The Unreceived Gift

He came to His own,

and His own did not receive Him.

John 1:11

Since John foreshadows the end of the story, I don't think it will do us any harm to skip there for a moment either. The saddest part of the greatest story ever told is that those who were meant to hear it and believe instead rejected it.

One in four babies born in the world are born in China, even with population control laws in place. Another fourth of the world's children are born in India, where there is no population control. But to neither of these two prolific and ancient civilizations was Jesus born. Christianity has often been touted as the White Man's religion, but Jesus wasn't born to European parents. It has been called a Western religion, but Jesus wasn't born in a Western Civilization. Jesus was a Jew, born to Jewish parents in the Jewish nation and raised as a Jew in a Jewish culture. He wasn't schooled by Eastern mystics or Egyptian sages or Western pagans. He was schooled as a Jew by Jews to grow up and be a Jew. Jesus came to the Jews.

It wasn't by accident that the Savior of the world had humble beginnings in a nation that seemed to be nothing more than the crossroads of greater civilizations. When God became flesh, taking on the form of a man, He did so as Jewish man. It wasn't an arbitrary choice, it wasn't happenstance or coincidental. It was deliberate and very intentional. For it was through the Jewish race that God has always revealed Himself to the world. Even though the ancient progenitors of all mankind could not be called Jews by any stretch of the word, there was a direct ancestry of holy men from which the Jewish people descended--Adam, Seth, Enoch, Methuselah, Noah, Shem, Eber, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel, became the father of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. The Twelve Tribes of Israel became a nation of three-million in Egypt, and it was through them that God brought His law to earth, carved in stone just for them. It was to Israel that God entrusted the mysteries of life, liberty, and the pursuit of true happiness--the joy of knowing and serving the Lord. It was to the Jews that He promised a deliverer; it was to Abraham, the father of the Jews, to whom the Lord promised blessing beyond imagination and descendants beyond number, and through whom the Lord promised He would bless all the nations of the earth.

So in fulfillment of His many great and precious promises to His Chosen People, when God became flesh, he came in Jewish flesh, a Jewish man come to save the Jews. He gave His life and ministry to help the Jews, to aid the Jews, the save the Jews. Some received Him. Some believed Him. But the saddest part of the greatest story ever told is that in the end, Jesus came to His own, and His own did not receive Him. They rejected Him as a nation, rejected Him as their Messiah, rejected Him as their king. And though that was a bad decision for them, it was a good decision for me. Because they did not receive Him, He was given in turn to the nations who were lost without God, lost without Him. And they received Him, and as many as did became the sons of God.