Merry Christmas everybody! This coming Sunday is the day when many believers celebrate the birth of Jesus. This miraculous event is recorded for us in Matthew 1-2; Luke 2; and John 1. Mark’s gospel makes no mention of Jesus’ birth. Matthew and Luke give the most detailed Biblical accounts and these details are important. They show that Jesus was born miraculously of a virgin, and it shows a lot of Old Testament prophecy fulfilled. However, none of these accounts give us the date, day, or time of the year this took place. Mankind took it upon himself to pick a day to celebrate the birth of Jesus though no place in Scripture tells us to commemorate a certain day to remember the birth of our Lord. This does not mean that it is wrong to celebrate Christmas, unless you try and bind it on others as something we are told to do in Scripture, because we clearly are not. The most powerful verse concerning the birth of Jesus is found in John’s account. John 1:14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.
When Jesus was conceived, God became a man. He was not part man and part God; He was completely human and completely divine. Colossians 2:9 For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form… Before Christ came, people could know God partially. But with the coming of Jesus, people could know God fully because He became visible and tangible in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the perfect expression of God in human form. The two most common errors people make about Jesus are to minimize His humanity or to minimize His divinity. Jesus is both God and man. It is in and through Jesus Christ that God and man come together. So, as we can see, the birth of Jesus was one of the most important events in all of history. But just as important as His birth, was His life, death, and resurrection. Jesus had to become human so that He could die and rise again in order to destroy the power of sin and death (Romans 6:5-11). Only then could Christ deliver those who had lived in constant fear of death and free them to live for Him.