“Behold, the virgin shall be with child and shall bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,” which translated means, “God with us.” (Mt 1:23).

Normally we don’t think of this name of Christ except around the Christmas season—probably because it has to do with His birth. But in light of Jesus’ promise at the end of His earthly life, “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matt 28:20), we do well to contemplate this name more frequently than once a year.

Let this sink in—God with us. The Creator of the cosmos, Maker of billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars, scattered throughout the universe. In a more relatable picture, this is the One who has “… measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, and marked off the heavens by the span [of His hand], and calculated the dust of the earth by the measure, and weighed the mountains in a balance and the hills in a pair of scales…” (Is 40:12–13). This God of infinite proportions, whose power is exceeded by nothing else, whose personal space is not exceeded by the extremities of everything that exists, has taken up residence in this small speck of a planet, among His image bearers. The infinite has come personally; that which knows no limits has condescended to the finite. He who is super-personal has connected with the human-personal, God fellowshipping with that which was made in His image. That’s Immanuel.

Uncovering the meaning of this name is not rocket science, for the Scripture tells us plainly what it means. But the wonder of it all was how it came to be that God is “with us.” The virgin birth shatters our categories of comprehension, for the most basic, self-evident facts of life would contradict such an event. Yet it should not surprise us that God’s coming to be with us would be marked by an extraordinary event. For after all, the tangible intersection of the Creator with His creation would be a singularity on a similar order as the original creation of the world. Cosmologists today speak of the beginning of the universe as a Big Bang, where all matter existing in a super-compressed form exploded into the expansive universe we see today. This is what they call the singularity. Certainly, creation was a big bang, no matter how you look at it. But for the Creator to become part of His creation, to become Immanuel, would involve an event much greater than any nuclear fission or fusion. Were it not for the fact that “in Him all things hold together” (Col 1:17), the universe at the point of incarnation would have exploded into infinite chaos. A virgin birth, in that perspective, would seem like an understated event. Yet, in that small act, God became Immanuel!

Lord, I commit to walk in a way that reflects Your presence in my life.