Stop for a moment out on the rocky, rolling land not so many miles from the great Mediterranean vastness, in the heart of what is known as the Judean hillside, near a small, inconspicuous village grandly called “The City of David.” Thousands of years ago, white flocks of sheep, trailed by their young vigilant masters, speckled those hills. One of these young masters was a song-writer, a poet, a thoughtful lad with a vibrant trust in his God, who would later become the greatest king Israel has ever known. But while he was still a boy out with his herd of sheep, David would sit upon the wind-swept hills and dream poems and songs about the Messiah who one day God would send to rescue His people Israel. Never doubting but ever praising the One who had promised such a Savior.
Many hundreds of years later, in those same hills, amongst the bleating of the sheep once more, an angel would appear to a new set of young vigilant masters. This angel would bring the news that the boy David had written of, the news that here, even in their own Bethlehem, the City of David, the Messiah had indeed come. Born as a baby, resting in the same place from which you might feed a lamb, wrapped in the same fabric the shepherds wore. A Messiah. Come to set His people free.
God must look on those Judean hills with their scattered flocks of sheep and shepherds with special affection. Perhaps that is why one of His Son’s most well-known stories is a simple tale of a shepherd’s unwavering search for his one lost lamb. David would have understood; the shepherds who heard of the Messiah’s birth would have understood. The Son of the Most High King came as a Savior to the simple, the poor, the common, the outcast. He came into the heart of the hills, hills flecked by little families of lambs and their leaders, hills written of in poems and songs, hills that have witnessed events the wonder of which the world has not dreamed.
