Some people go down all of life’s roads with their eyes closed! They look but they don’t “see”. They observe the surface but miss that which is underneath. Vision is present but perception is absent. It is like they are blind, deaf, and dumb but don’t even know it.
This would be a perfect description of many of the Jewish Religious Leaders in the year of Jesus’ birth. It there was such a thing as a “spiritual insight meter,” their’s would have registered very near to ZERO. Almighty God was working out His purpose in their midst but they didn’t even notice. Fortunately, all of God’s people were not this dull-witted. For within the Jewish Nation there were those who had studied the scriptures and had no Messianic dreams of violence and power and armies with banners. They were called THE QUIET IN THE LAND, and they believed in a life of constant prayer and quiet watchfulness until God should send His Messiah. All their lives they waited quietly and patiently for God.
Today we are winding up our Christmas sermon series on the FIRST SONGS OF CHRISTMAS by looking at one of these people, one of the QUIET ONES of ISRAEL who had incredible spiritual insight.
Take your Bibles and turn to Luke 2:
21 – On the eighth day, when it was time to circumcise Him, He was named Jesus, the name the angel had given Him before He had been conceived.
22 – When the time of their purification according to the Law of Moses had been completed, Joseph and Mary took Him to Jerusalem to present Him to the Lord
23 – (As it is written in the Law of the Lord, ‘Every firstborn male is to be consecrated to the Lord’),
24 – and to offer a sacrifice in keeping with what is said in the Law of the Lord: ‘a pair of doves or two young pigeons.’
25 – Now there was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon, who was righteous and devout. He was waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him.
26 – It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not die before he had seen the Lord’s Christ.
This chapter in the Christmas story picks up eight days after Jesus’ birth on the night the angels sang His praises to those humble shepherds. Joseph has apparently remained in Bethlehem after the census, deciding to make it their home. And on this 8th day since Jesus’ birth, Luke tells us that, like all Jewish boys, Jesus was circumcised. It was also customary to give the boy his name on this day and Jesus was given the name the angel instructed even before His conception.
A little over a month later, Joseph and Mary took the infant Jesus and made the journey north to the temple in Jerusalem so that they might obey Jewish Law by observing two more important ceremonies:
1. The first was known as THE REDEMPTION OF THE FIRSTBORN.
…according to every firstborn male belonged to God because He had saved all first-born sons of the Israelites in Egypt on that first Passover night. So all Jewish parents participated in this ceremony through which they could buy back their son from God at a price of about 5 shekels, paid to the priest.
2. THE PURIFICATION AFTER CHILDBIRTH.
According to when a woman had given birth to a child, if it was a boy she was considered unclean for forty days. She was permitted to go about her household duties and her daily business but she could not enter the Temple or share in any religious ceremony during this time period. When the required time period had passed she was to bring to the temple a lamb for a burnt offering and a young pigeon for a sin offering. A lamb was a somewhat expensive sacrifice, and so the law said that if she could not afford it she might instead of the lamb and the pigeon bring two pigeons. This was called THE OFFERING OF THE POOR and this was the offering that Mary brought.
This tells us that Jesus was born into an ordinary home; a home where there were no luxuries, a home where every penny had to be looked at twice, a home where the members of the family knew what it was like to struggle financially. Reading this account of the way Mary and Joseph carefully observed all of the laws of God reminds us of Paul’s words in that Jesus was “…born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under the law…”
When Mary and Joseph were in Jerusalem for these ceremonies they met an old man named SIMEON. As I said, he was one of THE QUIET ONES OF ISRAEL. SIMEON is the fourth SOLOIST in our study of the FIRST SONGS of CHRISTMAS. His name means “Hear and obey” and that is exactly what he did all his life. SIMEON listened to God, he heard God, he obeyed God, and His role in the Christmas story can teach you and me the value of listening to God–the importance of developing our own spiritual insight. Luke records that God had promised Simeon through the Holy Spirit that life would not end for him before he had seen God’s own Anointed King.
As a “QUIET ONE OF ISRAEL” Simeon was somewhat of a sentinel, for he had been placed in Israel to point out the Christ when He came. He was looking for the Lord’s Christ and when he saw Him, Simeon realized that a great drama had been set into motion at last. I can imagine that every day as he went into the Temple area he must have looked about him to see if the Messiah had come. Is it this one? NO. Is that the CHRIST? NO. I suppose that the temple officials, hurrying about doing what they thought was GOD’s business, considered SIMEON to be an old fool, a nuisance. Blinded by their own self-righteousness they never dreamed that it was SIMEON and not themselves that had a direct line to God!
Well one day after years, perhaps decades of looking, Simeon walked into the Temple and he saw a poor couple, a man who was a carpenter from Nazareth and his wife, both of them probably quite young. They had a child, a tiny one—just a little over a month old. Immediately the Holy Spirit set a little alarm off in Simeon’s head. THAT’S THE ONE! THAT’S HIM! Simeon did not question this by looking on the outward appearance. He did not say, “But, God, how can THIS be Your Messiah? I expected somebody much more important than this!” No, he humbly accepted the revelation as God gave it to him. Maybe that is what it means to be “righteous or devout”– to have enough faith in God, to be so familiar with His voice, that you can understand things from His perspective. Imagine how he felt! Finally, this is the one!
So he walked over and, I suppose, hardly able to contain his excitement. He introduced himself to Mary and Joseph, asked, “May I hold the child?” They hesitantly agreed and then, with the Salvation of the world held in his old gnarled hands, Simeon broke forth into HIS SONG OF CHRISTMAS. Tradition has entitled it “NUNC DEMITIS” which is Latin for “Now dismiss thy servant”.
“Sovereign Lord, as You have promised, You now dismiss Your servant in peace.
For my eyes have seen Your salvation,
which You have prepared in the sight of all people,
a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to Your people Israel.”
Simeon’s brief impromptu chorus celebrates one wonderful truth: GOD’S SALVATION HAS FINALLY COME!!!
Let’s look briefly at the word for “SALVATION” that Simeon used because the meaning of the Greek word for “salvation” in this text is very interesting. Simeon did not use the Greek word, “SOTER” although “SOTER” means “Savior”. Nor did he say that God’s “SOTERIA” had been revealed, although this word also means “SALVATION.” He chose the word “SOTERION” which means “One fitted to save," so he didn’t say, “my eyes have seen Your salvation.” Instead he said, “My eyes have seen One fitted to save others.” Four things made Jesus “fitted” to be our salvation:
- First is the fact that He was God. And only God is equal to the needs of mankind. Only God is equal to the problem of this world’s sin. And JESUS WAS GOD!
- But He was also man. This is important because only as a man could He die, and the price of sin, the cost required for a Savior, was death.
- The third required quality of the Savior was that He be sinless. Only one who is Himself sinless can die for others. So no other human could do this because each of us is a sinner and therefore we must die for our own sin. But Jesus was sinless so He could die for others, and since He was the infinite God, he could die for an infinite number of sinners.
- But not only was Jesus God, Man, Sinless, He was also love.
This is important for it would be possible—would it not—to have a God who was perfectly sinless, and who became a man, but who was unwilling to die because He did not care for us and did not want to save us? After all, why should God save us? Who are we? We have no claim upon Him. God can do without us. Yet the whole purpose of the incarnation, revealed in the message of the angel to both Mary and Joseph, is that Jesus had come to save His people from their sins. So when Simeon held the child in his hands and said,
“Finally, here is One who is perfectly suited to do what this world needs. He is God. He is man, He is sinless, and in addition to all this, He is the embodiment of the very love of God.”
Wouldn’t it be great if you and I could have the insight that SIMEON had? It seems to me that if we are to join God in His work in these days then Simeon’s brand of Spiritual Insight would be an essential thing.
What enabled SIMEON to see God at work? So that he could join Him in it? I see two things:
1. Simeon (like the QUIET ONES OF ISRAEL)
was a student of the Scriptures.
In his song of Christmas Simeon quoted the Old Testament several times. So Simeon was obviously a devoted student of God’s written revelation of Himself to humanity. He had read of the ways that God had worked through His people in the past so He knew what to look for. One of my favorite authors of books I read for just the fun of it are the action-packed novels of TOM CLANCY. One of his first novels was The Hunt For Red October and its plot centered on a Soviet Submarine Captain who was attempting to defect to the United States and take his new, high tech nuclear submarine with him. He had no way of contacting the US armed forces to tell them of his intentions and for all they new he was mounting an attack on our nation. In one of the strategy sessions the joint chiefs of staff were about to call for an attack on this rapidly approaching sub when that recurring hero of CLANCY’s novels, JACK RYAN, spoke up.
He said, “Wait a minute, this captain is not going to attack.” One of the joint chiefs asked, “How do you know that? How do you know he’s not going to launch an attack?” Ryan very confidently replied, “I know what he’s doing because I read his book.”
The same is true of SIMEON. He knew what Almighty God was doing because he had read His book. If we are to see God at work as SIMEON did, if we are to tune our spiritual insight to God’s wave-length, then we too must be students of scripture. Understand, we do not read the Scripture to KNOW, but to GROW. We are not told to read the Bible to make us smarter sinners but to help us conform to Christ’s image. We are not to fill our heads with a collection of facts but rather we read to transform our lives.
The Pharisees and religious leaders of SIMEON’s time read the scriptures but all they came away with was an accumulation of facts that led them to embrace a dry legalism. They just became self-righteous because they did not apply scripture to their own lives. They did not let it GROW them as it showed them how very much they needed God’s forgiveness.
2. The second essential quality for a person who wants the kind of Spiritual Insight that Simeon had was the practice of prayer.
Simeon was obviously a man of prayer for he had discovered that God does speak to us. And if we are to hear His voice then we must practice the discipline of prayer which includes learning to listen to God, like Simeon did, so that we learn recognize His voice amid all the other “voices” of this world. Some people never hear the voice of God simply because they aren’t listening for Him. You know the Pharisees of Simeon’s day prayed, but their prayer was not the kind of prayer that listen’s for God’s convicting voice. “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, robbers, evildoers, adulterers…or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I have.” But Jesus complimented the prayer of the tax collector who invited God’s changing voice into His life by saying, “God, have mercy on me a sinner!”
This kind of prayer, the prayer that SIMEON obviously practiced daily, will help us to be in tune with God. We will be able to notice Him at work in our lives and in the world. We’ll be able to hear Him when He speaks. Prayer is a a two-way communication with God. We speak to God but we also listen as He speaks to us. Remember what Gods says in prayer to you is more important than what you say to Him.
Life-changing prayer that enables a person to hear God’s voice and join Him in His work is selfless. It involves a desire to know God’s will and to conform our lives to it. Because to pray is to change!
What about you as an individual? If you were to tune your ears to hear God’s voice right now, what would He be saying to you?