Thoughts on Christmas
by Daniel Valles

Every year I get more and more disgusted with the frivolities that people flock after regarding Christmas.  A whole twenty-five percent of our year is spent selling and commercializing one holiday.  America gorges itself on rampant spending, debt, drunkenness, covetousness, greed, and a large obsession with getting stuff.  Yes, we pay token to how giving is more important, and that we are celebrating just like the wise men did, etc. ad naseum.

Christmas, for all the pageantry and programs, does not exalt God.  Nowhere are we reminded to celebrate when Christ came into the world.  The Bible barely mentions the fact of His birth after the initial accounts in the Gospels.  How then did we get all worked up into a warm, greedy, fuzzy feeling over this event?  I think it is because Satan wants us to get our attention off of why He came.   In John 18:37 Jesus answered, "Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth." 

The death on the cross and the resurrection is pinnacle of His earthly visitation!  He emphasized to His disciples that they should institute the ordinance of the Lord's Supper, not Christmas!  Have Christians gotten so off-focus with being intoxicated with Christmas that they have forgotten the only act of remembrance that Christ did institute?  No wonder then that people are flocking to see idolatrous images of Christ, Jehovah, God Almighty-in-the-flesh in a movie (the Passion)!  When you saw Jesus you were seeing the face of God - the very God we are repeatedly commanded in Scripture to make no image, likeness, or similitude of!

When we fill a quarter of each year with the wrong focus, that will affect how we view Christ when the time of His resurrection comes around.  While we are to constantly remember Christ's substitutionary atonement and resurrection for us, that particular time each year did have symbolic meaning, especially to the Jews.

What about the Christmas tree and all of the trappings?

Jeremiah 10:2-4 "Thus saith the LORD, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them.  For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe.  They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not."

Is adopting a practice of the pagan idol worship from centuries past and dressing it up in Christian terms all right?  No!  Learning the ways of the heathen, even if you call it something else it is still copying the world and its worship!

Am I against giving gifts?  No.  But you do not need the trappings of pagan worship hanging around your house to give gifts.  You do not need to run to the world's same excesses.  Can Christians remember Christ's coming to earth?  Yes.  In 1 Timothy 1:15, Paul reflects on the saying, "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief."  Too many Christians think it says, "Christ Jesus came into the world (to save sinners)."  The way we should look at it is the same way Paul viewed it: "Christ Jesus came into the world TO SAVE SINNERS."  On Christmas, it you do want to 'observe it'  you would be better to remind your family and yourself not that Christ came, per se, but that "He" came to save "me"!  Personalize it with emphasis on the salvation not the coming.

Perhaps a good Bible study that your family could do is to go through the Old Testament and study the Messianic prophecies that talk about WHY He would be coming.  The prophecies do not focus on how He was going to have such a grand entrance into this world that people would be remembering year after year - no, they speak of why He is coming. 

These are just some of the verses foretelling the coming of Christ:
Genesis 12:3; 18:18; Deuteronomy 18:15-19; Psalm 16:10,11, 49:15; Psalm 68:18; Isaiah 35:5-6; Isaiah 53:1; Isaiah 59:16;

This Christmas day, what will be your focus?  Learning the ways of the heathen, or remembering that Christ came to save you?