God Became One of Us

A friend of mine recently had to speak at a seminary banquet. There would be many pastors and church leaders there. I asked him what kind of Christmas message he was going to bring to these religious professionals. He said that he was going to speak on “Ministry in the Mean Season”.

Christmas can be a depressing time for many people. An article written by the director of the California Dept. of Mental Hygiene warns: “The Christmas season is marked by great emotional stress and more acts of violence than at any time of the year.”

Many people see Christmas as nothing more than an excuse to have a party, to overeat, to get drunk, to enjoy a couple of days off work or school, and to spend money. For them, Christmas has become just an empty holiday. In our culture, we’ve traded the real meaning of Christmas for a story that goes something like this:

And there were in the same country, children keeping watch over their stockings by the fireplace. And lo! Santa Claus suddenly came upon them and they were sore afraid. And Santa said unto them “Fear not, for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people who can afford them. For unto you shall be given great feasts of turkey and dressing and many gifts. And this shall be a sign unto you. You shall find the presents, wrapped in bright paper, laying beneath a tree that is covered with tinsel and lights. And suddenly there will be with you a multitude of relatives and friends, praising you and saying “Thank you so much, it is just what I wanted.” And it shall come to pass as the friends and relatives have gone away into their own homes, the parents will say to one another “Darn it. What a mess! I’m so tired. Let’s go to bed and pick it up tomorrow. Thank God, Christmas only comes once a year.”

What is Christmas really about? When you strip away the ornaments and the presents and all the rest, what do you have left?

The Bible tells us that Christmas is about a the birth of a baby - a birth unlike any other before or since. This baby was born of a virgin.

Does it not seem to you rather strange that the Christmas story should begin there? If Christmas is merely a myth invented by Christians to make the world believe that Jesus was somebody special, why would they invent a story that started there? There are few facts that are better known than the fact that it takes a man and a woman to have a baby. Virgins simply do not create babies on their own! Yet the Bible’s account of Christmas seems not just to mention this in passing, but to make a special point of it - that Mary was a virgin, and that the birth of this baby was unique.

One of the two Bible accounts of Christmas was written by a man named Luke. Luke happened to be both a doctor and a historian. Both of those occupations would have made Luke extremely skeptical of a story about a virgin birth. Yet he records it simply and clearly. Listen to what he wrote:

Luke 1:26 In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.” Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end.” “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?” The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.

In Matthew’s gospel, we read…

Matthew 1:22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: “The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel”—which means, “God with us.”

The Bible is telling us that Christmas was when God became one of us. The birth of Jesus to a virgin was a miraculous birth. This child didn’t come from the union between a man and a woman: this child came from God. At Christmas, the Son of God clothed himself in human flesh and became one of us.

But why did it happen this way? Why couldn’t the Son of God have just suddenly appeared as a full grown man? Or why couldn’t God have arranged to simply use a man who had been born naturally? Why go to all the trouble and complexity of having a virgin birth?

Well, to put it as simply as I can, if Jesus had come any other way, then what he ultimately did when he died on the cross wouldn’t have worked. You see, if Jesus had merely dropped down out of heaven one day dressed in a human body, I’m sure that he would have looked like a man, and talked like a man, and acted like a man, but he would not have been a man. He would not have been a flesh and blood human being. He would have been an apparition, an illusion, a mirage - something that looks real, but isn’t.

And if Jesus wasn’t a real flesh and blood human being, then when they nailed him up on that cross, he couldn’t have served as our representative; he couldn’t have been our substitute, and he couldn’t have really died for our sins. You see, the Bible says that when Jesus hung on the cross, he was really dying. He was really shedding his blood for us, and it was real human blood. It wasn’t some fake red liquid that God had invented for the occasion - it was real human blood.

And the only way it could be real, is if Jesus was a real human being. And to be a real human being, you have to be born. That’s your membership card in the human race - you have a mother who carries you inside her body for nine months. Her body nurtures yours. The food she eats becomes your food. Her bloodstream supplies yours with nutrients and energy so that you can grow. And as you are knit together in that secret place, you come to share in the essence of what it is to be a member of the human race. Jesus experienced this. He was a real person, just like you and me.

But what about the other alternative? Suppose that Jesus were just a man who had been conceived the way every other person starts out - with a human father and a human mother. Then at some point later in his life, he became very spiritual, filled with the Holy Spirit, even having some godlike characteristics.

Well, that wouldn’t have been good enough either. The Bible tells us that to be human is to be sinful. When Adam sinned, he passed down to all his offspring two things.

1. The consequences for what he did. Physical death is a consequence of sin. Every human being since Adam has been subject to physical death. Even little babies who have never sinned and have never even had a chance to sin still die. Because they, like all of us, have inherited from Adam the effects or the consequences of his sin.

2. Adam passed down to all of us a sin nature. When Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden, they rebelled against God. They replaced God at the center of their lives with themselves. That act fundamentally changed their make-up as human beings. From that point on, they were rebellious and self-centered. And they passed those characteristics down to their offspring. That spirit of rebellion and self-centeredness is what we call a sin nature.

I mentioned babies a moment ago. Babies are wonderful. They are cute. They are innocent. They are charming. But all too soon, you begin to see a streak of self-centeredness and rebelliousness that is already there in them. They do not have to learn how to disobey. They are born knowing. They are born with a positive potential for doing wrong. That’s the sin nature that we all inherited from Adam. And that sin nature makes us not only sinners in theory, it very soon makes us sinners in fact.

Now if Jesus was just a man, even a very good man, he would have inherited those two things from Adam. He would have been subject to physical death and he would have had a sin nature. And if that were so, then his death on the cross wouldn’t have accomplished anything at all for you and me. Why?

First, because if Jesus was truly an heir of Adam’s sin and guilt, then physical death for him, as for all of us, would have been inevitable. It would have been in the cards. Sooner or later, death would have got him. But the Bible says that when Jesus died, He did so as a matter of choice. He chose the time, he chose the place, he chose the manner, and he chose the reason. Jesus Christ voluntarily laid down his life for us. That makes no sense at all if it were not for the fact that Jesus didn’t have to die - ever! He chose to die in an act of obedience to God in order to redeem us.

Secondly, if Jesus were just a man, he would have had a sin nature. That would have made him a sinner. You cannot die for the sins of someone else if you yourself are a sinner too. A drowning man cannot save another drowning man. Jesus could not have served as our substitute if he himself had inherited a sin nature. If he died on that cross a sinner, he would only have been paying for his own sins. He could not even have paid for the sins of one other person, much less the sins of the whole world.

But because Jesus was born of a virgin, although he was fully human, he did not inherit Adam’s guilt, he did not inherit Adam’s sin nature. Though fully human, he was without sin. That is how he could be a sinless substitute on the cross.

So you see, Christmas has a lot to do with Easter. That’s why we have on the sign in front of our church “You cannot understand the true meaning of Christmas unless you see the shadow of the cross over the cradle.”

Christmas is when God became one of us. And the reason he did was so that he could die for us. If Jesus were only God, then he couldn’t really die. But if Jesus were only a man, then his death couldn’t have helped anyone else. It was the miracle of the virgin birth that enabled Jesus to be both God and man. This is the central fact of Christmas.

How appropriate that Christmas begin with a miracle! You can never understand what Christmas, indeed what Christianity, is all about unless you are ready to believe in miracles.

The miracle of Christmas is that, by the work of the Holy Spirit, a baby was born of a virgin. The miracle of Christianity is that, by the work of the Holy Spirit, you can be spiritually born.

John 1:12-13 Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

The miracle of Christmas is that the birth of Jesus brought a new beginning for mankind. We still refer to the years before his birth as BC and after as AD. The miracle of Christianity is that Christ wants to give you a new beginning.

2 Corinthians 5:17 If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has gone; the new has come.

The miracle of Christmas is that God became one of us. The miracle of Christianity is that God wants to make you one of His.

Will you believe it? That’s the key.