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December, 2023 (Vol.57-No.12) |
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Preached by Dr. Gene Scott on December 25, 1983 And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins. Matthew 1:21 CHRISTMAS IS A HEATHEN CELEBRATION. You don’t have to agree with me, but that is what it is. Yet Christmas can still be a lot of fun. Like Thanksgiving, you get to eat turkey with dressing and ham and pumpkin pie. There’s eggnog, but you might want to keep it non-alcoholic. And of course, there are presents. If you have a Christmas tree, you need to take care it doesn’t burn down your house. People are tired of winter, tired of freezing and tired of shoveling snow, but the Christmas holiday gives the hope of spring to come. So you can have a lot of fun at Christmas, but it has nothing to do with Christ’s birthday. Well then, you ask, should Christians celebrate it as Christ’s birthday? This church does not. Now there are many things I do that the world does. I get up in the morning, I go to bed at night, I eat and I drive an automobile. I celebrate the Fourth of July. There are all kinds of things I do that the world does, and I say there is nothing wrong with having a good time at Christmas. Jesus was not born on December 25. I am sure someone will say to me, “You’ve ruined my holiday!” The knowledge that Jesus wasn’t born on December 25 doesn’t have to ruin your holiday. Just enjoy the heathen holiday by having a good time with the heathen. The Bible says Jesus was a friend of sinners. Whatever happened to that idea? Some self-righteous person might say, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly have a good time with sinners, but I love their souls.” The self-righteous man won’t be a friend of sinners, but he is willing to distort the truth about the origin of the Christmas holiday. That is nothing but religious hypocrisy. Isn’t that what’s wrong with so much of religion? The word “hypocrite” comes from an old Greek word that comes out of Greek drama. It describes an actor who wore a mask and performed while hiding behind his mask. Part of what is wrong with the church is the idea that once you become a Christian, you have to suppress anything that feels good or is enjoyable. A lot of people who have lived their whole monotonous lives inside the traditional church wouldn’t know how to have a good time if you gave them a chance. “Sin” means falling short of God’s glory and “righteousness” means God expressing Himself through us. Sin has nothing to do with having a good time. Who do you think gave us the ability to enjoy life? Interpersonal relationships are among the deepest joys of life. You can enjoy getting together with friends or family during the holidays; there is nothing wrong with that. The joys of good companionship, the joys you have with friends and loved ones are only a taste of the joys we will experience in heaven throughout eternity. God has declared in His word, “in thy presence is fulness of joy.” The joys of heaven will not be found in golden streets or jeweled gates, but in God’s presence. There is nothing wrong with having a good time at Christmas. You can talk about Christ at Christmas, but be honest enough to tell your family the truth about Christmas’s heathen origins, so someone else doesn’t tell your children and cause them to lose their faith in later years. What do you think it does to the faith of young people in college when they find out that things they learned from their church about Jesus Christ are not true? What will happen when someone tells them Jesus wasn’t born on December 25? Wouldn’t that make them question everything they have ever learned from the church? It’s no wonder why so many young people have left the church. Tell your child the truth; tell him or her why the date of Christ’s birth was changed. I don’t really mind if Christ takes over every heathen holiday as long as the message of Christianity comes through straight and clear. You can laugh at the foolishness of some traditions or you can respect traditions that deserve respect, but don’t distort the facts. There is plenty of evidence in the Scriptures that points to the true date of Christ’s birth. John the Baptist’s father was serving in the temple when he received the prophecy concerning the birth of his son. The time of year when this occurred can be deduced from the Old Testament course of the priests. Thus it is possible to establish that John the Baptist was born in the spring. Since Jesus was born six months later, His birth would have been sometime in the fall. Luke’s Gospel records that at the time of Christ’s birth, there were shepherds abiding in the fields and keeping watch over their flocks by night. But there wouldn’t have been any shepherds in the fields on December 25. If you have even been to Palestine in the winter, you know how cold it can get there. The shepherds would still be in the fields during the fall, but not in winter. Furthermore, the Romans did not tax the people in midwinter; they taxed them during the Jewish festivals when all the people would be gathered together in one place. Every Jew had to go to Jerusalem three times a year: at Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles. That is why Luke’s Gospel records “there was no room at the inn.” The Roman tax collectors lived off the excess they could take from the people after having collected the Romans’ due. They were smart enough to know they should tax the people at harvest time when the people would have more money from the sale of their harvest. Why wait until winter to collect the taxes? By that time the money would be spent. So you can deduce they taxed the people during the Feast of Tabernacles when all the Jews came to Jerusalem in the fall of the year. So, what is the significance of December 25? It was the date of the old Roman feast of Saturnalia. The word “Christmas” itself is a contraction of two words, “Christ-mass.” “Mass” comes from the word massa, meaning “barley cake,” which refers to the little cakes that the heathen baked for the “queen of heaven,” a practice that was denounced by the prophet Jeremiah. The image of a baby in the manger was a symbol from ancient Babylon of the birth of Tammuz. Even the tradition of exchanging gifts comes out of an old heathen custom. When the wise men came to Jesus, they gave Him gifts; they never traded gifts among themselves! Don’t put up a little nativity scene with a baby in it and tell your children the baby is Jesus. Tell them there was a heathen baby born in Babylon years ago and that people in the Middle Ages didn’t know any better. The baby was also a symbol of the returning sun as the days began to get longer after the winter solstice. Teach your children some astronomy. Tell them there was an old heathen festival to celebrate the birth of the sun. Let them know there are conflicting viewpoints about religion. That won’t cause them to lose their faith. And if your children ask, “Why are we celebrating Christmas?” you can say, “Because we like to have a good time!” And if they ask, “Then why do we call it Christmas? the answer is that we have just as much right to talk about Christ at Christmastime as we do at any other time of the year, as long as we understand what the mistake is and who made the mistake. We are not ignorantly saying that Christ was born on Christmas day, but we can declare Christ every day of the year! The heathen worshiped the sun, which doesn’t perform very well in the winter, though it does a fine job during the summer. But Jesus is the same all the time. We often hear people say, “Let’s put Christ back into Christmas.” You cannot put Christ back into Christmas; He was never in it! But that doesn’t keep us from taking advantage of the day to talk about Christ, as long as we do it honestly. Even though we know Christmas is a heathen celebration, we are not so puritanical that we can’t have a good time. You don’t have to raise your children to make them feel like they are some kind of freak because they cannot enjoy a Christmas celebration. If you still want to keep a holiday that does have a sound historical basis, keep the Feast of Hanukkah, which is the celebration of freedom. Now having said all of that, I am going to put Christ into Christmas and teach some Basic Christianity, showing I can do what the rest of the church does, but I don’t have to lie about it. I can graft Christ onto Christmas with full knowledge of historical reality and say, “Move aside, heathen. We’re winning. We can take the best of what you do and enjoy it better than you can, but we have the truth of God’s word!” Christmas ought to be about Christ. First and foremost, Christmas ought to be about the fact that our God is a person. Philosophers try to tell us that mankind has anthropomorphized God. In other words, they tell us we have made God to be like us and we have projected onto God our personality traits, such as emotions of love and hatred. That is a bunch of nonsense. Christianity teaches that God revealed Himself and He revealed that He projected His image onto us. God’s word says the reason God looks like man is because He made us to be like Him. God created man in His own image. God is a person, and whatever else you can say about a person, when a person is present, he is absolutely there. There will never be any more of me here than is here right now, but it may take time for me to fully manifest my personality. I may choose not to manifest it all, and I may wish I hadn’t manifested some of it, but my entire person is here to be expressed. Now what Christmas ought to mean, regardless of the specific day Jesus was born, is that the person of God moved into a tent of human flesh. And though no man has seen God, as John 1:18 says, Christ “hath declared him.” The word “declared” is a translation of a Greek word that is the cognate of our word exegesis. It means “to lead out,” like leading someone out from behind a curtain and putting him on display. Christ led God out from behind the curtain of eternity and put Him on display. Many people like to talk about what they think God is like, but if you really want to know what God is like, look at Christ. My faith first started to grow when I bought Dr. William Graham Scroggie’s A Guide to the Gospels. It is a very thick book and not the kind of book you read straight through, but it helps you to look at the Old Testament through the Gospels. When you study the Old Testament in this way, you begin to see an unfolding manifestation of God, though the substance of God was not fully revealed until Christ walked onto the stage of history. Scroggie’s Guide also helps you to look through the Gospels to better understand the Epistles. You learn to see the Epistles as attempts to deal with problems in the church that arose among people who had met the Lord yet were too prone to forget Him and substitute other things for a personal relationship with God. Whatever date Christmas is celebrated, it teaches us that God moved out of the unseen world and struck a tent in human flesh and got involved with life where it is lived. Jesus brought God’s life down into ordinary streets. It was the religious people who rejected Him. Jesus didn’t divide people into two camps and say, “I will only speak to you if you act like the Pharisees.” Jesus was a friend of sinners. He brought the person of God onto the stage of history and confirmed what the Bible had been saying: God is a person who has feelings, who makes choices and who gets angry, as Jesus did when He cleansed the temple. You don’t have to stop having ordinary common sense to understand God. If you want to know what God is like, live with Jesus in the Gospels for a while. One of the things we learn about Jesus is that He came as our Helper. The name Jesus is the Greek translation of the Old Testament Hebrew name Joshua. The name Joshua is a contraction of two Hebrew words: Jehovah-Oshea. “Jehovah” is the self-revealing name of God and “Oshea” means helper. Linked together in a contraction, the name Joshua means “Jehovah who wants to reveal Himself as our Helper.” Jesus stepped out from behind the curtain of eternity and struck a tent in human flesh. The Bible says, “and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins.” There are lots of people who say they are trying to save us, but Jesus was the One who actually did it. Now I want to make this very simple: Romans 5:8 says, “God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” The church is very good at making people feel awkward. The church has lost its message when it tries to make you think that the only way to get God’s help is to change your lifestyle and be perfect. It makes no difference where you are or what your problems are today; the reason Jesus came was to help. If we could break through all the garbage the traditional church lays on us, Jesus could help many of us who have never recognized He came to help. Jesus didn’t condition His help on our being perfect. If we start trusting Him, He will do the perfecting. He came as a person and He came to help. To make it possible to help us, He came to redeem us. That brings us to the law of the kinsman redeemer. Once God says something, He is bound by it. Psalm 119:89 says, “For ever O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven.” In the Old Testament, God chose a people to be His mouthpiece even when they didn’t want to be. He would even make their mistakes serve His purpose by making their lives teach His truths in spite of themselves. Like actors on a stage called history, they dramatized the truths of God. That is one of the reasons the book of Ruth is in the Old Testament; it unfolds in a drama the law of the kinsman redeemer. God was teaching that when someone had lost his inheritance, redemption could only be obtained if someone near of kin would come forward with the price to redeem it. It must be someone near of kin; a stranger couldn’t do it. That is the meaning of the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes. Christ had to become our kin. This is explained in theological terms in Hebrews 2:14, where God says we were all born of flesh and blood and we didn’t have a choice about that. We “jointly participate” in flesh and blood, which is described using a form of the Greek word koinonia. While we didn’t have a choice, Christ did have a choice and He voluntarily clothed Himself in flesh and blood. God cannot violate His own word in order to save us. Once having uttered His word, salvation must only come from one near of kin. For that reason, Jesus had to come and be clothed with flesh and blood in order that He might become our kin and redeem us. One of God’s names is Immanuel, meaning “God with us.” God could have revealed Himself in something other than our human form, though I can’t imagine what that form might have been. But He chose to reveal Himself clothed in human flesh in order that He might help us. He revealed Himself as our kinsman in order that He might be with us, flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone. He voluntarily took our form in order that He might reveal what God in human flesh ought to look like. John’s Gospel opens, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us…” Erasmus’ Latin Bible says, “In the beginning was the Sermo.” Our English word “sermon” is a cognate of that Latin word sermo. In Bible schools, people are taught to preach sermons. But you cannot preach a true sermon unless you are preaching Christ. The preacher’s job is to bring forth an understanding and an awareness of the nature of the Sermon that God preached through Christ. And that Sermon is about the person of God, clothing Himself in flesh and blood as our kinsman redeemer, coming to be with us and coming to help us. He came to us in order that He might display on the stage of history, once and for all, what God looks like. He displayed God’s standard in order that we might see it and know we don’t measure up, as Paul said in Romans 3. We tend to compare ourselves to other people. We think we can merit God’s attention because we are better than someone else, but we all fall short. The terrible truth is that “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” Jesus is the revelation of God’s nature, the out-raying of God’s glory on the stage of history. He is the eternal Sermon who perfectly showed us what God looks like expressed in a tent of human flesh. The truth is driven home that no one has ever done that before and no one can ever do it again. Once Jesus appeared on the stage of history, all mankind could then see what godliness in the flesh looked like and know that we don’t measure up. That is the truth, yet He still came to help us. That is why Jesus is called the Messiah. The word “Messiah” was simply carried over into English from a Hebrew word. One of its meanings is “Deliverer.” Jesus not only came to help, He came to deliver. That is why I don’t try to save people; I want to introduce you to the One who can save you. Do what you will with Him, He came to deliver us. How did He deliver us? He delivered us by means of the atonement. The word “atonement” is a translation of the Hebrew word kippur, which means “cover over.” This word is found in the name of the Day of Atonement, “Yom Kippur.” Jesus came to lay down His perfect life and let us be covered by His marvelous performance. God had decreed that the penalty for sin is death. Christ laid Himself down and let God put the sins of all mankind on Him, in order that we might walk out from underneath the weight of those sins in the knowledge that He died in our place. And God took Christ’s righteousness and put it on us. We are covered because Jesus came to save His people from their sins. Most people don’t want to be saved, and I wouldn’t want to be saved either if salvation is what most people say it is. I grew up in the church thinking that being saved was worse than going to prison. I thought that being saved meant being saved from everything you wanted to do! That’s not the meaning of salvation. Jesus came to seek and to save what was lost. He came to save us from our sins. You cannot save yourself. Galatians 3 says that “as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse” of the law. Nothing will stop the curse of the law from falling, but Christ let the curse fall on Himself. “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us.” He enabled us to pass out from underneath the curse. All my sins were lifted off of me and put on Him, and He bore the penalty that I deserved. As men and women of faith, we have no difficulty believing that God spoke and not a thing became everything. From nothing came the universe. So why should it be hard for us to believe that by God’s spoken word, every sin ever committed, ever sin being committed, and every sin that will ever be committed was placed on Christ? In that sense, there is a “double happening” for ever sin: every sin you commit was also laid on Christ. The sins of this generation were already put on Christ 2,000 years ago. He already died for them. To punish you anew for your sins would be to say His death was not worth enough to pay the bill. That brings us back to the kinsman redeemer. In order to redeem us, Jesus had to have the price and He had to willingly pay it. The price was perfection. Only Jesus had the price, and He paid it. There is nothing you can do to remove your sins; Jesus paid it all. So quit letting some preacher or traditional churchman beat you to death with your sins. They are what they are. If you love Christ, you can become concerned about the price He had to pay because of your sins and you can individually identify with what He did for you; but they are all paid for, friends. Christ atoned for our sins, covered us and lifted them off of us in order that the Spirit of life might be our possession. Now for our faith, God can deposit a substance of His own life into us, like the substance of God that moved onto the stage of history, clothed with a tent of human flesh called Jesus of Nazareth. The substance of God through His Spirit can now move into tents of flesh everywhere, including you and me. For simple faith, God places us in Christ who is seated in heavenly places with the work finished. All we have to do is act on the belief that God will do what He said He will do. As long as we maintain the connection of faith, God’s Spirit in us takes care of making the changes in our life that move us toward being like Him. Christ was the Eternal Word who became the Living Word. Now His spoken words become implanted in you through hearing. As you believe God’s word and act on it, that same Spirit begins to engraft Himself into you. You may not even be aware of changing, but you will change. You will change because His Spirit is in you, and He came to help you. God’s Spirit has now come to dwell in unworthy vessels like you and me! And that same Spirit gives us the strength to make it through, which is why we can say in advance, “We made it through this coming year. And if Jesus tarries, we made it until He comes again!” Hallelujah! Merry Christmas! 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