Right at the heart of the Christmas story, in Luke 1:26-33. ESV, we read of the coming True Theocracy: the kingship of Jesus Christ. In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!”…
Merry Christmas! This is the first of three previously published posts I’m reposting in celebration of the coming of Jesus Christ–his first coming, that is. This was originally posted on February 21, 2012, as part of a teaching series, not as a Christmastime article. I was surprised when I opened and read it just now: the biographical information it starts with is almost exactly true again today. The only difference is that this was a re-do of that surgery, and…
We’re just two weeks from Christmas, and thankfully I’m hearing less about the so-called Christmas Wars this year. Not that there aren’t instances, like the banning of creches in Santa Monica, but there seem to be fewer of them. What I did hear a few days ago was a song from probably forty to fifty years ago, about Christmas being the best holiday of them all, better than Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day and the Fourth of July—and it brought…
I’ve been quite critical of University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne on more than one occasion, so I was quite surprised to find myself nodding in agreement with him today on a religion-related topic. He opened up this blog post saying, There’s a pretty dreadful piece by Tim Padgett in the latest online Time Magazine (I’m not sure about the print version) called “Having faith: what both Hitchens and fundamentalists don’t get about religion.“ It’s an attack on both fundamentalist Christianity…
Here’s a completely different kind of Christmas reflection for you: my BreakPoint column, Incarnation, Mission, and Worldview. It begins, It was about a dozen years ago that our church’s pastor came back from a pastors’ conference and told us our denomination was growing rapidly everywhere in the world except North America. We were shrinking here, he said. I remember what I thought. I don’t remember if I said it to him out loud. In a way I hope I didn’t,…
The Starbucks coffee cup reads, We invite you to listen to your desires and to renew your hope. To see the world not as it is, but as it could be. Go ahead. Wish. It’s what makes the holidays the holidays. Wishing, it says, is “what makes the holidays the holidays.” Try not to see reality, the world as it is. Wish for something else. That’s what the celebration is all about. Doesn’t that seem sad to you? It does…
We’re in the season of expectancy, preparing to celebrate the birth of Christ. There was a season of expectancy before his actual birth 2,000 years ago–expectancy both on earth, where prophecies of a coming Messiah were passionately studied and only partly understood, and also in heaven, where the eternal God was preparing to break in to time and space and human life. It has been said that Jesus was the only person who chose to be born. Matthew and Luke…
The stage has been set in Parts 1 through 5 (linked below). The human race, meant to be great under God, in worshipful relationship with Him, has fallen mightily by rejecting that relationship. God did not reject us, though. The plan was prepared since before the foundation of the world: Jesus Christ, God Himself, second Person of the Trinity, maker and sustainer of all creation, would come and provide our rescue. His coming was prophesied centuries in advance, here and…
