God Came Down

Merry Christmas.

What does Christmas mean?

Christmas is about the time that God entered into our world in the most personal sense, that of a human being. This wasn’t just a temporary appearance. This was beginning as a zygote and then naturally going through a gestation process and coming out of the birth canal of Mary and living life as a baby. This would be a baby who would need to have his diaper changed and be cradled and everything else.

At this point, I also want to clarify what I mean when I say that God came down. A lot of people who are anti-Trinitarians assume that if you say God, you mean a being who is unipersonal and if you say Jesus is God, you’re either saying Jesus is the Father or that Jesus is the Trinity. What is meant is that a person who fully possesses the nature of God became a man. It’s just a lot easier to say “Jesus is God” every time.

This is something unthinkable to Muslims. You mean God pooped? Yes. God fully took on the human experience. He had to eat and drink and sleep. He got His feet sore walking on the streets. He worked up a sweat and got callouses on His hands and had body odor.

To many, this seems unthinkable, and let’s face it. There’s a point to that. It is incredible to think of God doing something like this. Not only to do all of the above, but to end with dying on a cross in the greatest act of shame at the time. He was abandoned and rejected by those closest to Him.

It sounds odd to think of humility on the part of God, but that is what we have. We see it in the great hymn of Philippians 2. We see Jesus not clinging to glory, but taking on the form of a slave. We see God going to the greatest lengths to bring about salvation to man.

Revelation 12 actually depicts the incarnation taking place. We think of Christmas as a happy time, and it is, but the original wasn’t. In the original story, Herod goes and has children killed to make sure that he has no competition. It wasn’t a happy time.

Christmas is when the battle became personal. Christmas is when God entered into the world directly. In a war, the last thing the enemy would expect is for the ultimate head of the army to march out on the battlefield and engage the enemy himself. However, this is exactly what happens in the Christmas story.

It is always amusing to see the people who are so adamant about how evil it is to celebrate Christmas because of alleged pagan origins. Even if that argument was true, so what? No one today is doing this to celebrate a pagan deity, but to celebrate Jesus. If you can’t celebrate Messiah coming into the world, what can you celebrate? That’s what I celebrate today. I celebrate the virgin birth, which I do affirm. I celebrate the incarnation.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)