CHRISTMAS SERIES Episode 1 - Jesus Before Baby Jesus

Do you think Adam and Eve were a failed experiment of God? Do you think the Law of Moses and the Tabernacle were just more failed creations of God? What about the Temple built by Solomon, or the second Temple built after the exile of the Jews to Assyria and Babylon? Or the Jewish people themselves? Do you think God gave it his best shot, but these things just didn’t work out the way he’d hoped?

If you think that way, then it might follow God conceived of the idea of Jesus a short while before he was born. That Jesus is just one more of God’s ideas that he hoped would work out better than some of his others. Few Christians would probably word these conclusions so crudely, but they probably do at least partially represent what many people unknowingly believe.

On the other hand, many Christians believe all of those events and people were part of God’s plan that existed before the beginning of time itself; and that God knew before the creation of the world that only Jesus could be the Savior of the World (Revelation13:8).

One of the most revealing Scriptures in the New Testament is in Luke 24:27. In one of his first appearances after his resurrection, Jesus is talking to two of his disciples. “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.”

In other words, the Old Testament is about Jesus, but nobody could see it until Jesus showed them how. The Laws of Moses were about Jesus, but Moses did not know it. The prophets prophesied about Jesus, but they did not know it. The Psalms were about Jesus, but David and the other writers did not know it.

If you listened only to Christmas carols, it would be easy to conclude that Jesus did not exist prior to being born in the Little Town of Bethlehem. But John 1:1-14, along with a lot of other Scriptures, confirm that Jesus existed at the beginning of everything, before coming in the form of a man in Bethlehem.

Although it was hundreds of years before his birth, the prophet Isaiah spoke about the birth of Jesus in the present tense. “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given.” (Isaiah 9:6)