Expository Thoughts
Let us beware of despising the poor, because of their poverty.
Their condition is one which the Son of God has sanctified and honored, by taking it voluntarily on Himself. God is no respecter of people. He looks at the hearts of men, and not at their incomes. Let us never be ashamed of the affliction of poverty, if God thinks fit to lay it upon us. To be godless and covetous is disgraceful, but it is no disgrace to be poor. A lowly dwelling place, and coarse food, and a hard bed, are not pleasing to flesh and blood. But they are the portion which the Lord Jesus Himself willingly accepted from the day of His entrance into the world. Wealth ruins far more souls than poverty. When the love of money begins to creep over us, let us think of the manger at Bethlehem, and of Him who was laid in it. Such thoughts may deliver us from much harm.
Notes on 2:1-7
1. Caesar Augustus. This is that Octavius who, after the defeat of Anthony and Cleopatra at Actium, took the government of the Roman Empire into his own hands and was the first Caesar or Roman emperor.
3. Everyone went to his own town to register. Quesnel remarks, "Augustus imagines that he is busy advancing the glory of his name, and the luster of his reign. And yet his orders, by means of others more powerful and absolute than his, become subservient to the accomplishment of prophecies, of which he is altogether ignorant— about the birth of a King whom he will never know, and about the establishment of a monarchy, which will subject his and all others to itself. This is what happens in all ages, and people take no notice of