Right Now.

And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Beth-lehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.

So the angels have told the shepherds that Christ the Lord is (already) born in Beth-lehem, that tiny little town where it was prophesied centuries earlier by Micah, particularly in chapters four and five of the book bearing his name. But to actually be on the scene at the time it is happening, that THE Savior their Lord and their God first promised thousands of years ago (for this prophecy go back to just after Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden, in the third chapter fifteenth verse of Genesis) was there for them to come see -- this was what, in our parlance, knocked the shepherds off their feet! We hear the only things the shepherds say to each other (they will say other things, but we have no record of them) after the angels are gone, after the heavenly host is gone. Right now.

The field where the shepherds kept their flocks was likely just outside Beth-lehem, outside both to give the sheep room to graze and because shepherds, like any other guardians and cultivators of livestock, tend to stink. Having the angels with their announcement appear to THEM was just not something that happened! God's messengers would appear, or were expected to appear, to priests or others He had chosen to deliver His messages to. There were none of those -- prophets -- since the ministry of Malachi in the late fifth century BC, whose message we see in the last book of the Old Testament. The shepherds were the ones to hear the message that Joseph and Mary in the manger were living right then. Right now.

"Let us now go even unto Beth-lehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us." The shepherds did not try to reason this out, or at least did not take the many steps you and I likely would today, because they knew and believed God would not send His angels to tell them what was not true. We are not told what provisions they made (if any) for the sheep who were sleeping for the night, but we are told they knew where they were going because they sure knew where they had been! With every generation, and here we are reading this as I write this eighty generations removed, the story gets told again. Unto YOU AND ME is born a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. Right now.