And behold a voice came out of Heaven. (Matthew 3:17)

There were the more obvious times when Heaven broke through and showed itself to earth.  Such as…

–When the angel appeared to Zacharias in Luke 1 and later appeared to Mary.  Same  chapter.

–When our Lord was born in Bethlehem and the angels appeared to the shepherds in the nearby field. Luke 2.  That was amazing.

–And when Jesus was baptized.  The Father spoke from Heaven and the Spirit descended in the form of a dove.  Matthew 3.

–And of course when Jesus died on Calvary.  God darkened the sky at noonday, tore the temple’s curtain down the middle, and shook the land.

–And when He arose.  Oddly when Jesus came out of the tomb there were no accompanying theatricals–no quaking, just shaking (sorry; couldn’t resist). I’m thinking about the frightened soldiers.

But then–and this is why I came to the laptop this early morning–there were those not-so-obvious times when Heaven cracked the skies and intruded on humanity.  And in most cases, the carnal minded did not notice. They went on with whatever they were doing. Only those of a spiritual mind picked up on what Heaven was doing.  You can almost hear some of them saying, “Wait.  Did you see that?”  “Did you hear what He said?”

This for instance…

–Our Lord sat on the Mount of Olives overlooking Jerusalem. He spoke aloud, to no one in particular.   O Jerusalem, Jerusalem.  You kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you.  How often I wanted to gather your children together the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.  But you were unwilling.  

Okay, someone heard Him, obviously, to have recorded it for us.  Matthew, I suppose, since it’s in the Gospel of his name.  But please stay with me here.

That is something special.

Think what is happening there.  On the surface, it’s not very impressive.  It’s easy to walk right past it  The carpenter of Nazareth sits atop the hill opposite Jerusalem’s eastern walls.  And he seems to be talking.  To himself?  Looks like it.

And don’t forget who He is.  Jesus.  Carpenter.  Occasional visitor to Jerusalem. Only an itinerant preacher.  Untrained.  The irritant of all the powers that be.  The burr under the saddle of the religious leaders who insisted that they alone had the right to authorize preachers.

And then, most of all, notice what he is saying:  How often I wanted to gather your children together…. to comfort them, obviously.  Say what?  The carpenter is going to comfort the religious big shots? The small town preacher is going to comfort the residents of the capital city?

That’s exactly right.  Except something deeper is going on here.

It’s God talking.

That’s the only conclusion we can come to.

We have Luke’s account of a similar moment in Luke 19:41-44.  When He approached Jerusalem, He saw the city and wept over it, saying, ‘If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace!  but now they have been hidden from your eyes.  For the days will come upon you when your enemies will throw up a barricade against you, and surround you and hem you in on every side, and they will level you to the ground and your children within you, and they will not leave in you one stone upon another, because you did not recognize the time of your visitation.

Prophecy, they say, is history in advance.  This certainly is.  Jesus knows it’s coming and in His mind’s eye, sees it, and grieves over it.

Oh, one more thing.  Back in Matthew 23, there’s something else.  Heaven “intruded” not only in the final verses of that chapter, but just preceding that, Jesus said something remarkable if we think of Him as only the carpenter from Nazareth.

Therefore, behold, I am sending you prophets and wise men and scribes; some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues, and persecute from city to city, so that upon you may fall the guilt of all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar.  Truly I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.  (Matthew 23:34-36)

That, my friends, is the eternal Son of the living God speaking as only He could.

As the temple officers said of Jesus in John 7:46, “Never has a man spoken the way this man speaks.”

True.  That’s because He is far more than a man, guys.

Jesus is Lord.  In fact, in the beginning was the Word.  And the Word was with God.  And the Word was God.

The longer I serve Him, the more that overwhelms me.