Why put “Honestly now” in the title above these lines? Well, when you think for even just a moment of all the sham, the tomfoolery, and the humbug in today’s Christmas, it’s probably not superfluous to do so.

December means Christmas.

And Christmas means goodwill, tolerance, peace, and a moratorium on all our differences while Christmas carols and also the rollicking Ho! Ho! Ho! of You-know-who once more fill the land.

The climate of Christmas is enough to drive that detestable fellow Scrooge to a frenzy or else transform him into a saint. For a few days at least we bury the hatchet of all our grudges, we indulge in a splurge of giving, and once again we send our songs and shouts of brotherhood bounding to the skies. And that’s Christmas. Or is it?

The Christmas season means bad campaigning weather for conservatives who are sticklers who are forever crossing all the t’s and dotting all the i’s of the sound doctrine of Scripture. It’s a time to be jolly with no one to be excluded from the merrymaking with all of its glitter and glamor. Come one, come all—libertines and apostates though you may be—Merry Christmas! Goodwill to men! Our differences—at least for now, let’s sweep them under the rug. You’re O. K. I’m O.K. This is Christmas!

And what about the truth in all this?

Listen to Isaiah: “And justice is turned away backward. and righteousness standeth afar off; for truth is fallen in the street . . .” (59:14).

With Christmas carolers ringing the changes from morning to night in tunes both old and new, and with the marts of merchandise thronged as the frenzied buying and selling go on once more at a fever pitch, the tragedy is this: more than ever at this time of the year truth becomes such a scarce and strange commodity. That’s why the title: Honestly now, why was He born?

Peace on earth, goodwill toward men, tolerance, brotherhood—isn’t that what Christmas is all about? At Christmas time these are favorite terms or slogans that undiscerning merrymakers may glibly repeat with a mind to their sound but too often with but little regard for their sense.

Can’t conservatives versus liberals please bury their hatchet at least now that it is Christmas? Lest we mar the season and the celebration, should Protestants and Roman Catholics not scuttle their differences and at least for the time being join hands or put their arms around each other? After all, doesn’t the Babe of Bethlehem belong to all of us? Are we not all one when we meet at the manger?

Well, let’s take a closer look.

A closer look at what Jesus Himself has said. It is commonplace—at least, among evangelicals—to recognize that Jesus came on Christmas to give His life a ransom for many, that He came not to be ministered unto but to minister, and that for our sakes He became poor that we through His poverty might become rich.

But that’s not all. Let’s not forget that, prior to His condemnation and crucifixion, Jesus told His Roman judge, Pontius Pilate, why He had been born. “To this end have I been born,” said our Lord, “and to this end am I come into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice” (John 18:37).

Cynic and skeptic that he was, Pilate carelessly shrugged this off by saying, “What is truth?” Little did haughty Pilate realize that he was in the very presence of Him who is “the way, the truth, and the life.” Pilate was so near and yet so far. The bloodthirsty Jewish mob, Roman legions with their swords and spears, the Emperor to whom Pilate had to kowtow to stay in office and to be spared from being sent into oblivion—those were the realities and facts that left no doubt in Pilate’s mind. But the truth? Who cared a fig about the truth? To Pilate a harmless nobody in an ivory tower, a mystic whose mention of the truth held no interest for Pilate at all.

Did Pilate remain a stranger to the truth, and did he at last perish forever without it? If Eusebius and the Greek historians whom he quotes are correct, then Pilate was at last forced to commit suicide during the reign of Gaius (AD 37–41)—a by no means encouraging bit of evidence as to Pilate’s eternal hereafter, to be sure.

The moral in all of this is obvious.

The Babe in Bethlehem manger is lying there to “bear witness unto the truth.” That’s what Christmas is all about. Those like Pilate who are interested only in what they can feel and touch and handle are so near at Christmas time and yet so far.

The awful tragedy of our modern Christmas is that by and large the truth—without which Christmas is only so much ado about nothing or just plain hullabaloo—the truth is “fallen in the street,” buried far beneath all the rigamarole of secularism, commercialism, and humanism. And with all of this, a generation without God is trying in vain to comfort itself when there is no comfort and to say Peace I Peace! when there is no peace.

Honestly now, why was Jesus born?

Just to provide a brief season of annual merrymaking and entertainment to perk up our sagging spirits for the winter solstice when days are short and nights are long? Or as some kind of supercatalyst to purge mankind of its animosities and to make do-gooders of us all at least for this little season? Is that why Jesus came?

Once again, let’s read and reread what He said: “To this end have I been born, and to this end am I come into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth” (John 8:37).

Without the knowledge of the truth to be found in Christ alone there can be no salvation. To insist on celebrating the world’s Merry Christmas! while ignoring and rejecting the saving truth incarnate in Christ and revealed in Scripture is to be duped by a subtle Santa-Claus innovation of Satan by which he is luring millions along on their way to perdition in a God-forsaken world without end.

At Christmas time also, how can two walk together except they be agreed? Conservatives and liberals are bound to clash from Christ’s manger to His tomb and also far beyond. The truth is at stake when we go to Bethlehem, to Gethsemane, to Calvary, to every station on the via dolorosa, and to that awesome hour when the Man of Sorrows must tread the winepress alone.

Our Savior went so far as to descend into hell to bear witness unto the truth that we must know to be saved. This is the truth for which we have been charged to contend most earnestly against the father of liars and all his cunning brood.

To allow the spirit of a secular or humanitarian Christmas to disarm us or to agree to a truce at this season of the year or at any other time would be treason against our Lord and Savior who is the truth 365 days in the year even as He will be forever and ever.

Even Christmas allows for no moratorium or ceasefire in the battle for the truth unto which Jesus was born to witness.

The honest conservative guided by the Word remains inescapably antithetical and may not embrace the Bible-denying liberal even at Christmas. And why not? Because it is the truth that is at stake between them. And to compromise the truth is to compromise our Lord Himself. Jesus is the truth, He is full of grace and truth, and He was born to bear witness unto the truth. Universal amity, brotherhood, goodwill at the cost of the truth is anti-christian and of one piece with the great apostasy.

Let no one shrug this off now as a messianic complex or the bellicose mentality of troublemakers who are always spoiling for a fight. Healthy, Bible-directed conservatives, we insist, are progressive; they earnestly desire “if it be possible, as much as in [them] lieth, to [be] at peace with all men” (Rom. 12:18); and they rightly refuse to be caricatured as bigots or hopeless mossbacks who spend all their time in splitting hairs and finding fault.

The bona-fide conservative is one whose principles and sound doctrine gleaned from Scripture are not for sale, not any price. And certainly not for all the hectic hullabaloo and Santa-Claus enchantment that the world has to offer when once a year their Yuletide celebration rolls around again. In this the conservative is convinced Scripture leaves him no choice; as, for example, when he reads in Proverbs 23:23, Buy the truth, and sell it not.

Without the truth we would be without God in the world and the most pitiable of all men. It was for this reason that Christ who is the truth was born to bear witness unto the truth, including the three things we must know to live and die happily, as our Heidelberg Catechism so beautifully sets these forth.

The Christ Child came to bear witness unto the truth—the truth about God, about man, about Christ, about salvation, about the church, and about the last things.

Our Christmas celebrations are carnal and worse than worthless if they obscure these precious truths and bury them under the world’s Christmas with all of its secular, commercial, and humanistic pursuits from start to finish.

Honestly now, why was He born?

To bear witness unto the truth!

Of course, this world is no friend to grace, and you may even find yourself to be a persona non grata, one who strikes a sour and unwelcome note when you insist that your Christmas—beginning, middle, and end—must proclaim and show forth the glorious truth of it all, unto which Jesus came to witness.

You who love the truth, be of good cheer. Truth will surely conquer in the end. The poet, James Russell Lowell, said it so well:

“Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne—
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow,
Keeping watch above His own.”