Sermon Tone Analysis

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.

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

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.

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."

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.