Does God care? It can be so easy to look around us, to see natural disasters and not so natural disasters happening all around us, and conclude that if God is there at all, he doesn’t really care.

We only need to read the accounts of the happenings of first century Roman Palestine to realise the aforementioned conclusion might be wrong.

In a stable, in Bethlehem, a baby was born. This baby was foretold in prophecies reaching back to the beginning of creation itself. This baby would be the descended from Adam and also be the incarnation of God the Son. This would be the God-man. Somehow, the infinite would be contracted to the finite.

This baby would grow up to be a man, that God would walk amongst us. He would suffer as every other man, he would hunger, thirst and grow weary. He would know loneliness and rejection. Yet, he would go through something which no other man could do. He didn’t come to earth just to live a perfect sinless life and tell us how to live, nor did he come just to find out what it would be like.

The first sin of mankind caused all men to be born sinners. That, before a righteous and holy God, they deserved everlasting punishment. Yet God in his grace loved mankind so much, that he sent his Son to become a man, live on earth and then die a substitutionary and sacrificial death. God the Son would take on punishment due to sinners, God the Son would present himself as a perfect sacrifice for sin, that sinners might be made eternally right with God. Jesus Christ did everything necessary for our justification, making it available to all who put their faith in him.

Does God care? He cared enough to allow his eternal Son to die in our place, that we might not suffer eternal punishment, but have everlasting life with him.