Good Song…but Wrong Thinking
I couldn’t help but notice a line in the famous song, “Away in a Manger,” this week that I’ve never really paid attention to before. The third verse says,
The cattle are lowing
The poor baby wakes
But little Lord Jesus
No crying He makes
I have no problem believing that a cow may have awakened the Lord Jesus, but the, No crying He makes, is the line that takes it a bit too far for me.
Some have the idea that the Lord Jesus was not fully human. I admit that it is an impossibility in our minds to comprehend how Jesus could be both fully God and fully human at the same time, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t true.
But more than it being true, what did His humanness imply? I think the Scripture tells us enough. For one, the Bible gives us the miraculous birth of Jesus and all of the events surrounding it. Then we fast forward to a snapshot of Him as a pre-teen in the Temple amazing the teachers of Israel.
But after, Jesus lived such a normal, non-descript human life, that when He began to reveal Himself and start His ministry, everyone was shocked. Who did this uneducated nobody from a small no-account village think that He was? Nobody, from observing His life, suspected He was anything more than an average Jewish man.
We also see his humanity in his need for sleep. He was once so exhausted that He fell asleep in a boat in the middle of a terrible storm. We see his humanity in his hunger. We see his humanity in his tears. What does all of this mean though? It means that in His humanity, He had no supernatural advantages that He took advantage of. In fact, the Apostle Paul tells us in Philippians 2:5-8,
5 Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, 6 who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. 8 Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself…
Though He was equal with God, He didn’t exercise His supernatural rights. As a man, He embraced His humanness. Why would He do such a thing? He did this so He could relate to us. He did this so He could fully feel what we feel, which includes all of the limitations of being fully human.
What a wonderful savior we have who can relate to us, but even greater, who did not take any supernatural action against his attackers so that He could be the great atoning sacrifice for our sins.
So while I believe that it’s a very good possibility that the little Lord Jesus was woke up by a lowing cow, I certainly do not believe that He did not cry. The Christ-child was fully God, but He was also fully human, and the cry of a baby is God’s design to let mamma know her little one has a need.
Much love and Merry Christmas!
Wes LeFlore (918) 607-8489 or huskerwes1@gmail.com
