MERRY
CHRISTMAS
I thought that since it is so close to Christmas
that perhaps I would write something about the meaning of Christmas as far as I
see it. There are many, many verses in
the Bible that we could look at to focus our minds on Christmas, and I will do
my best to look at some of these verses in this writing about Christmas. I suppose the best place to begin is at the beginning
and that would mean to look at the first book of the Bible, for it is there
that we first see God’s message about Christmas, and it came at the very moment
that He was talking to Adam and Eve after they first sinned. God is now speaking not only to Adam and Eve,
but to Satan also when He says, “And I will put enmity between you and the
woman, and between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, and
you shall bruise him on the heel (Gen. 3:15).”
It was of course Satan who had tempted Eve into sinning through the
eating of the fruit and then Adam followed suit. God is saying here that there will come in
the future the seed of a woman who will destroy Satan, while he will bruise this
Seed. This verse speaks of the virgin
birth of Jesus Christ, the Seed of the woman and even though Christ did die, He
was only bruised because He rose from the dead, however Satan was judged at the
cross and one day will be placed into the lake of fire that was made for he and
all the demons who disobeyed the Lord.
This is the only place in all the Scriptures where we see this phrase “the
seed of woman,” for in all other cases it is the seed of man that brings
children into the world.
When
we look at the Gospel of Matthew we see in it the genealogy of Joseph all the
way back to Abraham. When we see the
genealogy found in Luke’s Gospel we see what many to believe to be the
genealogy of Jesus Christ through Mary, and this one goes all the way back to
God who created Adam. This is all part
of the real Christmas story, those who were involved in the birth of Jesus
Christ, the Savior of the world. I will
not go through all of these names, but I think a few of them which are familiar
are good for us to look at, names like Adam, and then his son Seth who was born
a long time after the other children that Adam and Eve had. Next let’s look at Enoch and his son Methuselah,
who is the oldest recorded human being in the entire Bible. Methuselah lived to be 969 years old; people
lived longer before the flood, and his name means “when I die it will come.” What will come? Well the flood came 969 years after he was
born, the flood that the Lord used to cleanse the earth of sinful people. Next we want to look at Noah the grandson of
Methuselah who of course survived the flood by building an ark. He and his wife, and his three children along
with their wives were the only survivors of the flood and their salvation was
the ark, which pictured Jesus Christ our salvation. Noah’s son Shem is the next one in the
bloodline of Jesus Christ and from Shem we will talk about Abraham, and it was
Abraham that God would call to begin a new nation through a family that began
with a great miracle, the birth of Isaac.
Abram and his wife Sara were both past the age of being able to have
children, but God did a miracle and Isaac was born to a 90 year old woman,
fathered by a 100 year old man. Now many
of those who are in the bloodline of Jesus Christ from this point on are a bit
more familiar, but there are three women who are in His line that I want to
talk a bit about, for most of these women were not of the best character before
they came to know the One True God, and that is the case with many today, I
know it is true with me. We see in
Matthew 3:1 the woman named Tamar. Tamar
was the wife of two of Judah’s sons, as one died and then she married the
second son who also died. Judah had a
much younger son and so Tamar waited for him, but Judah would not allow her to
marry him when he got older. Tamar
tricked Judah into sleeping with her, and when Judah found out that she was
with child he wanted to stone her, but found out he was the father he said that
she was more righteous than him and so their son Perez came into the line of
Christ. Rahab is the next woman in the bloodline
and she was a prostitute who hid the spies who came to spy out Jericho before
Israel would destroy it. Next we find
Ruth who was a Moabite. Ruth was a great
woman with a seedy background for the nation of Moab began with a relationship
between Lot and one of his daughters.
The last woman is of course Mary, the young mother of Jesus who obeyed
the voice of the Angel Gabriel and became with child through the power of the
Holy Spirit just as we saw the prophecy of it way back in Genesis 3:15, but it
was also prophesized in Isaiah7:14 “Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a
sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name
Immanuel.” Isaiah give more details of
this birth when he writes, “6 For a
child will be born to us, a son will be given to us; And the government will
rest on His shoulders; And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty
God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. 7
There will be no end to the increase of His government or of peace, On
the throne of David and over his kingdom, To establish it and to uphold it with
justice and righteousness From then on and forevermore. The zeal of the LORD of
hosts will accomplish this (Isaiah 9:6-7).”
There
are many prophecies concerning the Lord Jesus Christ, of His birth, His life,
and His death and resurrection that are found throughout the Bible that have
been fulfilled. There are prophecies of
His second coming that are in the future which will be fulfilled just as those
of His first coming.
Here
is something that I believe happened at the birth of Jesus, and that is the
stable that He was born in was actually a cave, and I believe that it was in
this cave that He was born in were where the lambs for the Passover celebration
were born in. We know that Jesus is our
Passover and that He died on Passover, so why would it be such a surprise that
He was born where the Passover lambs were born.
Now
when we think about the real meaning of Christmas we have to think about why
all of this happened. We can see from
the Scriptures that God had all of this planned from the beginning and for that
matter even before the world was created by Him. The plan was for the second person of the Godhead
to come to earth to pay the payment for sin that God required, and that payment
was to die as a sinless perfect sacrifice on the cross, but first He must be
born and as we look back at some of those who are in His line we know that they
too were people who needed a Savior to pay for their sins even though they were
a part of His line.
It
is hard to think about Christmas without thinking about Easter and about what
we call Good Friday. For without
Christmas there would be no Easter and that would be awful for all of us. Remember that Jesus came to die on the cross
for our sins and what we must do is first of all admit that we are sinners, and
then ask Christ to come into our lives to forgive us of those sins, and this
will mean that we are born again, and that is what Christmas is all about.
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