We always experience a vicarious thrill when we read of a difficult and successful rescue operation—of men in an open boat at sea, of miners trapped deep underground, of a mountain climber dangling by a rope, or a child in a well. How much greater the thrill and thanksgiving on the part of the rescued ones themselves, those who had felt the nearness of death.
The greatest rescue operation of the ages began on the first Christmas so long ago. Its real significance has been obscured by man-made interpretations and by the secularization and commercialization of a world ignorant of or indifferent to the event.
The first advent must be seen in terms of God’s love and man’s predicament. This was not a gesture of sentiment. It was not a demonstration of humanitarian concern. It was an actual rescue, God’s intervention in human history to save a sinning and lost humanity.
This intervention must be seen in its totality. True, at Christmas we celebrate the human birthday of the Son of God; but this was only one phase of the amazing act of divine love. As Jesus grew to manhood, he demonstrated his complete humanity, and at the same time his miraculous and supernatural powers testified of his deity. Later came his atoning death on the cross and his resurrection, followed by his ascension and his promise to return. All these aspects should be recognized in our celebration of Christmas.
God’s loving provision for the redemption of man is like a many-faceted gem. We find that Christmas means much more to us as we consider it in all its amazing detail.
First, we might say that there is involved an act of interposition. God, in the person of his Son, interposed himself between the penitent sinner and judgment. I have a friend who, while traveling the Burma Road in World War II, was next to a buddy who inadvertently dropped a hand grenade from his pack. As it hit the ground, the pin was knocked out. All around, men leaped away from the danger. But the one from whose pack it had fallen threw himself over the grenade, giving his life to save the lives of his buddies. Christ’s act of coming between our souls and certain judgment is expressed in a well-known hymn: “He to rescue me from danger interposed his precious blood.”
The divine rescue operation also involves reclamation. Most of us have seen the results of projects in which land is brought back into profitable use, or in which derelicts whose usefulness seemed over are reclaimed and restored. Jesus did just that for people, reclaiming them, restoring them to the place for which they were created, before sin had its devastating effect.
At the very heart of our Lord’s invasion of time is his work of redemption. Sold out to sin and dominated by Satan, man in trying to reform himself at best falls far short of the mark. Only God’s Son himself could truly redeem him. The price of our redemption was Christ’s own shed blood. No, the “blood atonement” is not the only facet of the atonement; but without it there is no redemption.
Then there is the strangely glorious facet of imputation. The Apostle Paul states this truth repeatedly in the fourth chapter of Romans. Even as Abraham’s faith in God was imputed to him as righteousness, so through our faith in God’s Son his righteousness is imputed to us. He no longer sees us as sinners; we are wearing the cloak of Christ’s righteousness. The Chinese character for “righteousness” is the character that means “lamb” set above the character for the personal pronoun “me”—a marvelous illustration of the fact that when God looks upon a person who believes in his Son he sees, not sin, but the righteousness of Christ!
There is also the facet of sacrifice. The Old Testament sacrifices were symbolic of the coming Saviour. The Prophet Isaiah uses this concept of our Lord’s sacrifice: “He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is dumb, so he opened not-his mouth” (Isa. 53:7). John the Baptist exclaimed when he saw Jesus, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world”! (John 1:29). Some twenty-seven times in the Book of the Revelation the figure of the Christ triumphant is that of the Lamb.
Permeating every aspect of our Lord’s intervention in time and human history is love—God’s love for the world, so great that it caused him to give his Son; Christ’s love, which made him a willing sacrifice.
The Christmas story leads to the idea of resuscitation. Those who work with victims of drowning, electric shock, or other accidents that cause breathing to cease and the heart to stop beating sometimes come to the point when they know that further efforts are futile, that the victim is dead. Christ came into the world to resuscitate those who are spiritually dead—dead and separated from God by sin. Paul speaks of “the God in whom [Abraham] believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom. 4:17). “Yield yourselves to God,” he writes, “as men who have been brought from death to life …” (6:13b); and again, “God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ …” (Eph. 2:4, 5). Life from death! Little wonder that the angels said, “Glory to God in the highest!”
Finally, this work of grace on man’s behalf includes illumination, in which the eyes of the spiritually blind are opened and they turn from darkness to light; freedom, release from the power of Satan; forgiveness for our sins, the things that have offended and grieved God; and cancellation, so that in God’s sight it is as though we had never sinned.
Christmas brought to us a revelation of God as he really is. We read of Christ: “He is the image of the invisible God.… For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.… In him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col 1:15, 19; 2:9).
Christmas is the start of the most thrilling rescue story of all time. And for all who accept God’s gracious offer of rescue, “there is therefore now no condemnation.… For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do …” (Rom. 8:1, 3).
This is the reason for a truly “Merry Christmas”!
