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    Dec 15, 2024

    The Beginning of Christmas Glory

    Preacher: John Repsold

    Series: Advent 2024

    Keywords: christmas, incarnation, glory, eternity past

    Summary:

    When did Christmas begin for you? What about for God? This message looks at the roots of Christmas from God's perspective...glory past.

    Detail:

    The Beginning of Christmas Glory

    December 15, 2024

     

    Fellowship Question:  How has the joy of Christmas changed for you as you’ve grown older?

     

    INTRO:  When did Christmas start for you?  Probably for most of us before we can remember, while we were babies and toddlers.  I don’t remember my first Christmases…but my parents and siblings do. 

    When did Christmas…and the glory of Christmas…start for God?  Was it at the angelic announcement to the shepherds in Bethlehem?  Was it 9 months earlier at the angelic announcement to Mary of a miraculous virginal conception?  Or was it sometime earlier?  And more importantly, WHY should it matter to us?  I hope that by the end of this message, you will see why it matters so much that the glory of Christmas started earlier than most people in our world understand. 

    Recap:  We are focusing on “Recapturing the Glory of Christmas” during this Advent season.  As we saw before, the glory of Christmas is not all the false substitutes we tend to get caught up in at this time of year—presents, trees, lights, carols, even family gatherings.  Great as those can be, they should be pointing us to a much greater glory….one that spans the entire arch of human history and is big enough to infuse every moment of our lives with more beauty, splendor and joy than we can imagine. 

    What is GLORY…particularly as it relates to GOD? 

    • So many of the dictionary definitions have to do with the response to someone or something rather than glory itself, i.e. worshipful praise, honor, renown, exaltation, etc.
    • When the Bible talks about the glory of God, it always refers to who He is in all His perfections—perfect splendor, perfect justice, perfect beauty, perfect love, perfect holiness, etc.

    We’ve seen the past couple of weeks that the glory of God is so perfect and overpowering that flawed, sinful people like us can not even be in God’s unfiltered presence and survive in our present mortal state.  The unfiltered, un-mediated glory of God is something so pure, powerful and holy that either God must veil his glory to sinful people or we must undergo some lasting spiritual and physical transformation…resurrection in a perfected state…in order to fully take in the full nature of God. 

                The Enemy of our Souls has tried to pervert our whole notion of God’s glory.  He’s tried to make God’s glory somehow unattractive to us, even repulsive.  Just think of your emotional reaction when you hear Peter’s call to holiness in 1 Peter 1:15-- 15 but as He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, 16 because it is written, “Be holy, for I am holy.”

    Does that strike you as an impossible, not particularly enjoyable mountain to climb…or a stunningly beautiful train trip to get a 1st-class ticket on? 

    ILL:  Canadian Rockies train trip in 1983.  Even the glory of the Canadian Rockies (which, by the way, always leaves me stunned and speechless with its beauty and grandeur), is but a faint whisper of the beauty and glory of the Creator who made them and wants us to experience Him, not just His handiwork.

    God’s call to holiness is a call to experience as fully as possible God himself: THE most amazing, beautiful, loving, kind, patient, glorious Being we can every possibly experience in the universe. 

    God, I think, gives us a myriad of experiences in life that remind us that the glory of His presence and person awaits us for the rest of our existence.

    Examples:

    • The beauty of marriage: that truly divine dance between a man and a women devoted in love to each other for all of life keeps calling to humanity through romance, love stories, romantic movies, etc.  And the Enemy of our souls keeps attacking it at every angle to destroy what God originally intended for us from the beginning of time.
    • The beauty of a fleeting sunrise/sunset.
    • The beauty of a lasting friendship, of a new baby, or an innocent, happy child, of a selfless, kind act.

    The whispers of the glory of all God is are all around us…and constant.

                But let’s get back to when the real glory of Christmas all started.  To answer that question we have to take a step back and get the bigger picture of the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ. 

                The birth of Jesus Christ isn’t just about some extra-special birth at some distant point in time in human history of some really neat human being.  It is about God, who is outside and throughout our massive universe… God, who is perfect in every way beyond our wildest imagination…that God somehow shrinking his greatness down into a human being called Jesus so that every sin-stained human being in history could be rescued and eventually recreated into the kind of person God originally intended us to be before we rebelled and pursued our own dark way. 

                Christmas, the coming of God to live among us and save us from our sins, had its beginning long before the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem over 2000 years ago.  We know that because of the over 800 prophecies in the O.T. about “the Messiah.”  Dozens of those prophecies have to do with a suffering Messiah who will take the punishment due us for our rebellion against the perfect God.  The earliest inclining of God’s plan to do that for us is found in the beginning of human history—the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve.  Genesis 3:15, the part of the original curse of God over our forefather’s sin that was directed at Satan himself says,

    “And I will put enmity
        between you and the woman,
        and between your offspring and hers;
    he will crush your head,
        and you will strike his heel.”

    Right from the beginning of humanity and our sinfulness in Adam and Eve, God is letting humanity know, “I’ve got a bigger plan that has cosmic implications.  Your offspring, Eve, is one day going to suffer a “strike to his heel.”  But in that offspring and in that suffering, “he” is going to “crush” the evil Serpent, Satan, and all his attacks against humanity.” 

                Did Adam and Eve understand that this would involve one of their offspring being God-in-human-flesh who would die on a Roman cross in order to strike a mortal blow to Evil in this universe?  I seriously doubt it.  In fact, the N.T. tells us that this was a “mystery” that God kept hidden (1 Cor. 2:7) through all human history until the revealing of Jesus Christ and the proof that he was “the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world” through his bodily resurrection and victory over death. 

                What about the other 500+ prophecies about the Messiah?  Why haven’t they been fulfilled?  Well, those prophecies point to the sovereign and absolute reign of the coming Messiah.  (This is why many Jews today reject Jesus; He hasn’t yet fulfilled hundreds of prophecies about the Messiah ruling over the entire earth.)  But the curious thing about all these 800+ prophecies about the Messiah is that, while some of them talk just about the suffering Messiah and others talk just about the reigning Messiah, many of them put side-by-side both the suffering and the reigning Messiah.  (See Zechariah 12ff.) 

    So, they must be talking about the same Messiah.  It can’t be two different Messiahs.  And that is precisely what the N.T. claims about Jesus.  He both suffered to redeem us as sinners and he will yet reign to restore us when He comes again to show what divine rule over this world can look like.  We’ve seen and experienced the glory of the suffering Messiah in saving us.  That should give us faith to hold onto the promises about the return or the reigning Messiah to restore us and creation to himself. 

    BTW, for Jesus to have fulfilled just 8 of those 300 prophecies he fulfilled has a mathematical probability of 1 x 1017.  [https://www.jesusfilm.org/blog/old-testament-prophecies/]  That is the same statistical probability of covering the state of Texas 2-feet deep in silver dollars, marking just one of those silver dollars, mixing it somewhere into the other hundred-thousand trillion silver dollars and taking one stab at grabbing the marked one.  That’s just 8 prophecies.  300???  If you want scientific evidence for the reliability of the Bible, try that.

    And if you want another piece of scientific evidence, this time from astronomy, go watch The Star of Bethlehem to see how God baked into the creation of our galaxy and solar system the exact timing of His incarnation into human history. 

                All of that grand plan to both set right individuals needing to be made right with God AND nations, societies, a world needing to be made right with God, was something God had planned, orchestrated, designed and personally embraced even before this universe came into existence.  Before a single angel was created, before a single demon fell from innocence, before the only 2 sinless human beings (other than Jesus) were created, Adam and Eve, before the Romans who would nail Jesus to the cross, and before you and I whose sin would take Him to the cross were ever created, God in his glory started the wheels of Christmas rolling. 

                How do we know that?  Let me point you to 4 of many verses that tell us that. 

    • I Peter 1:19-20—Peter reminds us that we weren’t made right with God (redeemed) by stuff like money or material things “but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. 20 He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake.”
    • John speaks of God’s plan in eternity past to rescue us while talking about the coming anti-Christ in Revelation 13:8. All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast—all whose names have not been written in the Lamb’s book of life, the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world.
    • 2 Timothy 1:9-10-- He has saved us and called us to a holy life—not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, 10 but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.
    • God even included US in this before-creation plan, according to Ephesians 1:4-- 4 For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love 5 he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— 6 to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. 7 In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace 8 that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and understanding, 9 he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ

    I don’t know about you, but my naturally inquisitive mind wants to ask what seems to me to be a very logical question:  Why on earth would God, knowing the horrors that human sinfulness would bring to this earth and to himself, ever design a universe in which human sin could wreak such havoc? 

    • This eternal plan in which God knew every human would sin and need saving, was and is for His glory.
    • This eternal plan, hatched before the world began, which would require the incarnation of God himself IF any of us were to have any hope of being reconciled to God for eternity, was and is for His glory.

    The glory of God is at the root of the incarnation. 

    How so?

    Paul gives us a clue in Romans 5 where he argues that the one glorious and matchless quality of the GRACE of God is known and experienced more deeply in a world where our sin has proliferated rather than a (hypothetical) world where sin had never happened.  To people who would pervert that grace of God and say, “Well, then let’s sin more so that we can see more of God’s grace,” Paul answers them in Romans 6.  That argument is not my focus today. 

    What I do want us to see is that human sinfulness built a stage upon which a whole spectrum of the glory of God has, is, and will continue to be revealed. 

    ILL:  What did I know of self-sacrificing love when I was first married?  Virtually nothing.  To be honest, marriage was all about “getting” the most beautiful woman in the world, enjoying her, having fun with her, satisfying my loneliness in life, etc.  It was only as my own selfish sinfulness kept cropping up that Sandy repeatedly showed me the true nature of the deepest kind of God-like agape love—self-sacrificial love that loved me in spite of my sinfulness towards her. 

                The same could be said of a host of other wonderful qualities I would never have known about her if I hadn’t been such a jerk!  Mercy, kindness, compassion, gentleness, grace, patience, long-suffering, strength, stability, etc. were all qualities I thought and hoped she had but didn’t really know she had until my sinfulness tested them. 

                The same is true with God.  If you and I…or Adam and Eve…had never turned our back on God (which ALL of us are guilty of doing), we would have known some measure of the love of God, but nothing compared to the sacrificial love Jesus has shown for each of us by choosing the cross so that we could choose Him.

                None of us would have known what grace was if we didn’t need it, let alone how amazing, rich and deep it is in Christ.

                Without sin, we could still have known the holiness of God, the power of God, the knowledge of God, His omnipresence and creative genius.  But, oh, the riches of his mercy, his kindness, his love, his justice, his patience, his steadfastness… all that and more would be virtually unknown to us. 

    Would life be “easier”?  Possibly.  Life is “easier” for robots that have no capacity for love or goodness or evil.  You can program them to do exactly what you want them to do and keep them from doing what will cause them to self-destruct or destroy others.  But those robots don’t reveal the real “glory” or complexity of character of their makers.  They just reveal programming that misses completely the moral and spiritual dimensions of a human being.  (Which is why AI can be a bit frightening.  It’s the human version of making a self-functioning thing in one’s own flawed image.) 

    But by the design of God in eternity past human beings do have the capacity to reflect some aspects of God’s glorious nature.  But that ability to reflect God’s greatness only comes when we are in right relationship with Him.  Turn away from Him and His glorious greatness and you get what is not like God.  You get hatred and mayhem, darkness and disease, selfishness and sexual perversion.  That’s just the nature of walking away from the glory of God.

                Now, you can argue with God about whether you or that kind of world would have been better than the one He created…and the you that currently exists in it.  But I would maintain that our finiteness, our extremely limited knowledge and wisdom, certainly our sinfulness (and the often poor judgment that results from that) disadvantages us in making any kind of reasonable criticism of God who is gloriously perfect in all that He is and does. 

                You see, God chose to create a world where the beauty of holiness and the awfulness of evil could be experienced side-by-side.  He chose to make people who could choose to embrace the glory of the goodness of their Creator OR could choose to embrace the darkness and deception of other gods, of destructive temptations, and of self-centered living.   

                So, from the perspective of the glory of God, it is very reasonable to see why God would create human beings with the capacity to sin/turn from Him.  The ability to genuinely love or hate our Creator is part of the price that comes with beings God chose to create with genuine freedom.  Both our freedom and our abuses of that freedom actually allow us to know and experience a whole lot more of God’s nature than a sinless universe would. 

                But what seems to me to be truly incomprehensible is why God, knowing what disasters we make of our freedom and knowing that the vast majority of us would ignore him, fight against him and hate him for most or all of our lives,… that God would devise a plan to save us that would require HIM, not us, to pay ALL the price, ALL the agony, ALL the injustice and absorb ALL the hatred of mankind against Him—this God who is nothing less than absolute good, self-sacrificing love and all the other wonders of his glory. 

                As the Scripture says in Romans 5, 7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”  And, as John says (1 John 2:2), not for just us but Christ died for the sins of the whole world—the world that would largely continue to reject him both now in time and for all eternity.  God, who hates with a holy hatred sin that both separates us from Him and destroys us and the people around us…that God chose in eternity past to embark on a plan for our rescue that would require him to enter our world in person, take on our humanity in time and eternity, overcome every temptation known to man, and endure horrific suffering and even death…all so that WE might experience His glory, His perfection to the full, forever. 

                In Jesus’ longest recorded prayer in John 17, he tied his impending suffering and death just hours away to his selfless love for us and love for the glory of God.  In praying for those of us who would believe in Jesus because of the testimony of His early followers, Jesus said,

    “22 I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—”  Jesus isn’t talking about some supernatural aura or glowing light about us; He is talking about sharing all that He is…giving us His fullness of love, of grace, of kindness, of forgiveness, etc….so that we can begin to experience the kind of relationships among ourselves that God has experienced in the Trinity from eternity past.  THAT is what will convince people that Jesus is truly the Messiah.

                Jesus summed it up this way in vs. 24--24 “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.

    In order for us to be with God both now and forever, Jesus didn’t withhold any of himself, any of His glory.  He truly gave us all of himself—all of his loving grace and mercy from before time began—so that we could forever experience, enjoy and revel in the unparalleled and great glory of the fullness of God. 

                This is the “glory” God wants us to recapture at Christmas—the greatness of God himself in eternity past designing humanity and history so that His coming to us at Christmas captivates our entire lives.  It’s not just a short season with some special music, lights and presents.  It’s a celebration of God truly invading our darkness with the glorious light of all that He is.  It is an annual reminder of the lengths God has gone to, even before time began, to insure that we can enjoy Him forever, to the full.

    APP:  What might possibly be appropriate responses to the glory of God come in human flesh to rescue us rebels? 

    • Attraction: the more we grasp the “glory of God”—all that He is—the more we should find ourselves drawn to God.  Every human is made with a longing for God that only God’s full nature will satisfy.  We might try to fill that longing in a hundred other ways, thinking that good things like money or fame or intimacy or work or a family or achievement is what our souls really need.  But we were designed not to be satisfied in life until we are satisfied with the best—God himself.  And it is in relationship with all that He is, His glory, that we will ultimately experience His power to bring us one day to perfection in eternity with Him.  Do you feel the attraction of the real Glory of Christmas—God himself?   
    • Pursuit: Every guy knows that being attracted to a beautiful woman is not that difficult.  But actually pursuing a relationship with her that changes your life is something else. 

    ILL:  I read an article this week about a millionaire named Jon Collins-Black who has hidden millions of dollars worth of treasure across the United States.  Oh, he also published a book on how to find it (which will probably recoup millions more!).  He’s apparently concealed valuables ranging from Olympic gold medals and rare trading cards to historical artifacts and crypto currency.  He put the stuff in 5 puzzle boxes and placed them on public property (within 3 miles of a public road).  Don’t worry.  Since 40% of the U.S. is public land, you only have about 828 million acres to search. 

    Jon Collins was inspired to do all this by a 2010 treasure hunt launched by Forrest Fenn which took 10 years to find. Fenn’s treasure was so difficult to find that multiple people died in the process.  Well, Collins-Black’s treasure hunt is meant to be difficult, but not dangerous.  “All the boxes are located in safe places that are not dangerous to get to,” he writes on his website. “Anyone of average health should be fine. An entire section of the book is dedicated to explain how to ensure your treasure hunting experience is a safe and fun one!”  [Dec. 5, 2024-- https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/05/crypto-millionaire-has-hidden-multiple-100000-bitcoin-around-the-us.html]

    APP:  Lots of us probably fantasize about finding buried treasure.  A good number of people will probably buy his book. Some will read it.  A few will study it.  But how many will actually spend time, money, life and effort to pursue the treasure?  Each box probably has a value of about $400,000, but obviously your odds of finding one are pretty slim.

          But God is a divine treasure on a magnitude of value exponentially greater than any of this measly treasure.  He is the “pearl of great price,” the “treasure hidden in a field” worth selling everything a man has in order to get that field.  God has not hidden himself 3 miles from some forest logging road.  In fact, He turned a celestial spotlight on his entrance into human history in a little town named Bethlehem 2,000 years ago.

          Ever since his entrance on the human stage there, He has offered himself and his glory to anyone willing to pursue him.  Attraction is good but it is not enough.  It will take pursuit to experience a relationship with God’s glory that really changes our lives. 

          How do you plan to pursue the glory…the fullness…of God this Christmas? 

    • Start by opening your heart to Him and inviting Him to be your Lord & Savior.
    • Pull out “The Guide-Book”, your Bible. Determine this year to pursue God 15 minutes a day in His Word.  15 minutes of your daily 1,440 minutes = 1% of your entire day.  That’s not a huge commitment to pursue the most perfect Being in the universe.  Get a read-thru-the-Bible-in-a-year Bible.  (Show)
    • Determine to do more of what you are doing today: put yourself as frequently as possible in close proximity to others who are passionately pursuing God. Find those people who make your faith look anemic…and hang out with them.  Their life will teach you how to actually pursue God.   
    • Awe & Gratitude:
      • When someone loves you sacrificially despite all your ugliness, failures and faults, we are hard-wired to feel gratitude. That God has done that for you from before the universe began should move us to hearts that seek new and fresh ways to express our gratitude to Him. 
        • Write out a Psalm of Thanksgiving this Christmas.
        • Find a fresh way to serve someone in need as a way to express your gratitude to God.
        • Practice 3-on-3: Stop 3 times a day for the rest of this year to take 3 minutes to tell God how grateful you are for sharing Himself with you.
      • When we encounter overwhelming beauty in this life, we are hard-wired to feel awe, to be speechless and moved to just revel in the experience drinking in that beauty in the moment. There is nothing more beautiful than the glory of God in the person of Jesus.  Allow God’s glory to overwhelm you this Christmas.