The Birth of a King (part 1): Who God Came For, and How He Came
The story of Jesus’ birth is pretty wild. It’s also a story about who God came for — and why that choice changes everything.
God. Coming to his creation in human form. Not as a man but as a baby. Born to a young girl that’s never seen intimacy and isn’t even married.
If I was writing the perfect story of God coming to save the world I’m pretty sure it couldn’t be more different than this one.
I’d have Jesus rolling through the sky like Superman. With super powers. Doing super things. Because he’s Jesus, right?!
But that’s not what we get.
Instead, we get shepherds. Angels. Magi. Gold.
And that’s been tickling away at my mind!
I wrote another post about the nativity recently, but something was still bothering me. Something was still gnawing away at me and I had to figure out what. And why.
So let’s start with the Shepherds.
Shepherds and a First-Century Problem
In a first Century world of power plays, positioning, and status, including shepherds into the birth of a king makes no sense.
They were nobodys. We’d probably call them losers.
It’s the job no-one wanted to do. It was manual labor. Dirty work. The bottom of the social ladder. And from a legal perspective, their testimony, the validity of what they saw (in general terms) wasn’t even considered reliable.
It’s kind of like a smash and grab at the side of a road. The police come, a guy in a suit walks up and says ‘I saw everything’, and then a homeless guy stands up and says “wait, he’s lying, that’s not what happened at all”.
Who are you going to believe?
The suit, right?
Well that homeless guy is the shepherds. They existed, and were real people, but no-one was buying what they were selling (other than meat for a lamb curry).
But you see that’s precisely the point.
God’s First Move Was Intentional
God wasn’t coming to save the guy in the suit. He was coming to save the homeless guy. Because no-one else even noticed him.
This very first act of entering the world was calculated with military precision.
Who God went to first, where he went, and how we arrived mattered. It really mattered.
He didn’t show up in a palace surrounded by the elites (although he came to save them too). He chose the social outcasts as some of the first folks to find out because he wanted to let them know that they mattered. That they were seen. That their voices would be heard.
And heard they were. Because we’re still talking about them 2000 years later.
Just like another shepherd no-one listened to when Goliath wanted to fight. It’s a subtle connection to King David from the Old Testament but boy is it there. Royalty came from a shepherd once before. Royalty is being announced to the shepherds once again.
A Kingdom for the People, Not the Gatekeepers
God’s kingdom wasn’t for the religious leaders. It was for the people.
God’s revelation wouldn’t be controlled or used for monetary and political gain any more, it was for everyone. For free.
God’s availability and access for his creation was changing, and while he used to engage with the priests through the Temple system, he announced the new system in the clearest possible way, by engaging with his people directly, and bypassing any intermediaries.
It’s entirely because they were outside the old system that the Shepherds were chosen, because there’s a second subtext taking place right here.
The Shepherd Prophecies
Ezekiel 34 is a prophecy connected to this day. God lays out his unhappiness at the rules of Israel (shepherds of his sheep, the people) and tells them that He’s stepping back in. Back into the role that was rightfully his.
King.
Ruler of Israel.
The way it was supposed to be before every wanted Saul so they could be like all the other nations.
Ezekiel tells us that God will set one shepherd over everyone (a foretelling of Jesus’ role), and that this shepherd will be in the lind of David (hence the genealogies in Matthew) and will be a prince, who leads with justice and establishes peace.
Watch Isaiah 40’s flow in the Greek version of the Old Testament (LXX). v.9 says “Behold your God” and 2 verses later we read he ‘Comes in power… as a shepherd he will shepherd his flock” (poimainó).
Ezekiel 34 is the same message - God himself will shepherd.
This is 2 of the major prophets prophesying exactly the same thing. One new Davidic shepherd is coming, God himself, and now the true Shepherd-King has arrived.
Need one more? Ok. Let’s look at Micah 2. It’s so good I’m quoting it here:
“But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans[a] of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.”
Therefore Israel will be abandoned until the time when she who is in labor bears a son, and the rest of his brothers return to join the Israelites. He will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God. And they will live securely, for then his greatness will reach to the ends of the earth.
This one starts as a prophecy of Jesus - Bethlehem, ruler of Israel, origins of old / ancient times (wow!) and the bam, here comes the same language. Again.
Shepherd.
Majesty.
Security.
Accessibility.
By announcing to shepherds the birth of this King, God’s saying “this prophecy of a new shepherd is being fulfilled. Today.”
Why? Because they’d understand. They’d make the connection. They’d feel the gravitas, because they were shepherds and knew what it meant to take care of their flocks.
Jesus would be one of them. Not literally. But prophetically.
Born in the City of David
Luke 2 tells us this was happening "In the city of David" (v. 11). Echoing back to the promise in 2 Samuel 7 that David's throne would be established forever.
Normally, when a king’s son is born, he’s born in the palace, in the place the king resides. Jesus is being born in the royal city, because he’s fulfilling that promise as that new King, whose throne actually would last forever. He’s not being born in the palace, though.
The Anti-Sign? A baby in a feeding trough
“This will be a sign (sēmeion): a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”
It seems really, really strange that the God of the Universe would roll into His creation in the most un-God like way imaginable.
We think in terms of power, status, recognition.
It’s not so much a sign but an anti-sign! Everything we’d imagine around a king’s birth (palace, throne, some kind of royal procession) is missing.
Instead we see total vulnerability. Humble poverty. Humility. A baby. Wrapped in a blanket and hanging where the animals eat and the God-Man born not to the elite in society, but to the poor.
It’s just so crazy to think he’d come this way. But actually, it’s not.
Because the New Testament repeatedly tells us about this upside down kingdom. Where the first shall be last and the last shall be first. Where the Savior of the world reaches down and washed the feet of his followers when it should be the other way round.
It’s this inversion that is at the very heart of the gospel:
Power arrives as weakness
Authority wears flesh
God makes himself interruptible
The shepherds may have expected a throne or a palace. But they sure didn't find one. Where they should have found independence, they found dependence. Where they should have found an all-knowing God, they found an un-knowing baby.
God is communicating another truth to us from the very beginning of His salvation plan. His victory isn’t coming through domination, it’s coming through love. Through a self-giving love. Which is why the cross and the resurrection make so much sense later on in the story.
This, is what we call the core of the doctrine of Incarnation - God becoming human, God emptying himself of divine privilege (Phil 2:5-8), God taking the form of a fragile, dependent, newborn baby, who didn’t even get a cool crib to sleep in but had to make do with an animal's feeding trough.
It’s the ultimate statement of God identifying with humanity, and especially with the poor.
The Virgin Birth (Luke 1)
Can’t ignore this one, because even today people have a hard time with a virgin giving birth to a child. But it’s there. It’s in the Old Testament:
Isaiah 7:14: "Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin (parthenos in Greek) will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel (God with us)." This is the prophetic bedrock for the Virgin Birth.
This is the prophetic bedrock for the Virgin Birth.
That’s why Matthew uses this exact same Greek word ("the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son." Matthew 1:23), connecting the famous prophecy of Isaiah to the baby we now know as Jesus.
This means that as the Shepherds went with haste and found Mary, Joseph and the baby, they became the first witnesses and then the first evangelists making known what had been told them.
This is crazy to think given they were the marginalized class.
