Now that Christmas is over, I think I can start to enjoy myself. It’s not that I’m anti-Christmas or anti-commercialism. It’s just that I find the whole affair to be exhausting. I mean, the travel, the shopping, and the crazy songs that totally miss the entire point of Christmas but are considered “Christmas carols”.
I love how people refer to Christmas as “Jesus’ birthday”. That is hardly true at all. From what I’ve heard about the date, it was more likely in the Fall. I don’t have a problem with the date, though, because it’s not some birthday party for God’s Son, but a recognition of what God did for mankind.
Christmas is a celebration of the beginning of a promise fulfilled. It was a promise first made in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve mistook it to mean their firstborn son Cain. But God looked into the long term.
He called Abram and made his children into a nation. There was a lot of struggle and turmoil and eventually they were conquered because of their disobedience to God. They were a group set aside to rebel against the rulers of this world and they ended up rebelling against God.
But God restored them after disciplining them. They regained their land, but found themselves under the thumb of foreigners for a time. There was a brief period where they maintained independence but it didn’t last long against the Roman legions.
And this is when God true plan and promise started. He set aside a virgin teenager and told her she was to carry the Messiah to term. The priesthood was corrupt, the king was a foreigner, and the nation was not holy.
So God sent his own self to show mankind what we should have been before the Fall. He was the rebel leader, a covert agent sent to reverse the tide of rising evil. The Romans may have been a civilization, but they were savages at heart. And it was that savagery that brought about the ultimate sin offering to God and thus redeemed us all.
To be a Christian is to be a rebel against this world and all its schemes, desires, and tyranny. Many Christians forget this and justify the evil deeds of others as “necessary”. But we must remember that we are not to be of this world, despite being in it. This spiritual perspective is hard to obtain and hone, but it can be done by even the simplest of minds.
This is what Christmas means to me. It is the observation of the start of something better for mankind than pointless gods and countless conquests. And all that started with the birth of a small, frail baby who happened to be the new Adam.