Advent: a Season of Love

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Do you know how much God loves you?

This particular story of God’s love begins with this man, Octavian.

Octavius was born in 63 BC to a Roman senator and governor. But most important to our story, he had a rather famous great uncle: Julius Caesar.

In 47 BC, at the age of 16, Octavius risked his life to travel to Hispania (modern Spain) to fight alongside Caesar. This impressed Caesar, who had no male heir (that he would recognize, at least).

On March 15, 44 BC, a day known as the Ides of March, Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of Roman conspirators, and the Roman kingdom was thrown into disarray. Who would be ruler now that Caesar was dead, and he left no male heir?

To everyone’s great shock, Julius had made some shocking moves in his will: 1) he named Octavius as his adopted son; 2) he named Octavius as the heir to the kingdom, not Marc Antony. Being so young, Octavius agreed to share power with Marc Antony and Marcus Lepidus in an agreement called the Second Triumvirate.

But power-sharing agreements never last long, and after some years of political intrigue, including a war with Antony and Cleopatra, Octavian (as he was now called) became the undisputed ruler of the Roman kingdom.

I nearly forgot to to mention that on January 1, 42 BC, nearly two years after his death, the Roman Senate gave Julius Caesar the posthumous title “the Divine Julius.” They claimed he was a god. Octavian, as his adopted son, took on the title of Divi Filius, “son of the divine” or “son of god.”

And so it was in the year 27 BC, the Roman Senate conferred upon Gaius Octavius Caesar the title Augustus, “the majestic one.” And this is the same Caesar Augustus that Luke, the biographer of Jesus, mentions in chapter 2 verse 1 of his gospel.

Caesar Augustus would reign 41 years until his death in AD 14. During those 41 years, he ordered three censuses to be taken. And it so happened that one of these censuses occurred around 4 BC.

The citizen was required by Augustus to register in the town of their ancestry. This was his way of keeping tabs on everyone and finding out how much tax revenue he could expect. That’s why we find Joseph carrying his very pregnant, virgin wife on the approximately 100 mile journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem. I can assure you, it would take an order of the government to make a 9 month pregnant woman take any trip, much less 100 miles over 10 days on foot and riding a donkey.

That’s one of the things that amazes me about this story. God had foretold years ago by the prophet Micah that the Christ would be born in Bethlehem. And God, years before Gabriel would ever go to Mary, cranked into motion a series of events.

God altered history because He loves you.

By the way, Augustus is just a footnote in this story and in history.

The man who changed his name to Augustus, the majestic one, is just a footnote in the story of the truly majestic one.

The man who was literally worshiped as a son of the god, Julius, just a passing curiosity in the Son of God’s birth story.

I imagine at some point in history God musing to Himself, “I have to make sure my Son is born in Bethlehem. But the virgin I’ve chosen (& her husband) live in Nazareth. How can I get them to Bethlehem?

“When the fulness of time had come” (Gal 4:4). When time itself became so pregnant that the Christ couldn’t be denied any longer, He came. He came when He was supposed to come. He came where He was supposed to come.

Not the first time.

Covering Adam/Eve and the Protoevangelium

Grace for Noah

Call of Abram and promise of a child

Throughout Scripture God was altering history because He loved His people wanted to save them.

God’s still altering history because He loves you.

There was a young man in the 1960s who was a preacher’s kid. He didn’t understand why the gospel was important, & He didn’t understand God’s love for Him. He rebelled against his father’s teachings, joined the military, and nearly died in Vietnam. God was moving.

When he returned home, he was a changed man, but not for the better. He had become hardened by war. He decided to attend the only college in his hometown, and it happened to be a Christian college. There he met a God-fearing young lady, and they married. Though that was an unwise decision on her part, God was moving.

A year later they were expecting a little boy, and the pressures of life began to mount. Life was becoming very uncomfortable, but God was moving in his history.

The best job he could find was about an hour’s drive away, so he’d get in his car every day for two hours there and back again. One day he came across a radio preacher, and he began listening to this preacher daily. As he listened to this preacher day after day, the teachings of his father began to return to mind, and one day — SNAP! — the dam broke, and the love of God poured into him. He pulled his car over to the side of the road and gave his heart to Christ.

God altered history in order to alter this man’s history. But that’s not the only history God altered. You see, that man was my father. When God altered his history, he altered mine. Because God loved my father enough to move his little world’s events to pour out His love on him, my life — my eternity — is forever changed. And my wife’s and children’s.

How has God changed your history? How is God changing your family’s history? He’s doing it because He loves you.

What is your response to this great love?

G. K. Chesterton once said that the really great lesson of the story of “Beauty and the Beast” is that a thing must be loved before it is loveable. A person must be loved before that person can be loveable. Some of the most unlovely people I have known got that way because they thought that nobody loved them. The fact of the matter is that unless and until we feel ourselves loved, we cannot love. That’s not only a principle of theology but of psychology and sociology as well. Just as abused children grow up to abuse their children, loved children grow up to love their children. Loved persons are able to love. Unloved persons are not. Christianity says something startling. It says that God loves and accepts us “just as we are.” Therefore we can love and accept ourselves and in so doing, love and accept others (Donald B. Strobe, Collected Words, www.Sermons.com).

You can shut God’s love out. Keep Him at arm’s length.

You can let God’s love in.

Give Him My Heart