We ARE the Shepherds

Luke 2:8-15

How many of you spent time with family at Christmas? We call them relatives because we relate to them. You probably have others to whom you closely relate.

We have the tradition of watching “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”  Which character are you like? Does life treat you like Charlie? Are you a bossy Lucy, pulling away the football at the last second, and offering advice for a price? Would you be Linus, clinging to whatever brings you security? Are you the tomboy Peppermint Patty, or her little friend Marcy who calls her sir? Are you Snoopy, complete with alter-egos, and full of dreams? Or his sidekick, Woodstock? Personally, I feel like Pigpen everywhere I go!

To whom do you relate in the Christmas story?  Probably not to Mary and Joseph. Their lives and parenting experience are foreign to us. You probably don’t relate to the wise men. They are certainly foreign to us. I hope you don’t relate to Herod. We love the angels in the story, but we cannot relate to those heavenly beings, just as they can’t relate to us, since they haven’t known redemption.  We can’t relate to any of these. But there’s another group in the story.  I submit to you that not only can we closely relate to the SHEPHERDS… we ARE the shepherds in this story! Let’s talk about them today, but first, we must back up…

The baby Jesus was not just any child, this was the long-awaited Savior of the world.  This is the One who finally would save His people from their sins.  This is the One who would finally be the Lamb that would offer the one sacrifice that was needed.  The entire sacrificial system would finally go away. Jesus Himself in Luke 19:10 said, "The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost."  In John 4:42 He is called "The Savior of the world."  1 John 4:14 says, "…the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world."

Jesus came to save the world. He didn't come to be an example of morality and integrity.  He didn't come to promote passivity.  He didn't come to demonstrate patience and kindness and mercy and tenderness.  He did all of that but He came to be the Savior of the world.  The Jews had long waited for that to happen.  They, as I told you last time, knew God as a saving God. They knew the nature of God was to save because He delivered them from their enemies and He had so often delivered them from the immediate consequence of the sin, consequences which they deserved.  He had rescued them from every imaginable kind of situation in spite of their sins. So they knew God as a saving God.  The God of the Old Testament had revealed Himself clearly as a Savior, but there was also the fact that though God was a saving God there had never yet come One who had provided fully and finally that promised salvation.  And so they long awaited the Savior of the world, the One who would come and satisfy the justice of God.

We find in this passage the angelic announcement that the Savior has been born.  The One of whom Luke writes in the book of Acts — Luke wrote Acts as well — the One who would come and be the Savior to the degree that he could say that neither is there salvation in any other name but the name of Jesus Christ, Acts 4:12. 

V. 11  This is the high point of history.  Because He was born, our sins could be borne…by Him, in our place.

And yet there was no fanfare in Bethlehem. It was so obscure, we don't hear any announcement at all at the manger - only Joseph and Mary knew the truth.  But then we come to verses 8-9 and an announcement is made. 

Caesar Augustus was promoting himself as the savior of the world, while the true Savior of the world was being born in Bethlehem in obscurity. 

It's little wonder all heaven broke loose and the angel showed up and started praising God.  It's little wonder the shepherds when they left, at the end of this passage, verse 20, were praising God as well.  This is the greatest moment in the history of the world.  That's why you have to stop a little and consider what's going on here. 

If you were a PR agent and you were designing a campaign to announce that the Savior of the world had been born, the last people you would go to is a bunch of shepherds.  You would want to go to the influencers, as they are called today.  We want to go to the movers and the shakers.  We want to go to the people who have the ear of the world.  So, first of all, we might consider going to the...the high priest.  I mean, he would be the religious leader of Israel.  We might be considering going to the chief priests and the scribes who were the teachers.  We might be going to the Sadducees, who made up the Sanhedrin, the ruling body of Israel.  Or you might go to the Pharisees because they were the religious fundamentalists.  They were fastidious about prophecies and we might want to go to them because they search the Scriptures.  They were looking for the Messiah.  And we might even want to send a press release to Caesar Augustus to let him know that the true Savior had been born.  But shepherds?  Not on your life. Consider this verse…

Isaiah 61:1

The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound;

So when the Messiah comes, He's not coming to the upper crust. He's coming to the poor, the lowly, the meek, the afflicted, the broken-hearted, the captives, the prisoners.  These are the outcasts.

This Messiah is going to touch the lowlifes.  In fact, as Jesus went through His life, He attracted to Himself the outcasts of society, tax collectors and absolute nobodies and prostitutes and sinners and drunkards and you know all that, because the Jewish elite, the aristocracy of religion in Israel, criticized Him for that and they said He hangs around such.  That's what messianic prophecy said, the Messiah would come to a certain category of humanity, and shepherds certainly qualified.

Mary, in her Magnificat praising the Lord when she was told she was going to be the mother of Messiah in Luke 1:52, praised God for exalting the humble, and the lowly. 

God chooses the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, the weak things of the world to shame the things that are strong, the lowly or base things of the world and the despised God has chosen.  Then nobody can boast.  The first announcement of the birth of Messiah is made to the lowliest, commonest of unskilled peasants in the Jewish social strata.

It's nothing against shepherds. In fact, Abraham functioned at some point in his life as a shepherd.  And Moses cared for the herds of his father-in-law in Midian as a shepherd.  And David was a shepherd.  In fact, a thousand years before Jesus was born, David was watching sheep in this same area, maybe in the same field.  It isn't that there was somehow a shameful profession. It was just a lowly profession. It was the lowliest of tasks.  Shepherds were insignificant.  They were basically ignorant.  They were uneducated. They were unskilled.  They did the kind of work, shepherding, that was generally given to children to do because it was so simple to do.  It didn't take any particular talent or any skill. They were the lowest paid.

And by virtue of the necessity of caring for sheep seven days a week, they lived in some level of violation or another of Mosaic law.  They couldn't maintain the Sabbath the way the Sabbath should have been maintained. 

Isn't it just like God to disdain the religious elite, the spiritual establishment, to disdain the hypocrites who thought they were good enough to achieve heaven by their own self-effort?  And to make the greatest announcement that's ever been made in the history of the world to the lowest of the low, the shepherds.  And Jesus Himself was happy to call Himself the Good Shepherd.  I am privileged to be an under-shepherd. Like Jesus, I love the sheep!  Unlike Jesus, I am one of the sheep myself! So there's nothing wrong with the task in itself.  And you have a group of your own that you shepherd.  We are the shepherds in the Christmas story!

Paul understood.

1 Timothy 1:15

^… Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.

The lower the sinner, the greater the glory to the God who saves him.

Now I believe that the shepherds that the Lord picked for this announcement were probably some who believed in the true and living God. They were probably devout.  They may have been among those who in verse 25 are described as looking for the consolation of Israel. That is they were looking for the Messiah, they were looking for the redemption of Israel, and so looking for the Redeemer.  Because in verse 20 when they had gone and seen the child, and realized what happened, they were glorifying and praising God for everything they had heard and seen.  It must have been that they were living in anticipation of that.  It's very likely that though they were socially on the lowest level, they may well spiritually been on the highest level.  And, of course, when they heard the message they were so filled with excitement they went immediately to Bethlehem.

By the way, they were never commanded to do that. It was their natural instinct. They heard news they considered great, and so they wanted to go and see and then tell others.

Let’s talk about their job. They watched the herd grazing all day, and at night they would bring them into the fold and the shepherd would lie across the entrance. That's why Jesus says in John 10, I'm not only the Great Shepherd, but I am the door.  The shepherd would make his bed and lie across the entrance to the fold.  No sheep could get out without walking across him, and he would make sure it didn't happen.  And Jesus calls Himself the door because He wants us to know that once we're in His sheepfold He'll never let us out.  That's the doctrine of eternal security.

What are they doing?  It says in verse 8, "They're keeping watch over their flock."  These shepherds may well have been caring for sheep that would be offered as sacrifices.  How interesting that the announcement of the final and full sacrifice, the Lamb of God slain from before the foundation of the world, the Savior of the world, was made to shepherds, who very likely who took care of sheep who were offered themselves as sacrifices, and thus as pictures of that coming sacrifice.

Well, the tranquil normalcy of a night of shepherding was violated in an amazing way in verse 9. 

There hadn't been any account of anybody seeing an angel in 500 years, half a millennium. And now, all of a sudden, we start seeing angels.  Gabriel appears to Zacharias and then Gabriel comes back and appears to Mary, and later to Joseph.  And very well this angel of the Lord could have been Gabriel back for another visit.  And it's evident that he's not one of the guys. 

The dark of night is suddenly emblazoned with the highest of all created beings standing amid the lowliest of all earthly folks.  And the sequence is the same as always before. Fear – comfort – an announcement – a sign.

"And the glory of the Lord shone around them."  I can't even describe to you what a significant statement that is.  That is one of the most amazing moments of all of history.

If you go back and study the glory of the Lord, that is simply defined as the manifestation of God in light.  Now God is not corporeal, He doesn't have a body, He doesn't have a physical form.  He's the invisible God.  But when He reveals Himself He does so as light, some kind of glowing, brilliant, shining, incomprehensible manifestation of light.  In fact, if He revealed Himself fully in light, in Exodus 33, it would be enough to incinerate anybody.  And that's why God said to Moses, "I can't show you My full glory, you'll go up in smoke."  So God tucked Moses in a rock and just let a little bit of His afterglow shine so that Moses could see it. And then Moses’ face shined!

But if you study the glory of God, you start in the Garden of Eden and God is there with Adam and Eve and there's no sin yet so there's nothing to fear - so that the presence of God is not something that consumes them. And so they're walking and talking with God in the cool of the day and they're in the presence of the Lord.  They're walking with the glorious, shining Shekinah manifestation of God.  Then sin comes in and immediately God says, "I can't have fellowship with you anymore," and He throws them out of the garden and he puts an angel with a flaming sword there, and that wasn't because He didn't care about them, it was because He did care about them and should they enter the garden and come into His presence they would have been immediately destroyed.  So God put the angel with the flaming sword there in a sense as protection. They can’t enter and eat of the tree of life and live forever in their fallen state.

It's a long time before the glory of God appears again.  In Exodus chapter 40 they finished building the tabernacle.  The tabernacle is going to be where they worship the Lord and there's a place in the tabernacle called the Holy of Holies where God is going to take up residence and when they finished that, according to Exodus 40, the glory of God came out of heaven and came down.  And the glory of God came and just filled that place - the great shining Shekinah presence of God had come back and God was manifesting His great presence and His great glory.  It was a monumental moment.  It was the establishment of worship.  His glory went up into the sky during the day as a cloud and led them, and as a pillar of fire at night and led them. And they saw the glory of God, the great light manifestation of God.  Later on when they built the temple, the same thing happened.  God was saying, I want you to give your attention to Me.  It wasn't very long, however, until they turned against God and you can read in Ezekiel 8 to 10, the glory of God left, it departed, it went away from the temple.  A sad moment, the prophet stands and he watches the glory of God go up over the temple and go up over the gate and up over the mountain and it disappears, and God leaves Israel.

This was before David even. And the glory never came back till this night in our text. The presence of God had come back into the world.  The presence of God had come not into a garden, or a building, or a tent - this time it had come in human flesh in the Messiah.

Later on in His life, Jesus took the disciples [Matthew 17] up into the mountain and He pulled His flesh back and they saw the glory of God.  He was transfigured before them. 

Someday the glory of God is going to come back.  We haven't seen it.  Nobody has seen it since those shepherds and those disciples, but some day the glory of God is coming back, Matthew 24 and 25, when Jesus returns and when the glory comes back it won't just be Israel and it won't just be a few shepherds, and it won't just be some apostles, when the glory comes next time the whole world is going to see it because God is going to blacken the sky, the stars are going to go out, the sun's going to go out, the moon is going to go out, it's going to get pitch black and then the full universe is going to be filled with the blazing glory of God. It won't be His hind parts, it won't be His afterglow, it will be the full face and glory of God. 

That glory was first revealed to shepherds, people like us.  And they were frightened.  The glory of God is terrifying.

When Isaiah saw God in a vision, he was terrified.  He pronounced a curse upon himself and expected to be immediately incinerated.  In chapter 1 of Ezekiel, he saw the glory of God in a vision, he fell on his face in a coma.  When John the apostle saw the Shekinah glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ in Revelation 1 it says he fell over like a dead man, he went into a coma.  Terror is the result of seeing the presence of God, even a veiled presence of God.  And not just the Father, but also the Son: People who saw Jesus and understood that He was God were terrified.  A woman was healed by Jesus and it says she was absolutely terrified when she realized He was God because He had just healed her.  The disciples had Jesus in the boat. It says they were afraid because of the storm.  Jesus stopped the storm and it says they were exceedingly afraid. They were more afraid of having God in their boat than having a storm outside their boat.  And it’s enough to terrify a sinner because a sinner knows: If I can see God, if I'm in the presence of God, then He can see me.  I see holiness, He sees sin. I'm in trouble.

The angel says, “Don't be afraid, the news is good.”  These guys went from absolute sheer terror to joy.  And suddenly appeared a great throng of angels praising.  No wonder just as soon as the show was over they quickly ran to Bethlehem to find the only baby in town that was lying in a manger.  No wonder they went everywhere telling everyone the good news!

We are the shepherds. We are the chosen. Let’s continue to see Him, to worship Him, and to tell others.