Chag HaMolad, that 4,000 years ago, God promised he would do something through the line of Abraham, 2,000 years later, Yeshua is born, and don't miss this, and 2,000 years after Yeshua is born, we're still talking about it.
Now, I want you to think about it all while you can, because you don't know. Imagine or try to imagine all the things that have happened in history for the last 2,000 years, most of which you know nothing about. You can't name the names, you can't name the dates, you can't give us the details. Many important significant things have happened in history over the past 2,000 years, that weren't even written down, that weren't even recorded, that just went away.
And yet think of it, the birth of a Jewish baby in the armpit of the Roman empire became a household name. When the set time had come, when the time was perfect, when God knew it would not slip through the cracks of history, He sent His son into this world born of a woman, to redeem those under the law so that we might experience sonship, adoption into the family of God. It had to be a demonstration that would be documented. So the Apostle Paul, when he's writing his complicated letter to the Messianics that lived in Rome, imagine Messianics living in Rome. In fact, again, the fact that there were Messianics in Rome spoke to the fact that Yeshua had risen from the dead.
Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people within just a few years had embraced Yeshua as their savior living under the Emperor Nero. So he writes a letter to the Messianics in Rome, and here's what he says,
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Messiah died for us.
"But God... " And here's our word, but God demonstrates or God demonstrated. But God demonstrates, He showed us, He acted it out. He didn't just tell us. But God demonstrates, and what does He demonstrate? His own love for us in this. And this was that thing that the prophets hinted at. This was the thing that had been foretold many, many years ago. This was the thing that the sacred texts foreshadowed. But this was the thing that, in Yeshua, God demonstrated and documented for the entire world. But God demonstrates His own love for us in this. While we were still sinners, Messiah died for us.
Now this is an amazing statement, and let me tell you why. Because when the Apostle Paul wrote this, because it's in the present tense, "While we were still sinners," we read that and go, "Wait a minute, Yeshua died a long time ago before I was sinning."
But when Paul wrote this, it dawned on him. This was personal for him, "While I was still sinning. While I was still resisting, before I even knew God had sent His son into this world, while I was still sinning, Messiah died for me." This had to have been overwhelming to the Apostle Paul, the Apostle Paul who went on a personal mission to get rid of the church, to arrest Messianics, to put Messianics to death. And he's thinking to himself, "God knew that's what I would do. God knew my passion. God knew that I would be a one-man wrecking machine when it came to arresting Messianics and having Messianics stoned and put to death. God knew what I was going to do, and while I was still a sinner, while that was still in my heart, as a Jewish man, Messiah died for me."
But Yeshua's death was a demonstration, a demonstration of how much He was for us.
But this brings us to another question, and this is a question perhaps you've asked, and weren't sure, you could ask this out loud. In fact, you may have been a Messianic a long time, and if someone were to ask you this question, you would say, "I'm not sure." Or perhaps you're not a Messianic, and this is the reason you're not a Messianic, because no one's ever answered this question for you. So I want you to listen. In fact, if you're shopping at home while you're listening, I need you to put that away and just listen for a second.
And if you're over in the West Auditorium, if you're looking at the screen and wondering, "How can I fit one of those into my basement?" I just need you to quit doing that. Wherever you are, I just don't want you to miss this next part.
Why in the world did Yeshua have to die?
It's confusing enough that God crammed Himself into a baby body, but why did He have to die? Why such a violent and public demonstration? Why the blood, the gore, the crown of thorns? Why was He beaten? Why did He have to bleed to death publicly? Come on. You've thought of this.
Why couldn't Yeshua just pronounce everybody forgiven?
Couldn't He get them all on the hillside and say, "Okay, before I go, one last thing. Everyone is forgiven. Heads up, I'm gonna talk to Dad, and Dad wants me tell you, 'Everybody is forgiven. All of your sins are forgiven. You can have eternal life. You can go to heaven when you die. Spread the good news. Everyone's forgiven. Gotta go.'"
Why didn't He just do that? A couple of reasons. First, nobody would have believed Him. In fact, in the Gospels, every once in a while, Yeshua would perform a miracle and heal somebody. He'd say, "Oh, yeah, and by the way, your sins are forgiven as well."
And the religious leaders would freak out, not because He healed somebody, that's what they should have freaked out about. They'd freak out because He says, "Your sins are forgiven." And they would say to Him what any of us would have said, "Wait a minute. You can't forgive sins. You can forgive someone who's sinned against you. But you can't say to someone, 'Oh, all of your sins against whoever you sinned against are forgiven, and all of your sins that you sinned against God are forgiven.' No mere mortal can pronounce anyone else's sins are forgiven. It's impossible to do. You can't forgive sins."
So if Yeshua had simply said, "Hey, I just wanna announce that everyone's sins are forgiven," no one would have believed Him. They didn't believe Him when He said it. No one would have taken Him seriously, and His words would have never survived the first century, because only a crazy man would claim to be able to forgive other people's sins against other people.
But more importantly, and this is the part I don't want you to miss, more importantly, here's the reason Yeshua had to die, here's the reason Yeshua had to come in a baby body, here's the reason God sent His son into the world to grow up among us, as one of us, and to die such a violent death, and demonstrate it, His death, public death in front of so many people, and for it to be documented to the point we are still talking about it today. Here's why. Because God is the author of life. God is the author of your life. And we're still trying to figure out life. Life is sophisticated. Life is complicated. Your cells are smarter than your brain. Your body is doing things you don't even understand. In fact, for generations and generations and generations, our bodies were doing things we didn't even... We didn't even understand germs for tens of hundreds of thousands of years, right? We're just figuring out the way the body works. God is the author of life. He is the author of your life.
And here's what I don't want you to miss, because this is the message of Chag HaMolad. When you dishonor the source of life, you dishonor God.
To dishonor the source of life is an expression of ingratitude, deserving the forfeiture of life.
Don't miss this. To dishonor the source of life is an expression of ingratitude, deserving the forfeiture of life. In other words, you owe, and I owe, we owe God our lives, and our disregard for God forfeited our right to life. You see, every single day of your life, every single day of my life, we should get up and just say, "God, thank you for my life. Yes. Whatever the question is, yes. How in the world would I say no to God who gave me life? How in the world could I resist God who gave me life? How in the world could I resist the will of God who gave me the opportunity to live?" And yet, we do it every single day.
And what's so crazy about it is you did not choose your birth and you probably will not choose the day you leave this planet, but somehow, within those miraculous book ends, where we've been given life, we shake our fist at God. And we say we're going to do what we wanna do, the way that we wanna do it. And we deserve to lose the greatest gift God ever gave us: The gift of life.
We owe a debt to the giver of life that we cannot pay. We owe Him our lives. But God demonstrates.
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Messiah died for us.
But God demonstrates His own love for us that while we... And this, that while we were still sinners, Messiah died in our place, Messiah died for us. We deserve to give up the thing most valuable to us because we have been so disrespectful of the giver of life.
Now, this next part is just mind-boggling to me, you may talk amongst yourselves, I just think this is incredible. After the resurrection, after Yeshua rose from the dead, He sends His guys to Jerusalem and the men and women to Jerusalem, He says, "You stay there and you'll know when you're ready." And a few weeks later, a few days later, they come into the very streets of Jerusalem where Yeshua has been arrested, dragged through the streets, dragged outside the city and crucified. And they're in the company of and they're in the presence of the very people who had Yeshua arrested and crucified.
So, there's Peter, Andrew, and James and John and all the rest of the guys and they step into the streets of Jerusalem after the resurrection and here is what they said to the very people who had Yeshua arrested and crucified. You ready for this?
But you rejected the Holy and Righteous One and asked for a murderer to be granted to you.
They look... They're eyeball-to-eyeball with the people who had Him arrested and they say, "You disowned the holy and righteous one," talking about Yeshua. "And you ask that a murderer be released to you. When Yeshua was on trial, Pilate offered to give Yeshua back to you. Pilate offered to spare Yeshua' life and you are so corrupt, you chose a murderer, you chose another prisoner, you chose Barabbas, someone who had taken life over the man who came to give life." And they were stunned. But, this next line was the show- stopper. Are you ready for this? You ready for this? I gotta know if you're... I'm not even gonna show you if you're not ready for this. This is so... Are you ready for this?
Yeah.
You killed the Author of life—the One God raised from the dead! We are witnesses of it.
Okay. You ready at home? This is unbelievable. They stare into the eyeballs of the men and women who had Yeshua arrested and they say to them, "You killed the author of life." Implication, God allowed you to kill the author of life. The author of life gave away His life. You cannot take the life of the author of life. You killed the author of life, but God raised Him from the dead and we are witnesses of this, that God sent His son into this world in a baby body to grow up like us and among us so that He could give what we would not and could not give and what we owed, our lives to the author of and the giver of life. Yeshua' death... Don't miss this,
Yeshua' death demonstrated the magnitude of our ingratitude,
the severity of our offense. We disregarded the author of life. We abused the supplier. We deserve to lose the supply.
Yeshua' death demonstrated the magnitude of our ingratitude and His death demonstrated the magnitude of His love for us.
Now, this is so important, okay, don't miss this.
You cannot demonstrate love without sacrifice. Love must be shown to be known, isn't that right? Words are cheap, I love you, I love you, I love you, yeah, yeah, you're right. Show me. Love must be shown to be known. Love must be shown to be known. Love must be shown to be known. You cannot demonstrate love without a sacrifice. So how does God, this is why this is so important. How does God, who claims to love the world, how does God that has put... He has made you in His image. How does God demonstrate, at a personal level, His love for you? The only way, the only way was to make a sacrifice that you would know about, because you can't demonstrate love without a sacrifice, and you can't demonstrate great love without a great sacrifice. You'll never know how much someone really cares for you until you see what they're willing to sacrifice for you. God demonstrated His great love for you through a great and necessary sacrifice.
For rarely will anyone die for a righteous man—though perhaps for a good man someone might even dare to die.
You see, very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person. Though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die, you might be willing to give up your life for someone you love or someone who's good or someone who's of great value to society.
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Messiah died for us.
But God, but God, but God demonstrates His own love for us in this, while we were still sinners, Messiah died for us. See, God needed Chag HaMolad. God needed Chag HaMolad to demonstrate and document His love for this rebel race. Otherwise, how would we have ever known? So, when the set time had fully come, when everyone had given up hope, when nobody was looking for it, when the set time had fully come, when the Roman empire had laid the groundwork for the message to be distributed, when the temple system had fallen in and had sort of... Was so corrupted that it was hard to even take seriously and people thought, "If that's what God is like, there is no more God." When the set time had fully come, a Jewish carpenter discovers his fiancee is pregnant and as he's trying to figure out, "What in the world do I do about this? And what in the world do I do with her? And do I shame her? Do I protect her? Do I lie? Do I marry her? Do I tell her mother? What in the world do I do about this?"
But while he considered these things, behold, an angel of Adonai appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Miriam as your wife, for the Child conceived in her is from the Ruach ha-Kodesh.
The angel of the Lord spoke to Joseph, that bewildered Jewish carpenter, and he said this, "Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife. Because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. God is on the move.
She will give birth to a son; and you shall call His name Yeshua, for He will save His people from their sins.”
Now all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by Adonai through the prophet, saying,
“Behold, the virgin shall conceive and give birth to a son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,” which means “God with us.” When Joseph woke up from his sleep, he did as the angel of Adonai commanded him and took Miriam as his wife.
Joseph, the set time has fully come. She will give birth to a son and you are to give Him the name Yeshua. Why? Because he will save his people from their sins." And all of this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet, the Prophet Isaiah. And then he quotes the prophet, "The Virgin will conceive and give birth to a son and they will call him," this is the best part, isn't it? This is why you're here. This is why you're watching. This is it. This is it. This goes from big God out there to something so personal, so intimate, stirred by grace. "The Virgin will conceive and give birth to a son and they will call him Emmanuel, which means 'God with us'." So God staged a demonstration and documented it so the world would know, so that 2,000 years later we would know. It didn't slip through the cracks of history. So the world would know. Because He knew this: We needed to see it to believe it.
We needed to know the story, to know the story was about us. And it wasn't enough to say it, He had to send His son to pay the price that we owed in such a way that once we embraced the truth of the story and once we embraced who Yeshua was, we would never, ever, ever, ever doubt God's love for us.
He had to be with us so that we could know He was for us. We needed a demonstration, and so God, God needed Chag HaMolad.
Now, as it turns out, someone else did as well. And that's where we're gonna pick it up next week.
But before we go, I cannot imagine ending a message like this without giving someone an opportunity to respond.
Because for somebody listening today, I would guess this is the first time it clicked for you. And salvation is such a strange thing. You hear it a thousand times, you read the story a thousand times, you can go to church a hundred times and then one day you're reading, you're listening, it's a song,
it's something on the radio, it's something somebody says, maybe something I said today and it's like, "A-ha, I get it." Suddenly the dots connected for me and I prayed like crazy before today that for somebody, this would be the day the dots connect for you.
“For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.
And John, who knew Yeshua, explained it best. He said, "For God so loved the world that He gave His only son that whoever believes in, not just believes, but believes in Him, would not perish but would be given the life they don't deserve." And the little phrase 'believe in' really means trust. And the way we illustrate it here is this is trust. Trust isn't a magic word. Belief isn't a magic word. There's not a spiritual version of trust and a secular version of trust. There's nothing mystical or magical about it. Trusting in God and trusting in Yeshua means just... It's just like you trust in anything. Just like I'm trusting this stool with my weight. To become a follower of Yeshua is simply to say, "God, I believe that Yeshua was your son that you sent into this world to die for my sins, and I'm placing all of my weight on His death for my sin to be the payment for my sin. I'm placing all of my trust in the fact that His death on the cross paid for all of my sin." And in that moment, according to the Scriptures, and in that moment, according to what Yeshua taught and the Apostle Paul would elaborate on later, in that moment, you become a child of God.
What happens to you is what Paul described. You are, in that moment, adopted into the family of God, because you have received freely what God has offered freely, the very thing you could never manufacture on your own. So if there's never been a time in your life where you have made that exchange with God, if there's... Maybe you did it as a child but everybody was doing it and everybody went forth, everybody got baptized and everybody got a cake afterwards and it's like in... But now you're an adult and you've wondered and you've wondered and you've had questions, if today was the first time, perhaps, you understood why Yeshua had to die for you, I wanna invite you to pray a prayer with me, and this prayer doesn't make you a Messianic. The prayer is simply how we express the fact that we're transferring our trust from our own goodness to what God through Messiah has done for us.
So I would love for everybody at Beth El Shalom and even as you're watching online, would you close your eyes and maybe bow your head in reverence and close your eyes and you can pray this prayer in your heart, you can pray it out loud, you can change the words, you can whisper it. Would you say,
“To see the face of my King is my sole desire. Yeshua, I make you the King of my life today. I fear none but You; I revere Your Name alone. I turn my heart and eyes from evil things today. Yeshua, I trust in You for my salvation. In Your Name, Amen!”
Thank you. We'll see you next week for part three of "Who needs Chag HaMolad?" Have a great week.