Our pastor challenged us recently to read through the Book of Matthew and share the lessons we learned. I started the same way I did for many years when I was teaching Sunday school, I prepared the introduction. I was studying the period from the time of Jeremiah and Malachi until the birth of Christ. J. Vernon McGee once said, “Station G O D went off the air for four hundred years.” Most people mistakenly think that God took His ball and went home for four centuries. But when we view the historical occurrences, they can only be explained by the hand of God.
While I was turning these things over in my mind, an unusual analogy came to me.
When I was a route man for the Coca Cola Company from 1972-1979, I had a friend at work named Butch. He and I would attend almost every Vanderbilt home basketball game. If we couldn’t get our hands on free tickets, we’d simply sneak into the game with the company employees on duty for the game. Sales uniforms did have advantages.
In the mid-seventies Vanderbilt had a great series of teams led by three young men referred to as the F-Troop. At the same time, Ernie Grunfeld and Bernard King were turning the conference into a circus at The University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Butch and I, through luck and shenanigans, had accomplished the impossible. We had acquired a pair of premium floor level tickets for the Vandy-UT game at Memorial Gym in Nashville. The lead story in the sports page of The Tennessean stated simply, “The Ernie and Bernie Show rolls into town tonight. The atmosphere was electric.
The morning of the game I was in the morning sales meeting, when Butch eased into the back of the room, late as usual. He slipped in beside me, elbowed me in the ribs and whispered, “The stage is set.”
It is the strangest thing, when I was studying the introduction to The New Testament, it struck me. I hadn’t thought of that incident for years, but that is exactly what God did for Zechariah, Joseph and Mary. He nudged them with the breath of an angel and said, for all eternity, “The stage is set.”
