The Wednesday Word ~ 20 December, 2023 A.D.
Why Jesus Came
Why did Christ Jesus come to earth? Why indeed? Many answers have been given to that most excellent of questions. Some, for example, say that Jesus came to give us the illustration of a Perfect Man. Some say, on the other hand, He came to show us how we should live. Others consider Him the greatest teacher of all time and say He came to teach us right from wrong. There are many more theories about why He came but to find the answer to this question we should let Jesus speak for Himself.
In Luke 19:10, in a simple sentence of 15 words, He declares one of His reasons for coming saying, “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost.” (Luke 19:10). Let’s unpack that statement. “.. the Son of man came.”… The Son of Man is a term mostly used by our Lord to denote His humanity. Yet when we examine Him, we discover that before He came to earth, He was God. In Christ, God came to earth and became human (John 1:1; John 1:14). Think of it, the infinite becomes finite, the eternal invades time. God has become human but in doing so He didn’t cease to be God. As it has been said before,“He came from the light into the darkness.He came from splendour into squalor.He came from purity into a world of sin.But still He came!” Who came? … It was He who was and is God. It was not an angel or some sort of extraterrestrial being who came. God Himself entered the human race in the form of a tiny baby (John 1:14). God had become human.
A central truth of our faith is that God became human but didn’t cease to be God. It is at this point we part company with Islam, Judaism, Mormonism and any of the other ‘isms’ which reject the notion that Jesus was God in human flesh. At the heart of our Christian faith is the specific truth that God has come to us in the person of the Lord Jesus. We now, in human terms, know what God is like for the Son of Man has made Him plain to us. But why did He come? Listen again to Jesus, “The Son of Man came to seek and to save.” Jesus came to seek and save. What an insight into the heart of God. Jesus is like the woman who lost a coin and searched her house until she found it.
He is like the man who lost a sheep and went into the wilderness to recover it. He is like the Father who welcomed his Prodigal Son home again. Jesus came to seek and save.He came seeking the wee man up a tree, He came seeking guilty adulterers. He came seeking blind beggars and lepers.He came seeking fishermen, radicals, physicians and tax collectors. He came seeking people at the top of the heap, and people at the bottom. He came seeking all manner of people. What a revelation of the heart of God. Then the rest of the verse says, “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost.” What does it mean to be lost? We are given one definition of lostness in Isaiah 53, where we read, “All we like sheep have gone astray we have turned every one to his own way.” ‘Lost' - It means that we by nature have gone astray. Before He found us we were trying to avoid Him. The truth is, no one had to teach us how to run away from God. We were in hiding from Him. If Christ had not come for us, we would never have come to Him. We didn’t even know we were lost until the Lord came seeking us (Romans 3:11). We were lost until Jesus found us.
And that’s the Gospel Truth!
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