Scripture References: John 1:1-18

Most who celebrate Christmas this year, will do so elaborately. Our houses will be brilliantly lighted. We will have Christmas trees, decorations, and adornments of many kinds. We will give and receive expensive gifts beautifully wrapped. We will eat from sumptuous tables where food will not only be good but artistically prepared. We will see moving pageantry and listen to inspiring music. But it wasn’t so with the first Christmas. It was simple and unadorned. There was a manger, an animal feeding trough, as it were, with lowing cattle, a crib of hay, and swaddling clothes.

The first Christmas was as human as it was simple and unadorned. At the center was a baby. The mother was a simple, unsophisticated, very young woman from Nazareth, and her husband was a carpenter giving a supportive presence during the night.

Christmas is about God entering the human situation in a person. Christian faith makes the almost incredible claim that God has come to us at Christmas in something as weak and helpless as a child. In the baby Jesus God took upon Himself our frail and fragile form. God made Himself little. We call this the incarnation which means “in the flesh.” God clothed Himself with our humanity.

None of the Gospels better presents this amazing truth than John’s. He says that the Word, which was God, “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” (John 1:14).

Eternity Entered Time

God had been active in His world. He had spoken to people in historical events, through prophets, and in other ways. But here was a strange, daring, new way of speaking. God came to men and women, clothed in their flesh and speaking their language. The eternal God, eternity itself, entered time. God was no longer only everywhere; He was somewhere. God was no longer just a timeless reality; He entered our time with its calendars, hourglasses, and sundials.

In much of the world where our gospel was first preached, people believed that flesh was evil. It was a prison of the soul, and the ultimate end of life was to be delivered from that prison. But John was saying that God, rather than seeking to escape our flesh, was entering it. He knew that it was not inherently evil. He had created it and pronounced it good.

God Became Human

There was an early effort to accommodate the gospel to the belief that flesh is evil, that the body is corrupt. The gospel would be much more acceptable to so many if it could adjust itself to this philosophy. So there arose a heresy in the church called Docetism that said Jesus was not really human; He just appeared to be. The New Testament vigorously opposed this heresy. John in his first letter wrote: “By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God” (1 John 4:2-3). John was saying that one of the real tests of Christian faith was to believe in the incarnation, to confess the humanity of Jesus. He was really human. God made Himself human.

To Be Continued

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®, ESV © 2016 by Crossway Bibles.
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