Insight for Today
A Daily Devotional by Pastor Chuck Swindoll

A Simple Season

(?)

THE WONDER OF AMAZON just continues to spread. Tens of thousands of employees and hundreds of thousands of square feet of operations all work with amazing precision to coordinate the receiving, packaging, and shipping of millions of products all around the world.

Now then—if one man can come up with an organizational plan as complex as all that, think of how much more efficient God's arrangement was almost two thousand years ago. I'm referring to the perfectly synchronized events surrounding the Savior's birth. For sure, it was no afterthought.

Scripture assures us:

When the right time came, God sent his Son.

GALATIANS 4:4

At just the right moment, precisely as God arranged it, entered the Messiah.

Micah said it would be in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2). It was. But I thought Joseph and Mary were of Nazareth, up in Galilee. They were. Aren't those places miles apart? Yes, in those times days apart. Then . . . how? Well, you see, that's just a small part of the plan, nevertheless amazing. Especially when you consider Mary was almost full term in her pregnancy. To get them down south in time required good roads—unheard of prior to the Roman takeover. And they certainly needed to be forced to travel . . . hence a required census from Caesar Augustus (Luke 2:1) that forced Joseph to register in person in the city of his family roots, Bethlehem (Luke 2:4).

But before a Savior could be born, there also needed to be some natural means of common communication—a familiar tongue that would quickly spread the news. No problem. Thanks to Alexander the Great, the father of Koine Greek, that language was ripe and ready for rapid dissemination of the gospel message through the pen of the evangelists and apostles from then on.

Thanks to good roads, a decision in Rome, and a bothersome census, it happened in just the right place, at just the right time, with an articulate language as the perfect verbal vehicle. A little baby that the world hardly noticed arrived. He was little more than a wisp of lint on the prophetic page, a pawn in the hands of the heavenly Commander of "Operation Arrival."