Now Jesus Christ was announced by the angels to the shepherds as the One who solves that sin problem. He solved it by His own death. He came to die for our sin. Our sin means that we, in our basic nature, are at odds with the God of the universe. And because we’re in opposition to the God of the universe, we’re at odds with all of the laws that govern the universe, all the moral laws that should provide for our well-being if we were obeying that God. And our sin has erected a great barrier between ourselves and God. And it was Jesus, the Son of God, who came to suffer and die in our place in order that that sin barrier might be removed, and that He might open up the possibility of new life and new opportunities for all who trust Him.
That’s wonderful good news. And it’s no wonder that with an announcement like that, the angels said to the shepherds, “I bring you good news of great joy that shall be to all the people,” because indeed it was good news.
Now secondly, this message of the angels was a joyful announcement because it had to do with the Messiah, that is, with the One who had been promised. That’s in the story, too, though somewhat disguised for us in our translations. It’s there in the word, “Christ.” We speak of Jesus Christ, and because we speak of Him that way, we tend to think that “Christ” is something like a last name. You have John Smith, Mary Jones, and Jesus Christ. That’s the way we think. Actually that word, “Christ,” is an English form of the Greek word, “Christos,” which is a translation of the Hebrew word for “Messiah.” Both terms refer to “one who is anointed by God for a special task.” It really means “the Anointed One.” So it’s not a last name, it’s a title. And it has to do with that One who had been promised in all of the Old Testament Scriptures and whose life is recounted in each of the gospels. It is this Messiah who had at last come to earth.
I think of some of those promises. They go way back in the Bible, back to the early chapters of Genesis. You recall that when our first parents, Adam and Eve, sinned, God appeared to pronounce judgment. In the midst of His words of judgment upon the serpent God said, “There is one coming who will crush your head, though you shall bruise his heel.” That was a prophecy of enmity between the people of God and the followers of Satan all down through world history, and the promise of One who should come and, eventually in God’s own time, destroy the works of Satan. Adam and Eve believed that, and so they became the first people on earth to look forward to that One who is the Savior.
The promise was repeated to Abraham. Abraham was led out of a pagan city, Ur of the Chaldees. And as God led him out, He promised that He was going to give him a new land and was going to make him a blessing. God said, “Through you, all the nations of the earth will be blessed.” One might have thought at that point that what God was referring to was somehow a blessing that Abraham himself could bring. But as God pointed out later in the unfolding of the story, the blessing to come from Abraham was not to come from Abraham himself, but from One who should be born in Abraham’s line, the Messiah.
Paul picks up on this later in the book of Galatians in the third chapter and says it was the seed (singular) of Abraham, not the nation as a whole, but that one anointed Messiah who should bring about the redemption that we all need.