Emmanuel Church Canterbury

Some years ago Joan Osborne released a song with these lyrics: ‘What if God was one of us?’ It’s a fascinating question: imagine if the real God was one of us! At last we could be sure who he is and what he is like. The Bible makes a shocking claim: God has indeed become one of us. We are just 2000 years too late to see him with our own eyes. But thankfully we have eyewitness records to find out what happened when he visited this planet. At his birth, Jesus was given the name ‘Emmanuel’ (Matthew 1:23). This name is no ordinary name: it is a Hebrew word which means ‘God with us’. Eight centuries before Jesus’ birth, God inspired the prophet Isaiah to predict that a child would be born miraculously to a virgin and be given this name (Isaiah 7:14). The eyewitness accounts in the Bible record that this really happened. When Jesus grew up he demonstrated that he was ‘God with us’ by all he said and did.