Redemption from Pain

Each day in the month of December, one of our kids opens a Christmas book that I wrapped. Nearly all of them are repeats we read year after year. I sat reading one of these picture books the other night, snuggled close by my youngest and middle child, with my preteen pretending not to listen in a chair nearby. It is one of our favorites with its pantameter rhythm describing the birth of Christ in beautiful detail:

“He had not a crib, but in a manger instead, The tiny new baby lay down his sweet head. Mary looked down at his cute little nose
and silently counted- ten fingers, ten toes.”

As I read those adorable lines, I couldn’t help but think about some of the characters we’ve studied this month and just how ugly humanity can get. We see it in the world all around us, but something in me wants to believe that my Bible heroes are perfect. Even this picture book of Jesus, while beautiful, doesn’t capture the humanity of Mary and Joseph and just how very humble Jesus’ birth was (one image makes Mary look like she’s wearing makeup!)

While Christmas is about the birth of Jesus, it is simultaneously about his eventual death on the cross, which paid our penalty for sin and frees all of us from that which we could not save ourselves. Only when we truly understand the depth and ugliness of our own sin can we grasp the magnitude of what Jesus has done for us. This advent series has pulled the curtain back on characters in the Bible, revealing that all have sinned. In this week’s story, the greatest and most honorable of the Israelite kings will show his need for a Savior, when he encounters a beautiful woman named Bathsheba.

We hail David as a righteous king (even the scriptures say he was a man after God’s own heart!), but his family life was by far his biggest failure and David’s actions toward Bathsheba are abhorrent. Abusing his power as king, he not only took another man’s wife but had the man murdered. (This is the writer of the Psalms!) In his providence, God used Bathsheba, the pinnacle of David’s failures to make way for redemption. All of David’s other sons would come to ruin except Solomon, the second son of Bathsheba was loved by God. (2 Samuel 12:24) He would carry on the family line to Jesus. It is incredible to think that God can make something beautiful out of our messes, particularly when we repent of them.

The most beautiful thing about scripture is that it does not pull punches when it comes to the brokenness in humanity. There is no one who is perfect except our Lord Jesus Christ. Stories like this one should drive us to our knees because of the great mercy of our God, who knows that even the best of us are in need of a Savior. And in this story, we see that it is possible, by God’s grace and mercy extended through Jesus, to experience redemption from our pain.