Come, Let Us Adore Him: An Advent Reading Plan by Paul David TrippSample

The angels sang because the everlasting Father had come to extend arms of redeeming grace to all who would give their hearts to him.

It is a wonderful, mysterious, hard-to-grasp, and beyond-the-scope-of-our-normal-reasoning story. This story’s amazing plot wasn’t written when Mary got pregnant or when prophets began foretelling it or when God announced it after the disastrous rebellion of Adam and Eve. This story is so miraculous in every way that it could have only come out of the mind of God in eternity before the foundations of the earth were laid down by his mighty hand. No man could write this plot and if he did, no man could expedite what he had written. This story is itself an argument for the existence of God and is a portrait of his holy character.

The beautiful world that God had created was now broken and groaning—the direct result of the rebellion of the ones God had made in his own image and had placed his guiding and providing love upon. The evidence of its brokenness was everywhere, from the inner recesses of the hearts of people, to violence and corruption of government, to the existence of plagues and diseases. In one of the gorgeous mysteries of God’s sovereign grace, he looked on his broken, rebellious world with eyes of Mercy.

His response would be intervention and rescue. He would do in grace what the law could never do. He would do in grace what we could never do for ourselves. He would offer the only thing that would ever address the need and solve the problem. He, himself, would become the greatest, most costly, most transformational gift ever.

God would take on human flesh and invade his sin broken world with his wisdom, power, glory, and grace. The sovereign King over all things would humble himself and take on the form of servant; he would live on our behalf the life we could have never lived, he would willingly
die the death that you and I deserve to die, and he would rise from his tomb as the conqueror of sin and death.

The implications of this birth are not only transformational to the cosmos, but also eternal in their extent. This is the story of Jesus, born in a barn in Bethlehem.The angels sang because finally hope had come. Don’t you want to join them?