Advent

Christmas All Year Round

December 25, 2019 By Ben Zornes Leave a Comment

I’m gonna keep this one short. You should be with your family and friends, eating a slab of fudge, or smoked brisket, or downing some mulled wine.

All I want to remind you of on this Christmas day, is that Christmas is a year round truth. Yes, the month-long crescendo which leads up to Christmas morning is a wonderful reminder of the long wait for Christ’s first advent, and the joy which geysered forth that first Christmas morning. It is a month which should be full of giddy excitement, anticipation, and gladness. God has come to make us His temple, His dwelling place. But Christmas isn’t just for December.

That first Christmas was when God planted the flag of conquest on the human race by taking for Himself a body. This means he intended to claim this planet for Himself. Christmas is a political event. Man’s kingdom––long ruled by the prince of darkness grim––has been overthrown, and is now ruled by a Man, like us, but One who died and overcame death and will never die. This Man is ruling at God’s right hand, for He came to bring the Kingdom of God. So remember, that this day is a reminder that Christ is King. Not in theory. Not in wish. Not in some esoterical “higher consciousness”.

No. Jesus Christ is King of planet earth. Now. The flag has been planted. The campaign of conquest marches on. And one day every knee will bow before Him, and every tongue will confess that truth. Which is why we, His people, ought to celebrate like crazy. So from my family to yours: have the holliest, jolliest, merriest Christmas, for Christ the Savior is born.

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

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.

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.

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Stars and Angels

December 14, 2019 By Ben Zornes Leave a Comment

The nativity story is full of angels, stars, a heavenly host coming down to earth, and even a star that stops above a house in a small, Judaean town. Many unbelievers might snort in ridicule. They regard such narrative elements as embellishments at best, and at worst, evidence that the whole thing is just a fairy tale.

Before the Copernican revolution, mankind would look at the heavens with the sense of looking up, whereas we have the sense of looking out. The heavens weren’t perceived as the cold, empty vacuum of the materialist worldview. Rather, it was thought that the heavens were warm, full of life and song. It was our planet that was cut off from the perfect dance of the heavenly bodies, and we were left out of the heavenly choir.

We shouldn’t let modern materialistic thinking skew how we read Scripture. The materialist wants you to look at stars and see flaming balls of gas, the result of a violent explosion, placed in a void of outer space. Stars formed as the result of impersonal forces of time and chance. Now that is the makings of an outlandish fairy tale.

But Ramundu’s rebuke of Eustace in Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is what we need to hear:

“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”
“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.”
C.S. Lewis

Scripture repeatedly wants us to think of stars and angels as going together.

The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches (Rev. 1:20)
When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? (Job 38:7)
There is no speech nor language, where their [the heavenly bodies] voice is not heard. (Psa. 19:3).
[The dragon’s] tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth (Rev. 12:4).

This is not a matter to blush about. God made the heavenly host. We should not be surprised that He imbued them with personality, movement, dance, voice. Isaiah tells us, “Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth. (Isa 40:26).” God gave the stars names. They sang with him at the creation of the world. A third of them were led astray by the dragon.

At Bethlehem a host of them arrive to sing a song heralding the reunification of earth with heaven by means of this blessed Child. The ancients knew that the order and life displayed in the heavens was something we’d been cut off from. But the angels come to tell this silent planet that God was coming to make peace with us. The silent planet would be silent no more, but man, in Christ, might join in the heavenly songs of praise to our God. Then the angels “hyperdrive” back to their heavenly positions. Then, as if all of this isn’t marvelous enough, one star gets the job of guiding the wise men to the exact house in which Christ and his parents were dwelling.

Truly, it is good to sing:

All thy works with joy surround thee,
earth and heaven reflect thy rays,
stars and angels sing around thee,
center of unbroken praise.
Field and forest, vale and mountain,
flowery meadow, flashing sea,
chanting bird and flowing fountain,
call us to rejoice in thee.
Henry Van Dyke (Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee)

Materialism cannot account for such an event. But it is the most likely of things to happen: when God became a man the stars and angels made sure we saw the signs for which they’d been appointed (Gen. 1:14). This was the beginning, after all, of a new creation.

Wise Guys Chasing Stars

December 13, 2019 By Ben Zornes Leave a Comment

Why would three or so wise men from the far east, after seeing an astronomical event, conclude that they should load up the camels, pile on the treasure, and head to Israel to worship a newly born king? Well, because of the prophecy about a Star. Now, in tomorrow’s post I will talk all about the stars, but for now stars are more than flaming orbs of gas, not less. Darwin teaches us that matter is all there is, but that’s just fool’s talk. Stars talk and dance after all.

The Magi (as they were called) knew to be watching for a star. How? First, because we know that a pagan seer once gave this oracle:

I shall see him, but not now: I shall behold him, but not nigh: there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children of Sheth.
Numbers 24:17

The ancients didn’t toss aside such prophecies with the indifference of pitching out an empty coffee cup. It is the likeliest thing for these sorts of prophecies to circulate to various priests and cultures. Stargazers would most certainly be interested in such a fortuitous Star prophecy. Which leads to another clue in this little puzzle. We forget that there was once a Jew of legendary godliness who was put over all the presidents, magicians, and soothsayers of the ancient far east. His name was Daniel. He was known for being an interpreter of dreams and visions. He is the likeliest source for the eastern astrologers to have come across this Moabite prophecy of a star arising in Israel.

Once more, we see that God is the hand behind the entire story of this universe. Stars in heaven do His bidding. Stargazers on earth who discern that heavenly dance follow His signs. Kings are His tools. Shepherds, carpenters, priests, Romans, handmaidens, Inn-keepers, all do His bidding. God’s story was coming to its denouement. This little boy was born, and the Stars were like neon signs to tell anyone who would look that here was the Main Character. The wise men were paying attention. Here was the King of the World. The takeaway? Come and worship Him.