Jesus and Christmas
Celebrating the Birth of King Messiah
Christ is new birth from God
Solomon BenDavid, the preacher, says “there is nothing new under the sun” and he is right, for the Christ is from a realm beyond space and time.
Christmas celebrates a miracle, the birth of Emmanuel - God within man. To all appearances human, but invisibly different in a magnificent way, in fact he was a completely new creature. Miracle of miracles, in the person of Yashua - Jesus, HaMeshiach - the Christ, the anointed son of God is born to Adam - mankind. The miracle does not end with Jesus, but through him and his work of atonement, it embraces all who believe and follow. All who choose to give their lives in atonement are reborn of God, completely new eternal creatures, and God would exclude none.
Jesus shows the world that the sons of God comprehend right judgement, and obey, without need of law, by the spirit and power of God who lives within them. The challenge of God is personal, the jihad - holy war, is internal to each individual, not between men, where love must dwell. Victory is assured to those who will not turn from the path of overcoming by the power of God.
For the heirs to Christ, every day is Christmas. We celebrate newness past and newness to come. We celebrate the father of fatherhood and a baby boy, the One who makes a mother virgin, who makes every new thing and all things new. Given new sight, we trumpet a new Adam, a new covenant, a new creature, a new Jerusalem, a new heavens and a new earth. Through the narrow way of Christ we approach a brand new creation, free from corruption, death and disease, eternal but also very much before us here and now. We approach the perfection of God. A perfection never feigned nor forced but entirely chosen.
Holy Festivals outline God's pattern for the ages
God gave the pattern of eternity through Moses to Ishrael - the people of God's realm. He unfolds it in a cycle of feast days with precision finer than any clockworks, for us to celebrate in all our generations. God gave the pattern of redemption through Jesus to his Ekklesia - assemblage of the called-out, a body not of this world, but of the spirit. He unfurls it in the life and death of this extraordinary man, as poetically as any music.
Rejecting God's holy feasts, we loose the pattern, and misunderstand the man. However, even in the face of our ignorance, even at the height of the worlds ecstatic fornication with Babylon, the climax of its orgy of trade, he works to save us. It is never wrong to worship and praise the almighty, our father, the One and only, and his son the lamb, anointed for slaughter and sacrifice, destined for resurrection and eternal reward.
Yashua BenDavid - Jesus the royal prince of the house of David, tribe of Judah, heir to the throne of the United Kingdom of Israel, was born in Beit Lechem - the house of bread and fruitfulness, in the autumn, probably on the feast of Sukkots, or Tabernacles. Here, in temporary tents, the beneficence of God's presence and miraculous provision for Israel in the desert for forty years following their exodus from Egypt, is celebrated. Did God fix this feast to illustrate the life of the Emmanuel Christ/Meschiach in the earth?
Yashua HaMeshiach - Jesus the Christ was born with a life that could not be taken from him. The object of countless conspiracies, Israel somehow knew that he was God's Messiah. He was jealously hunted and ruthlessly persecuted by the worlds powerful, even as he emerged from the womb, and until his surrender to execution by the priests.
He lived a life of uncompromising love in a time of corrupt and confused doctrine much like today. For the three years of his ministry, huge numbers of ordinary Judeans followed him everywhere. They hung off his every word. Here was a king indeed! At times thousands jostled and crowded him and his Talmudim - students, and personal entourage. He would often duck into a cave to rest, or commandeer a small boat to address large crowds from the lake. Wherever he went, compassion, charity, food and healing were in generous supply.
The History of the Christmas
The Mass of Christ began as a movable feast celebrated continually throughout the year. After the conversion of Rome, by arrangement between the government of Rome and the newly established Roman Catholic Church, upon their receiving baptism, Roman slaves were set free and granted Roman citizenship.
It was an embarrassment to the church that the December twenty-fifth Winter Solstice, the many thousand year old Pagan festival of the Birth of the Sun God (Mithra, Saturn, Adonis, Tammuz or BAAL,) remained so popular among their growing Pagan membership. This Pagan holiday, Natalis Solis Invicti, was declared the official birthday of Jesus the Christ and instituted an annual celebration by the Vicar of Christ, Julius I, Pontifex Maximus around AD320, as a ploy of the Universal Church to appropriate the popular annual holiday. Emperor Constantine the Great legitimised the change of the Pagan holiday to a Christian one in Roman law.
Since it's invention Christmas has always been a playful mix of absolute truth with mythology, superstition and outright lie. Every child, even the eternal One, loves hide and seek. Undetected, he hides right under your nose, in your face, he remains invisible. He parades spectacular visions before non seeing eyes, whispers earth shaking truths into non hearing ears. So it was at the cross roads of time, and so it is at Christmas.
Praise God who acquits us, heals us, gives us power to overcome all things, and makes us perfectly new. Praise his son, our advocate who shares with us in all things including our suffering, who gives even his life to redeem ours. He teaches us by his own example what it means to become the children of the most high God.
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