The Reason for Christmas

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Well, if you were to walk into my house today, which I don’t recommend because it’s a mess. Abigail spreads things from room to room and we can’t keep up with her. But if you were to walk in there today and you were to look at our Christmas tree, you might think that it was a little bit weird.

When Charlie got finished putting it up this year, I was looking at the decorations on it. The first three ornaments I saw were a platter of tacos, a can of Coke Zero, and a revolver. I was like, this is awesome.

My Christmas tree can beat up your Christmas tree, I can almost guarantee it. You might look at that and think, that’s bizarre. If you don’t know the background, if you don’t know the back story, that we have a long-standing tradition in my family that each year, everybody in the family has bought an ornament that represents something about them or some memory for the year or something that happened.

And so the tacos and Coke Zero are just because that’s like the official. We’re sponsored by tacos and Coke Zero at this point. The revolver ornament, I think, probably is for the. .

. It’s supposed to be memories, but my memory doesn’t work so great. I was going to say, I think it’s for the year that I took Benjamin and let him shoot a rifle for the first time when we were hunting coyotes.

There’s an Eiffel Tower ornament that my mother got me years ago when I started studying French. There’s several fox ornaments because Madeline, when she was a little girl, when she was a littler girl, just had this toy fox that she just absolutely adored and took everywhere with her. So the randomness of our Christmas tree, if you know the back story, is all these family memories.

And suddenly what you would walk in too cold and think, this is the weirdest Christmas tree ever, makes sense. It’s family memories. There are a lot of things in this world that if we don’t know the back story, they make a whole lot less sense.

This morning, I want to talk about the back story behind the Christmas story. Now, as a church, we’ve spent a lot of time focusing over the last month on the Christmas story. We put together the live nativity.

We read the Christmas story from Luke 2 last night with the kids. I want to look at the reason for the Christmas story. So if you would, turn with me to Genesis 3.

And I told my wife where I was going with this, and she said, isn’t that kind of weird for Christmas? Don’t you think people come to hear Luke chapter 2? If you did, I’m sorry, you should have come last night.

We’re going to Genesis 3 this morning. Genesis chapter 3, and once you find it, if you would stand with me, and we’ll read together from God’s Word. If you don’t have your Bible or can’t find it, it’ll be on the screen for you this morning.

We’re going to look at the first 15 verses here, but I really want us to focus in mainly on verse 15 this morning. This is a familiar story to a lot of you, but in case it’s not, it goes like this. Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.

And he said to the woman, has God indeed said, you shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, you shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die. Then the serpent said to the woman, you will not surely die, for God knows that in the day that you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings.

And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, Where are you? So he said, I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself.

And he said, Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat? Then the man said, The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate.

And the Lord said to the woman, What is this that you have done? The woman said, The serpent deceived me, and I ate. So the Lord God said to the serpent, Because you have done this, you are cursed more than all cattle and more than every beast of the field.

On your belly you shall go, and you shall eat dust all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed, and he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. And you may be seated.

And you might be sitting there already saying, That’s not Christmassy. What does that have to do with Christmas? I beg to differ.

The greatest Christmas song, in my opinion, that’s ever been written is Hark the Herald Angels Sing. And if you can see that, I realize it’s kind of small to fit the whole verse on there. At least the way we sing it here, that’s verse 4.

There’s so many variations of this on the internet. I had to send Christy a message and have her get me the exact lyrics we sing. But this is the fourth verse that we sing of Hark the Herald Angels Sing.

A Christmas song talking about the angels and the message that they brought to the shepherds. And the fourth verse says, Come, desire of nations, come. Fix in us thy humble home.

Rise the woman’s conquering seed. Bruise in us the serpent’s head. Adam’s likeness now a face.

Stamp thine image in its place. Second Adam from above. Reinstate us in thy love.

Hark the herald angels sing. Glory to the newborn king. You see, the reason I bring you to Genesis chapter 3 this morning, what seems to be a random passage to deal with at Christmas, is because this is the first promise recorded in Scripture of the coming of Jesus Christ. The story that we think started at Bethlehem started many, many years before that.

Well, from our perspective, it started in the Garden of Eden. In God’s perspective, it started from eternity past. He always knew that this was the plan. But from the standpoint of what we have record of, this is where the story started.

In the Garden of Eden with the fall of man, with the descent of humanity into sin and God promising to do something about it. So I want us to look at this this morning to renew our appreciation of what exactly this gift that we received on Christmas Day so many years ago, what exactly it means for us. And in order to understand this, we have to understand first of all that sin wrecked the world and condemned humanity.

Sin is the most destructive force on earth. we might not realize it because it’s so foreign to us, given how ugly the world is at times. But this world is not the way God created it to be.

Yes, God created it. But God created it for us to have harmony with Him and harmony with one another and harmony with the world around us. And is that the case today?

Is that what we have? A lot of times we don’t even have harmony within ourselves. Yet God created us to live at peace.

If you look at the first two chapters of Genesis, It was this paradise that God created. God was in the habit of walking in the midst of the garden and having perfect fellowship with His creations, with these people He’d created. And I don’t understand exactly what that means.

I can’t tell you what that looks like that they took walks with God. I tend to think that heaven has some parallels to the Garden of Eden, so hopefully we’ll get to see what that means to go take walks with the Lord. But I can’t tell you what that means exactly.

I just know it means they had this fellowship that we can’t really understand. And they had this fellowship with one another, and yet everything was destroyed. And it wasn’t destroyed because there was necessarily power in this fruit that they ate.

What came along and destroyed everything was the sin behind the choice to eat that fruit. The sin, the desire to disobey God and go our own way instead of doing what He said. That was the problem.

The problem is not that they ate fruit. The problem was that God said, do things this way, and man said, no, I’d rather do things my own way, and we’ve been reaping the results of that ever since. It devastated everything.

And we see this in the first 14 verses of this chapter. They came along and they defied God’s authority. They were disobedient toward Him, but they defied His authority when He said, do this, and they said, no, we’re going to do something else.

That’s defiance of His authority, right? They impugned God’s character. when God gave them these rules and said, here’s the reason for it.

And Satan came along and said, God’s lying to you. God knows if you eat that fruit, you’ll be just like him and he doesn’t want the competition. And Adam and Eve apparently thought, you know, that’s right.

I kind of would like to have what God has. And so they came along and they decided that God’s motives were impure. They decided that they were morally in a superior place to judge the motives of God.

And they tried to take his position. Part of the promise of the fruit was you will be like God. So we look at this and we think sometimes from our modern standpoint, what is the problem that they ate this piece of fruit?

I mean, is it really that big a deal? It is a big deal when you consider all the spiritual dimensions behind what was going on and what it said about their view toward God. And the effects of sin after that, they touch every part of creation so that the world is no longer the way God made it.

We see this when He cursed the snake. Not just Satan, but the snake. I did some reading on this this week to try to understand why God cursed snakes.

I’d really like to understand why He even made them. But why did He curse them if Satan is the one that did this? And it’s not the snake knows he’s cursed, but every time we see the snake, we are reminded of the curse that’s been placed on Satan.

We are reminded of the judgment of God. And maybe that’s why I run and scream like a little girl when I find Him on our porch. It’s a reminder of the judgment of God.

It’s supposed to be scary. But it messed up the world. And we see as he goes on after the part we read, and he talks about the troubles that Adam was going to face, and the troubles that Eve was going to face, and the changes to the creation as a whole.

And we see the fact that this perfect fellowship between them and God was severed. Suddenly, they’re trying to hide themselves from God. We see that everything is different because of their sin, because of their fallen condition.

They were trying in verses 8 through 10 to hide from God. Now, can you hide from God? He sees you when you’re sleeping.

He knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good. I’m not going to sing the song.

But you can’t hide. And by the way, when God comes through and says, where are you? And who has told you?

And God asks these questions. God is like the best lawyer in the world. God is not asking questions He doesn’t know the answer to.

He’s giving Adam a chance to fess up. So they tried to hide from God. We see in verses 11 through 13, They tried to justify themselves.

And we typically do that when we know we’re wrong. See, we see this with our kids. If they didn’t do it, usually they just say, I didn’t do it.

When they’re guilty, they start saying things like, well, it wasn’t me, but I. . .

And they start trying to justify themselves. And we do that with God, don’t we? Well, God, see, it’s okay because we try to spit out justifications because we know we’re not justified.

We know it’s not okay. And so we see that for the first time ever, there was this divide between them and God. And if you’ve ever felt like God was distant from you or you were distant from God, that’s where this started.

It was with this sin in the garden because that’s not the way God created things to be. And where we’re left here, leading up to verse 15, is a hopeless situation. Because the presence of any sin, the presence of any disobedience, destroys everything and we can’t undo it.

We can’t fix it. We can’t do enough good to earn extra credit to change it. My favorite example to illustrate this is the hypothetical story that if I was on trial for murder and the judge said, what do you have to say for yourself?

Do I get off the hook if I say, but Your Honor, look at all the other people I didn’t kill. Do I get extra credit for that? The fact that I let you all live, does that erase what I’ve done?

By the way, I haven’t killed anybody. That’s purely hypothetical. We don’t get extra credit for that. So just doing right from here on out does not erase the wrong that we’ve done.

And so we are in this situation where we are separated from God, and no matter what we do, if we were on our best behavior from now until He returns, we couldn’t do enough good to undo the wrong that we’ve done and to fix it. It’s hopeless. And yet we see here in verse 15, God refused to leave us in that condition.

He says in verse 15, I will put enmity between you and the woman. That word enmity means to be an enemy. I’ll put hostility between you and the woman.

Now, at the point he says this, the woman had just sided with Satan. And by the way, so had her husband. They both had.

When God said, this is the way you ought to do things, and Satan says, no, no, this is the way you ought to do things, they had picked a side and it was the wrong one. So they had given their allegiance to Satan at this point, and he undoubtedly thought he had won. Satan has been at war with God since before all of this started.

And Satan’s no idiot. Satan knows that he’s doomed. He knows that God is the winner in the end.

Satan knows the end of the book. But Satan’s fondest hope, knowing he can’t defeat God, is to try to hurt God by taking as many of the creation that God loves most with him when he goes. And there’s no doubt in my mind that Satan at this moment thought he’d won.

He’d won over the allegiance of mankind, but God said, I’m going to put hostility between you. Now that’s crazy to me. Not crazy in a way that.

. . Crazy as in I’m blown away by it.

So crazy is probably the wrong word. I’m blown away by this because we deserve to be left right where we were. If you’re in the middle of a circle, I know this is not what happened, but we’ve watched.

. . Charles has shown me videos lately where the couple will put a baby in the middle of a circle and they’ll stand on either end and see who the baby will come to.

And we’ve talked about, would Abigail come to me or her? Aaliyah, right? The baby’s going to go to Aaliyah.

The baby’s going to find Aaliyah. She’s going to call an Uber and that’s where she’s going to go. Right?

But if God and Satan were standing on either side of a big circle, mankind just wandered over to Satan. And I don’t know about y’all, but if I were God, I’d be saying that’s fine. Y’all deserve each other.

Enjoy that. But God did not leave us where we were despite what we deserved. God made it clear he was not going to leave mankind in bondage to Satan.

And that’s why he says, I will put enmity, I’ll put hostility between you and the woman. He promised that he was going to come and he was going to split this little rebel alliance wide open and he was going to set the captives free. Here he’s specifically even describing Eve.

He’s not just describing humanity, he’s describing her and saying, this one who has fallen into rebellion, even her, I’m going to rescue. The one who fell under Satan’s spell would be delivered. So the question then is how?

How would God rescue humanity? And that’s where this ties in with Christmas. God raised up the seed of the woman for our deliverance so that everyone who had ever fallen under Satan’s spell could be delivered by the seed of the woman who would crush the serpent’s head.

He says not only will I, in verse 15, will I put enmity between you and the woman, he says, and between your seed and her seed. He said there would be hostility between Satan and the seed of the woman. This description, the seed of the woman, is really unusual because it was a patriarchal society.

When you read through the scriptures, it’s usually son of so-and-so and they’re listing the man. As a matter of fact, you read through the book of Numbers, you read through the book of Genesis, you read through the book of Matthew, you read through some of the places where they have the genealogies. They say, man one begat man two, man two begat man three, and so on and so forth.

And affected cloning in the ancient world. Where were the women? Now the women were involved, they typically were known by their father’s name and their father’s lineage.

It’s incredibly rare that somebody would be identified as the seed of the woman. And it’s especially fitting as a description to Jesus Christ. Because the description we’re given of Jesus and Matthew and Luke is that He was born to a mother who was a virgin. He had a human mother, but the conception there was the work of the Holy Spirit without a biological father.

And skeptics will say, how is that possible? Listen, I believe God created DNA to begin with. If God created all the DNA, it’s hardly a stretch to say that the Holy Spirit would go in there and create more DNA.

I just don’t see it’s that big of a hurdle. Like, ask Him to do something hard next time. Jesus is described as having no biological father.

If He is the seed of anybody, if He is the offspring anybody, it is the woman. And this is not just something that I’ve pulled out of thin air. This has been what Christianity has taught all along, that Jesus is the seed of the woman.

Back in the generation after the apostles, Irenaeus wrote that the Lord summed up in himself this enmity, saying he is what God is talking about. Jesus himself is what God is talking about with this enmity, this hostility in chapter 3. The Lord summed up in himself this enmity when And He was made man from a woman and trod upon the serpent’s head.

It’s been the teaching of Christianity all along that Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of Genesis 3. 15. That He is the seed of the woman.

He is the seed of the woman in a way that nobody else could ever claim to be. We’re all offspring of women, but He is only the offspring of a woman. And He was raised up by God to set us free.

That was His purpose in coming in the Christmas story. was to come to earth to set us free, to come to earth to deliver us and to bring salvation. That’s why in Luke chapter 1, the angel told Mary, Luke 1.

31-33, You will conceive in your womb and bring forth a son, and shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Highest. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end. That’s describing Jesus as the Messiah, tying him into all the promises of the Old Testament, of the deliverer who was going to come.

That’s a lot to take in for a girl who’s still saying, how is this even possible? It’s why the angel told Joseph in Matthew chapter 1, that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. Because if you’re Joseph, and you’re hearing all this for the first time, would you find that hard to believe?

No, no, I promise this is God’s son. And so God sends an angel and says, the child she carries is conceived of the Holy Spirit. And she will bring forth a son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.

And by the way, that’s what the name Jesus means. The Lord will save. It’s why the angel told the shepherds in Luke 2, there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ, who is the Messiah, the Lord.

And it’s why Simeon, in the story that I shared with you last week, when Jesus was about eight days old, I believe, and brought to the temple to be presented. In Luke 2, Simeon lays eyes on the child after having been promised by the Holy Spirit that he would live long enough to see the Messiah. He said, My eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared before the face of all peoples.

Jesus Christ is the seed of the woman who was raised up for our deliverance. And then just like God promised back from the beginning of time, back in Genesis 3, Jesus struck the fatal blow to Satan’s plans for dominion over us. See, Satan had it planned out that when he’s cast into the lake of fire, he’s going to take as many of us as he can with him.

He’s going to take all of us with him. But Jesus has defeated Satan every time they’ve gone head to head. You think of the times it’s mentioned in Scripture that Satan has tried to do something to stop Jesus, and it has never worked.

Think about when Satan laid it on Herod’s heart to try to kill all the young boys in Bethlehem. because he knew that this king of the Jews was born. He was told this by the wise men.

And he didn’t want to deal with somebody else being a rival for his throne. He says, I’ll just take care of it this way. I’ll just kill them all.

And yet God sent word to Joseph to get Jesus and Mary and take them to Egypt. Jesus thwarted Satan’s plans once. Think of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness at the beginning of his ministry.

When he spends 40 days, 40 days without food, I can’t, my goodness, sometimes 40 minutes without food, and I’m willing to agree to whatever you want. But he went 40 days without food. And when he was at his weakest and most vulnerable from a human standpoint, Satan came along and began promising him all these things.

Began promising him glory and worship and all of these things, which, by the way, are his. That’s the part I never understood. I’ll give you all the kingdoms of the world if you’ll just worship me.

He made all those. Those are his. go home Satan you’re out of your league here.

But each time even when Satan tried to twist the scriptures God the Son who inspired those scriptures through the Holy Spirit said it is written and rested on the authority of the word and defeated him sent him packing. And then at the cross I can’t help but think Satan thought he had won. That here Jesus had done this this incredible ministry.

He know who he was and the people still missed it and they crucified him. They killed him. Little did he realize that them missing the signs and crucifying him was the plan.

It wasn’t just an accident where God said, oh, he got crucified. Well, let’s make some lemonade out of the lemons. It was the plan of God.

It was his plan from eternity past. So the instrument of what Satan thought was going to be his greatest triumph was his ultimate defeat. Because this is, I believe, the moment where he thought he had, this serpent thought he had inflicted this major blow on Jesus. It was just a flesh wound, just nipping at his heel.

You can survive a snake bite to the heel. A snake can’t survive its head being crushed. And at the cross, this moment when he thought he had inflicted his plan on Jesus, Jesus crushed the serpent’s head.

Jesus gained the ultimate victory because he took responsibility for our sins, for everything that you and I have ever done that has defied or disobeyed God, those things that held us separated from God, those things that we could never get past in order to be right with God again, Jesus took responsibility for all of those. And the sinless Son of God was nailed to the cross and shed His blood and died in our place so He could pay for all of that sin so that all of that sin could be forgiven. And so you and I could experience the the fellowship with God we were created for.

Genesis 3. 15 is the first mention in Scripture of Jesus coming and what He was coming to do. But thank God it’s not the last mention because Jesus came and fulfilled what God said He was going to do.

What Satan inflicted on Jesus was just glancing, but what Jesus accomplished there was devastating to Satan’s plans. And now you and I have hope only because Jesus Christ came to save us. Listen to me.

If Jesus had come to be born as a baby, and that was the end of the story, if God’s Son had come to be born as a baby and that was the end of the story, it would be an incredible story. But it would do precisely nothing for us. It only matters because He came to be born as a baby to crush the serpent’s head, to be crucified for us, and to rise again.

You and I can have the hope that He offers because He’s done everything that’s necessary for us to have it. We don’t earn forgiveness. We don’t earn salvation by being good people.

we don’t earn it by going to church not even on Christmas day I’m so thankful that you have taken the time to be here and to worship Jesus with us for us to do this together today of all days but we don’t even get extra credit for doing this if we want to be right with God if we want to experience peace with him and fellowship with him if we want our sins forgiven there is one reason and one reason only why that happens it’s that Jesus Christ paid the price for those sins and rose again to prove it, and He offers it to anyone who will believe. So this morning, if you recognize that you’ve sinned against God, if you recognize that you are distant from God, and you know it’s not supposed to be that way, you have a choice.

You can either try on your own to get right with God, you can wear yourself out doing all the religious things and never get any closer, or you can believe that Jesus was enough and trust in the fact that He paid the price for your sins and rose again, and ask for His forgiveness on that basis.