The Point of Christmas: Salvation from Sin
Do we desire a Savior who will come into our lives, cleanse us, forgive us, renew us, change us, make us holy, and give us, in the end, eternal life? That’s the kind of Savior Jesus is. Christ, the baby born to Mary, is God’s gift to us, and His work of salvation is the point of Christmas.
“What do you want for Christmas?” Asking that question of others is always a diverse experience. There’s the person who is ready with a long list of things. Then there’s the person who only wants one thing, or the person who is offended by the question, or the person who has no idea what they want.
Now consider what we would find if we asked people not, “What do you want for Christmas?” but, “What do you want for a Savior?” Perhaps we would uncover similar answers. We’d find the person who has a list of problems this savior would have to be able to solve. Then we’d discover the person with one major issue in their life they want the savior to solve. Maybe we’d find people who feel that God has let them down, and unless the Savior comes up big, it’s only going to make them more bitter. Undoubtedly, we would also identify people who feel like life is pretty good, and they’re not even sure they need a Savior.
The way we answer the question, “What do you want for a Savior?” reveals a great deal about the spiritual condition of our hearts. This answer highlights what is important to us and reveals what we believe our greatest needs to be. It discloses whether we are even aware of our need for salvation.
As we continue with our study of Christmas: What’s the Point? we turn to Matthew 1:18-25
to see that Jesus, the true Savior, came to save His people from their sins. There are three questions that must be answered as we use this passage to consider the salvation Jesus secured.
First, as we think about God’s provision of salvation in Jesus, what qualifies Jesus to be the Savior?
This critical question was important to the original readers of Matthew’s Gospel. Matthew wrote his account to a primarily Jewish audience, who were familiar with the Old Testament promises and prophecies about the Messiah. One of Matthew’s goals for this Gospel was to prove that Jesus is the promised Savior, starting this quest by establishing that Jesus was qualified to be the Savior. Matthew is intent on showing how it is that Jesus is qualified to be the Savior, the heir to the Davidic dynasty, even though He is not the biological son of Joseph.
Matthew first tells us, in no uncertain terms, that Jesus is qualified to be the Savior because He was born of a virgin. Notice in our passage that Matthew adds that Mary was with child by the Holy Spirit, indicating this was not unfaithfulness to her soon-to-be husband, but a miracle God performed by His Spirit in her. Mary’s Son was not a mere human but the product of the Holy Spirit causing her to conceive apart from any relationship with a man. The clear testimony of Scripture is that Jesus was born of a virgin.
What’s more, the virgin birth is one thing that qualified Jesus to be the Savior. We need a Savior who is free from the stain of sin, who is not under the curse incurred by Adam, and who can represent us before God. Any child born naturally would have the imputed sin of Adam and already be disqualified from being the Savior. A natural birth simply could not provide a righteous Savior who was undefiled and separate from sinners! In addition, our Savior also must be a mediator.
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Is Reason a Servant or a Master?
We have good reason to trust God. But this trust moves us beyond mere reason. Faith is well-reasoned trust. While we may not fully, rationally, comprehend mysteries like the doctrine of the Trinity, we can trust the triune God. The Christian need not use reason as an ultimate guide to all belief, but they certainly must not neglect it.
What is the role of reason in the life of faith? Should a believer simply walk by faith and defy all rational concerns? Should Christians ever offer a coherent and compelling explanation for what they believe? How might we balance all the ways reason can both go right and wrong in the domain of spirituality?
One of the definitions Webster’s dictionary gives for faith is, “firm belief in something for which there is no proof.” Is there no evidence for God? Do Christians have a firm belief is something for which there is no proof? Is Christian faith irrational?
Alvin Plantinga from Notre Dame University strongly disagrees. Plantinga has long been a champion of a view known as “Reformed Epistemology.” He argues belief in God is neither irrational nor does it require an argument. Plantinga says belief in God is a properly basic belief, something we can believe in without arguments or evidences.
We believe in God in a similar way we believe in the reliability of our sense experience. Our senses can fail us. We still trust them. There are times our senses are entirely off, like when we are dreaming and everything we experience is false. We can’t prove we’re not in some dream state now, or even living in the matrix, or stuck in some sort of virtual reality.
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God’s Anger Can Open the Door to Experiencing His Mercy
God’s anger “marks the end of indifference.” It marks the end of His patience with sinners, and ironically, it also signals the opening of the door to experiencing His mercy. This is the discipleship of Jeremiah—who spoke with compassion yet clarity and realism and counseled his people toward a relentless pursuit of the Lord through their pain.
God is love. He would never intentionally bring pain and suffering into my life. Therefore, the grief that I experience is from some impersonal force—like fate— something random and out of control. It certainly cannot be from God. He is too good to let me suffer.
Many professing Christians reason this way.
But the Bible clearly teaches that God is both infinitely good and in control of all creation—even the evil in the world. Though He is not the author of evil, He is Ruler over it, as the book of Job illustrates. And because God is in control of all things, we can have hope and turn to Him for mercy and grace in the face of overwhelming circumstances.
In Lamentations 2:1-22, Jeremiah did not stop with simply recognizing that the Lord was the One who was behind Judah’s horrifying circumstances. To simply say, “God did this,” and then stop would leave God’s people to dangle over the precipice of bitterness and despair. It would inevitably lead to hardness of heart and hopelessness. Instead, as pastor-poet, Jeremiah moved on to shepherd the severely disciplined nation and thus minister a measure of comfort and hope to them.
We, like Jeremiah, must live with the temporal consequences of sin in a fallen world.
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Five Things You May Not Know about Adam
Jesus is referred to as “the last Adam [who] became a life-giving spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45). He came to crush the head of the serpent and take away sin. He died as the perfect—sinless—sacrifice for the trespasses we have committed. When we are in Jesus, we are safe. When we die and stand before God at the Judgment, He won’t see a sinful descendent of Adam, but rather a “new creation” in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17).
Adam is one of the best-known people in the Bible. Despite this, most people only know a few basic facts about him. His connection to every person on the planet, and therefore our need for the Gospel, is outlined below, as are five things about Adam you may not have known before.
1. “Adam” Is Grounded in Hebrew
The word Adam can mean a number of things in Hebrew: mankind, man, and a personal name. For example, “Let us make man in our image” (Genesis 1:26) uses the word ‘āḏām (אדם) to mean ‘mankind’ (see also Genesis 5:2). This includes men as well as women, who are both made in God’s image. Later, in Genesis 2:7 we read more specifically about the creation of the first man. In this verse, ‘āḏām is preceded by the definite article hā (ה), akin to the English word ‘the’. This man was formed of the dust of the ground. The Hebrew word for ground is ‘ăḏāmâ (אדמה). So, we learn of the man (hā’āḏām) Adam (‘āḏām), made from the ground (‘ăḏāmâ), who is the first of mankind (‘āḏām). Not only do we see God inspiring some play on words, we also think there can be no “better name for the progenitor of all humanity” than Adam.1
2. Dust of the Ground
We, as indeed are all creatures, are not evolving to become better, we are DEvolving and getting worse.
The Bible records that Adam was specifically made from the dust of the ground before God breathed life into him (Genesis 2:7). The Hebrew word for dust is ʿāp̄ār (עפר, pronounced ‘afar’), which conveys the concept of dry earth. Now, Moses didn’t know about the material composition of the human body, or what elements were. Yet, he specifically recorded this detail when compiling the book of Genesis around 3,500 years ago. Today we are able to identify the elements that make up the human body, which can all be found in the dust of the ground. When we die and decompose, we do exactly what the Bible teaches: our bodies return to dust (Genesis 3:19).
Of course, just like baking a designer cake, the right ingredients must not only be present at the right time and in the right quantities, but they also need to be put together with purposeful design and complex organization. It is because God has done this and given mankind reason, intelligence, and consciousness that we have the ability to communicate, to love, perform complex mathematics, to produce beautiful artwork, and to play musical instruments brilliantly. Dust can do none of this, no matter how long you leave it. What we observe of humanity fits the biblical account of creation far better than Darwin’s theory.
3. Men and Women: Same Number of Ribs
Adam didn’t have to spend long in the Garden of Eden on his own. God created for Adam a wife, called Eve. God chose not to create her from the dust of the earth, but rather, from one of Adam’s ribs (Genesis 2:22). Some Bible skeptics have falsely claimed that if this were true, it would mean that “women have one more rib than men”.2 As a result, sometimes they think ‘gotcha’ when they confidently exclaim that men don’t have one rib less than women. Men have exactly the same number of ribs as women—12 pairs.
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