Before I begin my Advent blog I want to wish everyone a Happy Finnish Independence Day.
This is now the season of Advent and I want to focus on our Lord Jesus as the coming King. In actuality the first coming of Christ led to his second Coming. When we walk with God we need to think about spiritual things. We need to consider what state our souls are in before the Majestic King who was involved in the very creation itself and Humanity.
For many people at this time Christmas is not about the above but rather a time of celebration, eating and drinking the wrong stuff, meeting with our friends and getting expensive presents. At the work place it can be that there are expensive celebratory bashes before going our separate ways. I am not passing judgement on these things because we are all free to make our own decisions.
But perhaps sometimes it is time to start to think about what really matters to you as a human being. Celebratory bashes come and go but at the end of the day what really matters to you? For the Christian prayer and meditation can bring spiritual renewal for the things that really matter. Perhaps you belong to another religion, or you are an atheist perhaps in reading my take on the importance of Christmas you too will be rejuvenated by the Living and Everlasting God that perhaps in the past you denied his existence.
As we move towards Christmas, we prepare our hearts for the coming of Christ’s first coming. At this seasonal time, we prepare for the Coming King Jesus to come into the world for the first time and to begin his saving work. For me these next three Weeks are going to be a type of pilgrimage for the purification of the soul, as we reflect on the very fact that God became a man in the person and work of Christ. Obviously, we cannot in our own strength purify our souls, it is a work of God’s grace in our live and that by the gift of faith which God gave to his children in the first place. Even the purification of our sins can only take place when we bow our knee to king Jesus at the cross with the hope of his second return.
We need to remember that without the first coming of Christ there would not have been the hope of his second coming. Both are linked. As John says:
“1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. 4 In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. 5 The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. John 1:1-5”
The second Person of the Trinity left heaven and became a real man. God became a man. In the Person of Christ dwells the infinite and the finite. Jesus is fully God and Fully man. This is indeed the mystery of Christmas. Karl Barth was correct on this point. The ordinary natural person cannot comprehend this amazing truth. Only when a person is born a new (from above) can his spiritual eyes be awakened to the full knowledge of this. For the person who has come into faith he, she understands that God became a man for us. For Barth, it is faith seeking understanding. We believe that we may understand and understanding only comes by way of worship and devotion to our Lord.
It is interesting that John’s Gospel begins with ‘in the beginning’. This was no accident and in the Greek version in the Old Testament it begins like this. The Word with the Father and the Holy Spirit were instrumental in bringing human life into the world in the first place. The Lord Jesus from his divine side was instrumental in bringing us into existence. We as human beings have replace God’s love with hate and sin. God still did not give up on His creation but decided to take on human flesh and become a baby in a manger.
The point of the Gospel is that God broke into our history. This is not a fairy tale; on the contrary it is historical fact. When I think about the characters of the Apostles:
- Were they crazy and made the Gospel up?
- Were they sober minded to the point of dying for their beliefs that Jesus indeed rose from the dead?
The facts are that out of all of these Apostles only John made it to old age and even then he was a prisoner on Patmos Island away from civilization!
St Paul had his head chopped off; James the Lord’s brother James was murdered; Peter was crucified upside down et al.
I hope you see the point I am trying to make. I have good reason to be persuaded that the Christmas story is not a fairy tale in its original form.
There are those theologians who would put the Christmas story on a back burner and not take it so seriously. The Romantic theologians such as Schleiermacher were more interested in moving away from the external objective facts and focus on the internal workings of the mind having been influenced by the philosophy of Kant. This whole movement to the modern day started from Schleiermacher. For Barth the break with this movement happened when his teacher Adolf von Harnack signed a declaration with the leading scholars of the day. They were pro-war and very nationalist:
(wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Manifesto_of_the_Ninety-Three_German_Intellectuals)
Anyhow for Karl Barth, his teachers who sided for WW1 was the last straw. He dumped liberal theology and looked for objective foundations. As it was with John Calvin, Luther and the other Reformers centuries before; Karl Barth saw the importance of a new Reformation for the Gospel with truer epistemic foundations.
So then Christmas matters and how it is interpreted matters. For Schleiermacher ‘the feeling of absolute dependence’ was more important than historical foundations. For Barth the objective historical fact that God broke into our time and space is more important and the concept of revelation is back to where it ought to be (As found in the Bible and the Apostolic Creed). (Whether or not knowledge is immediate or mediated, we can leave this for another day).
For Schleiermacher on the other hand including the whole liberal tradition, the goal posts for Christian knowledge were moved. No longer did revelation have centre stage but this changed to experience. The emphasis was the search for universal building blocks. I think a good case can be made that Schleiermacher used Kant’s ideas to come to his theory of ‘gefuhl’. The theory of the feeling of the absolute dependence.
So then what am I really saying:
I am saying that advent is about the Coming Universal King who would have the offices of
- Prophet
- Priest
- King
- Sacrifice
God becoming man took on the role of prophet and in that role he would:
- Show us how we ought to live (by faith)
- He would explain to us how much his Church would suffer.
- He would show us about the end of the world.
- And the New era of His Second Coming into the world.
As a man he would hold the office of priest:
- not according to the law because he was born of the tribe of Judah, rather as a perpetual priest in the order of Melchisedek.
- As this High Priest there would be no need for sacrifices because he is the Eternal Son of God
As King:
- Jesus is king of the line of King David.
- King Jesus was greater than David in that his kingdom would never end “Your house and your kingdom shall endure before Me forever; your throne shall be established forever.”’ 2 Samuel 7:16(NASB)
Our Lord Became the sacrifice:
God had a plan that was set in place since the early days of creation for our salvation and the hope of eternal life:
- By this will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.
11 Every priest stands daily ministering and offering time after time the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins; 12 but He, having offered one sacrifice for sins for all time, SAT DOWN AT THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD, 13 waiting from that time onward UNTIL HIS ENEMIES BE MADE A FOOTSTOOL FOR HIS FEET. 14 For by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are sanctified. Hebrews 10:10-14 (NASB)
Reflection
From my point of view, the true meaning of Christmas should always be protected because at the moment of the incarnation God became a man. It was decided in heaven that our lord would be born of a virgin. Our Lord had to be the perfect candidate for the possibility of having our sins washed away. For Christians what happened in Bethlehem is a real historical even that would lead to the cross and the resurrection and the salvation of many from every nation.
We need to protect the Christmas story from anyone who would try to move the goal posts from God’s revelation to human experience and attempt to de-mythologize (separate myth from history). This story is no myth, it is historical so let us protect the story of our Saviour.
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