As I think about the birth of Christ, you can almost think of it as his first birth. "What do you mean Nate that sounds weird." Well, Jesus was with God from the beginning and to go to Earth for him was his first birth. This was a human birth. A birth into a world with sin, pain, and strife. It was a world Christ knew but had never lived in before. He was in Heaven when the fall of Satan happened. He witnessed the power of sin. When he came into being on earth, Jesus was immersed into a world of sin, a world much different than beside the hand of his father. After the Crucifixion, Christ rose from the dead, walked on Earth a few days and then ascended into Heaven. This was his 2nd birth, the return to Heaven. He was returning to the place he came from. The place where sin was non-existent. I would like to know what the feeling was for Christ when he returned. Did he almost feel like the prodigal son? Even though Christ never sinned he understood it. He understood what it was like to be gone from the father. As I ramble on I wanted to share a verse that got me thinking about this. Genesis 1:26 and it says:

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."

To me the "us" God refers to is himself, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus. Jesus was with God when the Earth was created. To me it shows that Christ was there from the beginning just like he said in John 1:1, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." He was with God in the beginning. How sweet. The mind of God will never cease to amaze me.