She brought forth her firstborn son, and she wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a feeding trough, because there was no room for them in the inn.
He came, according to prophecy, to be "despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering." He was to be without "beauty or majesty," "like a root out of dry ground." Would it had been fitting that a man who was to die naked on the cross should be robed in purple, as a King, at his birth? Wouldn't it have be inappropriate that the Redeemer who was to be buried in a borrowed tomb would be born anywhere but in the humblest shed, and housed anywhere but in the most lowly manner? The manger and the cross standing at the two extremes of the Savior's earthly life seem most fit and appropriate to each other. He is to wear through life the clothes of a peasant; He is to associate with fishermen; the meek are to be His disciples; the cold mountains are often to be His only bed; He is to say, "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head;" nothing, therefore, could be more fitting than that in His time of humiliation, when He laid aside His glory, and took upon Himself the form of a servant, that He should be laid in a manger. 