Christmas is such a strange time because of how corporate everything is plus if you live in South Carolina it’ll be around 70 degrees Christmas day. That aside I think that there are two things that we should think about this Christmas.
- In my opinion the virgin birth is the greatest miracle that God ever performed upon a human being. The creation of Adam is something we all marvel at but have no real connection too because it preceded human history. The birth of the new Adam was vey different. The Triune God was of course present but also involved was the faith of Mary. She is the mother of our Lord and the woman that all generations called blessed (Lk. 1:42-48). As the handmaiden of the Lord she showed herself to be a true daughter of Abraham in both the flesh and the spirit. As baptists and maybe protestants more broadly we tend not to discuss Mary due to the position she holds in the Roman church. I feel that this is inappropriate, as she is a hero of the faith and the woman that the Father entrusted His only begotten Son with. Christmas is the miracle of the new creation and the triumph of the faith of Abraham over sin and death.
- The Incarnation is also on my mind during this season. It is baffling to think that God wanted to come down to earth for our sake. Socrates sings of the wisdom of Diotima, telling us how we can know the essence of beauty. She told him, “He who from these ascending under the influence of true love, begins to perceive that beauty, is not far from the end. And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty….until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is (Symposium 211b-c).” The greatest wisdom that man could conceive of was climbing to God. Yet, the one true God has told us that this is impossible. It is He, who must descend down to us. Beauty came down to us to transform us so that we could worship Him in the beauty of holiness (Ex. 28:2, Ps. 29:2). He prophesied that He would give us new vestments and access to heaven (Zech. 3:1-10). This was all achieved in the Incarnation. We become what we see and now we see Him and are being transformed by His Spirit glory to glory (II Cor. 3:17-18). The Incarnation is the hope that in seeing the face of God in the flesh we will be purified so that when we see Him in His glory we will be as He is (I Jn. 3:1-3). Christmas is the hope of transformation so that one day we will see Him face to face pure of heart (Rev. 22:3-4). For blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God (Matt. 5:8).
Merry Christmas!
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