The earthly invasion of Jesus—the “Incarnate Word”—was an event that all of history had built up to.

THE INCARNATE WORD

In the period prior to the Incarnation, mankind was aware of three things: a spiritual realm that was pure and unchanging; a material world that was corrupt and fleeting; and the infinite gulf between them. Therein lay a problem.

For pre-Christian people, God was a distant and impersonal deity whose true identity and desires were largely unknowable. Anxious about relying on personal guesswork to forge the divine divide, people looked to enlightened go-betweens. The proliferation of temples, priests, and priestesses over the ages was a response to man’s felt need for mediation.

When the Incarnate Word broke into history, He was unlike all the mediators that had gone before. They were human; He was human and divine. He was the perfect bridge over the gaping chasm between the earthly and the heavenly—a priest who not only intercedes for man, but who reveals God to man. As the apostle John wrote, “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father's side, has made him known” (John 1:18).

Of all places, it was in a cave that the “One and Only” first made him known.

CUT INTO A HILLSIDE

Caves were shelters for animals, lepers, and refugees. Darkness, and the threats of disease and physical danger, made them undesirable habitats for all but those on the margins.

The cave was also a metaphor for the material world—the impermanent, corrupted “shadow” of reality, a thing to be despised. If man was to learn the true nature of things, he must turn his attention from the cave to the heavens—the pure and unchanging realm of Being.

In time, a Persian coterie left the cave and followed the heavens until they landed on the outskirts of Bethlehem. There, G. K. Chesterton notes, they came upon a cave cut into the side of a hill, where a young mother was caring for her newborn.

Never could they have imagined what lay at their journey’s end: a refuge for outcasts, where an impoverished couple was attending a suckling infant, wrapped in strips of cloth, and resting in a feeding trough.

Neither could they have processed the reality before their eyes: “A child who was a father and a mother who was a child.” Yet, in some inexplicable way, they sensed that, in this humble scene, Truth was not outside the cave but inside it. For those who had been studying the matter, the time for “God with us” had come and with that, a divine statement about the world had been made.

Although spoiled by the effects of sin, the material world is not a loathsome object corrupted beyond repair. It is a creation loved by its Creator who entered, by way of a cave, in the flesh and form of a human infant to restore it and make himself known.