THE HEART OF THE MATTER

(The Real Reason For The Season)

Christmas season is different than it used to be. We, as a nation used to revel in the fact that this great country’s Congress had set aside a national holiday to celebrate the birth of the one on who’s teachings we have based our laws, our ethics, our moral compass, our benevolent attitude toward the world.

This year, far more than any ever, we have seen strong opposition to this celebration of Jesus birth. I remember, 20 years ago when we used to be so bothered that

Santa Clause had become more prominent than Jesus on Christmas….

We used to be bothered that commercialism had robbed our nation of

“ the real reason for the season”.

I actually remember the first time I saw the word: X-MAS… the shock that went through me that someone would eliminate the word Christ from Christmas.

That all seems mild now… in a year when the courts of our land are being called on to strip every morsel of Christmas from the public square. When a school district in Massachusetts this week decided to refer to their Christmas tree as “a magical tree”

and changed the color of the elves hats in their Christmas play from green and red… so as not to offend any non-Christians.

I heard of towns that have allowed nativities as long as their was no baby Jesus in the manger…. I heard of one town that allowed a nativity on public property as long as their was no Baby, no Mary, no Joseph, no wise men, or shepherds.

This stuff is not accidental… In order to understand the hostility that does exist against Christmas you have to understand what the story of Christmas is really all about. The story of Christmas didn’t start at the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem.. It started much earlier….

If you’ve had any Bible teaching in your life… you probably already understand that Christmas is not a stand-alone holiday. Christmas ( the birth of Jesus) would not be significant without Easter. (the death of Jesus) and neither of those would have any meaning at all if Jesus had stayed dead… if their had been no resurrection.

Let me explain.. This birth.. and death.. and resurrection of Jesus Christ was not some arbitrary set of events, some lucky cosmic lottery drawing…

The book of Revelations calls Jesus:

Revelation 13:8 …the book of life belonging to the Lamb that was slain before the creation of the world.

It all started long before this world was created.. The beginnings of the Christmas story starts with God and the angels who are worshipping him. One of those angels, named Lucifer, is an archangel and seems to be God’s # 1 angel with a very important position:

Ezekiel 28:14-17 I ordained and anointed you as the mighty angelic guardian. You had access to the holy mountain of God and walked among the stones of fire. 15 "You were blameless in all you did from the day you were created until the day evil was found in you. 16 Your great wealth filled you with violence, and you sinned. So I banished you from the mountain of God. I expelled you, O mighty guardian, from your place among the stones of fire. 17 Your heart was filled with pride because of all your beauty. You corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor. So I threw you to the earth and exposed you to the curious gaze of kings.

What got Lucifer so ticked off that he gave up the #1 position in the angelic hosts to take on his Creator… a fight he couldn’t possibly hope to win.. We figured that out last week:

God… without satan’s permission and counsel created a higher being… a more important being… a being that He, God would devote more love and attention to… a being literally created in His own image:

Psalm 8:5 For you made us only a little lower than God, and you crowned us with glory and honor. (NLT)

And Lucifer is ticked… and mistakenly goes to war with his Creator.. And predictably loses:

Revelation 12:9-12 This great dragon--the ancient serpent called the Devil, or Satan, the one deceiving the whole world--was thrown down to the earth with all his angels. 10 Then I heard a loud voice shouting across the heavens,

And terror did come… Satan’s revenge against God, (again predictably), was to try to corrupt God’s choice creation… to try to get mankind to transfer their allegiance from their Creator; and give it to him. He succeeded….. mankind fell. Adam and Eve, with every possible advantage in the whole universe chose to walk against the God who created into them His glory and honor. They threw it all away, for what? It’s hard to even imagine:

But since that time every one of us, who originate from Adam and Eve, carry with us, in our hearts that virus of sin planted there by God’s enemy (and ours). I don’t have to convince, most of us( perhaps any of us) that we are sinful people. It doesn’t take us long to figure out what we are capable of doing, that our conscience tells us is contrary to God’s way. If you read your Bible it becomes a mirror in which we increasingly tend to see the evil buried deep in our core.

The Bible paints a fairly bleak picture, of mankind’s lost-ness.. of our personal inability to overcome this virus of sin.. to overcome the power of satan:

Ephesians 2: You…live just like the rest of the world, full of sin, obeying Satan, the mighty prince of the power of the air. He is the spirit at work in the hearts of those who refuse to obey God.

We desperately need to adjust our mental picture of what thee baby Jesus in the manger was all about. I tried last week to begin to paint a picture of Jesus, just before he stepped out of heaven and into the body of a human baby. This was the Jesus who, with a word from his mouth created the universe (JN 1) This is the Jesus who sustains every molecule of the universe, without whom all matter would dissolve into nothingness. This is the God who was part of exiling satan from heaven.

It kind of hard to imagine Jesus sitting under a tree in heaven wrestling with his inadequacies of whether or not he’s up to the task of redeeming mankind.

This is the Son of Man spoken of in Daniel 7: 13 "In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. 14 He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations and men of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.

As Jesus stands between the precipice between heaven and earth He’s the great Divine Warrior going of to war, This is the most important battle of all time… there can be only one possible conclusion; The eternal welfare of all mankind hangs on what happens in the next 33 years.

Let me reuse some phrases from last week:

The first coo of Jesus as a baby in a manger was not the beginning of anything. It was the fist of God connecting with satan’s chin.

From the second God arrives on this earth satan is scared spit-less. Imagine him as he listens in on Gabriel’s message to Mary.

Luke 1:31-33 You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David,33and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end."

I’ve looked at these statement differently, this year. Look at them from the strategy of war. There’s enough information here to tell Mary something big is afoot, to tell the enemy, satan, something big is about to happen… but not enough to reveal God’s strategy for defeating satan.

Imagine satan attending the Christmas musical on the Bethlehem hillside after the birth of the Savior:

Luke 2:13-14 Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, 14"Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests."

I heard some celebrities talking about what they wanted for Christmas and they said they just wanted what Christmas was all about: Peace on earth! If Christmas accomplished what it was intended to do… every diverse people group in the whole world would get along in perfect peace.

Nonsense! That’s not what the text says… “peace to men on whom his favor rests’. Nowhere, ever, does Jesus suggest that his coming, to this world is going to cause everyone in the world to live together in peace. There is a cosmic battle going on in this world between good and evil. Mankind still positions himself on either side of that great battle and until Jesus returns for the second and last time, that battle will rage on!

Jesus himself said:

Matthew 10:34 "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.

At no point, in Jesus ministry is he sitting down with the representatives of evil and the representatives of righteousness and saying “Can’t we all just get along” Think about Jesus life… every time he came up against evil he walked straight into the teeth of the battle… just as you expect a warrior to do!

He constantly paints the picture of two kingdoms. Satans kingdom of darkness and His kingdom of righteousness. He never leaves any doubt that he came to establish the eternal success of the one and the complete destruction of the other!

Hebrews 2:14 Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—

It all comes down to this:

Jesus Christ, the son of God, came to this world, took on human, flesh, took on himself the sins of all mankind, took the punishment for our sins on himself, died in our place, faced head-on the forces of sin and death, defeated satan and hell and rose from the dead victorious over the grave…..

Conclusion: The Story of Christmas (C.S. Lewis who’s Chronicles of Narnia..now#1 )

The only reason Jesus came as a baby was to live to adulthood so he could die in our place. The reason he died was so he could defeat death, conquer satan’s power over our hearts and set us free. He then rose from the dead, conquering death to pave the way to eternal life for us all.

C.S. Lewis in his book The Grand Miracle: paints Jesus Incarnation as a royal diver standing in the glistening sunlight above a dark lake. At the bottom of the lake is something that has been lost of great value. He takes off all his royal robes until he is left completely naked dives into the water. He swims down through the beautiful sparkling top waters. (that’s his birth) He continues to swim deeper and deeper until the lake becomes black and it’s difficult to see. Finally he’s at the bottom where it is pitch dark . He digs into the muck at the bottom into the worst possible places. Until he finally retrieves the prize. With his lungs ready to break, He swims back closer and closer to the surface and finally breaks through the top of the water holding in his hand the thing he went down to get… That thing was the key to freeing men and women’s hearts ( your heart and mine) from satan’s virus of sin.