What’s wrong with “Christmas”?
Nothing. That is, nothing is wrong with Christmas without the quote marks—meaning God’s Christmas as we learn it from His Word. But man’s “Christmas” (now with the quote marks) and the world’s “Merry Christmas!” over and over again, when it is only a shoddy and Satanic imitation of the real thing—well, that’s a horse of a different color, nothing less than humbug of the worst conceivable kind.
Humbug? Yes, that’s what it is, Charles Dickens’ always popular Christmas Carol notwithstanding. And please don’t call me Ebenezer Scrooge for saying so either. Cenius though he was in his almost incomparable literary excellence when it came to communicating the real meaning of Christmas, Dickens was a disaster. Christmas Carol is a masterpiece of humanitarian propaganda, idolized by modern Christendom (?); but, in reality, Christmas Carol’s undiscerning devotees are actually worshiping at the shrine of another golden calf.
What’s wrong with “Christmas”?
At the risk of appearing naive or even childishly simplistic, I would say: there’s no sin in it anymore. And let’s be clear about this: when men obliterate all thoughts of sin, wickedness, judgment, and hell from their minds, then it makes no sense to talk about Christmas any longer. To perpetuate this annual hullabaloo of “Christmas” is fantasy, a sham, and a cruel deception if man no longer recognizes his terribly real and urgent need for salvation from sin and thus for the Christmas of the Bible.
Sin and the Christmas of God’s Word are antithetical to each other. The angel of the Lord left no doubt about this when he told Joseph: “And she [Mary] shall bring forth a son; and thou shalt call His name JESUS; for it is He that shall save His people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21).
Of course, the mere suggestion that we drop this counterfeit “Christmas” from the world’s calendar would be regarded as rank heresy. The marts of merchandise would be thrown into a tailspin; Santa Claus would be canonized anew, this time as a martyr; a crusade against cruelty to children would soon be on the march; both the owners and the patrons of nightclubs and other haunts of sin and revelry in the “Christmas” season might be left aghast. The show must go on even though it may be the opposite end of the poles from what the Christmas of the Bible is intended to be.
Of course, nothing is really wrong with Christmas!
That is, nothing is wrong with Christmas for penitent and believing sinners who see and celebrate it on the background of the darkness of their lost condition, their doom, and their perdition from which they were delivered by Christ who saved them from their sins.
When Pastor I. Sai of the Tiv church in Nigeria visited America a few years ago it was interesting to get his reactions to what he saw. As we drove at high speed on one of our modern expressways, with traffic whizzing by, he shook his head in amazement. But when he was asked what impressed him most about this country he replied that to him the most striking thing was all the lights at night. Recalling our own visit to Nigeria some time before and how we were struck by the darkness of the African night, Pastor Sai’s reaction to all our light was not strange at all. All his life he had known the pitch black darkness of night, and so at night he was amazed to see everything here ablaze with light. We who have never known any different just take this abundance of light for granted so that we hardly give the matter a thought.
And even so, it is only on the backdrop of the night of sin that we can glory in and be thrilled each year anew by the dazzling light that dawned when Christ was born on Christmas to save His people from their sins. Apart from this, all those Christmas lights shining from trees and windows everywhere are only cheap and tawdry even though for the moment they may titillate one’s aesthetic fancy; and, at last when the show is over, they by themselves will leave us with electric bills of an all-time high, but with no abiding peace and satisfaction.
Our Lord never does anything without a good reason. Is it too far-fetched then to say that what happened on that night of nights on the fields of Ephrathah was symbolical of this relation between the light of salvation and the darkness of the night of sin? Every word of that old, old story is pure gold and we are to marvel at it as being always new: “And there were shepherds in the same country abiding in the field, and keeping watch by night over their flock. And an angel of the Lord stood by them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them . . .” (Luke 2:8, 9).
The birth of Jesus as the Light of the world is not radiant with joy and glory for us unless we first have come under the conviction that without Him we deserve to be consigned to the place of outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Christmas is real only for those of whom we read: “The people that sat in darkness saw a great light, And to them that sat in the region and shadow of death, To them did light spring up” (Matt. 4:16).
There was nothing wrong but all was right with Christmas for righteous and devout Simeon who was looking for the consolation of Israel ( Luke 2:25).
Ursinus and Olevianus must have been deeply imbued with the realization that the Deliverance or Salvation part of their classic Heidelberg Catechism would be merely academic and meaningless unless they would present it on the background of the first part about Misery or Sin.
The protevangel or mother promise of Genesis 3:15 ful611ed in Christ does not come alive for us unless we see and believe it in the context of the doom and gloom of man’s disobedience and fall in the Garden.
“Joy to the world! the Lord is come” will flood our souls with peace and praise, fill our hearts with adoration, and incite us to a spontaneous and bonafide Christmas celebration only if we know that if He had not come we would be forsaken of God for ever and ever.
For God’s blood-bought people all is well! But—
“Let those refuse to sing who never knew our God; But children of the Heavenly King, May spread their joys abroad.”
Apostate theology has gone all-out to strike a deathblow at the very heart of Christmas!
Surely, the Christ of Bethlehem and of Calvary is not to be contradicted when He affirms that He came “to give His life a ransom for many” (Matt. 20:28). However, liberal or apostate theologians pretend that they know better as they boldly deny the vicarious atonement that Christ Himself said He had come to make on the accursed cross of shame. In so doing, these false teachers have cut the very heart out of the gospel of both the manger and the cross. They have robbed Christmas and also Good Friday of their true meaning so that for them and their disciples the darkness of damnation is always unrelieved.
To document this accusation I am indebted to Lutheran Herman J. Otten who in his book Baal or God (Leader Publishing Co., New Haven, Mo.) supplies pertinent quotes from which I cite the following:
“A representative of modern Lutheranism writes in an LCA publication: ‘Above all, not a single passage in the Bible says that on the cross of Christ the eternal God was reconciled by a representative of the human race.’ This Lutheran says it is wrong ‘to think that the cross of Christ is a matter of reconciling God with a bloody sacrifice.’”
“Georgia Harkness, a prominent Methodist theologian, rejects the vicarious satisfaction in simple and clear terms:
‘There is the propitiation theory, centering in words we still use in the Communion service: If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the whole world. When this is taken to mean, as it too often has been that an angry God has to be appeased, the modern Christian rightly rebels. It sounds like primitive religion, and clearly is not the kind of God that Jesus worshiped and served! Jesus’ God of fatherly love for all men, even sinners, needs no sin offering to propitiate his wrath.’”
“Bishop John A. T. Robinson writes in his popular volume, Honest to God, that ‘the whole schema of a supernatural being coming down from heaven to save mankind from sin, in the way that a man might put his finger into a glass of water to rescue a struggling insect, is frankly incredible to man come of age, who no longer believes in such a deus ex machina.’ Robinson says that ‘The full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world supposed to have been made on Calvary requires, I believe, for most men today more demythologizing even than the Resurrection.’”
“Bishop G. Bromlev Oxnam, one of the first six presidents elected by the World Council of Churches, rejected the vicarious satisfaction of Christ when he wrote:
‘Hugh Walpole in Wintersmoon tells of a father and son at church. The aged rector read from the Old Testament, and the boy learned of the terrible God who sent plagues upon the people and created fiery serpents to assault them. That night, when the father passed the boy’s bedroom, the boy called him, put his arms around his father’s neck, and, drawing him close, said, Father, you hate Jehovah. So do I. I loathe him, dirty bully! We have long since rejected it conception of reconciliation associated. historically with an idea of a Deity that is loathsome. God, for us, cannot be thought of as an angry, awful, avenging Being who because of Adam’s sin must have his Shylockian pound of flesh. No wonder the honest boy in justifiable repugnance could say, ‘Dirty bully.’”
Specific sources of the above quotes with their apostate theology are available upon request. Let it suffice now to say that all this audacious and bare-faced heresy would give the lie to that which is at the very heart of the miraculous birth and the atoning death of our Lord Jesus Christ. Let’s be done with all our Hallelujahs! and Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter celebrations if we are minded. even for a moment, to embrace this Satanic denial of the redeeming work of Him who is the Prince of Peace. the Lamb of God, our risen Lord! The lie of the liberals would torpedo the glorious Gospel of Christmas proclaimed so beautifully in Scripture: “For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though He was rich. yet for your sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty might become rich” (II Cor. 8:9).
All the brightness of Christmas is so badly tarnished in our day by a prevalent and growing tolerance of sin, permissiveness, self-indulgence and a denial of divine judgment!
Of course, we need not be reminded that sin did not first come into the world today or yesterday but that it has always been around, ever since its inception at the dawn of history.
However—and no stone should be left unturned to make this crystal clear also to today’s youth so sorely tried and tempted—because of today’s modem means of communication, confrontation, and also transportation, no generation has ever before been exposed to all the enticements and allurements of sinful flesh, the world, and the Devil as we are today. The warning in the well-known lines of Alexander Pope ought therefore to be seriously taken to heart:
“Sin is a monster of such frightful men
That to be hated needs but to be seen.
But seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.”
The celebration of Christmas is as popular and prevalent throughout the world as ever. But, alongside of this, as anyone who is at all discerning knows, there is an unprecedented wave of self-indulgence in drunken revelry, divorce. pre-and extra-marital sex, murder by abortion on demand, and the brazen propaganda of homosexual libertines who insist that society shall no longer deny them the respectability to which they would have us believe they are entitled. Call this the “new morality” if you will, but there is nothing new about it except that it is the same old immorality now calling louder than ever to high Heaven for its “just recompence of reward” (Heb. 2:2).
The murder of the innocents at Bethlehem is bloodcurdling, especially so because it arose out of a Satanic determination to rid the world of Christ Himself who is our Savior, Lord of Lords, and King of kings. But let’s not be self-righteous as if there is nothing of all this afoot in the world and in our hearts today as wen as two thousand years ago. Our glamorized, commercialized, and secularized Christmas celebrations in all of which there is no tear of repentance for sin and no publican’s cry of “God, have mercy!” may be far more sophisticated and seem far more civilized than Herod’s atrocious crime of long ago, but the awful reality is that these two at bottom arc actually one and the same, an evil determination to get rid of Christ as Lord and Savior because we have no need of Him.
What’s wrong with Christmas?
It’s better to ask: what’s wrong with us, what’s wrong with me? The answer is simple. If once again we and our children Should go through this season and observe Christmas with never a thought or a word about our sin and about the Savior who for us became so poor as to be plunged into the depths of hell to redeem us from it, then everything is wrong, terribly wrong!
Under God and by His sovereign, saving grace, may this be the theme of our Christmas celebration:
And what do we do to make things right again?
“He saw me plunged in deep distress,
And sped to my relief;
For me He bore the shameful cross
And carried all my grief.”
Hallelujah! What a Savior!
Nothing. That is, nothing is wrong with Christmas without the quote marks—meaning God’s Christmas as we learn it from His Word. But man’s “Christmas” (now with the quote marks) and the world’s “Merry Christmas!” over and over again, when it is only a shoddy and Satanic imitation of the real thing—well, that’s a horse of a different color, nothing less than humbug of the worst conceivable kind.
Humbug? Yes, that’s what it is, Charles Dickens’ always popular Christmas Carol notwithstanding. And please don’t call me Ebenezer Scrooge for saying so either. Cenius though he was in his almost incomparable literary excellence when it came to communicating the real meaning of Christmas, Dickens was a disaster. Christmas Carol is a masterpiece of humanitarian propaganda, idolized by modern Christendom (?); but, in reality, Christmas Carol’s undiscerning devotees are actually worshiping at the shrine of another golden calf.
What’s wrong with “Christmas”?
At the risk of appearing naive or even childishly simplistic, I would say: there’s no sin in it anymore. And let’s be clear about this: when men obliterate all thoughts of sin, wickedness, judgment, and hell from their minds, then it makes no sense to talk about Christmas any longer. To perpetuate this annual hullabaloo of “Christmas” is fantasy, a sham, and a cruel deception if man no longer recognizes his terribly real and urgent need for salvation from sin and thus for the Christmas of the Bible.
Sin and the Christmas of God’s Word are antithetical to each other. The angel of the Lord left no doubt about this when he told Joseph: “And she [Mary] shall bring forth a son; and thou shalt call His name JESUS; for it is He that shall save His people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21).
Of course, the mere suggestion that we drop this counterfeit “Christmas” from the world’s calendar would be regarded as rank heresy. The marts of merchandise would be thrown into a tailspin; Santa Claus would be canonized anew, this time as a martyr; a crusade against cruelty to children would soon be on the march; both the owners and the patrons of nightclubs and other haunts of sin and revelry in the “Christmas” season might be left aghast. The show must go on even though it may be the opposite end of the poles from what the Christmas of the Bible is intended to be.
Of course, nothing is really wrong with Christmas!
That is, nothing is wrong with Christmas for penitent and believing sinners who see and celebrate it on the background of the darkness of their lost condition, their doom, and their perdition from which they were delivered by Christ who saved them from their sins.
When Pastor I. Sai of the Tiv church in Nigeria visited America a few years ago it was interesting to get his reactions to what he saw. As we drove at high speed on one of our modern expressways, with traffic whizzing by, he shook his head in amazement. But when he was asked what impressed him most about this country he replied that to him the most striking thing was all the lights at night. Recalling our own visit to Nigeria some time before and how we were struck by the darkness of the African night, Pastor Sai’s reaction to all our light was not strange at all. All his life he had known the pitch black darkness of night, and so at night he was amazed to see everything here ablaze with light. We who have never known any different just take this abundance of light for granted so that we hardly give the matter a thought.
And even so, it is only on the backdrop of the night of sin that we can glory in and be thrilled each year anew by the dazzling light that dawned when Christ was born on Christmas to save His people from their sins. Apart from this, all those Christmas lights shining from trees and windows everywhere are only cheap and tawdry even though for the moment they may titillate one’s aesthetic fancy; and, at last when the show is over, they by themselves will leave us with electric bills of an all-time high, but with no abiding peace and satisfaction.
Our Lord never does anything without a good reason. Is it too far-fetched then to say that what happened on that night of nights on the fields of Ephrathah was symbolical of this relation between the light of salvation and the darkness of the night of sin? Every word of that old, old story is pure gold and we are to marvel at it as being always new: “And there were shepherds in the same country abiding in the field, and keeping watch by night over their flock. And an angel of the Lord stood by them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them . . .” (Luke 2:8, 9).
The birth of Jesus as the Light of the world is not radiant with joy and glory for us unless we first have come under the conviction that without Him we deserve to be consigned to the place of outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Christmas is real only for those of whom we read: “The people that sat in darkness saw a great light, And to them that sat in the region and shadow of death, To them did light spring up” (Matt. 4:16).
There was nothing wrong but all was right with Christmas for righteous and devout Simeon who was looking for the consolation of Israel ( Luke 2:25).
Ursinus and Olevianus must have been deeply imbued with the realization that the Deliverance or Salvation part of their classic Heidelberg Catechism would be merely academic and meaningless unless they would present it on the background of the first part about Misery or Sin.
The protevangel or mother promise of Genesis 3:15 ful611ed in Christ does not come alive for us unless we see and believe it in the context of the doom and gloom of man’s disobedience and fall in the Garden.
“Joy to the world! the Lord is come” will flood our souls with peace and praise, fill our hearts with adoration, and incite us to a spontaneous and bonafide Christmas celebration only if we know that if He had not come we would be forsaken of God for ever and ever.
For God’s blood-bought people all is well! But—
“Let those refuse to sing who never knew our God; But children of the Heavenly King, May spread their joys abroad.”
Apostate theology has gone all-out to strike a deathblow at the very heart of Christmas!
Surely, the Christ of Bethlehem and of Calvary is not to be contradicted when He affirms that He came “to give His life a ransom for many” (Matt. 20:28). However, liberal or apostate theologians pretend that they know better as they boldly deny the vicarious atonement that Christ Himself said He had come to make on the accursed cross of shame. In so doing, these false teachers have cut the very heart out of the gospel of both the manger and the cross. They have robbed Christmas and also Good Friday of their true meaning so that for them and their disciples the darkness of damnation is always unrelieved.
To document this accusation I am indebted to Lutheran Herman J. Otten who in his book Baal or God (Leader Publishing Co., New Haven, Mo.) supplies pertinent quotes from which I cite the following:
“A representative of modern Lutheranism writes in an LCA publication: ‘Above all, not a single passage in the Bible says that on the cross of Christ the eternal God was reconciled by a representative of the human race.’ This Lutheran says it is wrong ‘to think that the cross of Christ is a matter of reconciling God with a bloody sacrifice.’”
“Georgia Harkness, a prominent Methodist theologian, rejects the vicarious satisfaction in simple and clear terms:
‘There is the propitiation theory, centering in words we still use in the Communion service: If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the whole world. When this is taken to mean, as it too often has been that an angry God has to be appeased, the modern Christian rightly rebels. It sounds like primitive religion, and clearly is not the kind of God that Jesus worshiped and served! Jesus’ God of fatherly love for all men, even sinners, needs no sin offering to propitiate his wrath.’”
“Bishop John A. T. Robinson writes in his popular volume, Honest to God, that ‘the whole schema of a supernatural being coming down from heaven to save mankind from sin, in the way that a man might put his finger into a glass of water to rescue a struggling insect, is frankly incredible to man come of age, who no longer believes in such a deus ex machina.’ Robinson says that ‘The full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world supposed to have been made on Calvary requires, I believe, for most men today more demythologizing even than the Resurrection.’”
“Bishop G. Bromlev Oxnam, one of the first six presidents elected by the World Council of Churches, rejected the vicarious satisfaction of Christ when he wrote:
‘Hugh Walpole in Wintersmoon tells of a father and son at church. The aged rector read from the Old Testament, and the boy learned of the terrible God who sent plagues upon the people and created fiery serpents to assault them. That night, when the father passed the boy’s bedroom, the boy called him, put his arms around his father’s neck, and, drawing him close, said, Father, you hate Jehovah. So do I. I loathe him, dirty bully! We have long since rejected it conception of reconciliation associated. historically with an idea of a Deity that is loathsome. God, for us, cannot be thought of as an angry, awful, avenging Being who because of Adam’s sin must have his Shylockian pound of flesh. No wonder the honest boy in justifiable repugnance could say, ‘Dirty bully.’”
Specific sources of the above quotes with their apostate theology are available upon request. Let it suffice now to say that all this audacious and bare-faced heresy would give the lie to that which is at the very heart of the miraculous birth and the atoning death of our Lord Jesus Christ. Let’s be done with all our Hallelujahs! and Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter celebrations if we are minded. even for a moment, to embrace this Satanic denial of the redeeming work of Him who is the Prince of Peace. the Lamb of God, our risen Lord! The lie of the liberals would torpedo the glorious Gospel of Christmas proclaimed so beautifully in Scripture: “For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though He was rich. yet for your sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty might become rich” (II Cor. 8:9).
All the brightness of Christmas is so badly tarnished in our day by a prevalent and growing tolerance of sin, permissiveness, self-indulgence and a denial of divine judgment!
Of course, we need not be reminded that sin did not first come into the world today or yesterday but that it has always been around, ever since its inception at the dawn of history.
However—and no stone should be left unturned to make this crystal clear also to today’s youth so sorely tried and tempted—because of today’s modem means of communication, confrontation, and also transportation, no generation has ever before been exposed to all the enticements and allurements of sinful flesh, the world, and the Devil as we are today. The warning in the well-known lines of Alexander Pope ought therefore to be seriously taken to heart:
“Sin is a monster of such frightful men
That to be hated needs but to be seen.
But seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.”
The celebration of Christmas is as popular and prevalent throughout the world as ever. But, alongside of this, as anyone who is at all discerning knows, there is an unprecedented wave of self-indulgence in drunken revelry, divorce. pre-and extra-marital sex, murder by abortion on demand, and the brazen propaganda of homosexual libertines who insist that society shall no longer deny them the respectability to which they would have us believe they are entitled. Call this the “new morality” if you will, but there is nothing new about it except that it is the same old immorality now calling louder than ever to high Heaven for its “just recompence of reward” (Heb. 2:2).
The murder of the innocents at Bethlehem is bloodcurdling, especially so because it arose out of a Satanic determination to rid the world of Christ Himself who is our Savior, Lord of Lords, and King of kings. But let’s not be self-righteous as if there is nothing of all this afoot in the world and in our hearts today as wen as two thousand years ago. Our glamorized, commercialized, and secularized Christmas celebrations in all of which there is no tear of repentance for sin and no publican’s cry of “God, have mercy!” may be far more sophisticated and seem far more civilized than Herod’s atrocious crime of long ago, but the awful reality is that these two at bottom arc actually one and the same, an evil determination to get rid of Christ as Lord and Savior because we have no need of Him.
What’s wrong with Christmas?
It’s better to ask: what’s wrong with us, what’s wrong with me? The answer is simple. If once again we and our children Should go through this season and observe Christmas with never a thought or a word about our sin and about the Savior who for us became so poor as to be plunged into the depths of hell to redeem us from it, then everything is wrong, terribly wrong!
Under God and by His sovereign, saving grace, may this be the theme of our Christmas celebration:
And what do we do to make things right again?
“He saw me plunged in deep distress,
And sped to my relief;
For me He bore the shameful cross
And carried all my grief.”
Hallelujah! What a Savior!