Lecture

The promised land is a beautiful land, filled with mountains, streams, and living things. It’s also a land filled with Bible stories.

Layer upon layer upon layer that was laid down over time, and each layer has a relationship to the others.

In fact, it’s so full of stories, Moses directed parents to teach their children, not just when they sat at home, but as they walked along the road.

God gave me lots of ways to try to better understand who He was. One of them is nature.

Jesus learned stories from the land as a child, and as an adult He often linked lessons with landscape.

Jesus used this view as a backdrop for the command that still rings in our ears today.

Sometimes those lessons were associated with things you could see: farmers plowing fields, fishermen separating catch, wide roads and narrow roads. At other times Jesus associated lessons with things that could not be seen, previous events that had occurred at a teaching location.

The people were seeing Jesus doing something they had seen before in this place.

The land still speaks in this way, and when we accept Jesus’ invitation, the one He gave to Peter and Andrew, “come follow me,” we’ll find ourselves in places we have been before as Bible readers. Jesus intentionally takes us to places like this so that we experience a kind of geographic déjà vu.

A sense that something important happened here before.

That’s a signal for us to explore how Jesus is building a lesson on the layers of stories beneath our feet.

Our journey begins where it should, at Bethlehem with the birth of Jesus. It’s an excellent place for us to see how history layers on one place on the land, and a very good place for us to see how Old Testament stories influence our understanding of stories from the life of Jesus. Before Jesus was born in Bethlehem, we have Bethlehem stories from the time of the judges, from the time of the kings, and from the time of the prophet Micah.

If you look below, you’re going to see the ruins of three towers. When a family planted its farm field, they wanted to be near it when it was harvest time. So when the crops were ripening, they would actually move their entire family out into the agricultural field away from the village to live in this sort of stone igloo. So there’s a symbol of the agriculture that’s so intimately connected to Bethlehem. Bethlehem in Hebrew means “house of bread” or “bakery place.”

Bethlehem stories are always stories about how the Lord comes to help people in need. Now, the first time we see that is at the time of the judges, in fact at the time of Ruth and Naomi. And these two ladies have come to Bethlehem, and they have a huge problem to solve. They’re in difficult economic straits. Ruth is out gleaning in the agricultural fields, and it’s there that the Lord provides a solution for this family in the form of a man by the name of Boaz. Boaz eventually forms a relationship with Ruth in those agricultural fields and on that threshing floor; they’re married, and suddenly this family that was in such difficulty has a solution that’s provided by the Lord.

The second time we see this happening is actually during the days of Ruth and Boaz’s great-grandson, David. Saul is current king of Israel, and the people of Israel are suffering because he is not the kind of king that the Lord needed to lead His people. And so once again, all eyes turned to Bethlehem. The prophet Samuel goes to Bethlehem and anoints David as the ideal king, the king that provided the best ruling experience that Israel ever had.

It’s no wonder then that when Matthew and Luke tell the story of Jesus’ birth, they place the name of Bethlehem, or its equivalent, “town of David,” into the story no less than nine times. The story of Bethlehem that starts in the fields with Ruth and Boaz takes on new meaning in the fields when the angels deliver this incredibly powerful message: “The king of kings and lord of lords has come.” But the very first words that they speak, in many respects, are the most important and most powerful of that entire Christmas day. Because when the angels came to the shepherds, the very first thing they said to them was “fear not.”

We’ve heard that language before only in a different way. The very first words that were spoken by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden after their fall into sin were these: “We hid from you, Lord, because we were afraid.” And I find it so striking and so powerful that in these fields of Bethlehem, the very first words that the angels speak to the shepherds are these. The meaning of this night: you can stop being afraid because Bethlehem has delivered the ultimate solution.