Christmas in Invisible Ink
I learned to play football and Indiana Jones pretty early on because my neighborhood of boys had exactly zero interest in dolls or Hello Kitty. After Christmas, we’d gather in the driveway next door to play with our new toys. There were bikes, roller blades, pellet guns, and one year, something that completely fascinated me: an undercover spy kit with an invisible ink pen. You could write secret messages anywhere and everywhere and only a special light could reveal what was written. I think God and invisible ink have a lot in common.
Most of us start the Christmas story in a manger, but it really begins in a garden. When God spoke the world into existence everything was as it should be. Creation sung in perfection. Man enjoyed an unbroken, close relationship with God. But when Adam and Eve chose sin over God’s instruction, everything broke. All was thrown into desperate, dark chaos. Peace was severed and fear reigned.
Rather than moving away, God remained and whispered a promise of redemption and rescue: a Savior would come to deliver the world and set things right.
From that time, God whispered the promise of our coming Savior to his people generation after generation. His people often lost heart because the promise wasn’t fulfilled quickly. There was famine, war, exile, Godly kings, corrupt leaders, and seasons of restoration. Even still, His people watched with great expectation, and eventually, Jesus came just as God said He would. 450 years after the last words of the prophets, Jesus’ cry broke the silence from a Bethlehem stable - a cry of deliverance, of peace, and of sin’s defeat.
From the moment God whispered the promise until Jesus’ first cry, there was never a time the plan was not in motion. Everything - and everyone - moved toward the coming of Jesus. In ways unseen and unknown to man, the plan was masterfully orchestrated and carried out in the perfect way, in the perfect place, and with all characters positioned perfectly across every generation at the perfect time. There was no detail neglected or skipped, and never once was the promise forgotten or abandoned. Not even for a moment.
It’s the long waiting, the silence, the uncomfortable tension between a promise and its fulfillment that trip us up.
God never stopped writing His redemption story, even though it often seemed to be written in invisible ink. And since Christ’s coming, everything - and everyone - is moving toward His return, toward sin’s final end and our final and complete rescue. It’s happening right now as we live and breathe and work and eat. In ways we cannot comprehend this side of eternity.
Do you feel the hope here?
Can you feel the absolute enormity of God’s plan - that His ways are so much higher, so much larger, so much more than we could ever imagine? Trying to wrap my mind around it all makes me want to explode in joy and fall to my knees all at the same time.
Have you ever felt God to be absent, forgetful, or just out of reach? Have you ever stood at the bottom of a mountain - maybe an impossible decision, a broken marriage, a broken heart, or a lost child - and felt the climb to be impossible? Or maybe you’ve woken up in a tangled mess that seemed too much for anyone to untangle.
If God is powerful enough to orchestrate the salvation of mankind, what on earth could we ever face that would be too hard for Him?
My friends, we are not alone. You need to know this, and right now, so do I. We are not forgotten. And whatever we face today and in every tomorrow to come, God is working in ways we cannot fathom.
Our story is part of His big story, even when we cannot see it. Even when it’s being written in invisible ink.
I want to hear your thoughts - join the conversation below! Looking back now, how can you see God at work in ways you weren't aware of at the time? What have you believed to be too hard for God, and how would it change you to know it's not too hard for Him?