(Editor’s note: This column was originally published on December 20, 2023. We liked it so much, we’re sharing it again.)
Jack Benny was from Waukegan. The renown comedian of the mid-twentieth century mentioned it occasionally on his radio show and later on The Jack Benny Program on television, along with his screechy violin skills and his miserliness. But even if this Scrooge who played it for laughs had never referenced his hometown, viewers could have deduced it from his use of an interjection common to the north Chicago suburbs: Lookit!
The script might open a sentence with “Look” before Rochester’s boss delivered some wry pontification, but Benny would say “Lookit!” It was as natural to him as y’all is to a Southerner. All the kids in his neighborhood said it back in the day. They still do.
The Bible has its own version of “Lookit!”—that attention grabbing exclamation that arrests the hearer and forces focus on something important. It is both interjection and imperative, exclamation and command: “Behold!”
It’s God’s way of saying to all the kids, Lookit!
The Christmas narrative is especially punctuated with its Beholds, and a significant number are delivered by angel messengers.
Most famous may be the pronouncement over a Bethlehem hillside accompanied by the brilliant angel chorus: “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy” (Luke 2:10).
This series of attention grabbers reaches back to Old Testament prophets as Isaiah tells a weary people in foreign exile that their rescue will come, albeit in an unexpected fashion: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call his name Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14). To this rescuer’s doubting uncle, an angel interrupting his annual temple duty first offers the customary comfort “fear not” before predicting the birth of old Zechariah’s own son as the forerunner of the Messiah.
“Behold! I bring you good news of great joy!” —The angel to the shepherds outside Bethlehem
But when the elderly priest questions the message, comfort turns to caution with the familiar interjection: “And behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things take place, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time” (Luke 1:20).
When that same angel appears to young Mary, her question does not betray doubting, but curiosity. “How can this be?” she asked.
“Behold,” Gabriel interrupted, stopping what could have become a string of questions and redirecting an unmarried teenager to the answer. “You will conceive in your womb and bear a Son, and you shall call his name Jesus” (Luke 2:31).
The angel’s explanation is backed up with similar miraculous evidence, signaled by a second holy Lookit!
“And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 2:36).
Then Mary adopts the word herself, not just as a rhetorical device, but as if to borrow the messenger’s own way of saying, if you need proof, you can see it for yourself. The young woman said to Gabriel, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 2:36).
And if we need proof that the promise was fulfilled, we can look to John’s own nativity story not in a creche but in the cosmos. In the poetic prologue to his Gospel, John uses another word that in the King James translation beautifully references the angels’ interjection. John attests it really did happen and we were eyewitnesses:
“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
Behold? Indeed, we did.
Ancient words, ever true
The words often translated “behold” in English appear 1,298 times in the King James translation of the Bible. Other versions render it as “look” and “see.” In other forms, it can mean “to find out” or “to make sure.”
In Greek, this is from the word idou. Not a gentle nudge, this is a command to “Stop! See this! Don’t miss it!” It is a demanding version of the more gentle invitation heard later in Jesus’ itinerant ministry to “come and see.” When each of them discovered the Messiah, both Andrew and the Samaritan woman said to those around them, If you don’t believe me, come and see for yourself. Behold a man.
In Hebrew, behold is often translated from hinneh. Sometimes it comes out as “Lo!” To the earthy and redoubtable Jews, God regularly says Hinneh! If you need proof, look here.
But before we are too harsh on the nation who often heard this directive and still struggled to believe, we should remember our own age of incredulity. In these days, it’s hard to believe even what we see with our own eyes, where artificial intelligence trumps real intelligence with computer-generated realities, and where lies are easier to sell than truth.
In this toxic time with its doubting and head-scratching and furrowed eyebrows, God still says, “Lookit!”
Changing me, changing you
If we are to accept God’s invitation to investigate and more fully understand what he had been doing all along, we can look back to his own prophetic declaration more than 500 years before the birth of the Messiah.
God’s people were in exile in a foreign land. Should they fear God had forgotten them and that his reported promises were somehow delayed, Isaiah brought a word that explained that it was all part of a bigger plan.
Hinneh, here is something new.
“Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert” (Isaiah 43:19).
What a beautiful, yet insistent invitation to come and understand what God has intended from the beginning: to bring into the world a Savior who will change hearts, and lives, and peoples, and nations. We cannot close our eyes to him or to his mission.
God’s new thing is ancient. It is the restoration of a pathway into his very presence, cut through wilderness and desert, cut through sin and separation, cut through the veil into the throne room. And all who accept his beckoning are welcome to the change that it will mean for each of them.
Behold the child, by nature’s kindly law pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw. —Alexander Pope
“Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Idou, new creatures.
Not merely a Baby in a cow stall for shepherds to come and see, this is the Savior of the world. And he issues his appeal personally and persistently.
“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me” (Revelation 3:20).
Behold, Jesus.
– Eric Reed is editor of IBSA media.