The Reason for the Season?

So, another Christmas has come and gone, and I sincerely hope yours was a merry one. While I'm at it, I suppose a hearty "Happy New Year!" is in order as well—and if I don't get on the stick, I may have to add "Happy Valentine's Day" to the list. Although the holiday season may be over (for Westerners maybe, but not here in Taiwan), what motivated me to write a somewhat belated article on the subject of Christmas was something that happened to me last month on Christmas Eve. But more on that later.

Without a doubt, Christmas is the biggest holiday of the year in the West, and it is a time for families to get together and exchange gifts, have parties, enjoy festive meals, etc. It is also the traditional day to celebrate the birth of Christ, so in spite of the crass commercialism and maudlin sentimentality, it has strong religious overtones. At least it does for some people.

As far as the date of Christ's birth is concerned, the truth is that no one knows for certain what day He was born—the Bible doesn't come right out and tell us. The earliest first-century believers didn't know, and from all indications didn't much care. But if we don't even know when Jesus was born, then what does Christmas have to do with Jesus? Westerners often talk about "keeping Christ in Christmas," and about how "Jesus is the reason for the season" and so forth, but how justified are such sentiments?

Is Jesus really the reason for the season?

Or is there something else at work behind this most festive of holidays?

Whenever I consider something that has become extremely popular with the world yet still appears to have a Christian face on it, verses such as the following come to mind:

Jesus said that the world would hate those who believe in Him, and the reason is simple: The message of the gospel exposes the sinful nature of people. That's the entire point of it. God's Word doesn't coddle the flesh—it cuts to the bone. The message of the gospel, through the power of the Holy Spirit, exposes the wickedness of people's sinful, unregenerate hearts, and unceremoniously throws their broken flesh at the foot of the cross. The gospel lays bare people's need to change their minds about their sin and their need for the forgiveness and reconciliation with God that Jesus made available to them. And even though that is good news from an eternal standpoint, it is a painful and unpleasant truth for people when they first come face to face with it.

That's why the world hates the gospel, and why the world hates those who believe it. It's also why the world hated Jesus two thousand years ago, and why the world still hates Him today. But this begs the question:

If the world hates Jesus and the message of His gospel (and they do), then why on earth has Christmas—ostensibly the day to celebrate the birth of the gospel's central figure—become far and away the most popular holiday in Western civilization?

In this article, I want to briefly review a couple of the primary historical elements of the Christmas narrative, and discuss how the traditional aspects of Christmas give shape and shading to people's concepts of both God the Father and God the Son.

Finally, I want to share with you a personal experience that served to get me thinking about the real reason for the season.

The date

The first obvious question is, why December 25? To begin with, let's get one thing straight: It is highly unlikely that Jesus was born on December 25. How do we know that?

With one sentence, the Bible pretty much demolishes the idea of Jesus being born in late December. In the region surrounding Jerusalem (which includes nearby Bethlehem, where Jesus was born), there would normally only be shepherds out tending sheep in the fields during the fall or spring—not in late December, when the sheep are ordinarily kept in corrals.

I have read articles written by people who, in apparent attempts to defend the traditional date, claim it's possible for sheep to be in the fields at that time of year because the average temperature is not all that cold. True, but nevertheless: Most sources I have checked indicate that sheep in that region are not normally out grazing any later than November—and for reasons besides just temperature.

Although there isn't universal agreement, most sources say that the date of December 25 comes from the pagan Roman festival known as Saturnalia, which honored the god Saturn and was basically a wild, week-long public orgy in December that culminated on the 25th. According to most sources, the ancient Romans picked it up from the Babylonians.

In the fourth century AD, Emperor Constantine allegedly converted to Christianity, and so instead of feeding followers of the Jewish Messiah to the lions like his predecessors, he made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire—a move that turned out to do far greater damage to the Church than anything hungry lions could do. This fledgling state religion had a lot of competition from a plethora of pagan deities and practices, however, and in an effort to integrate Christianity into the fabric of Roman society as well as those conquered by the Romans, a number of existing pagan gods, goddesses, symbols, rituals, and festivals were cleaned up, given shiny new Christianized meanings, and incorporated into the Christian narrative.

This pastiche of paganism morphed into today's Roman Catholic Church, and to this day many of these pagan symbols and rituals are firmly entrenched in an idolatrous religious system that remains irredeemably married to the world—and arbitrarily choosing to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ on the final day of what was little more than a drunken, orgiastic free-for-all is just one example.

Although the Bible doesn't tell us what year or day of the year Christ was born, there is an intriguing trail of clues in Scripture that have led some folks to conclude that Jesus was actually born from mid-September to early October. That means He was conceived around December, about nine months earlier.

I can't prove it definitively (and I doubt anyone ever will), but the more I study this, the more I am convinced that Jesus was in fact conceived on Hanukkah (which nearly always comes in December) and born on the Feast of Tabernacles (mid-September to early October) the following year.

By making a few fairly reasonable assumptions, we can easily place His conception and birth within about a two-week window of those feasts. But the God who spoke the universe into existence doesn't do random and can certainly arrange for a baby to be conceived and born on any day He chooses (and He does conceal certain things from us).

I think it would be exquisitely ironic if every time Jews celebrated Hanukkah, aka the Festival of Lights, they were unknowingly celebrating the day that God planted His seed within Mary to give us the Messiah—the Light of the World. And every time they celebrated the Feast of Tabernacles, they were in fact celebrating the day Jesus was born and began to tabernacle among us, and the fact that He will tabernacle among us in the Millennial Kingdom and beyond.

Good luck trying to convince me otherwise.

Santa Claus

The primary figure associated with Christmas, of course, is Santa Claus, and the jolly old personification of the holiday has a long, colorful history. Most of the lore and legends surrounding Santa go back to St. Nicholas, a man whose life provided the foundational elements of the tale.

Born around AD 280 in Turkey, Nicholas became the bishop of Myra at a young age and was well known for his kindness and generosity. He had a penchant for giving to those in need in a secretive manner, and legends abound of St. Nicholas sneaking around in the middle of the night to leave anonymous gifts or sums of money to people with urgent needs.

Although official canonization procedures for saints within the Roman Catholic Church weren't formally established until the eleventh century, Nicholas was widely recognized and venerated as a saint as early as the fourth century in many parts of Europe. As a fledgling Roman Catholic Church sought to gain a foothold in areas long steeped in paganism, they linked and merged various Catholic saints and symbols with local pagan deities and practices to win over the common folk and spread Christianity—at least the idolatrous, works-based Roman Catholic version of it.

One such Roman Catholic poster boy was St. Nicholas. Nicholas died on December 6, AD 343, and the anniversary of his death became a widely celebrated feast day. But when December 25—the last day of the pagan celebration of Saturnalia—was arbitrarily linked with the birth of Christ by the Roman Catholic Church, it wasn't long before the two began to merge into a single year-end season of raucous festivity.

In the early nineteenth century, as an upstart American nation attempted to distance itself from Great Britain and establish its own cultural identity, New Yorkers were rediscovering their seventeenth-century Dutch roots. One such import was Sinterklaas (a Dutch derivative of "Saint Nicholas" which became "Santa Claus" in English), a character that had evolved over the centuries into something resembling the familiar bearded figure we know today.

Then in 1823, an anonymous poem was published (later credited to Clement Clarke Moore) that became immensely popular in America entitled "A Visit from St. Nicholas," and after centuries of morphing and tweaking, most of the traditional imagery we associate with Santa Claus was in place.

There is an urban legend that the modern image of Santa Claus as a fat, jolly old man with a huge white beard and a red suit with white trim was created by the marketing department of the Coca-Cola Company in the 1920s (or 1930s or 1940s), but it's not true. They may have polished it up and given it their own spin, but all the essential elements of Santa's image were already in place well before Coke was invented in 1886. What the Coca-Cola Company did do, however, was permanently etch the modern image of the bearded bearer of gifts into the public consciousness.

Other fanciful miscellanea

In addition to the date of December 25 itself and the primary character of Santa Claus, there are numerous other fanciful elements that are woven into the traditional Christmas narrative. Many have their beginnings in ancient pagan practices and beliefs and have come along for the ride as Christmas evolved over the centuries.

There's Santa's toy shop at the North Pole staffed by elves busily making toys for children. Santa monitoring the behavior of children worldwide in order to maintain an up-to-date list of who's naughty and who's nice. Santa's eight flying reindeer (all of which are individually named in the 1823 poem "A Visit From St. Nicholas"), who pull Santa's gift-laden sleigh all over the world on the evening of December 24, landing on top of each house so Santa can clamber down the chimney to place gifts under the Christmas tree. Leaving a snack for Santa in the form of milk and cookies on the kitchen table.

(Now, if I'm Santa and I'm gonna be humping presents all night, I probably wouldn't say no to a grilled cheese sandwich and a hot cup of coffee...but tradition is tradition.)

There are other Christmas traditions, of course, but these are a few of the more fanciful ones.

My purpose, however, is not to prove to you that Christmas is one big myth—that elves don't make toys at the North Pole, reindeer can't fly, and Santa neither exists nor comes down anyone's chimney to deliver presents and help himself to some milk and cookies in the kitchen. I suspect you already knew that. I'm not trying to insult your intelligence. What I want to do is draw your attention to the following question:

How does the traditional Christmas narrative shape and influence our concepts of God the Father and God the Son?

Let's start with God the Father.

Ho ho ho

Few would disagree that the character of Santa Claus has evolved over the centuries into a God-like figure in the minds of billions of people, and in many ways popular culture has gone to great lengths to solidify that image in ways both subtle and not so subtle.

For example, Santa lives at the North Pole—a place we think of as being very white, very remote, and very much "up there."

Heaven.

He has legions of magical elves diligently doing his bidding all year round, making gifts for good girls and boys.

Angels.

And speaking of good girls and boys, what exactly does Santa do all year long, when he's not supervising the production of toys, that is?

He's making a list and checking it twice. Why? To keep track of who's being good and who's being...well, not so much.

So, Santa is watching us all, monitoring who is helping little old ladies across the street, returning their library books on time, or voting for candidates who are against abortion—and who is fudging on their taxes, stashing Playboy magazines under their mattresses, or strapping explosives to their bodies and blowing up buses in Tel Aviv. Gosh, how does Santa do that?

He's omniscient.

He flies a sleigh loaded with thousands of tons of toys at nearly the speed of light in order to visit the home of every boy and girl on earth in a single evening. Wow!

He's omnipotent, and at least on Christmas Eve, essentially omnipresent.

Not only does Santa know what every person is doing at all times, but he's logging that information and keeping it on file in order to determine who gets a "present"—which we could take to be admission through the pearly gates and into heaven when we die.

This is salvation by works, Satan's number one go-to tactic in blinding men to the truth of the gospel. And it works like magic, because it makes sense to our fallen nature. Anyone who believes in God (which includes Satan and every demon there is) typically assumes God is good—so we'd better be good if we want God to be pleased with us...and ultimately reward us with a cushy afterlife in paradise.

Now, think for a second. We talk about how Santa makes his list of who is naughty and nice. OK, great. But let me ask you a question:

Have you ever heard of Santa actually withholding presents from anyone?

I sure haven't. Is there ever a child in any family who does not receive a present because he was "naughty"? No! For crying out loud, in America you'd probably be hauled away for child abuse.

Although Santa apparently encourages children to be nice by holding out the possibility of not receiving a gift, it seems that in the end everyone does, regardless of their behavior. OK, maybe "good" children get more or better presents, but the bottom line is that nobody goes away empty-handed when it comes time to open the gifts. Why?

Because Santa loves everyone.

Christmas and its jolly old frontman are all about love; generosity; peace on earth and goodwill toward men. If some kid ends up crying on Christmas Eve because Santa refused to bring him a new bicycle, where's the "Christmas spirit" in that?

This is universal salvation, Satan's number two go-to tactic. That works like magic too, because it guts the gospel of its power and allows sinful men to remain content in their unregenerate spiritual condition. The message of the gospel is that you must repent and believe in faith that Jesus' death and resurrection paid sin's penalty for you in order to be saved.

The thinking associated with universal salvation, however, goes like this:

If there really is a God (and check it out—I'm doing the Big Guy a favor by entertaining the possibility that He exists), then He must be all about love. God is love! That Bible of yours actually says that. I mean, the idea of hell is so...medieval. How could a loving God deny anyone entrance into heaven, much less sentence them to eternal punishment, just for doing stuff that comes natural to us? How loving is that? Believe me, we're all God's children, whether you call Him Yahweh, Allah, Buddha, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. All this fire-and-brimstone jazz is nothing but a bunch of superstitious nonsense meant to scare children into behaving. Grow up.

Santa Claus has evolved into an image that has been planted into the minds of billions of people: a God-like figure who gently encourages people to be good, but lovingly rewards everyone with a pleasant afterlife regardless of their failures (i.e. their refusal to repent and believe the gospel).

But that is not the God of the Bible.

"Away in a manger..."

It's clear that Christmas plants false, misleading images of God the Father in people's minds, but what about God the Son? How does it shape our ideas about Jesus?

Since Christmas is the day to celebrate Christ's birth, one traditional activity that has long been part of Western Christmas celebrations is to set up a scene depicting the birth of Christ (a Nativity scene), complete with Mary and Joseph, the shepherd boys who came to see Him that night, and the three wisemen who brought gifts from afar (which is historically inaccurate because the magi didn't show up until many months after Christ's birth).

And of course, the star of the show: Jesus.

(Waaaa...) Uh, make that the baby Jesus.

In every Nativity scene ever created, Jesus appears as a helpless little baby, a newborn wrapped up in blankets and lying peacefully in a manger, or a small wooden trough that holds feed for farm animals. In some Nativity scenes, He is so obscured by the manger you can barely see Him. But obscured or not, little Lord Jesus is typically reduced to a small detail.

Now, if Jesus is truly the reason for the season as so many people claim, then I have a few questions I'd like answered (uhhm...as soon as someone changes the Lord's diapers):

• Where is the Jesus who turned water into wine, commanded storms to be still and demons to flee, and fed five thousand with somebody's lunch?

• Where is the Jesus who made lepers clean, the lame walk, the blind see, the deaf hear, and the dead live?

• Where is the Jesus who got in the face of the most powerful religious leaders in Israel and put them to silence?

• Where is the Jesus who made His own whip and used it to drive the money changers from the temple out of zeal for the sanctity of His Father's house?

• Where is the Jesus who was crucified for our sin that we might be clothed in His righteousness and reconciled to the Father by faith?

• Where is the Jesus who rose from the grave on the third day, ascended to heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father to intercede for us?

• And where is the Jesus who will take us to be with Him before He returns as the King of kings and the Lord of lords?

It seems that the Christmas story completely erases the real Jesus from its traditions and imagery, and in His place leaves us with a helpless infant that needs His bottle.

But that is not the Jesus of the Bible.

The real reason for the season

As you may know, I teach adult English in the suburbs of Taipei, Taiwan, and here in this little Buddhist/Taoist island nation, December 25 is not a holiday (much less the evening December 24). So, as usual, I taught my regularly scheduled classes on both days last month, including one on Christmas Eve.

My school publishes its own monthly magazines that teachers use in their adult conversation classes (both English and Japanese, at several different levels of difficulty), and they contain a range of topical articles that are generally tied to current as well as seasonal events, including holidays. So, every December our magazines can be counted on to have an article or two about some aspect of Christmas, and I always enjoy telling my students about how Americans celebrate their favorite holiday and all about the traditions and folklore surrounding it.

Of course, I also tell them how Westerners traditionally observe Christmas as a day to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, in spite of the fact that many people realize that He probably wasn't born on December 25.

As I was chatting with the students in my class that evening about some of these Christmas traditions, a girl in the class laughingly observed:

"So, everything about Christmas is fake."

I chuckled and conceded that, yeah, pretty much all the traditions and stories about Christmas are fake—it's a collection of fanciful myths and legends that have evolved over the centuries, and even celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ on December 25 is a tradition, since we don't actually know with any degree of certainty what day He was born—in fact, we're not even 100 percent sure of the year, much less the day.

But then she turned her head with a grin and mumbled something as if she didn't fully intend for me to hear it—but I did, and it left me flash frozen:

"Maybe Jesus is fake, too."

I suspect she honestly didn't want to offend me, since she's been a regular student in the class for some time and, like most people in any of my classes, knows I am a Christian (it would be hard for them not to, because even though I try to refrain from anything that could be considered blatant proselytizing in class, I am not the least bit shy in regard to what I believe).

What stunned me was certainly not the fact that she doesn't believe in the Jesus of the Bible. Only a small percentage of my students do. Only a small percentage of people in Taiwan do. Only a small percentage of people anywhere do. I'm surrounded by such people every single day. We all are.

Breaking news: Guess what? Most people don't believe in Jesus!

That's not exactly a shocker. What floored me was the sudden revelation of something that had somehow escaped me my entire life.

As far back as I can remember, I always knew Christmas was replete with make believe. Santa Claus, the flying reindeer, the elves, the whole shtick. Don't get me wrong—I loved Christmas, but c'mon. I don't remember ever being that stupid, even as a small child.

But being raised in a church-going Christian family, I don't remember ever doubting the fact that Jesus was real and that He was our Savior—even though some of the details remained a bit hazy until I got a little older.

What had never occurred to me until that very moment, however, even as a born-again, biblically literate adult, was the real reason why such a holiday had ever evolved in the first place.

It finally hit me. I finally understood the true purpose of Christmas.

And there it was, encapsulated in one short sentence. The true purpose of Christmas is to induce people to say exactly what my student had just said.

I finally realized that the traditional Christmas narrative so completely buries the truth about God the Father, God the Son, and the message of the gospel under a mountain of fanciful myths and childishly absurd legends that it leads people to believe that the Son of God whose birth it supposedly celebrates must be every bit as mythical as the toyshop at the North Pole, the flying reindeer, and the jolly red-suited character who comes down every chimney on earth on the evening of December 24 to deliver gifts made by elves.

Thus, if you are silly and naive enough to believe that Jesus is the Son of God, sent into the world to be born of a virgin, live a sinless life, die on the cross, and be resurrected to atone for the sin for anyone who will believe in faith, you're on par with a small child who is waiting up to hear the sound of reindeer on the roof and to see a fat man in a red suit come down the chimney with a sack full of toys on Christmas Eve.

Christmas is one big fairy tale—so Jesus is probably a fairy tale, too.

Now, let's put on those thinking caps and see if we can figure out who would want to develop a holiday that would bury Jesus and God the Father under such a mountain of mythical nonsense that it would induce people to view both God and His Son as being just as mythical...

If you guessed Satan, you guessed right.

The traditional Christmas holiday, in all its delightful, mythical splendor, is one of Satan's master strokes. It's pure genius. It's a deeply entrenched holiday that is steeped in fanciful myths for children, while brimming with warm sentimentality and goodwill towards men for adults. At the same time, it deftly accomplishes two critical goals:

1. It turns God into a jolly, loving figure who winks at sin, condemns no one, and just wants to make us happy. This does a terrific job of taking the focus off His infinite holiness that our sin offends and His perfect justice that demands our sin be judged.

2. It keeps Jesus in a manger as a helpless little baby. By focusing on His birth, attention is shifted away from His life and, more importantly, His death. It's His death that is central to the gospel message, because it's His death and resurrection that purchased our redemption and allows us to be forgiven of sin and reconciled to God by grace through faith.

Taken together, these two points effectively KO the gospel of Jesus Christ with a devastating one-two punch:

The traditional Christmas narrative
gives us a God who doesn't judge
and a Jesus who cannot save.

Let's connect the dots, shall we? If God doesn't judge us, then why do we need saving anyway? And if we don't need saving, who needs this Jesus character? And a God who doesn't judge isn't much of a God, and so He probably never existed in the first place. That liberates us and allows us to grow up, shake off the superstitious myths of the past, and be our own gods who are perfectly capable of saving ourselves, thank you very much.

It leaves us right where Satan wants us.

Bah, humbug?

God has a way of using everything Satan does for His own purposes, and Christmas is no exception. Even though Satan's scheme was to create a holiday that would make Jesus look like a myth, the debate over the true meaning of Christmas invariably brings the focus right back on Him, right where it belongs.

The truth is that everything Satan does ultimately backfires. It always has, and it always will.

So, am I being a dour, legalistic party pooper? Am I doing my best Scrooge imitation, trying to guilt you into throwing out your Christmas tree and tearing down your Christmas decorations, and wagging a bony finger of condemnation at you until you return all the gifts and wear a scowl for the duration of the Christmas holiday? Am I snidely judging anyone who deigns to do anything the least bit festive around December 25?

Absolutely not!

Is it wrong for Christians celebrate Christmas?

Same answer.

Get that Christmas tree up and decorate it until the branches sag under the weight of the tinsel! Pile presents under it three feet deep! String up so many Christmas lights that your house can be seen from low earth orbit! Go caroling until you're arrested for disturbing the peace, and bake enough Christmas cookies to feed a battalion! But in all you do, celebrate who Jesus really is.

Celebrate Christmas as if Jesus gave His life for you.

Because He did. Besides, the Bible makes it clear that we should have no qualms about what days we choose to celebrate:

It also makes quite clear the reason we should celebrate anything: Whatever we celebrate, we should "observe it to the Lord."

My point is simply this: Before you worry about keeping Christ in Christmas, make sure you've got Christ in Christmas to begin with! You want Christmas to be all about Jesus Christ? That's great. Then for crying out loud...

Don't leave Him in the manger!

Make Christmas a celebration of the real Jesus Christ, the one the Scriptures testify of: the Messiah, the Son of God, who was crucified and resurrected to redeem us from the law of sin and death, and who is returning soon as our Conquering King! Jettison the infantile mush that keeps Jesus consigned to the manger as a perpetual baby and celebrate Him for who He really is.

And if you want to keep Santa Claus in your Christmas, by all means. Take your kids to see every department store Santa in town, and dress up in your own red suit and white beard and holler "HO HO HO" and have all the Christmas fun you can stand.

But take care to keep jolly old St. Nick in his place. Don't let Santa Claus influence, much less define, your image of God. Santa is a jolly old mythical soul who winks at our naughtiness and gives everyone a present anyway.

Santa is a myth. He is not God—so don't promote him to that position.

God is the Creator, and He is perfectly holy. Our congenital "naughtiness" separated us from Him, and His perfect justice required Him to judge it. So, out of His perfect love, He sent a part of Himself into the world to live in a body of flesh and die to take our punishment and be resurrected so we could be forgiven and reconciled to Him if we will but believe in faith.

God is real. He is not Santa—so don't demote Him to that position.

I say all this because I don't want to give you the impression that I hate Christmas. I don't. I love Christmas, and always will—and I refuse to allow the religious, legalistic, know-it-all Scrooges of the world to ruin it for me.

That said, however, I do hate what Satan has tried to do via the traditional Christmas narrative. Satan's goal was to create a holiday that would bury both God the Father and God the Son under a mountain of myths—and in the eyes of the world he has largely succeeded.

The point I want to leave you with is that we don't have to let Satan get away with that. Let's take Christmas back from the devil by making Santa Claus ride in the back seat of the sleigh and honoring the true, living God who is ultimately in control.

And get Jesus out of that puny little manger and celebrate the Jesus Christ of Scripture, the Son of God who...

Is Jesus, as He is portrayed in Scripture, really the reason for the season?

Only if you make Him so!

More importantly, is He your Savior and the Lord of your life?

Same answer.

Greg Lauer — JAN '15

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