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December 13, 2006
Midweek Advent #2
Matthew 1:18-25
Pastor Robert Raasch

God's Promise to Joseph

1. A Promise Offered to a Troubled Heart
2. A Promised Accepted by a Believing Heart

He's sometimes referred to as the forgotten character of the Christmas story. For while the Bible records the words of Mary and the shepherds, the angel and the Magi, even Zechariah and Elizabeth and later Simeon and Anna, still we hear not one word from Mary's husband Joseph. Does that mean that Joseph isn't all that important or that you and I have nothing to learn from this man, the step father of Jesus? Not at all. The fact is, we have much to learn from Joseph-not in what Joseph says to us, but rather in what God said to Joseph.

In our midweek services this year, we've been focusing on the promises that God made to people waiting for the coming of the Messiah. Last week we studied the promise God made to the nation of Israel. Today, we turn our attention to:

God's Promise to Joseph

We'll see that the promise God made to Joseph was:

1. A Promise Offered to a Troubled Heart
2. A Promised Accepted by a Believing Heart

First, a promise made to a troubled heart. I mean, isn't that the truth? Imagine that you were in Joseph's shoes. Wouldn't you be more than a little stressed out about now? You've fallen in love with a Jewish girl named Mary. You're engaged to be married. But according to the custom of the day, even though you're "married" in God's eyes, you haven't yet moved in together. In fact, for the last three months, your fiancée Mary, has been staying at the home of a relative named Elizabeth. And then when Mary comes back home, what do you discover? She's pregnant! What!?! You know that you're not the father. You know that you never had relations with her. How can you come to any other conclusion than that she's been with someone else? She's been unfaithful to you! Oh, sure, she's tried to feed you some line about how God had gotten her pregnant. Yeah, right. Give me a break!

Suddenly all you're hopes, all your dreams about the future-shattered. You're thinking, "how could she do this to me? What was she thinking? I trusted her and now that trust was gone." Now all that's left for you to do is to decide what you're going to do with her. Jewish law gives you two choices. You could make a public spectacle of her…haul her before the proper authorities…charge her with the sin of adultery and leave her punishment in their hands-which according to Old Testament law might well be death by stoning.

Or you could handle this whole affair privately. You could quietly give her a certificate of divorce, acknowledging that she's been unfaithful and that you are not longer husband and wife. In either case, you lose something. The whole situation has your stomach tied in knots. You're torn between what could have been and what is. And chances are, there's a little voice inside of you saying, "God, why me? What did I do to deserve this? I mean, we had our whole lives ahead of us, and now she goes and gets pregnant. God, how could you let this happen?"

You know, sometimes as we consider the wonder of the Christmas story, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that there are elements of this story that were pretty hard on people-including Joseph. Here was a man whose heart was genuinely troubled by what he thought had happened. Fortunately for Joseph and really for all of us, God had an answer for Joseph's troubled heart, an answer found in a promise.

Here in our text we read that after Joseph considered the various options open to him, then "an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, 'Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.'" With those words, God is addressing Joseph's biggest question, namely, "What happened? How could she be pregnant?" God's answer is simply: "The Holy Spirit conceived this child in her. That means that she has not been unfaithful to you, Joseph. You can still trust her. You can-in fact, you must-take her home as your wife."

And yet, not only does the angel answer the "how" question (namely, now this child was conceived), but more importantly, he went on to answer the "who" question, namely, who this child would be. The angel tells Joseph that Mary "will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins."

Oh, what a powerful promise that is. "He will save his people from their sins." The word, "people" refers to more than just the Jewish nation. That's a reference to the whole human race. God is here promising Joseph and us that the baby who bears the name Jesus would ultimately rescue all mankind from the guilt and punishment of their sins forever. This baby would be the Messiah. And as Matthew goes on to explain, this promise was in perfect fulfillment of what the prophet Isaiah had written 700 years before. We read in Isaiah, chapter 7, "The virgin will be with child and give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel."

My friends, you realize, don't you, that the promise made by the angel and the prophet both go beyond the ability of the human brain to comprehend. I mean, when the angel told Joseph that "what is conceived in (Mary) is from the Holy Spirit," it wasn't like a little light bulb went on in his head and he said, "Oh, now I understand. A virgin spontaneously conceiving without relations with a man. Sure, I've seen it. Now I get it. And this human child is in fact going to be God? The Divine is going to take up residence in the womb of my wife? Oh sure. Now I understand."

No friends, Joseph could not mentally grasp the Incarnation of God any more than we can. But what he couldn't understand, he could still believe. That's why we say that the promise that God made to Joseph was not only offered to a troubled heart, it was also:
II. Accepted by a Believing Heart

Now, someone might say, "How do you know that Joseph believed God's promise? I mean, the Bible doesn't say that he believed it. Besides, isn't faith invisible? Yes, it is. But while faith is invisible, the actions that flow from faith aren't. Matthew records those actions for us here in our text. "When Joseph got up, he did what the angel of the Lord has commanded him and took Mary home as his wife." That, my friends, was an act of faith. Joseph trusted God. He trusted in God's promise. He trusted in God's explanation for Mary's situation. And he put his faith into action-mind you, in spite of the ridicule he undoubtedly faced for bringing home a pregnant fiancée. I mean, you think about it. Having a fiancée pregnant before the wedding day never looks good. Either your girlfriend was fooling around without you, or she was fooling around with you. In either case, there would be a certain stigma attached to your marriage in the eyes of the community. But Joseph set all that aside and instead put his trust in God. He took Mary home, and as Matthew tells us, "he had no union with her" until the child was born. And then when the child was born, Joseph did exactly as the Lord had told him to do. He gave him the name Jesus, which in the original language means "the Lord saves." Joseph was putting his God-given faith into action in his life.

So what does all this mean for you and me today? Is there a message that God wants us to take home from this account? Absolutely. First, there's the reminder that things don't always go the way we expect them to. Sometimes the circumstances in our lives leave us feeling hurt, betrayed abandoned. Sometimes it's the result of sin; other times, it's not. In either case, such unexpected difficulties can leave us thinking, "God, what's going on here?" Like Joseph, we can find that our hearts are troubled.

And how does God address our troubled hearts? The same he addressed Joseph's troubled heart. He speaks to us-no, not by means of an angel in a dream-but rather, through his inspired apostles and prophets in the pages of Holy Scripture. Here is where God speaks to us and helps make sense out of the stuff going on in our lives. Here God makes it clear that the human race, by nature is thoroughly corrupt. Scripture says, "Every inclination of (man's) heart is evil from childhood" (Gen. 8:21). And again, "The sinful mind is hostile to God." That not only explains why there are child molesters and internet scams and people blowing each other up on a daily basis, it also explains why, as St. Paul put is, "What I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do, this I keep on doing." (Rom. 7:19).

Who of us has not been tormented by the reality of our own sins? The very things that we swore we'd never do again, the very attitudes that we despise in others, the very thoughts that are absolutely abhorrent to God-these and more we keep doing again and again and again. We all can say with St. Paul, "What a wretched man I am. Who will rescue me from this body of death?" (Rom. 7:24)

Who will? God will! And how do you know it? You know it because of the promise God made to Joseph, namely that his wife would give birth to a baby who would save his people from their sins. My friends, Jesus' "people" is you and me. That baby, conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, is my Savior and yours. In his perfect life and innocent death, the stain of our sins has been blotted out in full. By Jesus' resurrection, God has assured us that he has accepted Jesus' payment for our sins. And because God made and kept that promise in the person of Jesus, you can be sure that he will keep the rest of his promises as well, namely, that he will provide you with the food, clothing and shelter that you need in life, the promise that he will defend you from danger, by keeping evil away from you or by using it to serve your good, his promise that he will not give you more than you can bear, but rather will allow you to cast all your cares on him, for he cares for you, the promise to uphold us with his righteous right hand and when we breath our last, take us to be with him forever in heaven.

These are just a few of the promises that God makes to us in his Word, promises which we can trust, because he's kept his greatest promise. Let's face it, there are going to be times when like Joseph we say, "God I don't get it. Why is this happening to me?" But then like Joseph we can look to God's promises, more specifically look to that baby in Mary's womb and say, "I may not understand everything, but I know that God loves me, because he's given me his very best. He's given me his Son. And in that God-Man, Jesus Christ, I know that my sins are forgiven. And therefore no matter what happens, I know, that on the basis of his Word, I'm going to be all right with God-for Jesus' sake." Amen.