Monday, December 17, 2012
318 - Shopping, Rebellion, and Surprise
Spirituality Column #318
December 18, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville
Shopping, Rebellion, and Surprise
By Bob Walters
Author of (click) Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
December 18, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville
Shopping, Rebellion, and Surprise
By Bob Walters
Author of (click) Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
Two thousand years ago the humble baby born with the Name
above all names hastened a rebellion above all rebellions.
Jesus
born in the flesh was God become incarnate.
Everything the world thought it knew about itself and about God was
turned on its head. The God of creation,
laws and power revealed Himself through humanity, faith and humility in an
obscure baby born to a teenaged virgin.
Every Christmas we shop to surprise our loved ones with
gifts.
God surprised everybody with Jesus.
Whether it was Hebrew history, Greek philosophy, Roman
law, pagan gods or Asian mysticism, Jesus Christ was exactly what the world
needed but absolutely not what the world expected … or wanted.
Hebrew scripture was rich with stories of a relational
God Who was at once utterly loving and relentlessly just. He inexplicably favored some people, and
rained down wrath on others. His
standard was His own. God’s story written
in the Bible’s Old Testament assured His unique, uncreated but creative being. Amid sin and law, amid temporal love and ceaseless
treachery, fallen man wallowed in an unrelenting pit of self-interest. God’s prophecies pointed to a coming Messiah
Who would set the fallen world right with the example of God’s gloriously
unselfish love, righteousness, and power.
The Hebrews expected
the Messiah to come and kill the Romans.
The Romans, who insisted that everyone worship Caesar, were duped by the
Hebrews into killing Jesus, the Messiah King whom the Jews would not worship. The Greeks, largely unaware of Hebrew
scripture, philosophically posited an objective, infinite and eternal good, never
expecting that particular, personal and enormous “good” to divinely arrive on
earth, in humanity, in history … in a Palestinian manger.
Globally, mankind created gods in every imaginable image,
including his own. Mystics and
philosophers imagined a Great Beyond of riches or emptiness – man’s way of
explaining the unexplainable. Jesus
Christ was God’s way of explaining His goodness, humility, love and truth.
With faith, Jesus toppled every other king, god, idea,
and human power – defeating death by dying, erasing man’s sin with His pain on
the cross, restoring man’s image in God’s glorious kingdom, and assuring man’s
eternal life with His resurrection.
Nothing else in man’s history is as radical as that. Man’s pedantic rebellion against man – the
perpetually cross-purposed politics of society, governments, cultures, nations,
religions, philosophies, and lately, science – is a ho-hum charade of pyrrhic righteousness. Rebellion is empty without the Creator God’s Holy
Son in our lives.
In our tongue-tied times, we are chastened to worship
Jesus without His name and to celebrate Christmas without Christ.
It’s surprising how good it feels to rebel and say “Merry
Christmas.”
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com)
would add, “Jesus loves you.”
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