Joy to the World and What it Means

No more let sins and sorrows grow.  Nor thorns infest the ground:

He comes to make His blessings flow

Far as the curse is found, far as the curse is found,

far as the curse is found.

These words were written by Isaac Watts, the famous English hymn writer and composed by George Frederick Handel.  The first two stanzas lead us into joyful, thankful worship.  This third stanza speaks to the purpose of the Savior's coming.  It takes us back to the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve's disobedience separated them and us from all the blessings of fellowship with God.  It speaks of the growth of sins and sorrows.  The thorns infesting the ground must be speaking of how man's work would be made more difficult because of Adam and Eve's sin.  So our world both then and today, apart from the Savior's coming, is afflicted with the growth of sins and sorrows, and our work is made more difficult by sin's grip.  Even nature is engulfed in sin's grip.  This certainly describes the world we live in today.  Sin's curse is spread thick over all humanity and even of nature.  Although the great work of tracking down and destroying the curse actually ends at the cross, the Savior's coming begins at Bethlehem, where Jesus is born into the world.

The Savior's coming changes the game.  He comes to make his blessings flow in no limited fashion but to everywhere the curse is found.  The blessings that come with the Savior's birth are meant to chase down and overtake the sins and sorrows of this world in as powerful a manner as those sins and sorrows were first released into this world.  So the questions for me are will I believe that the blessings of God's coming are big enough to replace the evidences of the curse in my own life, and the lives of all the people I know no matter what the evidences of that curse are in their lives?