What if Jesus Had Never Been Born?

Have you noticed that there are certain movies which always show up on television at Christmastime? Charles’ Dickens’ A Christmas Carol with its memorable, and to young children, terrifying ghost scenes. Charlie Brown’s Christmas - with its bedraggled Christmas tree and its mellow jazz piano soundtrack. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, with no redeeming value at all. And, one suspects in coming years, the present blockbuster The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, starring Canada’s own Jim Carrey in green makeup.

But perhaps the best-loved Christmas movie of them all is the 1946 classic It’s A Wonderful Life. In that famous film, the lead character George Bailey is played by the loveable Jimmy Stewart. George runs into some adversity and begins to doubt his own worth. And in the process of wrestling with that issue, he is allowed a supernatural glimpse of what the world would have been like if George Bailey hadn’t been in it.

This morning, I’d like to take that same concept and elevate it to a different level. I’d like to apply it to the life of Jesus Christ. What if Jesus had never been born? At Christmas, we celebrate his birth. But what if he had not been born? What if the faith we call Christianity had never come into existence? What if there had never been an institution called the church? What would the world be like? Would it be very much different from the world as we know it today?

Down through the years, many critics of Christianity have blamed the teaching of Jesus for all sorts of societal problems. They claim that the world would have been a much better place—more enlightened, more educated, more humane—if Jesus and the church and Christianity had never existed. Is that an accurate assessment? Let’s think about that this morning.

Today’s message isn’t going to be a Bible lesson, it’s going to be a history lesson. God has written two books—he’s written the Bible, and he’s written the book of human history—and we have much to learn from both books.

Jesus was born into the Roman Empire approximately 2,000 years ago. The Roman Empire in the first century, for all its supposed sophistication, was a rather brutal place. For starters, up to half of the population were slaves who had absolutely no legal rights. For example, if a man who owned slaves were murdered, all of his slaves would be executed because it was simply assumed that one of them was the murderer.

Infanticide—the killing of unwanted children—was routinely practiced. Unwanted babies were left to die from exposure or by being eaten by wild animals. If you were a child in the Roman Empire, your chances of living beyond the age of 8 were less than 50/50.

The average life expectancy for an adult was only 30–40 years. There was no social welfare system and no charitable organizations to take care of you should you run into problems. If you were elderly and unable to work for a living, you might be disposed of by being given poison to drink. The practice of suicide was widespread. Life was cheap in the Roman Empire.

There were no hospitals for you to go to if you were sick. The only places for healing were pagan temples where superstitious rituals were performed in the hopes of making the sick well. Disease flourished in the ancient world, because principles of sanitation were unknown. Plagues and epidemics routinely struck down large numbers of the populace.

For entertainment, the Romans indulged in the blood sports of the Coliseum, getting their thrills from watching people being torn apart by wild animals, or seeing gladiators fight each other to the death.

Many of the leading politicians and rulers of Rome were bloodthirsty madmen who committed unbelievable atrocities. The government was corrupt and capricious. Civil wars and coups were a regular occurrence.

In fact, the only reason we look back today on Rome as being a sophisticated society is that it was so much more advanced than any other civilization or culture that had preceded it. If Rome was bad, everything else that had come before Rome was infinitely worse!

This was the world into which Jesus Christ was born. His earliest followers were citizens of that world—people who had been raised in that society, who were children of that culture.

It’s a fair question to ask: Did Jesus’ life and teaching personally impact them for the better? Did He bring positive changes to their lives? Did Jesus’ teaching cause them to rise above the level of their culture? Did they, in turn influence that society for the better? Well, there is a great deal of evidence to indicate that they did.

To begin with, Jesus taught that the individual is important. He personally went out of his way to identify and associate with people who were regarded to be unclean or somehow “sub-human”. He cared for the poor. He touched people who had contagious diseases. As a Jew himself, he associated with people who had broken the Jewish law, and with people of other nationalities with whom the Jews did not associate.

And Jesus did that to show that each individual might come into a personal relationship with God. Jesus taught that each and every human being matters infinitely to God, because we are all made in the image of God. There are no unimportant people and God loves every one.

That had profound implications for the way that the first century followers of Jesus began to view other human beings. In a culture which believed that human life was cheap and disposable, the early Christians began to teach that life was sacred and to be protected—no matter whose life it was. They began to uphold what we now call the sanctity of human life.

One practical result was that the early Christians stopped the practice of killing babies. They would not practice abortion or infanticide. We have a letter which was written in the second century by one Roman to another in which he describes Christians in the following terms: “they marry and beget children, but they do not destroy their offspring.”

Not only did the early Christians not destroy their own offspring; they began to rescue the children of others. They would go outside of the cities to the baby-dumping places where infants were customarily left to die of exposure, and they would rescue those babies from certain death, adopt them, and raise them to become Christians.

If you think that that is something that only happened way back in the first or second centuries, you would be wrong. There are many non-Christian cultures in which infanticide is still practiced today, and tragically, North America has become one of those places. But everywhere that there are true followers of Jesus Christ, they are standing up to defend the sanctity of human life.

In the early part of the twentieth century, Christian missionaries reached the islands of the Western Pacific, where many of the tribes were still practicing cannibalism. But when those people received the Gospel message, they stopped being cannibals.

Author James Hefley tells the story of how, during World War II, an American G.I. found himself stationed on one of those remote islands in the S. Pacific that the missionaries had visited many years before. One day, on a jungle patrol, that soldier literally ran into one of the natives. This particular native happened to be able to speak English quite well. In fact, he was even carrying a Bible.

The soldier pointed to the Bible and said “You know, we educated people don’t put much faith in that Book anymore.” To which the native replied “Well it’s a good thing for you that we islanders do. Otherwise, you’d be in here by now.” And he patted his stomach.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ brings positive change wherever it goes.

I mentioned earlier that there were no charitable institutions in the Roman Empire—no hospitals, no social insurance programs, no concern for people in distress. In fact, the Roman writer Polybius said “In Rome, no one ever gives away anything to anyone if he can help it.”

But Jesus taught his followers to give and to have mercy on the downtrodden of society. He taught them by word and by personal example to have compassion for the poor and the sick, the widow, the orphan, the prisoner. And the early Christians began to do just that.

Dr. Kenneth Scott Latourette was a great historian who taught at Yale University. He tells us that the early Christians introduced two revolutionary concepts to Roman society.

1. They taught that becoming a Christian meant becoming a giver. Giving was an obligation in the early church, whether you were rich or poor, slave or free. You gave according to your ability. They took seriously the teaching of 2 Corinthians 8:9 which says of Jesus that “though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor, so that we through his poverty might become rich.” The early Christians discovered tremendous joy and freedom in giving.

2. They gave, not just to their own group—not just to other Christians—but to unbelievers outside of the church. They gave to the pagans. They gave to help those who, in many instances, were actually persecuting them. They gave to their enemies. And their enemies noticed.

In fact, the last Roman Emperor who tried to stamp out the Christians was a man named Julian. And he said this in frustration: “It is disgraceful that these Christians not only support their own poor, they support ours as well.”

On occasion, when there were famines or natural disasters, the Roman government came through with some relief. But that relief seldom got to the people who really needed it. It was gobbled up by the wealthy upper classes, the civil servants, and the government workers before it ever got to the common people.

But the Christians went out into the streets and ministered to the needy. And through the centuries since Rome, whenever there has been disaster, wherever there has been suffering, you will find the followers of Jesus Christ there, ministering to people’s needs.

During the Middle Ages, the monks of the Catholic Church lived very humble lives and helped the poor in many practical ways. It has been ignored or forgotten that the Roman Catholic Church—for all its abuses and excesses down through history—did set aside 25% of each parish’s resources for the relief of the sick and destitute. Speaking of medieval Europe, historian Will Durant says “the Church was a continent-wide organization for charitable aid.”

And the same is true today. What are the major relief organizations in the world? Almost all of them were started by Christians. The Salvation Army. The YMCA. World Vision. Food for the Hungry. The International Red Cross, which was started by a Swiss banker named Jean Henri Dunant.

Dunant was an evangelical Christian. Back in 1859, while traveling in Italy—a country which was in much turmoil. He came upon the aftermath of a bloody battle near the town of Solferino and he was appalled at the lack of care and provision for the men who had been wounded. Many of them lay dying simply for lack of medical supplies. Henry Dunant couldn’t forget what he saw and he became convinced that God was calling him to do something about it.

So he wrote a book, which he called the “Memory of Solferino”. And in the book he proposed setting up a neutral, non-political international body that would provide medical and physical assistance to people who had been devastated by warfare. The response to his book was overwhelming, and the result was the founding of a new organization.

When he was looking for a symbol and a name for this new organization, Dunant settled upon a simple red cross—the symbol of Jesus, the symbol of Christianity—to represent what he was trying to do. In fact, that symbol, because it is associated with Christianity, is not acceptable to the Muslim nations, so they adopted their own symbol, the red crescent.

Now I’m not saying that the International Red Cross is a Christian organization. But it was founded by a Christian who was concerned for the needs of others. For his efforts, Dunant became the first recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

I could tell you the stories of George Mueller, a Christian who established a number of orphanages in England, or Robert Raikes, a Christian who who founded the Sunday School so that the children who worked in the factories of 18th century England could learn how to read and write. Or William Booth, a Christian who founded the Salvation Army in order to feed and clothe the homeless people he saw on the streets of 19th century London.

William Wilberforce was an evangelical Christian and member of Parliament who was instrumental in ending the slave trade in the British Empire. What is not as well known about Wilberforce is that, although he himself was not a Roman Catholic, he helped to spearhead the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829. Since the days of Henry the VIII, Catholics in Britain had been treated as second class citizens. They were not able to vote, not able to hold public office or become lawyers, not able to worship freely and organize their own religious schools. But thanks to Wilberforce, they were given back their rights.

If you were to visit Calcutta, India today, you would find some of the poorest most miserable urban slums anywhere on earth. Go to the worst neighborhood of Calcutta and you’ll find in the midst of all that human suffering a bright, shining light of hope—a little hospital, run by a group of Catholic nuns known as the Sisters of Charity. Up until recently, that hospital was headed by a little, elderly Albanian nun who loves Jesus. Her name was Mother Teresa, and she wrote “Today God has sent us into the world as he sent Jesus, to show God’s love to the world. And we must sacrifice to show that love, just as Jesus made the greatest sacrifice of all.” The successors of Mother Teresa are making a difference in Calcutta for Jesus’ sake.

If you were to go to the outskirts of the teeming city of Manilla in the Philippines, you would find a gigantic garbage dump, several acres in size. What’s unusual about this garbage dump is that it’s home for 10,000 people. They live in hovels and shacks on that steaming, stinking mound, where they eke out a living salvaging the scraps and trinkets they find by digging through the debris.

You won’t find a mosque there. You won’t find a Buddhist or a Hindu temple. You won’t find a chapter of the local humanist association. But you will find a church. There’s a Christian church located on that dump, ministering to the needs of the dump-dwellers and giving them hope for a better life.

In the Roman Empire, there were no hospitals, other than medical dressing tents for soldiers who were wounded in battle. But the early Christians began to provide shelter and treatment for the sick. In the earliest centuries, they couldn’t build hospitals, because Christianity was still an outlaw religion. But by the year 325 AD., Christianity had become accepted. And in that year, at the Council of Nicea, the church authorized the bishops of each region to build a hospital in each major city of the Roman Empire, to care for the sick and suffering.

The oldest hospital still functioning anywhere in the world today is the Hotel Dieu in Paris, founded by Christians. The oldest hospital in the Western Hemisphere is the Jesus of Nazareth Hospital in Mexico City, founded in 1524. With a name like that, I don’t have to tell you who founded it.

Down through history, many of the most revolutionary developments in medical science and care for the sick have come from the hands of committed Christians. Dr. Louis Pasteur did research into bacteriology which led to the practice of pasteurization, sterilization, and the development of vaccinations against many diseases. Pasteur was a committed Christian who had an unshakeable faith in God and the Gospel.

The same is true of Joseph Lister, the English doctor who helped to develop antiseptic surgery.

Sir Wilfred Grenfell was a successful British doctor. After hearing evangelist Dwight L. Moody speak, he gave up his practice in England and moved to Labrador in 1892, where he devoted himself for the next 40 years to the welfare of its people. By the time he retired in 1935, he had founded five hospitals, seven nursing stations, three orphanages, boarding schools, cooperative stores, industrial centers, and agricultural stations and a ministry to sailors called the King George V Seaman’s Institute.

I had the privilege a number of years ago of meeting Mr. Wilson Greatbatch, a man who lived on the outskirts of Buffalo, NY. Mr. Greatbatch happens to be an evangelical Christian. He is also the father of the heart pacemaker, which he invented in 1958.

And yet somehow, it has become popular nowadays in the media to portray Christians as backward, ignorant hillbillies or bigoted rednecks.

But the truth is that followers of Jesus Christ have been in the forefront of education, exploration, and scientific discovery down through the ages. Because Christians believe that all truth is God’s truth—so we need not fear to follow the truth wherever it leads us.

Jesus taught us that we are each important to God. And God thought enough of us to want to reveal His truth to us in a Book—the Bible. Now if we’re going to be able to understand that truth, we’re going to have to be able to read. And if we’re going to be able to read, then we’ll also be able to write.

And that’s why Christians have always been the pioneers of language translation, literacy, book publishing, communication, and education for the masses. It’s because Christianity is based on the Word.

Back in the 9th century, a couple of monks named Cyril and Methodius went from northern Greece into Central Europe to teach the Slavic people about Jesus. The very first thing they had to do was figure out the Slavic language, and to do that, they had to develop an alphabet. The result is the Cyrillic alphabet that is still used in Russia and Eastern Europe today.

Back in the 15th century, a German Christian named Johann Gutenberg figured out a way to modify his wine press so that it would press pages of paper down onto a block that contained movable type. Thus you had the printing press. What motivated Gutenberg to come up with that idea? Because he wanted to print copies of the Bible so that everyone could have one.

Then a man named Martin Luther came along and said that not only should everyone have a copy of the Bible, everyone ought to be able to read and interpret it and understand it for himself. And that idea—one of the primary ideas of the Protestant Reformation—sowed the seeds for the idea of universal education.

The Puritans carried that idea to the new world, and within twenty years of their settling in Massachusetts, they did something about it. They passed a law which called for the establishment of public schooling for everyone. Their law was called the Old Deluder Act because they believed that it was the strategy of Satan, the Old Deluder, to keep people ignorant so that they would never be able to read the Bible.

When it comes to university education, you might be interested to know that virtually all of the first 100 colleges and universities started in North America were started by Christians.

Harvard University got its start from a donation of money and books from the Rev. John Harvard. It was originally a place for the training of ministers.

Dartmouth was founded to train missionaries to the Indians. William and Mary was created that “the Christian faith might be propagated”. Columbia University was opened in 1754 for the expressed purpose “to teach and engage young people to know God in Jesus Christ.” The first president of Princeton University said “Cursed be all learning that is contrary to the cross of Christ.”

Now most of our universities in Canada and the United States have long since departed from the principles and purposes of their founders, but the people who established those institutions were followers of Jesus Christ.

So as we look back on the past 2,000 years of history, we have to acknowledge that the followers of Jesus have made quite an impact.

If Jesus had never been born, and lived, and taught the things he did, none of this would have happened. Because there wouldn’t have been the motivation in people’s hearts to do these things for other people who were less fortunate.

But all of that isn’t why Jesus came. Jesus didn’t come to create social change. He didn’t come to improve society. He came to create personal change. Because only personal change can create social change.

The reason this world is such a dysfunctional place is that it is populated by people who have dysfunctional hearts. People who have dysfunctional hearts create dysfunctional families. Dysfunctional families create dysfunctional neighborhoods.

Dysfunctional neighborhoods create dysfunctional cities. Dysfunctional cities create a dysfunctional nation. And dysfunctional nations create a dysfunctional world.

But it all starts with the human heart. And Jesus came here to do something about our hearts. To bring us back to God. We’ve all got sin and hatred in our hearts. But Jesus came to take that sin away.

And when you get your heart fixed, it makes you want to:

- help your neighbor instead of hurting him

- bless him instead of blaming him

- love him instead of leaving him the way he is.

And that creates societal change. And if Jesus hadn’t been born, none of that would have happened.