📖 Jesus was born in a house

I. One of the beautiful reminders about Christmas is the reality that God cares.

We all know what it is like to question God, be angry with God, and wonder why God would allow some difficult thing(s) to happen.

But here’s what we know: whatever difficult thing you may be dealing with this Christmas season, you aren’t going through it because God doesn’t care.

Because if God didn’t care, he wouldn’t have come.

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II. Matthew begins and ends in the same way the Hebrew Bible does, and he does it on purpose.

In the Jewish ordering of the Old Testament, the final book is 2 Chronicles, not Malachi. Matthew, writing his Gospel to a Jewish-Christian audience, shapes his Gospel to echo that story.

Matthew opens his Gospel with a genealogy, just like Chronicles.

Chronicles traces Israel’s story from Adam. Matthew traces that story forward to Jesus, the Son of David. It is Matthew’s way of presenting Jesus as a new beginning and a new Genesis.

Matthew closes with the Great Commission, where Jesus declares his authority, sends his people to go, and promises his presence.

2 Chronicles ends the same way. King Cyrus declares his authority, calls God’s people to go up and rebuild the temple, and promises that the Lord will be with them.

Matthew begins and ends his Gospel with the beginning and ending of the whole Old Testament (Genesis to Chronicles), tying all of it together in the person of Christ, who is the beginning and the end, the fulfillment of all things promised by God.

Jesus is the new Genesis, the new Creation, the new David, and even the new Cyrus, only greater, as his authority extends over all the earth and heaven.

Just because something is in a biblical narrative or story does not mean the Bible condones or endorses it.

When we read stories of violence, polygamy, or moral failure, the point is usually to show the consequences of sin or God’s faithfulness despite human brokenness.

As readers, we are meant to see how these stories play out, and allow that to frame what the biblical writers are trying to say, as very rarely do the stories include an explicit statement like (and this was a good or bad thing).

For example, the creation ideal we read about in Genesis 1–2 is marriage between one man and one woman. And yet, there are plenty of stories in the Old Testament of polygamy.

And yet, you see time and again the strain, difficulty, and problems this polygamous relationships always create, implicitly showing us that polygamous marriages do not lead to life and do not live up to the Genesis ideal.

Understanding this helps us avoid assuming that just because something is described in Scripture, it must be something God approves of.

Jesus was born in a house, not a barn or wooden stable.

In Luke 2:7, when it says there was “no room in the inn,” the Greek word is kataluma, which does not mean hotel, inn, or barn. It means guest room.

The word kataluma appears two other times in the New Testament:

Both passages refer to the guest room where Jesus would eat the Passover with His disciples.

So when Luke uses kataluma in the birth story, he is not talking about an innkeeper turning Mary and Joseph away. He is saying that the family member’s house Mary and Joseph were staying in had a guest room that was already full (or was not suitable for giving birth), so they stayed in the main living area of the house, where a manger (a feeding trough) was also located.

This means Jesus was almost certainly born inside a normal family home, surrounded by people, not in a detached stable.

With The Old Breed by E.B. Sledge

Sledge, a US Marine during WWII, shares his story of fighting the Japanese in the South Pacific in 1944–1945.

It is a fascinating look at what he (and many others) experienced during WWII. The book is sad, interesting, and enlightening about what war was actually like (as much as one can understand by only reading about it).

There is some military jargon used throughout the book that is never really explained for those of us who have no frame of reference. Also, there were many times when it was difficult to picture the landscape and scenes being described.

You can't blame the author for that, but even when there were maps throughout the book trying to show where they were going and what was happening on the island, they didn’t make much sense to me either.

So while I am glad to have read the book, there were many times I couldn't picture or imagine what exactly was going on. And of course, this book shows the heartbreaking reality of war and its consequences.

Overall, the book was decent. It could be hard to follow at times, but it was still a helpful and sobering read.

7/10

P.S. Life has gotten a lot harder for Santa’s elves…