They said it was still a mystery, but that doesn’t mean they shrugged their shoulders and dismissed the seasonal celebration, nor did they diminish the miracle of His being “Here With Us”. It was Christmastime for three composers in 2005, and Ben Glover, Jason Ingram, and Joy Williams were undoubtedly thinking about the Christ child (see here the nativity picture, Adoration of the Shepherds, by 17th Century Italian artist Matthias Stom [Stomer in English]), apparently in a way that was similar to the emotions we can imagine were expressed on the faces of the people at that time. Wonder and probably bewilderment at the same time, and yet great joy inhabited these witnesses, as God still invites us to do today. Will you and I ever figure out everything about this, or is that really what He wants from us during the annual Christmas celebration? Or, how about everyday life? Perhaps the mystery part is something He intends to leave alone, as part of the lure, the fascination that keeps drawing us toward Him, to a time and place and attachment. Just draw nearer.
From the lyrics these three wrote, one might ask if Ben, Jason, or Joy had recently welcomed a newborn into their midst. Or, maybe they had visited a hospital’s neonatal unit and beheld some new arrivals of one or more friends or acquaintances. We could expect that these three might also have been reading from biblical accounts of the Christ-child’s birth or expected arrival, perhaps in Isaiah 9:6, or in Matthew 2 or Luke 1-2. And yet, none of these biblical stories contain details about the child’s physical appearance, so we cannot say for certain what Ben, Jason, and Joy used for inspiration for their own words about Him as a baby. Videos for the song strongly imply the songwriters were thinking of the Christmas story, so that much we could say, although no more specifics are known. The lyrics that Ben, Jason, and Joy wrote are pretty clear about what mystified them – and should, likewise, stun us – about this baby, however. They marveled at the ‘tiny fingers’ of hands ‘so small’, that these same flesh-and-blood human appendages had also ‘measured the sky’ as the universe’s Creator. Or, how about His ‘infant eyes’ and ‘ears’ that made the ‘dawn’ and heard ‘an angel’s symphony’, demonstrating that His human form and divine nature had been amazingly accomplished in the same small body. Someone once said ‘great things come in small packages’, and this was never more true than with Jesus in Bethlehem on a night over two millennia past. No one ever arrived as a baby carrying such significance, a divine ‘love reaching down to save the world’, in the form of a baby. Incredible. And yet, we know that Jesus Himself would say that saving people wasn’t impossible (Matthew 19:26; Mark 10:27). A baby who is God…nonetheless, that still staggers the imagination, until you realize that the Creator-God in involved.
The words Ben, Jason, and Joy wrote tell us something more on top of the incredible but true God-baby story that we should remember. Don’t let it become routine. Something quite predictable happens when people live through several Christmases: they begin to say, ‘Oh yeh, we’ve heard this one before, and it’s no different than what we heard last year’. But, could that be why these three composers have us remember that this human form that occupied a manger also made everything we can see above us in the heavens? The next time Christmas seems hum drum, take a close look at a newborn baby, and then look up and observe the stars, the moon, some of the larger planets, and even the sun. His handiwork is there, in that small child’s diminutive hands and goo-goo eyes looking back at you, and in those heavenly bodies that look down on us too. Who else but Him could have fingerprints in both?
Read here some thoughts about the song’s meaning: Here With Us | Joy Williams Lyrics, Meaning & Videos
Watch a video of the song here: Bing Videos
See information on the image here: File:Adoration of the sheperds - Matthias Stomer.jpg - Wikimedia Commons…The author died in 1660, so this work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 100 years or fewer. This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published (or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office) before January 1, 1930.
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