Really, the Advent season runs from Genesis 3 onward, and Christmas Day is when the miracle prophesied in Luke 1:35 is fulfilled. For those of us who believe personhood can be derived from Psalm 139:13-15 and Job 31:15, we believe the Incarnation did not begin at Jesus' birth but at his conception. And if this is so, when Colossians 2:9 says, "For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily," we know that the fullness of deity dwelled in fertilized ovum.
Will the Empire State Building occupy a doghouse? Will a killer whale fit inside an ant?
And here we are told that omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, utter eternalness and holiness dwelled in a tiny person. This makes Santa coming down a chimney seem a logistical cakewalk.
"The head of all rule and authority" (Col. 2:10) had one of those jelly-necked wobbly baby heads. The government rested on his baby-fatted shoulders (Is. 9:6).
This miracle of addition is important. We must hold it tightly or lose the bigness of the Incarnation. God came as unborn child so that Christ would experience all of humanity. And he experienced all of humanity so that we might receive all of him for all of us.
If God came as a vulnerable, needful, weak baby, we have no need to fear for our own vulnerability, needfulness, and weakness. He emptied himself (Phil. 2:7) so that we would not see our own emptiness as a hopeless cause. "As you received him"—desperate, helpless, desirous—"so walk in him" (Col. 2:6). The miracle of the God-Baby proclaims the gospel's specialty: rescue of the helpless.
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. (John 20:30–31)
I feel so strongly that among those of us who have grown up in church and who can recite the great doctrines of our faith in our sleep and who yawn through the Apostles’ Creed — that among us something must be done to help us once more feel the awe, the fear, the astonishment, the wonder of the Son of God, begotten by the Father from all eternity, reflecting all the glory of God, being the very image of his person, through whom all things were created, upholding the universe by the word of his power.
You can read every fairy tale that was ever written, every mystery thriller, every ghost story, and you will never find anything so shocking, so strange, so weird and spellbinding as the story of the incarnation of the Son of God.
How dead we are! How callous and unfeeling to your glory and your story! How often have I had to repent and say, “God, I am sorry that the stories men have made up stir my emotions, my awe and wonder and admiration and joy, more than your own true story.”
The space thrillers of our day, like Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, can do this great good for us: they can humble us and bring us to repentance, by showing us that we really are capable of some of the wonder and awe and amazement that we so seldom feel when we contemplate the eternal God and the cosmic Christ and a real living contact between them and us in Jesus of Nazareth.
When Jesus said, “For this purpose I have come into the world” (John 18:37), he said something as crazy and weird and strange and eerie as any statement in science fiction that you have ever read.
Oh, how I pray for a breaking forth of the Spirit of God upon me and upon you; for the Holy Spirit to break into my experience in a frightening way, to wake me up to the unimaginable reality of God.
One of these days lightning is going to fill the sky from the rising of the sun to its setting, and there is going to appear in the clouds one like a Son of Man with his mighty angels in flaming fire. And we will see him clearly. And whether from terror or sheer excitement, we will tremble and we will wonder how we ever lived so long with such a domesticated, harmless Christ.
These things are written that you might believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God who came into the world. Really believe.
1. Jesus is the reason for the season.
The primary purpose for observing Christmas is remembering Jesus’s birth. At Christmas, we celebrate Jesus’s birthday, not the little drummer boy or Santa Claus!
2. Jesus preexisted with God in the beginning before the world began.
Jesus’s birth as a baby in a Bethlehem manger doesn’t mark the beginning of his existence. Rather, as John’s Gospel teaches explicitly (John 1:1, 14) and the other Gospels imply, Jesus took on human flesh in addition to existing eternally as part of the Godhead.
3. Jesus’s birth was the culmination of centuries of messianic expectations.
Jesus’s coming occurred in fulfillment of messianic expectations including his birthplace, virgin birth, and other details surrounding his advent. Later, during his earthly ministry and particularly in his death on the cross, Jesus fulfilled many more messianic patterns and predictions.
4. We should distinguish between cultural and biblical Christmas.
We must separate fact from fiction, and historic, biblical truths from mere Christmas traditions. This includes Santa Claus, presents, reindeer, Christmas trees, and other paraphernalia. Not that these customs are necessarily harmful or unhelpful
5. Jesus’s birth is part of a larger cluster of events that culminates in Jesus's death for our sins as God’s suffering servant.
Jesus wasn’t only born as a baby, he grew up as a young man who knew the Scriptures. Then, when he was about thirty years old, he began his public ministry, healing many, exorcising demons, raising the dead, and commanding the forces of nature. In keeping with his own predictions, he died, was buried, and after three days rose from the dead. While at Christmas we celebrate Jesus’s birth, we should remember that it is part of a life unlike any other that brought us salvation and forgiveness from sins.
6. Jesus, the Son of God, was conceived by the Holy Spirit in his mother Mary’s womb.
At the heart of Christmas is a biological and theological miracle that requires supernatural faith. Skeptics scoff at the notion of God conceiving a child in a virgin’s womb, calling it a biological impossibility and dismissing it as mere legend. Believers will recognize that only a sinless human being could save humans by dying for them, and that such a sinless human being could only be conceived by God himself.
7. There is no incarnation without the virgin birth.
Andrew Lincoln, in his book Born of a Virgin?, has argued that the virgin birth is unhistorical while asserting that the incarnation could still be true in a spiritual sense. This, however, is contrary to scriptural teaching, which keeps the virgin birth and the incarnation together as two sides of one and the same coin. Only a virgin birth allows Jesus to be the God-man who combines two natures—human and divine—into one person as the early church councils went on record as affirming.
8. Jesus’s birth was accompanied by rejection.
Herod tried to kill Jesus (Matt. 2:16). There was no place for Jesus in the inn (Luke 2:7). Even though the world was made through Jesus, the world didn’t recognize him (John 1:11). Many didn’t welcome the birth of the Christ child. The reason for this was primarily that Jesus threatened people’s self-interest. Sinful people love sin more than God and refuse to come to the light lest their sin be exposed (John 3:19–21).
9. Jesus came to make a second, spiritual birth possible for those who believe in him.
As Charles Wesley affirms in "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," Jesus was “born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth.” John writes, “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (1:12–13). Later, he tells the story of Nicodemus, whom Jesus told that he must be born again (3:3, 5). Anyone can be born again spiritually by repenting of his sin and placing his trust in Jesus. Those who don’t experience this second birth aren’t believers but Christians in name only (Rom. 8:9).
10. Jesus’s coming marks the ultimate sacrifice.
He left the glories of heaven to enter the world—a dark place—naked, vulnerable, and defenseless. He exposed himself to the human condition and took on “the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom. 8:3). He became weak, humbled himself on a cross, and died for our sin (Phil. 2:5–8). That—not gaudy commercialism—is what Christmas is all about.
“He, the Life of all, our Lord and Savior,did not arrange the manner of his own deathlest He should seem to be afraid of some other kind.No. He accepted and bore upon the crossa death inflicted by others,and those other His special enemies,a death which to them was supremely terribleand by no means to be faced;and He did this in order that,by destroying even this death,He might Himself be believed to be the Life,and the power of death be recognised as finally annulled.A marvelous and mighty paradox has thus occurred,for the death which they thought to inflict on Him as dishonour and disgracehas become the glorious monument to death’s defeat.”
– Athanasius, On the Incarnation
...John 1:14 says, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” The Incarnation teaches us that the divine Son took upon a human nature to reveal His Father and to reconcile all things. The incarnational ministry of Jesus didn't begin at His birth, as the creed points out, but at conception. Jesus was a fetus.
Indeed, the eternal Son of God, who created all things and who holds all things together (Col. 1:16-18), came into the world in a womb. As He sustained the universe and held the stars in their places, the body of His mother sustained Him. He came into the world to crush Satan, sin and death, and in doing so He took upon a human body that was itself crushable. Right there, in Mary’s womb, was Immanuel, God with us.
The Incarnation did not begin with the birth accounts relayed in the Gospels; it began at the moment the divine Son was conceived in Mary’s womb by the Holy Spirit. Jesus’ first moments on this earth were not in the manger, but in Mary. Jesus’ body, His muscles and bones, formed in the cavity of her body.
The Lord of the universe came to His creation in embryonic form. The Son of David’s body was vulnerable enough to be sucked out of His mother by a vacuum. The Lamb of God had the kind of body that could be flattened by forceps.
One of the reasons Christians are pro-life is because Jesus was a fetus. If we lose the essential truths that are bound up in the Incarnation, including the full humanity of Jesus, we lose the gospel. The humanity of Christ that we see in His conception is also on full display in His crucifixion. Though forceps did not crush Jesus’ body, it was crushed by a cross.
In the midst of a culture of death, we must promote and embody the culture of life—in every way possible. The culture of life has not just come under attack in recent decades but since the Garden of Eden. The Church promotes the kingdom of God because our King, though once dead, now reigns in life and power. The culture of life is still under assault from the culture of death; the Planned Parenthood videos are just the latest piece of evidence. Yet, in the face of death, the Church continues to preach the conception, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ until the consummation of His Kingdom, when only the culture of life will remain.
