The real story of Christmas is one of incarnation. It may be a confusing word, but it simply means that God became flesh, that God assumed a human nature and became a man in the form of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It’s a biblical doctrine essential to our Christian faith, and it sets the Christmas story apart from any other one. We can’t put the Christmas story in the same category as St. Nick or Rudolph or grandmothers being run over by reindeer. As a matter of fact, we have to apply this doctrine to this Christmas story if we hope to commit to this faith journey. Many people have remarked that Christianity is fine so long as you separate Jesus from divinity. They like to point out the wisdom in the Sermon on the Mount, the generalized loving philosophy of Jesus, but they also strip Him of any eternal value beyond nice statements and Twitter quotes. By denying doctrine and applying ourselves to “being the best person we can be,” we’ve inherently created our own doctrine. This doctrine is deceptive and is built on the premise that the Holy and Just God of our universe is going to judge us someday by the standards we’ve created ourselves versus the standard that He’s created.
It’s paramount that we believe in the incarnation. It’s the foundation of what we believe. At the fall of man in Genesis, amidst the brokenness and fallen humanity, a truth is proclaimed: the offspring of man will crush the serpent’s head. Jesus is that very offspring. The redemptive nature of Jesus is reaffirmed on multiple accounts through the Old Testament. We find it also in Jeremiah where it says, “the virgin will conceive.” Are we truly celebrating Christmas with an awareness that it is about God being born through a virgin? If you’re looking for rational reasons to refute Christianity as a worldview, look no further. If you lack faith, you don’t have to point to the impossibility of the resurrection or the improbability of Jesus’ miracles, you can simply look to the birth of the Author of our faith. However, if you do have faith, Christmas is the moment in history where Hope was born. To the world, it’s foolishness. To the believer, it’s the beautiful mystery that changes everything.
