We’ve covered a lot of ground in nine posts.  A lot of threads weave through the canon.  The resulting tapestry is stunning and breathtaking, but we can’t help ourselves, our gaze goes from the whole to the who…the one who reveals God to us, the Son.

10. The centerpiece of God’s great Word is His Word, His Son, our Lord, the Christ, the deliverer called Jesus, from Nazareth.

The epic adventures of God’s chosen people take more than a few posts to tell.  In various times, in different ways, God spoke to them.  But in these last days He has spoken to us in a son!  Can we ever get beyond the wonder of Jesus of Nazareth?  Fully God, fully man, fully one.

His arrival should not have been a surprise.  God predicted and announced His coming, as if the enemy were so unequal that even with press releases and pronouncements, his terror attacks would amount to nothing.  More than that, God showed His Immanuel-ness all the way through.

God is the kind of God who would choose to walk on two legs with His creation in the garden.  But what of an unholy people, surely they could not see His face and live?  He is the kind of God who would meet with such as Abraham, and Jacob, and Manoah, and let them live.  He is the kind of God who would dwell in tents near His special people, meeting face to face with Moses.

And so the communication of the Father became flesh and pitched his tent among us, so that we beheld his glory!  No one has ever seen the Father, but if only we could request just a glimpse?  If you have seen me, Jesus would announce, you have seen the Father.

So he spoke to a gathering of the biblically trained elite, and also to a pair of hurting disciples on a road trip.  To both he made it clear that the Scriptures speak of Him – by prediction, by appearance, by certain types, by fulfilled themes.  Their hearts burned within.  Two, in delight at the One who came for them.  The others, in anger for the love of God was not in them.  The Christ stirs hearts, he can leave none in some hypothetical neutral apathy.

The glory of God’s grace and faithfulness manifest in the flesh of a carpenter from Nazareth.  Can anything good come from there?  He was the solution to sin, the revelation of God, the forever bond between divine and human, the one who is coming, the one to be worshipped, the one who is friend, who is brother, who is bridegroom.

The greatest theme in the Bible is not our sin, our faith, our redemption or our obedience.  It cannot be primarily about us, and yet wonder of wonders, it is about the One who became one of us.  The incarnation, the step us-ward, the path cross-ward, the indignity of humiliation at the hands of those created in His image.  Can anything good come out of Nazareth?  Oh yes, the only One who is good came to there, and from there.

The foundation stone and centerpiece and capstone of every good idea, promise, purpose and revelation is the Word made flesh, the ultimate revelation of the Father, His beloved Son.