What No One Tells You About Christmas
By Joel Settecase
This was previously posted here.
At Christmas, we celebrate God’s ultimate self-revelation: He became a human being. This teaching is known as the Incarnation, and it is what Christmas is all about. There is so much truth about God packed into the Christmas story.
God is all-powerful: He is able to make something like this actually happen.
God is love: He provided salvation for His people.
God is Triune: the Father sent the Son to become a human, conceived by the Holy Spirit.
And God with us: intimately working every detail of life toward His good will.
Did you know that the Bible’s picture of God is utterly unique in human history? When it comes to man-made religions, we human beings do not have a great track record of describing God. Human religion always tries to squeeze God into one of two false boxes. It either makes God one, but too distant and different to be known (like “the Universe”), or it teaches many “gods,” who are too similar to humans and limited to be worth worshiping (like the Greek gods). But the Bible presents God as both one and many (three). God is both above the universe and lovingly involved in it.
The Christmas story presents a picture of God that no creative human mind, no ecstatic would-be prophet, no committee on religious authority has ever been able to match. God is simultaneously beyond our understanding and yet intimately accessible to us. He is perfectly holy and yet willing to stoop to our level in order to save us from ourselves.
This true and unique picture of God is only presented in the Bible, because among the world’s religious systems, only the Bible was revealed by God. And the God who has revealed Himself in Scripture has revealed Himself ultimately in Jesus Christ, the “image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), in whom “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Col. 1:19).
The uniqueness of the Christmas story and what it teaches about God stems from, and points back to, the Bible’s divine origin. It doesn’t seem to be man-made because it isn’t man-made. The Gospel from God, and it is true: Jesus has come, and He is both Savior and Lord. If you don’t yet know Him, I pray you will get to know Him as He truly is this Christmas.