Never Alone

When I think about Christmas and the New Year, there is always a pause in my heart. For some people I know, the holy-day times are not filled with celebration or anticipation. Maybe it is because they have a lost loved one the year before, or there has been a family break-up or they have received news of their own health crisis. There is a sense of isolation and loneliness that is hard to shake.

As a believer in Jesus reflecting on the birth of Jesus, I see several mental images project across my mind. I imagine the courts of Heaven where the Father, the Son and the Spirit eternally existed in eternity past (Just thinking about that blows my mind!). As that first Christmas approaches, I see my Savior leaving His heaven home--leaving the eternal fellowship of the triune God--leaving the eternal comfort, joy, and peace of a sin-free environment. He leaves all alone and the next image to flash up in my mind’s eye is a cradle in Bethlehem. O wait! There’s something off about this cradle: it’s a smelly manger. The creator of the universe is enwrapped in human flesh—God with us! There he is in a cold cave sleeping where farm animals come to eat and do other things! The God-man all alone in a cave where animals eat, sleep and do other things—the story of His life: “rejected of man…a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” Then the scene changes again to a cruel Roman cross. After living a sinless life, loving the lost (all of us!), healing many and having compassion on every crowd he ever met, he endures the searing pain of a cruel cross. As Christians we know our Savior “was born to die!” It is the awesome good of the “good news!” There our Lord is dying all alone. “My God, my God why have you forsaken Me?” haunts the corridors of my mind. However, the images of Christmas do not end with the searing pain of a cruel cross! My mind fast-forwards through the triumph of the empty tomb to the end of the Christmas story. The fourth and final image that becomes wonderfully clear when I think about Christmas, is the courts of heaven again. Our victorious risen Lord is not living there all alone! No! He is there at the right hand of the Father and there are millions and millions of people dressed in fine wedding clothes—white and clean! And I hear, “Welcome home, come see the place I’ve prepared for you!” The staff and the students at Alaska Bible College hope and pray that you have answered His invitation to become His bride: “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16) He left the courts of heaven alone, slept in a smelly farm animal manger alone, suffered the searing pain of a cruel cross alone, so that He could spend forever with His bride, the church, in the courts of heaven, never alone! “Whoever comes to me, I will never cast out!”—Jesus (John 6:37).

So as we embark on a new year, may I remind you that we who have placed our faith in Jesus have a coming King who knows what it feels like to be isolated and alone. He has promise to never leave us alone and someday very soon, I hope, will come again and take those who have believed in Him to His Father’s house where we will never ever feel alone again.

Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. And you know the way to where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. –Jesus John 14:1-6 (ESV).

Dr. David Ley is the President of Alaska Bible College.