In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to his own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. (Luke 2:1-5)
Have you ever thought what an amazing thing it is that God ordained beforehand that the Messiah be born in Bethlehem as the prophecy in Micah 5 shows); and that He so ordained things that when the time came, the Messiah’s mother and legal father were living in Nazareth; that in order to fulfill His word and bring two little people to Bethlehem that first Christmas, God put it in the heart of Caeser Augustus that all the Roman world should be enrolled in his own town?
Have you ever felt, like me, little and insignificant in a world of seven billion people, where all the news of big political and economic and social movements and of outstanding people with lots of power and prestige?
I you have don’t let that make you disheartened or unhappy. For it is implicit in Scripture that all the mammoth political forces and the giant industrial complexes, without their even knowing it, are being guided by God, not for their own sake but for the sake of God’s little people – the little Mary and the little Joseph who have to be got from Nazareth to Bethlehem. God wields an empire to bless his children.
Do not think, because you experience adversity, that the hand of the Lord is shortened. It is not our prosperity but our holiness that He seeks with all His heart. And to that end, He rules the whole world. As Proverbs 21:1 says, “The King’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; He turns it wherever He will.”
He is a big God for little people, and we have great cause to rejoice that, unbeknownst to them, all the king’s and presidents and premiers, and chancellors of the world follow the sovereign decrees of our Father in heaven, that we, the children, might be conformed to the image of His son, Jesus Christ.
