Have a very "holy" Christmas!

Christmas has become so secularized that it is little more than a cosmic birthday party in most circles. To avoid being swallowed up by the superficial tinsel and trappings of the holiday, most of us tack on our own religious version of Christmas and appease our consciences by at least giving lip service to the real significance of the season.

Those who change “Merry Christmas” into “Happy Holidays” offend us, and we certainly don’t want our children or grandchildren to get out of school for Christmas and have it called “Winter Solstice.” Furthermore we don’t even like the idea of Kwanzaa or Hanukkah getting equal attention with “our” Christmas season.

But even our most noble attempts to capture the true meaning of Christmas seem to be diluted by the commercialization of a society so skillful in communicating its worldly message of merriment and merchandizing. All of us are probably guilty of compromising the true meaning of Christmas.

Our best Christmas pageants could never really capture the significance of the incarnation, the wonder of the shepherds, and the worship of the wise men. After all, Christmas is the incarnation of holiness, and the celebration of a doctrine central to Trinitarian Christianity.

The Incarnation is the foundation stone upon which the framework of all Christian doctrine is laid. In fact, without the Incarnation, none of the rest of orthodox Christian thinking makes any sense whatsoever. The doctrine is this: God became incarnate, that is, put on human flesh. Until the moment of conception, God had been completely other than this world, but in that moment took on humanity, still as much God as if he were not man and yet as much man as if he were not God – the God-man.

This is such a radical doctrine that some of the earliest theologians referred to it as “the scandal of the Incarnation.” The term does not designate the Incarnation as a heresy, but describes the difficulty that some people had in accepting the Church’s teaching that God became man. The Incarnation scandalizes people because they resist the idea that God would limit Himself in that way or stoop to our level at all.

How could a Being as holy, powerful, and filled with glory as God become sullied with human flesh? It would seem a diminution of God’s holiness. And yet that is what Jesus’ birth represents to orthodox Christians, and it is this Incarnation of holiness that is celebrated at Christmas.

We probably seldom reflect on the Incarnation of holiness, because as Matthew Henry said, “No attribute of God is more dreadful to sinners than His holiness.” It is the holiness of God that sets the standard for our conduct.

We tend to play the comparison game and judge ourselves favorably because we regard ourselves to be more righteous than our neighbor, but our neighbor was never meant to be the standard for our conduct. Morally, our standard of living is determined by the quality of holiness in the character of God. We must set the clock of our conduct by the character of God and His Son, who is the express image of the invisible God.

The holiness of God also means that he hates sin. He loves everything in conformity to His laws and loathes everything contrary to His laws. While we minimize, rationalize, and even glamorize sin, God despises it. It follows, therefore, that He must necessarily punish it.

If God hates sin then it also surely incurs His wrath. We must not forget that “the way of the transgressor is hard” (Proverbs 13:15). For one sin, God banished our first parents from the Garden of Eden. For one sin, God instructed Joshua to have Achan stoned. For one sin, Elisha’s servant was smitten with leprosy. For one sin, Ananias and Sapphira were cut off from the land of the living.

But this eternal God whose holiness stands in direct contrast to our sinfulness and who has been offended by our iniquity, rebellion, and disobedience has provided a way for us to enter once again into His favor. His holiness demands a perfect sacrifice for our sins and through the Incarnation the provision of such a sacrifice was made possible. For Jesus, throughout his life, was known to be “holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners” (Hebrews 7:26) thus qualifying as the only one who could atone for our sins.

A. W. Tozer has declared, “We must hide our unholiness in the wounds of Christ as Moses hid himself in the cleft of the rock while the glory of God passed by.”

Oswald Chambers said, “Holiness, not happiness is the chief end of man.”

Therefore, have a “holy” Christmas!