1977 was a banner Christmas for me, because I got a Marlin .22 rifle with scope, and a fly rod. I remember feeling the venti endorphin surge that Christmas morning. None of it was connected to Jesus. In fact, to me, the Jesus aspect of the season had been more of a hassle than anything else.
My family typically went to midnight service, which I usually thought of as the last unpleasant hurdle before I could finally tear into the presents underneath the tree. While I sat in the pew, enduring that lackluster religious combo meal, I simply couldn’t understand the choruses of joy, joy, joy about a baby in a manger. It felt like the folks singing the loudest might have been fudging their enthusiasm.
Okay, shame on me for feeling that way at the time. But I think a lot of people don’t feel a straight line connection between seasonal joy and Christ’s coming.
If we took an honest inventory, the upbeat holiday mood seems rather to proceed from sentimentality, tradition, time off from work, décor, Christmas shopping that was done early and cheaply, family get-togethers, office parties, excited kids, and loads of treats you’re not supposed to eat. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of those things. I still enjoy them every year (Well, some of them, anyway). It just seems a little weird to superimpose Jesus on top of the whole package and insist He is the real reason for the joy, joy, joy.
Before Black Friday or Cyber Monday
You don’t get this same sense of disconnect when reading about the birth of Jesus in the Bible. Of course, the forces of Walmart and Amazon had not yet encumbered the event. The scriptural narrative gives us a definite impression of urgency, hope, and anticipation at His coming, and deep relief afterwards. Every column inch of those early gospel chapters showcases someone who bursts with praise for Christ.
Real biblical joy—the kind that can’t be stolen, bought, or returned for in-store credit—stems from the fact that our greatest problems, the eternally fatal ones, have been solved in Christ.
The Day That Wrecked Our Lives
For a little refresher, I want to take you back, not to a predictable recount of the Christmas story, but to the beginning of the world in Genesis chapter 3, where Adam had committed the very first sin. The back story is relatively simple. God had told the man he could eat from every tree of the garden except one. He then added with all gravity, “The day you eat from that forbidden tree, you’ll die.”
Later, when the coast was clear, Satan entered the garden concealed within the serpent, a creature familiar to Eve. He had some opinions to offer on the matter.
In the space of one extremely short conversation, he led her to doubt God’s word, to deny there would be any consequences in disobeying Him, and to suspect God’s character and motives. In typical satanic sleight-of-hand, the serpent played up the immediate benefits of disobedience—“Your eyes will be opened!”— but he disputed any long-range negative effects.
Both man and woman bought it. As God warned, they died upon eating—not on the outside, but the inside. Their heart of worship and communion with God instantly pruned up and dried out. The two stood condemned. Their previous sense of peaceful harmony with God morphed into an intense feeling of awkwardness, alienation, and shame, all symptoms of sin.
This is more than the account of one man’s fatal mistake, because the Bible tells us Adam and his wife weren’t alone in their fall. They took us with them. According to Romans 5:12, “Sin entered the world…and death passed to all men.” We feel it, too—spiritual death, oncoming physical death, and somewhere deep inside, a certain expectation of coming judgment where we will answer for the many evil things we’ve done. It is our intuitive dread of “the second death,” something so bad it would be better to have not been born than to experience it.
Genesis chapter three, then, was a grand train-wreck moment.
Someone is Coming to Get Even
The devil stood next to the ruined couple, like “Mayhem,” the character from the All-State insurance commercials—I’m the little voice encouraging you to do the wrong thing. Then after everything crashes down, he shrugs and gives a sheepish chuckle.
God wasn’t laughing.
Gen. 3:14 The Lord God said to the serpent,
“Because you have done this,
cursed are you above all livestock
and above all beasts of the field;
on your belly you shall go,
and dust you shall eat
all the days of your life.
15 I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.”
The first few times you read these verses, you might not have known they referred to Jesus at all. Yet Gen. 3:15 has been called the mother of all Bible prophecies. It is the first gospel message ever preached by no less than God Himself, and directly to the devil! It obviously wasn’t good news to the serpent, but it certainly was to the two human beings who were listening in.
Here’s how God laid out His sermon: First, He made it clear that a state of enmity will always exist between the serpent and the woman. Try not to understand this as a religious folk story explaining why human beings and snakes don’t naturally get along. This passage contains a lot of symbolism and double entendres, and it’s supposed to take us into a deeper understanding. The bottom line: Satan is the natural enemy of mankind. He hates the very soul of a human being. He will never be our friend. Our safest course of action is to dislike and distrust him. That is the enmity.
But not only would enmity exist between the woman and the serpent, but between the offspring of the serpent and that of the woman. The serpent’s offspring generally refers to whatever comes out of him, including all the people that belong to him from Cain, the world’s first murderer, all the way down to the Antichrist. The woman’s offspring is also collective, referring to the people who belong to God, but contained within a singular, personalized “He.” God thus tells the serpent, “He shall bruise your head.”
It’s impossible to say what the devil was thinking at the moment, but he must have been surprised. A man was going to come and deliver a mortal injury to him? How could such a thing be? Angels are more powerful than human beings, let alone an archangel.
But if this fallen angel puzzled over what it might imply for a mere man to hurt him, the prophecy was yet to become stranger. For God indicated a struggle would occur. The promised coming man would deal a mortal blow to the serpent’s head, presumably stomping it, while the serpent would manage to bite, to bruise, the heel of the man’s foot.
The man would apparently recover, but the serpent would not.
Finally, the Champion Appears
This prophecy germinated a hope within the human race, immediately causing us to anticipate the arrival of the “head-bruiser.” It gained steam and proliferated into dozens of further, more detailed prophecies throughout the Bible until Hebrews 2:14, where it says, that “through death, He [Jesus] destroyed Him who has the power of death, that is, the devil” and in 1 John 3:8, where it says, “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.”
These verses finally unveil with crystal clarity that the offspring of the woman, the promised Man, the champion of the human race, the head bruiser, is Jesus Christ. It may seem odd to say during a holiday known for sentimentality, that the baby in the manger came to carry out a destroying work. He cherished the souls of men, but showed nothing but contempt for the serpent.
Perhaps stranger still, at the apex of His work on the cross, we tend to see only what happened to Him—the whipping, the crown of thorns, the crucifixion—as it were, the serpent striking His heel. This was what men saw. Only faith’s keen sight can also view His great simultaneous bruising the serpent’s head. The cross invalidated the devil’s work and annulled his power so completely as to destroy him.
Mere Preachy Talk, or Authentically Joyful News?
We’re tempted to think of all this as being mere theology–interesting, maybe, in the same way that other fields of study like astronomy, or geology can be interesting to laymen. But certainly an attitude of deep personal appreciation for Jesus ought to result.
Years ago, the news program 60 Minutes aired a piece on the high rate of early onset Alzheimer’s in one particular South American family. Researchers had identified one mutated gene in the family that 100% guaranteed the disease would emerge in an individual.
The news program gathered six children from that family into a room for a group interview. Each of them knew they had a fifty-fifty chance of having the gene. Their anxiety about the future was palpable. They cried as they talked about the situation. One said she had decided not to have children because of the risk of passing on the disease.
Whenever anyone finds himself or herself in such a game of genetic Russian Roulette, nothing is casual anymore. Every plan must be made in light of a possible abbreviated life and a horrible, ignominious end.
That sorrowful little news interview is a microcosm of all of us. The only real difference is that our chances of having the “sin” gene isn’t fifty-fifty. It’s one hundred percent certain. Sin and death have touched everything in our lives now, generating a fear of death and final judgment as well. It has tainted our hopes, darkened our desires.
But Christ has come. For all who believe in Him, those problems are no longer malignant. They are gone.
You’re supposed to feel something about that.
If you still don’t quite get it, go back to the room with the Alzheimer’s candidates. Imagine how they’d felt if a new therapy were offered that could free them from the tyranny of that one mutated gene. Probably nothing in their lives would remain untouched by fresh, new hope. Even the mundane problems of life would seem laughable, faced now with a smile, and a song.
That’s the kind of joyful connection we have with that manger in Bethlehem.
