The Old Testament and the Nativity

This year, Canada Post chose the Nativity scene to be featured on their holiday stamps, and to many, the appearance of this vital image to the holiday season may be a breath of fresh air after being overrun by Santa Clauses and reindeer for years. In a holiday season that is only becoming more driven by commercialism, the seemingly fewer appearances that Christ’s birth makes during Christmas time remind us that we can take its significance for granted, and think of it more as a decoration to go along with Christmas than what the heart and soul of the holidays are actually all about: The sending of God’s Son into the world to save humanity from sin.

Every year, we sit in our pews at Christmas Eve services and hear the Nativity recited, able to name the plot points beat-for-beat, and it can be easy to think we already know all there is to know about the story. But what about the perspective of Jewish Christians two thousand years ago? What were their reactions? How was this story proof of the fulfillment of God’s promise to Moses that one day he would bring forth a prophet to save His people from captivity forever? (Deuteronomy 18:15-19)

It may be that by looking at this story from a new perspective, namely, the perspective of the early church Jewish Christians, the Nativity story can come alive for us in new ways. In this, I mean looking to see how the story of Christ’s birth is evident within the pages of the Old Testament. Of course, many are undoubtedly familiar with the prophetic passages in reference to the birth of the Messiah. (Isaiah 7:14; Micah 5:2) But the foreshadowing of Jesus’s coming does not begin and end there. The birth of Jesus is in many ways a callback to stories the Jews were already familiar with and were enough to cement in their minds the significance of who this Man was meant to be, and His role as the promised Saviour.

Parallels to Mothers and Barrenness

Toward the beginning of the Christmas story in Luke’s gospel, Mary (who has discovered from an angel of the Lord that she is pregnant) goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who is pregnant with a son who will come to be known as John the Baptist, despite her old age and being presumed barren. (Luke 1:6-7) Elizabeth’s pregnancy, despite being old in age, is a direct callback to Abraham and Sarah’s miraculous conception of Isaac. In both cases, doubts were present. Sarah and Abraham (then Abram and Sarai) doubted God and had Abraham conceive with a servant, Hagar, which led to division in his family once Isaac was born. Likewise, Elizabeth’s husband Zechariah doubted God as well, which led him to losing his speech until their baby was born.

This theme of miraculous pregnancies is not isolated to Abraham’s story, either. We also see this in the story of Hannah (1 Samuel 1-2) and with Samson’s mother (Judges 13), both of whom struggled to conceive. Through each of these pregnancies, God brought forth great men who acted as leaders for Israel, setting the stage for the Virgin Birth and Incarnation of Christ we see in the Nativity stories.

Parallels to Moses

Some of the more blatant callbacks to the Old Testament stories in the Nativity are to Moses’ birth in Egypt. Just as Pharaoh ordered the murder of innocent newborns to cull the growing Hebrew population (Exodus 1:15-22), King Herod ordered that all boys under two years old be killed in Bethlehem. Both were given divine protection from God, as Moses was placed in a basket and floated down the Nile, and Mary and Joseph fled from Israel to Egypt. Jesus’ family fleeing to Egypt and their eventual return to Israel also parallels the Hebrews living in Egypt, and their eventual exodus. Parallels between Jesus and Moses are evident all throughout the gospels and would communicate to a Jewish audience Jesus’s role as the new Moses, the new Law (a central theme of Matthew’s gospel).

Immanuel: God with Us

In Matthew 1:23, Matthew quotes Isaiah 7:14: “The virgin will be with child and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel--which means ‘God with us’.” The meaning of this name “Immanuel” references back to the Tabernacle in Exodus: The place in which God’s presence dwelt during the Israelites' exodus in the wilderness before entering Canaan. Matthew is very specific in citing this verse, showing that God has now come down to dwell with His people again after centuries of silence. Again, this connection would have been more immediately apparent to many Jewish audiences than it is to us today.

What Does This Show Us?

These callbacks and allusions are very strategic. They are meant to show the reader who Jesus is, and how he fulfills the Old Testament scriptures (Matthew 5:17-18). Through church history, there have been some who have felt the Old Testament has become useless now that we have the Gospel, but it is parallels like these that remind us that Christ is firmly rooted in the Old Testament. When He grew up being taught the Scriptures, He saw how these narratives spoke to His life and to His calling as the Messiah. And this is no less apparent than in the Nativity story in which we reflect on and celebrate every year, come December.

Simon Biedler is the part-time administrative assistant at the EMMC Home Office in Winnipeg. He is currently studying an Honors degree in English at the University of Manitoba. He is interested in pursuing a Master’s degree and perhaps one day teach writing or literature in a college setting.

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This article was originally published in the Recorder vol 62, No. 5