Many Christians have a mistaken idea about Christmas. They think that we are celebrating the time when the Almighty God became a man for us and for our salvation. That’s almost right, but it is not completely right. It is true that the Word did indeed become flesh for us, Immanuel, God with us. But God did not become a man.
Luke 2 6 While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, 7 and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.
If we want to be accurate, the Bible does not say that the Son of God became a man. It tells us that the Son of God was born as a baby and laid in a manger. The Babyhood of the Son of God. The legends told that some Greek gods took human form as adult human beings. But at Christmas the Son of God did not become a man. He became a baby. And there’s a difference.
Jim Packer wrote, “The divine Son became a Jew; the Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, unable to do more than lie and stare and wiggle and make noises, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. And there was no illusion or deception in this; the babyhood of the Son of God was a reality. The more you think of it the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the Incarnation.”
Isaiah prophesied, “The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel”—which means, “God with us.” (Matthew 1:23) Immanuel – God born as a human being. But not just as a human being, but as a tiny baby.
This was what the angel Gabriel had told Mary beforehand.
Luke 1 31 You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High.
The Son of God would become a human being by being born as a baby to his mother Mary. And so it unfolded.
Matthew 1 24 When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. 25 But he had no union with her until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus.
God became a human being. Just think about what God is like. And then think what that meant when God to enter this world as a tiny baby.
1. God is Omnipotent – all-powerful, Almighty. Born as a vulnerable helpless baby.
2. God is Omniscient – all-knowing. Yet the Son of God became a tiny baby, without speech or language – “the Word without a word.”
3. God is Omnipresent – everywhere all the time, yet Jesus was confined to one time and one place as a baby laid in a manger.
4. God is Eternal – outside space and beyond time, yet was born as a baby, limited to living out the span of a human life, a life which would be limited by death.
5. God is Holy – yet he entered the world polluted by human sin as a helpless baby, opening himself to be hurt by human greed and pride and selfishness and jealousy and hatred.
He came down to earth from heaven, Who is God and Lord of all,
And His shelter was a stable, And His cradle was a stall:
With the poor and meek and lowly Lived on earth our Saviour holy.
6. God is All-loving – God IS love and entered a world where true love is in very short supply, to live a life of love and sacrifice, starting as a helpless baby.
7. God is Transcendent. In every way God exceeds, goes beyond, rises above, excels over , surpasses ANYTHING we can begin to imagine.
Even if we ever do have a faint glimmering of what God is like, we can never describe it, because human language does not begin to have the words to describe the Divine! Human language is limited – and religious language has become devalued. Consider a word like “awesome”. It used to mean “awesome” – inspiring us to awe and wonder – now it just means mildly interesting. Especially in this age of media and trivia, language has been wasted. Words to describe the really big or really great have been trivialised. There are some words we could use but nobody knows what they mean any more. “Ineffable” means indescribable, inexpressible, beyond words, overwhelming. People have lost the language which used to be used to describe the indescribable. Some people attempt to make the deep things of God accessible to folk who are new to Christian things by only using words which everybody can understand. But that reduces the awesome God we are describing to our everyday human level. So I can say without fear of contradiction that, WHATEVER ideas you have about God, your God isn’t big enough! Your ideas about God aren’t great enough! God is infinitely beyond our knowing – beyond even our imagining.
Yet here is the miracle of Christmas. That indescribable, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, eternal, holy, loving, transcendent God was born as a tiny human baby. God with us! God into man cannot go – yet has gone!
Lo, within a manger lies He who built the starry skies,
He who throned in height sublime Sits amid the cherubim.
Our God, heaven cannot hold Him, Nor earth sustain,
Heaven and earth shall flee away When He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.
So let’s think a bit more about the Babyhood of the Son of God. However young an infant, or a toddler, or a child, or a teenager, or an adult in their twenties, Jesus was once exactly that age. And it can’t have been comfortable being born so many years BP, before Pampers. Everything all of us experienced growing up, from our earliest memories, Jesus also experienced. Even the teenage rebellion of disappearing on the way home from Jerusalem only to be found in the Temple, his Father’s house. Jesus had to grow up just like every human baby has to grow up.
There are many great joys in the privilege of being grandparents. We get to watch our grandchildren grow up stage by stage, usually without being overwhelmed by having to care for them moment by moment and day by day. Our granddaughter Ellie is four and three quarters and our grandson Mark is two and a quarter. We have had the joys watching them learning to feed themselves, learning to take their first steps, learning to talk, learning to play games, learning to build with duplo and lego, learning to draw and to read and to write and to do jigsaws. Even watching them learning to pick themselves up if they ever fall over. We can see how their vocabulary and their understanding and their sense of humour is growing day by day and week by week. And Jesus had to grow just as Ellie and Mark and all other children are growing.
For he is our childhood pattern. Day by day like us he grew.
He was little, weak and helpless. Tears and smiles like us he knew.
And he feeleth for our sadness. And he shareth in our gladness.
Luke sums up Jesus growing up to manhood in just one verse.
Luke 2 52 And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and men.
J.B.Phillips And as Jesus continued to grow in body and mind, he grew also in the love of God and of those who knew him.
The Babyhood of the Son of God. Jesus experienced all the joys and all the sorrows we did growing up. Just one example, something I have never thought about before – we know that Mary’s husband Joseph had died before Jesus began his public ministry, although he was still alive when they went to Jerusalem when Jesus was 12. We cannot be certain, but it is possible that Joseph died while Jesus was still a teenager or a young man. As he was growing up, Jesus had to experience and learn about grief. Not just at the cross but from a young age, Jesus was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
Jesus was fully God. But at the same time he was fully human. And Jesus was also a typical human being. He began his life as a refugee. He grew up poor, not rich. Jesus’s life was as precarious as anybody’s growing up in a rural community, living before electricity and running water and modern medicine. Jesus was one of a marginalised people – powerless, not powerful. He lived most of his life in obscurity in a back of beyond village nobody would have heard of.
v.1 HE walked where I walk, He stood where I stand, He felt what I feel, He understands.
He knows my frailty, Shared my humanity, Tempted in every way, Yet without sin.
God with us, so close to us. God with us, Immanuel!
v.2 One of a hated race, Stung by the prejudice, Suffering injustice, Yet He forgives.
Wept for my wasted years, Paid for my wickedness, He died in my place That I might live.
God with us, so close to us. God with us, Immanuel!
The Son of God became Immanuel, God with us. But Jesus would not enjoy any special protection in this cruel world. He would share in all its sufferings, the sufferings of the exploited, mistreated, ignored and marginalised people who have always made up the vast majority of the world ever since the fall. However hard our own lives may be, Jesus Christ the suffering servant lived a much more typical human life than any of us ever will.

In the third century Athanasius of Alexandria wrote this. “Christ became what we are so that He could make us what He is.” From the very first day of his birth, Jesus had to share all the misery and all the suffering of humanity so that at the end by His death on the cross he could redeem humanity. He shared our humanity so that we could share His divinity.
The Babyhood of Jesus. The Letter to the Hebrews tells us why it matters for us that Jesus should share all of our human experiences, even from birth through childhood and adolescence into adulthood.
Hebrews 2 17 For this reason he had to be made like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. 18 Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.
Hebrews 4 15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin. 16 Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.
Jesus has been tempted in every way as we are. The word temptation carries two related meanings. It means being tempted to sin but it also means facing a trial or a test of any kind. All through his infancy and childhood and teenage years, Jesus went through all the kinds of experiences which that word embraces. Temptations, trials, persecutions, tests of our faith, Jesus has faced all of these and come out victorious! Jesus is “not unable” to sympathise with our weaknesses. Jesus understands completely. Because when God became a human being in Jesus Christ, He shared all our experiences of life from that very first day as a tiny baby. Whatever our situation: He knows what it’s like! That is why Jesus is able to help us whenever we need his help.
6 Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.
The Message translation puts it this way.
“Now that we know what we have—Jesus, this great High Priest with ready access to God—let’s not let it slip through our fingers. We don’t have a priest who is out of touch with our reality. He’s been through weakness and testing, experienced it all—all but the sin. So let’s walk right up to him and get what he is so ready to give. Take the mercy, accept the help.”
Oswald Chambers wrote, “The tremendous revelation of Christianity is not the Fatherhood of God, but the Babyhood of God—God became the weakest thing in His own creation, and in flesh and blood He levered it back to where it was intended to be. No one helped Him; it was done absolutely by God manifest in human flesh. God has undertaken not only to repair the damage, but in Jesus Christ the human race is put in a better condition than when it was originally designed.” (in The Shadow of an Agony from the Quotable Oswald Chambers).
The Babyhood of the Son of God. The greatest surprise in the world remains that God chose to become a baby. We should never ever get over this surprise! The human life of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, did not begin as an adult when he started his public ministry. Jesus took 30 years to get to that point. The Son of God became a human being as a tiny baby. So today we rejoice as we celebrate the Babyhood of the Son of God. Bow down and worship – for this is your God!