A man with a mission

It’s Christmas, so guess whom I am going to speak about? Right first time - Moses.

Moses should not have survived babyhood. At that time, the King of the land required that all baby boys be put to death, but the wit of his mother saved him. Actually it was God’s providence that saved him because God had a mission for him. As a full-grown man, Moses was divinely commissioned to bring God’s own people out of a land of slavery and into the Promised Land. This Promised Land was their true home, it was to be a place of freedom, abundance and blessing.

Fast forward around 1400 years to another new-born baby who the king of the land wanted to kill. As with Moses, this boy’s parents, whose names were Mary and Joseph, managed, in the providence of God, to keep the infant from King Herod’s clutches. The name of the child in question was of course Jesus and, as with Moses, he was born to fulfil a divine mission. At first hearing, the mission sounds the same as the one given to Moses: to save God’s people from their slavery and bring them to a place of blessing.

In the nativity plays and carol services during the coming weeks, we will hear the words spoken to Joseph, ‘You will give him the name Jesus because he will save his people…’ (Jesus means Saviour). What sort of ‘saving’ is this? In the time of Moses it was very much a temporal salvation; the deliverance of the enslaved Hebrew people from the tyranny of the Egyptian Pharaoh. Jesus made it very clear however, that the salvation he had come to bring was in the realm of the spiritual. His mission was, and is, to free men and women from the shackles which prevent them from experiencing God’s many faceted blessings both in this life and the age to come.

The mission of Moses (to rescue the Hebrews out of Egypt and lead them to the Promised Land), is a foreshadowing of what God has planned for people like you and me. Bringing people from one geographical location to another is one thing. Freeing men’s souls is far more demanding and something which Moses, a mere man, couldn’t do. God had to send his one and only Son, and it is this that we remember at Christmas time.

Slaves don’t need too much persuasion to accept freedom when it is offered to them. Jesus tells us that we are all slaves in one way or another. He offers himself as our deliverer, to undo our shackles and bring us home to God.

#Christmas