During childhood there is this yearning question of “what will you be?”. Parents place their children in various activities and as their children improve there is a sense of inifinite potential. Will my child go pro? Will they be a president? And so on.
There is a seeming yearning parents have for a special child. Or to at least know if their child is incredibly special. But this is not only between parents and their children. Our wider culture has an eye on the youth. Whether it is the young athletic prospect or the prodigious math student. Our culture asks the question what will this child be? What kind of greatness will he achieve? This question can become a dominant question, that spreads throughout the media.
Within this desire of our culture is a biblical yearning. It is a yearning for a special child who will ultimately save us. This yearning began after the first sin of Adam of Eve. When God cursed the serpent he said in Genesis 3:15:
“I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.“
God said that there would be an offspring of the woman who would bruise the head of the serpent. The evil angel who deceived man and plunged this world that we live in into sin will be defeated by a child born of a woman. The archetype of the special child began here. From then on men have considered the potential of children. The question of “will this child save us?” began then. And many special children were born.
Noah was one of them. When he was born his father said in Genesis 5:29b:
“Out of the ground that the LORD has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands.”
He truly was a special son. Only Noah’s family survived the flood that God brought over the whole earth. (See my previous blog on the relief of the curse after Noah: Is The Ground Still Cursed?). Yet Noah was not the promised seed. He did not defeat the serpent.
Moses was another special child. We are told his birth story in the book of Exodus. He is a child brimming with potential, an Israelite raised in Pharaoh’s household, who God chooses to lead His people to the promised land. Yet even Moses is not this promised seed.
So many special children were born yet none fully brought rest to mankind.
These special children were all pictures of the one special child who defeated the devil and now saves men from eternal condemnation. They picture Jesus. The boy Jesus is a child who truly meets the expectations of infinite potential. This is the child who is the king of the entire universe. He is even the king of heaven. No other child can live up to such expectations, which a parent can mistakenly place upon him or her. Yet Christ lived up to these expectations.
The point of our blog today is not to say that a child cannot be uniquely special. In fact all children are uniquely special creations by God who made them in His image. They are of awesome value. And different children are uniquely gifted in different areas of life. That is how God has made man, that the diverse gifts of different men bless one another (1 Corinthians 12:12-26). So yes children can be specially gifted and in Christ they can grow to express their unique gifts which the Lord will give them for His glory.
The point of this blog rather is to say that the desire for special children with infinite potential, children who will “change the world”, and ultimately truly satisfy the world, that desire points to who the human heart truly yearns for, Jesus. Only He can fill that yearning.
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