We have Christmas exactly backwards. Consider how we celebrate our modern Christmas. It starts when we get past Thanksgiving. It is a time of parties, good cheer, and feasting, lasting for at least the entire month of December. Then sometime around New Year, we take down the decorations. About that time, we realize that we’ve been overly indulgent. We go on diets, join health clubs, and make New Year’s Resolutions to do better next year.
This is the total reverse of how Christmas was celebrated for nineteen hundred years. For most of the history of the church, December was a month of fasting, not feasting.
But the Victorian Christmases of Scrooge and Dickens happened after December 25. The Twelve Days of Christmas started on Christmas day and ended on the Feast of the Three Kings, on January 6. Christmas did not come until after Advent.
The Advent season was solemn and soul-searching, like Lent. During that time, people refrained from worldly pleasures, not indulged in them.
No one ever believed that Jesus’ birthday was actually December 25. It was a date chosen by the church to begin the liturgical drama of the year. December 21 is the darkest day of the year. The birth of Jesus afterward symbolizes the dawning of the light.
We know what Christmas is supposed to mean, but we often fail to feel it. We are so taken up with shopping and partying to experience this transition from darkness to light. We do not appreciate the light, because we do not know the darkness. To us it is a time for merriment. If we are going to understand the light of Christmas, we have to understand that darkness first.
When my family was younger, we made an annual pilgrimage to see Joy’s parents in Michigan. It was a thirteen to twenty-four hour drive, depending upon where we lived. Early on we discovered that the easiest way to travel with small children was to travel overnight. So before the trips, I would sleep as much as I could. Then armed with coffee, protein, and caffeine pills I would stay awake all night, until Joy woke up at dawn and relieved my driving.
Between six and midnight was easy. Then as one o’clock came it became harder to stay awake.. By two in the morning, the dark seemed to close in around me. The world shrank to a small tube of light on an abandoned road, with no one but truckers and policemen on the road. I would gulp more coffee and keep going.
By four in the morning, the coffee was wearing off. I had used up all the tricks I knew to stay awake. I was thinking that this whole trip was a foolish idea. Sometimes, I would consier whether or not to turn off the road and rest. It was too late to check into a hotel, but I did not know if I could make it.
Then, about four thirty or five in the morning, I saw something that woke me up again--a faint lightening of the eastern sky. It wasn’t much, but it enough to remind me that the night was coming to an end and the dawn was coming.
This is what the Nativity was—the coming of the light. It wasn’t much at first, a baby in a manger, a star in the sky, but it was enough to start us rejoicing. The night had an end to it, and the dawn was coming.
The darkness fell in Genesis 3. Adam and Eve committed the first sin, and ever since we’ve gotten steadily worse. The forbidden fruit in one generation led to murder in the next. Murder led to conquest. Conquest led to genocide. Men became haters of God and followers of a lie. But since the beginning of the darkness, there was always a glimmer of hope. In Genesis 3:15 God said. “And I shall put an enmity between your seed and her seed, and you shall bruise his heel, but he shall crush your head.” A savior—a seed of woman alone—would come and destroy the works of the devil. So wherever there was darkness there was hope.
Hope--what a frail word! When we say hope, we really mean wishes. “I hope to be married someday.” “I hope I win the lottery.” But Biblical hope is much, much stronger than that. It is a certainty of future deliverance. It is not a wish—it is the firm belief in something better coming.
Without hope, we do nothing. Who would work at a job if he did not hope for a paycheck? Who would practice the piano if he did not hope to get better at it? Hope is a very necessary element of our endurance of suffering.
Hope is the Christmas present that Jesus brings to us.
In the NIV version of the Old Testament, the word “hope” appears ninety-two times. The first reference is in Ruth 1:12, when Ruth’s mother-in-law Naomi admits there is no hope for her to have more children. The second reference is I Chronicles 29, is from King David. He saysto say that our lives on earth are like a shadow, having no hope. Both references are to hope that we do not have. We cannot reverse time. We are all going to die.
The first positive reference to hope is in Ezra 10:2 Ezra condemns the people of Israel for marrying into foreign families and practicing idolatry. Then Ezra tells them that there is still hope, if they are able to keep the Law of God.
What a faint “hope” that is! The Law contains six hundred and twenty-five ordinances. It is impossible to keep it all. Yet according to Ezra, it was their only hope.
So in the early part of the Old Testament, references to hope are few and far between. But then we come to a book that is full of hope. The word is used eighteen times, one sixth of all the references in the Bible. Surprisingly, the most hope is the book of Job.
Job is one of the most depressing books in the Bible. It is about a wealthy, righteous man who had everything. Then everything in his life falls aparte. Even his very flesh is cursed. For forty-three chapters he and his friends lament his fate, and try to make sense out of what has happened. It is a very dark book indeed. Yet sprinkled about it are jewels of hope, like stars in the dark night sky. Here is are a couple of examples.
Job 13:15 “Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him; I will surely defend my ways to his face.” Job has faith in God. Even if God kills him, he will not give up. He knows that God will vindicate him in the end.
Job 19:25-27 “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him, with my own eyes — I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!”
Ezra’s only hope was that people would obey the law. Job knew better. Even the most righteous man is a sinner sometimes. Even if you never sinned, your world can still fall unexpectedly on top of you.
My volunteer work at Hope, Inc. has been an eye-opener about the nature of human suffering. I meet Jobs in there every time I go. Like Job’s comforters, many people I speak with who do not go there think that those who do suffer because of their sins. Many do. If people practiced temperance and chastity a full half of the people who go for emergency assistance would not need it. But these are not all the people who need help. They are not even half. Many suffer, not because of their own choices, but because they are victims of neglect and abuse. Many women are stuck with children by men who abandoned their families, for example. A far larger group are people who are there because of an act of God. They have lost their jobs due to a bad economy, they have had a serious illness or accident, or they are so depressed due to serious loss that they live in a permanent state of confusion and depression
Job did nothing to deserve his fate. He obeyed the Law, as Ezra suggested, yet things did not go well with him. He had every reason to wallow in grief and depression. Job wailed and complained bitterly.
Even so, Job’s faith held. He still believed that God’s help was on the way. He believed that God was good even when what he did appeared to be bad. His faith did not depend upon his perception of what God did, but in his relationship with God. If God killed him, God would still be good. One day, his Redeemer would arrive.
Job saw that glimmer of light in the eastern sky. Somewhere in heaven was a person who would redeem him. When he finally came to earth, then we would understand why we have to suffer. We would see that God is still good in the midst of suffering.
We say that Christmas time is for children. Nonsense! Children may have a good time at Christmas, but they are mostly incapable of understanding it. Most adults are clueless, too. Only a person like Job, who lost everything, has a chance to understand the real purpose of Christ’s coming. It is not until we fully grasp the darkness that we know the light.
Isaiah spoke prophetically of the coming of Jesus in Isaiah 9:2-7
2 The people walking in darkness have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.
. . .
6 For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
We all walk in some kind of darkness. For some, it is the threat of lost jobs or lost security. For others, it is illness. For others, it is grief. For others, it is obsession and addiction. For others, it is depression. For many people, it is just the general feeling of guilt for our sins.
For those who suffer like Job, there is a redeemer. Job did not know his name. But he knew that he lived. He anticipated His coming, like we look for the dawn.
We know His name. We know all about how he came—we just don’t understand it. We fail to see how a baby in Bethlehem can help us cope with grief, temptation, poverty, and rejection. Job understood the meaning of the cross better than we do. His redeemer lived. He didn’t say he would live, but that he lived now. Christmas is the birth of one who is our friend forever.
We learned this in Bible School. But it is not until we go through he crucible of suffering that we understand what it means to know the close, intimate presence of the Lord.
This is the meaning of Christmas. It is Emmanuel—God with us. Whatever dark road we travel, there is always a glimmer of light, the light of Christ, shining through.
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