Ben Zornes

Christmas IS for Fussers (Part 2)

December 22, 2019 By Ben Zornes Leave a Comment

Yesterday I said, “Christmas ain’t for fussers.” But––as Reb Tevye would say––“on the other hand,” Christmas is for fussers. We are a discontented race. We envy, covet, lust, gripe, murmur, dispute, wrangle, tangle, and war. If we have plenty, we are still dissatisfied that we don’t have their stuff. If we don’t have much at all, we’re despondent that the “1% are keeping us down.” But, Christmas is the offer of salvation from all our twisted up malcontent.

We wanted to be as God, and so we grabbed the fruit before the Lord’s appointed time. The history of lost humanity is one long tale of us hating God and hating our brother. We hate God because His holiness offends our grimy-grey morality. We hate our brother because he won’t fall down and worship us. We are a miserable wreck.

But Christmas comes. And it’s message is that Christ humbled himself (Phi. 2:7-8). The Lord if Glory came down into the garbage dump of the cosmos, laid hold of the dead corpse of humankind, and took it upon Himself, died the just death which was coming for us, all that He might resurrect you and me to share in His eternal glory which he had with the Father and the Spirit before all worlds.

It is this humility which is both our salvation and our example. He became one of us, that He might save us from our gripes and hatreds and sins. Then He show us the way to be truly human. Christmas is for the fussiest of fussers. The grinchiest of grinches. The scroogiest of scrooges.

This great mercy is why His name is the name which will be upon every tongue, and to which every knee will bow (Phi. 2:10-11). So we see in the Christ-child both the one who will pay the death-price for our sin, and the one who will show us the way out of the prison of our sin. The cost of our sin was the humiliating death of Christ. The way out of our sin is the humility of Christ. So all fussers come to the Christ child, and fuss no more. Instead, let your knees bend low, let your tongue sing loud:

Hail the heav’n born Prince of Peace, hail the Son of righteousness
Light and life to all He brings, risen with healing in His wings
Mild He lays His glory by, born that man no more may die
Born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth
Charles Wesley

Christmas Ain’t for Fussers (Part 1)

December 21, 2019 By Ben Zornes Leave a Comment

We must all admit that we’ve had at least one displeasing Christmas present. Perhaps it was the wrong size, color, shape, brand, or age level. Someone just mentioned that their boyfriend’s mother bought her a giant rubber ducky for Christmas last year. She was 26 years old. It wasn’t a gag-gift. Once, my sister, being quite young, opened a Christmas present from our Grandma. It was a set of clothes. To which my sister memorably replied, “Clothes. Boring.” And tossed them aside.

Of course, we’ve all probably groaned or grumbled or fussed about some gift we’ve been given. We like to think that we left all the grumbling behind us in our childhood. But zooming out we can see that we adults are just more discrete in our fussing. Some families dread Christmas because it ain’t a slice of peace on earth, more like World War 3. So and so doesn’t want some other relative around because their feuding. The adult kids are with the other parents this year. Mom and dad can hardly wait for school to start again. That sort of thing.

But we also can fuss in very spiritual looking ways. “Look at all this materialism.” “Christmas has pagan roots.” “This is all so over the top.” Or the sanctimonious, “I aim to be generous all year round.”

But Scripture forbids––in all its forms––fussing: “Do all things without murmurings and disputings (Phl. 2:14).” The greek word for murmurings is hilariously transliterated as “goggysmos.” What an onomatopoeia! Goggysmos means an inner secret debate. Like those arguments in your head that you always win, looking (in your mind’s eye) like a renowned rhetorician from ancient Greece.

So, regardless of your age, regardless of the gift, regardless of the season, be thankful. No fussing. Christmas ain’t for fussers. No fussing for children, and no fussing for the big people. Gratitude is the context in which Paul prohibits murmuring and disputing. Christ’s sacrificial humility (Phi. 2:5-11) is the mindset which we’re to have. In other words, Christ’s Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection should bring us up short if ever we’re tempted to fuss.

Materialism is an Orc

December 20, 2019 By Ben Zornes Leave a Comment

Christmas is a battle between two world-views. On one side, like an uncircumcised Philistine, stands Materialism. On the other, the armies of the Living God, shaking in their boots despite the fact that God has come in the flesh. Materialism is like an Orc, it is a twisted version of something beautiful. That something is the Incarnation. And the Armies of Israel should defy the giant, and sling a stone at his forehead.

For decades now, we’ve been told that the universe is governed by cold, brute “forces”, which the scientists like to call laws. Gravity. Chemical processes. Ecosystems. Nuclear fission. Second law of thermodynamics. “All that we see and touch can be explained,” so the white lab coats tell us. But then they wax eloquent about the beauty and glory of mathematical formulas, the boundlessness of space, the wonder of the animal spirit, and the mysteries of physics.

But the Materialist has no basis to call anything good, beautiful, or even true. If matter is all there is, then nothing actually matters. Our emotions are identical with a shook up can of Dr. Pepper.

However, this Goliath of our day has a smooth stone coming for his brow. That stone is the announcement which took place in Bethlehem 2000 years ago. There it was told to a virgin that she would bear a Son, miraculously, and this child would be a true human child, but whose origin was from eternity. His name would be Immanuel, God with us. In other words, the transcendent God drew so near to us that we could see, hear, and touch Him. The Incarnation is a big fancy word that we use to describe what took place when God became a man. Jesus did not cease to be God, nor did he ever become God. He was God. But God now had a material body.

Which means that the matter of this world was now joined to God not only in a relationship of Creator/created, but by a Redeemer/redeemed relationship. God had come to save the world, and redeem it from the curse. Man’s salvation has implications for the whole material world. It groans, we are told, for the adoption, “the redemption of our body (Rom. 8:23).”

The Materialist believes that stuff is all there is, and ends up with nothing. It can’t explain beauty, joy, glory, or goodness. But the Incarnation bridges the divide between God and man, Creator and creature. Now, in Christ, our body and soul is promised resurrection. Our final state is not one of disembodied ghoulishness. No, we will eat, drink, laugh, play, in a material world which will have been resurrected to glory.

So, Christmas is a celebration of the Incarnation, which means we should not just give each other the ethereal “Christmas Spirit.” We should give each other stuff. Things. Molecules of matter. God gave us Himself, wrapped in human clay, in order to redeem the whole created world. So smoke a pork shoulder, give diamond earrings, snuggle under a fleece blanket with piping hot chocolate, sing with vocal cords, lift up holy hands in praise, and enjoy the blessings which God has filled this world with and redeemed by His own blood.

Break the Bank Like Wise Men

December 19, 2019 By Ben Zornes Leave a Comment

What sort of giver are you? How much is too much? Do you tell yourself that because you’re such a generous person all year round that you don’t need to give elaborate presents come Christmas-time? Do you chide those who seem to go overboard with the gift-giving, and look down your nose at their consumerism?

Generosity is imitative. In fact, every gift and dollar you’ve ever donated wasn’t even yours to give. God has given you “play money” so that you can imitate His generosity. But you didn’t create those atoms out of nothing. You didn’t cause yourself to exist to take that breath to work that job to make that money which you donated to a charity. All of your giving is dependent on God’s giving.

Which is why, when it comes to Christmas, we shouldn’t be tempted to hold back. God demonstrates for us how we ought to give. He gives Himself. It is no cliché to say that He gave the greatest of gifts. In giving us His Son, He gave us Himself, and by giving Himself: “of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace (Jhn. 1:16).”

So break the bank this Christmas. Give lavishly. And it goes without saying, do so wisely. It isn’t generous to your family to rack up a bunch of debt, which, in effect, enslaves them for the rest of the year (or longer). But, give the most you can.

If you’ve been stingy all year long, now’s a good time to repent and sin no more. If you’ve been withdrawn and distant from your family this year, give them your time, attention, and thoughtfulness in the form of tangible gifts. And get busy being present with your family all the year round. If you’ve been generous all year, why stop short?

God has given unto us, and we ought to imitate Him in our giving. Which means giving the sort of gifts which cannot be repaid. Leave the receiver aghast in shocked joy. Give with such gusto that the grace shown to us at the first Christmas is echoed in our gift giving. We didn’t deserve the salvation which God sent to us in His Son; but He gave it out of sheer grace and goodness. So go and do likewise.

Give Christ. Give Him by imitating Him. Give Him by praising Him. Give Him by reading His Word together. Give Him by giving thanks for all the gifts He showers upon us daily and through each other’s imitative generosity. Give Christ. All of Christ.

Don’t Ruin Christmas

December 18, 2019 By Ben Zornes Leave a Comment

There are two sorts of people who ruin Christmas. Those who douse it with a gallon of sentimentalist syrup. These folks unreflectively trot out the Christmas tree, spread tinsel everywhere, spread “Christmas cheer”, and make sure Santa is center stage. The other sort are those who mutter about the pagan origins of all these things, and love to remind us “Jesus wasn’t born on December 25th anyway, bahumbug.”

Just because you’ve decked the halls does not mean that you are truly celebrating Christmas. You may just be celebrating an Americanized “Happy Holiday.” As a Christian, this is not at all acceptable. We celebrate Christ. He is the focal point of it, and if we or our families miss this fact, we’ve got the whole thing upside down.

But, if you’ve bought the myth that Christmas is really a pagan holiday with a Christian veneer, you couldn’t be further from the truth. To top it off, even if you’re correct about the pagan roots of Christmas, why should it surprise you that converted pagans celebrate Christ’s birth like pagans would? There’s a lot to cover in a short space so let’s look at some of the issues in question.

December 25th?

December 25th is a perfectly reasonable date for the birth of Christ. As William Tighe shows, the Romans likely hijacked it from Christians, not vice versa:

The pagan feast which the Emperor Aurelian instituted on that date in the year 274 was not only an effort to use the winter solstice to make a political statement, but also almost certainly an attempt to give a pagan significance to a date already of importance to Roman Christians. The Christians, in turn, could at a later date re-appropriate the pagan “Birth of the Unconquered Sun” to refer, on the occasion of the birth of Christ, to the rising of the “Sun of Salvation” or the “Sun of Justice.”
William Tighe, Calculating Christmas

Christmas Trees?

Jeremiah 10:3-5 describes a heathen practice similar to trimming our Christmas trees. But Jeremiah goes on to explain that we shouldn’t fear the heathen’s idols or their idolatrous practices, they can’t do evil or good. God is the one who made trees and He was the first one to hang ornaments on them. If anyone did the borrowing it was the pagans. Just putting up the tree doesn’t mean you’re celebrating Christmas. We can certainly celebrate the birth of Christ without a tree. But, if we do have one we aren’t committing idolatry. After all, the trees belong to God.

Santa?

But what about Santa? If you’re marking gifts “From Santa”, I think you’re setting yourself up for awkward conversations with your kids when they realize it looks an awful lot like your handwriting. But, should we do away entirely with Father Christmas? I say, “No.” First of all, Santa was a real person. St. Nicholas was a brother in Christ, who famously punched the heretic Arius. Now that’s a Santa we can get on board with. He was also well-known for his generosity and service to the poor. His legend has certainly grown and been embellished. However, as Michael Ward shows in his book Planet Narnia, the figure of Father Christmas can be a helpful literary device to depict Joviality. So tell your family about the godly man, St. Nicholas. And don’t fret over the helpful symbol that a jolly king in red offers. But do not put him in your nativity scene.

Back to Eden

So don’t ruin Christmas. Don’t ruin it by decking the halls with sentimentality, or grumbling about the jolliness of the whole affair. Make the whole lead up to Christmas a robustly Christ-centered celebration. All the festivities and hullabaloo are pointless without worship of the Incarnate Christ being the main thing. On the other hand, don’t see pagan demons behind every wreath. Remember, the pagans were grasping after God in all the wrong ways, as Paul reminds us in his rebuke of the Athenians (Acts 17:23). The pagans were trying to get back to Eden the way we all do, by their own superstitious works of self-righteousness and worldly philosophy.

However, the only way back to the tree of life is through the tree of Calvary. And at Christmas we remember that the child born in Bethlehem would one day hang upon a tree for the forgiveness of our sins. Which is why we ought to celebrate with gusto.

The Serpent and the Savior

December 17, 2019 By Ben Zornes Leave a Comment

God saw all He had made, and it was good. There was no blemish, or blot, or mistakes. Adam is placed in the garden sanctuary to dress and keep it, and the story of mankind begins with a wedding. But the honeymoon is soon tainted by the arrival of a dark serpent bent on deceiving the woman, and then, by her, defeat the priest-king of the planet.

The serpent succeeded. The man didn’t even do battle with the worm. Man was overthrown, and subjected to the lordship of that wicked dragon. God comes and pronounces judgement on the serpent: it would one day have its head crushed, even as it wounded the Seed of the woman.

God then tells Eve that “in sorrow” she would bring forth children. Think of the implications. Children are the continuation of life, and the woman was the vessel whereby the life which God had created was to be perpetuated. What ought to have been the joy of a woman became mingled with great sorrow. Bringing forth life would not be an event of unmingled joy. Instead of ease and blessing, would be trouble, and pain. With each new child was another reminder of another death that would surely come. Another sinner was born

The womb of Eve was the first place to feel the consequences of the dragon-curse. But when God was about to begin a new creation, He sends an angel to a young virgin to tell her that by the Holy Ghost she was going to conceive the promised seed. The womb of Mary became the very first place where the Second Person of the Trinity took on human flesh, in order to slay the serpent.

The curse of our sin had spread out like wildfire and affected and tainted and ruined everything. But when Mary conceived, by the power of the Holy Spirit, God was telling us that He had come in order to destroy all the works of the devil (1 Jn. 3:8). He came to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found. The serpent would soon be defeated by the Savior. But first the Savior arrived in the womb of a woman, the very place where the dragon-curse had first been felt.

If it were chess, the Incarnation was God putting Satan in check, the Cross took Satan’s queen, and the Resurrection was checkmate. Or as Tolkien put it:

The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy.
JRR Tolkien

That it Might Be Fulfilled

December 16, 2019 By Ben Zornes Leave a Comment

The story of Jesus does not have its beginnings in 4 B.C. during the reign of Herod the Great, in the town of Nazareth. Biblical illiteracy has led some to think of the Bible stories as disconnected moral tales, with some more important than others. The story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection might be the most important one, but who’s to say. Thinking that Christ’s only relationship to the rest of the Bible is simply being another tale in a moral anthology means you’ve missed the whole point of His story.

The story of Jesus is really the story of the whole Bible. Look at how the four Evangelists (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) frame the beginnings of their Gospels.

Matthew: Begins with a genealogy tying Christ back to Abraham and David (Mt. 1:1). He also insists that the events of Christ’s early life were done in fulfillment of OT prophecies: “Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet [ … ]; And was there until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son. … And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene (Mat 1:22, 2:15, 23).”
Mark: Doesn’t get two dozen words into his Gospel before he appeals to the Prophetic witness regarding the events surrounding Christ’s life (Mk. 1:2); and later in Mark’s introduction, Jesus’ first lines are: “The time is fulfilled (Mk. 1:15).” To which we are forced to ask, “What time is fulfilled?” And, of course, this takes us back to the Old Testament.
Luke: It is almost impossible to create an exhaustive list of the OT citations from the first two chapters of Luke’s Gospel. It is laden, like a child’s stocking on Christmas Eve, with OT allusions, references, examples of the OT prophetic ministry (cf. Lk. 1:67, 2:27-28), and descriptions of obedience to Mosaic laws (cf. Lk. 2:22-23). To read it without any understanding of the Old Testament is like trying to write a book in Mandarin on Tyndale’s influence on modern English.
John: Begins far more philosophically than the other Evangelists; he starts with an allusion to Genesis 1:1, then moves on to link Christ’s coming with Moses’ ministry (Jn. 1:17). Finally, as John the Baptist’s ministry is introduced, we see the Jews querying who John was. They ask if he was the Prophet (Cf. Deu. 18:15). He denies being that prophet. But then a few verses later he winks and nods in the direction of Jesus, informing us that Jesus is the Lamb of God, come to take away the sins of the world. In other words, here stands the grand finale of Moses’ sacrificial system and the Great Prophet who would teach Israel God’s law.

As the story of Christ unfolds we see that at every turn all the rhymes and riddles of the OT begin to be unfolded. All the shadows turn to mist and become substance. All the symbols terminate on the Savior.

We cannot ignore or jettison the Old Testament, and still think to understand the Gospel of the Lord Jesus. We must see that the glad tidings—which are declared by the Gospel writers—are such good news because of the entire story. Christ’s coming is the payoff moment of God’s story. Reading it apart from the rest of the story is like reading how the detective solved the mystery without knowing who the characters are, or what the crime in question is. All of this to say, read the whole story of how God sent His Son to save the world from a dragon.

Bethlehem: The House of Bread

December 15, 2019 By Ben Zornes Leave a Comment

Earlier, I mentioned that Bethlehem meant House of Bread. But I want to give some more attention to the history of this city, and why we should care.

Rachel, the beloved wife of Jacob, died and was buried in Bethlehem (Gen. 35:19).

One of Israel’s judges, Ibzan was born and died in Bethlehem (Jdg. 12:8-10); he had sixty children: thirty sons, and thirty daughters. He married all of them off. He was a fruitful man indeed, with a very full quiver.

Ruth, the Moabite, returns with Naomi to Bethlehem; Boaz redeems Ruth (and by extension Naomi) from her barrenness and widowhood and restores them to their inheritance (cf. Ruth 1-4).

Ruth and Boaz are the great grandparents of King David; he was born and raised in Bethlehem (1 Sam. 16:4-13). By New Testament times, it is called the city of David (Lk. 2:4).

The prophet Micah once declared by divine inspiration:

But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.
Micah 5:2

He was prophesying during a period when the kingdom of Judah was deteriorating. Her kings were not glorious, they were often not godly. The Assyrians were threatening to destroy that once great kingdom. One commentator ¹Baker, David W., T. Desmond. Alexander, and Bruce K. Waltke. Obadiah: an Introduction and Commentary. Leicester, England: Inter-Varsity Press, 1988. Pg. 182 points out the contrast which Micah wants us to see:

The kings born in proud Jerusalem failed; the Messiah incarnated in lowly Bethlehem triumphs.
Bruce Waltke

Seven centuries later, scholars and even the astute populace knew that the Messiah must come out of Bethlehem (Cf. Mt. 2:6 & Jn. 7:42). They knew that David’s promised seed would come from Bethlehem. They knew that this king would be from of old, from everlasting.

Notice the various OT events which are connected with Bethlehem. Rachel once barren, is buried there; and the city of her burial later gives rise to a judge who is clearly a very fertile fellow; Ruth comes to harvest barley seed in Boaz’s field, but ends up becoming his wife to bear his seed.

God sends his Son to be born in a city of Bread. A city where the barren become fertile. Where seed is multiplied and turned into bread. Where promised seeds sprout and begin a great harvest. Christ is the first fruits of the new creation work of God. Remember seed must be ground into flour in order for it to be then turned into bread. This promised seed would come, be ground to pulp, put through the oven of adversity, and a new loaf would come forth to feed this world. In Christ, the barren is turned to fruitfulness, and the hungry are fed.

References [ + ]

« Previous Page