Christmas is upon us again, and for those of us who’ve experienced more than a few, it kind of loses its wonder after a while. It shouldn’t. If what Christmas celebrates actually happened, if it is actually true, then it is the most profound event in all of history, by far. We need to ask ourselves why we should believe this preposterous history in the first place. It is certainly preposterous on its face. God becoming man? Seriously? You have to be kidding. Nope! The incarnation, God becoming man, makes perfect sense in the context of the Christian message: God himself saves his people from their sin (Matt. 1:21). He accomplished it by becoming one of us, and paying the price for us in our place. God himself, in Christ, fulfilled for us, all that he demanded of us. No wonder so many find it hard to believe!
Christmas is upside down from our every natural inclination. We think we should be able to, in effect, save ourselves, that God owes us because, after all, we’re not all that bad. That’s funny. We all know, deep down, we’re really quite bad. Anyone who is honest will admit that they can’t even live up to their own standards, let alone a perfectly holy God. So God himself coming to save us from their own inability and ineptitude is the greatest news ever! So if it really is great news, true news, then we should expect that it will make a difference, not only among those who accept it as true, but for the entire world. It did, has, and still is making a difference. Made up stories and lies don’t do that, and that’s all Christianity would be if it is not true. The transformation from the ancient world to the modern wasn’t an accident, and can only be explained by the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
The world into which Jesus was born was a nasty place. Thomas Hobbes, some 1600 years after Christ, described his world thus: “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It was even worse in the first century. Life it not so nasty, brutish, and short as it once was, and Christianity deserves most of the credit.
The odds of this tiny movement of Galilean peasants surviving against the power of almighty Rome were incalculable. In the eyes of their contemporaries, both Jewish and Pagan, they were nothing if not pathetic. Surely in no time Jesus’ followers would be crushed by the might of Rome and their Jewish enemies. They should have been! There were other would-be Messiahs who’d come along before Jesus, and all were killed and their movements came to nothing. Not this one. In Acts 5 we read of a Pharisee named Gamaliel who spoke up when the Sanhedrin was ready to put Peter and the other Apostles to death:
38 Therefore, in the present case I advise you: Leave these men alone! Let them go! For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. 39 But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God.”
God in Christ is the only explanation that makes any sense of the transformation of this small group of mostly uneducated Jews, who against every Messianic expectation they had, led a movement that eventually transformed the Roman empire. In due course the story of a baby born of a virgin, whose ministry lead him to an ignominious death on a Roman cross, and who was raised from the dead, this gospel transformed the entire world, for good. The examples are too many to list here, but a few would be the end of crucifixion, hospitals, universities, universal education, science, human rights, the end of slavery, caring for the poor, and one could go on. If you want to know how much of the modern world owes to Christianity, you can read several books by Rodney Stark. I just finished reading a book by Jeremiah Johnson called, Unimaginable: What our world would be like without Christianity. And just this week learned of another book I’ll be reading soon by Tom Holland (not a Christian that I know of) called Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.
In a secular culture that ignores its Christian heritage, we’re left with the impression that our modern world just happened by accident, or maybe because of the so called Enlightenment when Western thinkers rejected religion. No, it happened because that baby in a manger 2000 years ago came to save his people from their sins. Merry Christmas!
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