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[00:00:00] Good afternoon, St. Paul Lutheran Church. It's Pastor Wolfmuller here. And this is the Christmas Eve Drive to Church special edition. I think it's a 52nd edition of Sunday Drive to Church. We started Epiphany last year. Anyhow, I was looking over all of the lessons this morning and marveling in them. What a glorious truth we have today as we celebrate the 2026th birthday of our Lord Jesus Christ. The birth of God. And this mystery is captured so profoundly in the Scriptures. Now we'll hear the Luke text, which gives us the birth of our Lord and especially the preaching of the shepherds. And I think that's what the sermon will be on this afternoon. You can't not preach on this. Glory to God in the highest and peace to his people on earth. It's just the most fantastic, wonderful, glorious, peace giving, life, giving joy giving text, perhaps in the whole of the Gospels. It's absolutely tremendous, tremendous. But as I was looking through the other texts, it seems like there's a little bit to unfold in some of the Old Testament passages. So I thought, because that's what the Sunday Drive to Church podcast is for, we might talk about the texts and get you primed and ready, because when they're coming at you in church, they're coming pretty fast. And you don't have a lot of time to really think about what's going on. I mean, it's already you're hearing this reading from Genesis chapter three. Why Genesis three? What is going on here? And then all of a sudden praying and singing and then whoomp onto Isaiah chapter nine and whoomp. So anyway, that's what we're going to do to celebrate in the joy and the peace and the kindness of our Lord. We'll think about these Old Testament texts on the way to church and hopefully that'll be helpful for you. But I'm flipping over to. To the prayer and let's do this. Let's pray this to get started. Oh, God, you make this most holy night to shine with the brightness of the true light. Grant that we who have known the mysteries of that light on earth may also come to the fullness of his joys in heaven through the same Jesus Christ, your son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
[00:02:22] So the Old Testament, the first. There's, I think one such a bulletin again. Jonathan has done one, two, three.
[00:02:30] Three. One, Two. Yeah, three.
[00:02:34] There's gotta be more than one. Two, three. I'm missing one. Four Old Testament Lessons.
[00:02:43] Hold on a minute.
[00:02:47] All right. I knew there was four. Two pages are stuck together. We have four Old Testament lessons and then two New Testament Gospel lessons. The first is Genesis, chapter three. And it's. This is so important and so foundational. There's a way. I was thinking about it this morning, about how Christmas is a cosmic event. And it's from the very, very beginning that it's promised the seed of the woman. But this comes, astonishingly in the garden when the Lord comes and finds Adam and Eve hiding in their fig leaves, hiding in the bushes. And he speaks first to Adam, who told you you were naked? Have you eaten the tree? The woman you gave me, she gave it to me. So then the Lord turns to the woman, what have you done? The serpent deceived me. And then the Lord turns to the devil, the serpent in the garden. And he doesn't ask him any questions, what have you done? Where are you? He just starts preaching to the devil. And he preaches the devil his coming condemnation, his coming destruction. I'm going to put enmity between you and the woman and your seed and her seed. That should be understood, capital S seed. That's the promise of the child. And here, this promises given in such a beautiful way that this seed will be able to do what Adam and Eve could not do. Adam and Eve could resist the devil. I mean, they could have maybe tried harder, but they had the authority to resist the devil, but not to overthrow the devil. That belongs to God alone. But this seed, this baby, will have devil overthrowing power.
[00:04:18] So that this will be the divine man, the God man who will have a birth and he'll have a heel that will crush the serpent and be crushed by the serpent. It's such a marvelous promise here. The old church called it the proto evangelion, the first gospel promise, Genesis 3:15. The fountain from which all the other promises in the Old Testament flow. The promise of the seed of the woman who would be crushed and in his being crushed would crush the devil and his seed. Sin and death and win redemption and peace between God and man. It's all there in this beautiful promise. And we reflect on it with wonder, because we knew that the punishment for eating the fruit would be the death of humanity. On the day that you eat of it, surely you will die. But now in this promise, we see that on the day that they ate of it, God also will die.
[00:05:15] Because for this reason, Christ came into the world to bear our sins and carry our sorrows and be our Savior and to take our place under God's wrath and to suffer and die for us. It's an amazing, amazing promise. So that the Old Testament. When John sees a vision of the Old Testament, the entirety of the Old Testament in Revelation 12, he says there is a woman with child.
[00:05:41] This is Israel in the Old Testament is the seed waiting to be born. The picture of the pregnant woman who's ready to give birth to the Messiah. And that happens. It's all reduced down to one with Mary. And then here comes Jesus. Beautiful. We turn next to Isaiah 9 and Isaiah 11.
[00:06:02] Remember, we also have Isaiah 7. I think we'll have that tomorrow or sometime soon. These are the Christmas passages of Isaiah. You remember this, that the old church fathers used to call Isaiah the fifth Gospel because it has so much of the story of Jesus and the early parts of Isaiah. Especially here in Isaiah 7, 9 and 11, we have all these Christmas promises.
[00:06:28] And then when we get later, we have the Advent promises. That's Isaiah 40, 41, 42, the coming of the comforter. And then even later we have the Good Friday promises. Isaiah 53, he will carry our sins. And we considered him stricken by God and smitten. The suffering servant passages. And then even later in Isaiah, we have the new heaven and new earth promises.
[00:06:52] So there's so many beautiful. I remember one time I was listening to a symposium paper at. When I was a seminarian. Boy, oh boy, back in the Dark Ages. And there was someone giving a paper and they said, here's the gospel in Isaiah. And they just quoted passages from Isaiah. And it went all the way through the conception of Jesus, the birth of Jesus, the teaching of Jesus, the miracles of Jesus, the suffering of Jesus, the death of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, the establishment of the kingdom of God. It was absolutely beautiful. There's so much there. Well, here we're in the early Christmas sections. We're going to hear from Isaiah 9 and Isaiah 11. So first from 9. And let's just not miss the paradox. That's one of the things that all the readings tonight and all the hymns are going to force these two things together.
[00:07:44] That here is eternity and here is time.
[00:07:49] Here is the never started, always was.
[00:07:55] Who has a birthday.
[00:07:58] Here is God who is a man. It's an amazing thing. It says to us a son is born. To us sorry for to us a child is born. To us a son is giving and you'll call his name. Wonderful counselor. Mighty God, Everlasting Father.
[00:08:16] So here is the birthday of a child whose name is everlasting Father.
[00:08:23] Do you see the marvelous wonder of this.
[00:08:28] It's captured in these hymns that talk about how Jesus is being the one who holds the universe is being held in the hands of his Mother.
[00:08:38] That this infinite in this very, very finite, this absolutely strong in the very, very weak, this mystery of the Incarnation. We reflect on this and I don't know if we should number the names 4 or 7.
[00:08:59] Normally in the text it says wonderful counselor, 1, mighty God, 2, everlasting father, 3, prince of peace, 4. But my old professor used to say that we should put commas between all of them. So you have seven, wonderful, his name. He has seven names. Number one, Wonderful number two, Counselor, Number three, Mighty Number four, God. Number five, Everlasting Number six, Father. Number seven, Prince of Peace.
[00:09:29] And that peace gets emphasized because of the increase of his government and his peace, there will be no end. That means that the kingdom that Jesus establishes will grow and grow and grow until it pushes out all that the devil wrought in the garden. All darkness and sin and suffering and sorrow.
[00:09:49] That's the hope that we have for everlasting life. It says he'll sit on the throne of David. So thinking about this, this is Isaiah. So Isaiah is the prophet of the destruction of the north. He's in Jerusalem when the north is being besieged. And so that's around 7, 22 or so and a little bit after. So the promise that came to King David was probably in the year 1006 or 1002 or something. So we're looking at about 280 years later that Isaiah is preaching and reaffirming this promise from Second Samuel, Chapter 7, that this seed of the woman, seed of Noah, seed of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Judah, seed of David, that this one is on the way. And he will establish and uphold this kingdom with justice and with righteousness and peace. He is the Prince of peace. How beautiful that he's called Jesus here, is called God so that God is born.
[00:10:57] Just that mystery is enough to spend eternity thinking about. Oi. Then we're on to Isaiah, chapter 11.
[00:11:05] Is this great shoot from the stump of Jesse, this famous passage? So this is also referring to this messianic king from the line of David. Remember, Jesse is David's father and it calls the tree of. This is David's family tree. It's cut down so that this is this way that the prophets would do this amazing thing. The people would be boasting falsely in the promises of God. They were misusing the gospel to continue to sin.
[00:11:39] We can see this too, in our own lives when we start to use the gospel as an excuse for sin and say, oh, the Lord will forgive me so I can do that. Or the Lord will look away, or the Lord is nice so he doesn't bother with this stuff. And we use the Gospel as an excuse for sin. That's what the people in the Old Testament were doing. They're saying, oh well, the Messiah has to come in Jerusalem, so the Lord won't, so Jerusalem won't be destroyed. There's all these promises the Lord has to keep so we don't have to worry about living a life of repentance and faith and so forth. And the Lord says, hey, I can cut down this tree and still make a branch come from the stump. So when you hear that word stump of Jesse, this is not so good, especially if you're a king from the branch of King David. In fact, I think that's also what's happening in Isaiah 7, where it says a virgin will conceive and give birth to a son. Remember how the Lord went to King Ahaz and said, ask a sign. And he has this fake piety. I don't want to ask a sign from the Lord. And Isaiah says, the Lord himself will give you a sign. The virgin will conceive. And when that word, the virgin will conceive is a beautiful promise for us fulfilled in the Matthew, in the Christmas story, in the birth of Jesus. But look at what it does to Ahaz here. Here he is, the descendant of King David, thinking that it could be his child who will be the Messiah. And then the Lord says, nope, this Messiah is going to be from a virgin. In other words, you're not going to have anything to do with it. And so the Lord is cutting out Ahaz while still keeping his promise. And that's the stump promise here too. The Lord is cutting off the lineage of David, but still keeping his promise. So there's not a son of David on the throne in Jerusalem from the time of captivity in Babylon, 586, etc. On forward even to this day, when we get to in the time of Caesar, it's Herod on the throne, Herod the Great on the throne. It's not a son of David, it's Herod there. And yet the Lord is going to cause a branch to come up from the root.
[00:13:46] That's Jesus, the holy branch. So we can't miss the threat in that text along with the promise. And then the sevenfold gifts of the Holy Spirit are given to him, remembering Psalm 45, 6, 11, 6 and 7, that you will bear the Spirit in full measure. Here it says, and the Spirit of the Lord will rest upon him. So 1 spirit of the Lord, 2 spirit of wisdom, and 3 understanding, spirit of counsel. Four and five might the spirit of six knowledge and seven, the fear of the Lord and his delight.
[00:14:20] How amazing to know what Jesus delighted in and still delights in. His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. He will not judge with his eyes or decide dispute with his ears, but with righteous judgment he'll judge the poor. And this kingdom that he has with righteousness as his belt, and faithfulness as the belt of his loins, will be be an undoing of the violent nature of humanity.
[00:14:45] And in fact this peace will come so that. Listen to all this description. The wolf will dwell with the lamb, the leopard with the young goat. The calf and the lion will eat together the cow and the bear, the lion and the ox and the children and the snakes, so that the.
[00:15:07] So that the serpent who ravaged the world by his temptation in the garden is now no longer even a threat. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. There's three of the lords in this text. There's the spirit of the Lord, the fear of the Lord, and the knowledge of the Lord.
[00:15:32] And this is what Jesus comes to bring.
[00:15:35] Absolutely tremendous, this arrival of the kingdom of God. The fullness of God's rule, which was destroyed in the garden, is now restored in Christ by the forgiveness of sins.
[00:15:46] And then this wonderful promise from the fourth Old Testament verse, Micah, chapter 5. Micah was a contemporary of Isaiah, so about the same time, and he preaches this. But you, O Bethlehem, Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me, one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose origin is from. Of old, from ancient days. That ancient days is a biblical way of talking about eternity before the foundation of the world. So it says, all right, there's going to be a baby born in Bethlehem who is eternal.
[00:16:26] What?
[00:16:28] This is back to the same mystery of the two natures of Christ, his divine nature, which is eternal, and his human nature, which is celebrating tomorrow its 20, 26th birthday.
[00:16:42] And those two are united in the singular person, in the one person, Jesus Christ, our Lord. So that he is the. The theanthropos, that is the old Greek term that the fathers used for it, the God, man, in the unity of his person, he takes onto himself our flesh and blood, our humanity.
[00:17:05] It's Absolutely tremendous. So that he can have a birthday, and he can be also the ancient of days.
[00:17:12] Therefore they shall give him up to the time when she was in labor, has given birth, and the rest of his brothers shall return to the people of Israel. And he shall stand and shepherd his flock. I think that standing there in verse 4, he shall stand is a prophecy of the resurrection.
[00:17:26] So that Micah is seeing not only the birth of Jesus, but also his death and his resurrection. And he will shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God. And they shall dwell secure, and he will be great to the ends of the earth.
[00:17:41] I was reading last night in some commentary, I think I was reading in Edersheim. Yes, I was reading in Alfred Edersheim, Life and Times of Jesus Messiah. And he says, look, let's just pretend like Jesus isn't the Messiah. He certainly fulfilled all the promises of the Messiah and nobody else did. So either he is the expected Messiah, or there is no such thing as the expected Messiah. Because all the promises that God gave in the Old Testament, all the timelines have passed. It's too late for the Messiah to come if Jesus is not the Messiah.
[00:18:21] So that you really have one option. You can't still be waiting for the Messiah. It has to be either Jesus or none at all. But we have this confidence that it is Jesus. And this is one of the ways we have this confidence. Because he fulfills all these promises. He's born in Bethlehem, which is not something that.
[00:18:38] It's not something that Jesus arranged. Well, he did, but it's not something that we think a baby can arrange where you're born. Like, I always joke around how people ask if I'm the oldest. And I said, well, I wouldn't. Wouldn't be anything but the oldest.
[00:18:55] This is so dumb. As if you have a choice about who your parents are and where you're born and who your siblings are and all this sort of stuff. But here's the promise. He'll be born in Bethlehem, and he is. And almost miraculously. Well, it is miraculous that he's born in Bethlehem, because here's Joseph and Mary living in Nazareth until the very last moment.
[00:19:19] They arrive in Bethlehem on the day of his birth.
[00:19:25] They were camping out tonight. The day before, they were camping out somewhere along the way, probably down by Jericho or something like that.
[00:19:34] So that he.
[00:19:36] This is just in time that the Lord arranges for the holy family to arrive in Bethlehem for the time of his birth. Now, it's really interesting that this prophecy was known to be the prophecy of the birthplace of the Messiah.
[00:19:54] And it's not just because. So Bethlehem is the town of David, means city of bread. It's where David's family was from. So it's hometown of David. But David moves his home and capital to Jerusalem, up the street.
[00:20:09] But we have this prophecy that's not only from the house of David, but from the town of David, the Messiah will be born.
[00:20:15] This comes up in the visit of the wise men, which we'll have on Epiphany in a few weeks. And they come to Jerusalem because that would be the logical place to come and look for the king. And Herod's like, what do you mean, I'm king? He asked the scribes and Pharisees. They say, oh, the Micah text says Bethlehem. And they quote the text, but they in fact paraphrase the text and they change it because it says, you, O Bethlehem, Ephrathah, are too little to be among the clans of Judah. And then when you read it later in the Gospel of Matthew, that too little part is left out.
[00:20:54] I'll read in Matthew 2. 6. Thus it's written in the prophet. But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are not the least among the rulers of Judah. For out of you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel, so that that least in the clans becomes not the least of the clans. And why does it become not the least? Because of this promise in Micah. As soon as the Lord says to Bethlehem, you're gonna be the hometown of the Messiah. Now it is no longer the least. It's famous. It's like. I don't know, this is a bad example, but it's like Luckenbach. I mean, the least of the towns of the hill country. But not anymore, because it's made famous in the song. Well, so this is what happens with Bethlehem. I don't know if that's a good example or not.
[00:21:43] I sometimes should maybe not say the first thing that comes to my mind.
[00:21:48] But this is what's going on here with Bethlehem. It's now exalted because this is where the Messiah is going to be from. How beautiful. All right, there's our four Old Testament texts, and that's probably enough. Although, I mean, you have all these hymns, and I hope you'll take home your bulletin because we found some great new quotations to put in there for Christmas. There's one and there's one from Luther. There's one from John Chrysostom. There's going from Leo the great.
[00:22:17] I hope you'll take this home and use it as a devotional tool as well.
[00:22:23] For your family, for yourself. So there you go. Merry Christmas.
[00:22:29] Christmas Eve. Drive to church. Can't wait to join you in the Lord's church in a few minutes to sing his praises and rejoice in the. In the birthday of our God and our Savior, Jesus Christ. Merry Christmas.