Christmas Is Good News Because You Are A Sinner (Matthew 1:21)
Central to the joy of Christmas is the realization that we are worthy of God’s justice. God the Son took on human flesh is not an insignificant fact. It is the type of story that would get everyone’s attention. But that is not why we celebrate it so much. We celebrate Christmas with all our might because God the Son took on human flesh to save us from our sins.
“She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”” (Matthew 1:21 ESV)
We celebrate Christmas like we do because we understand what it is that Jesus did for us. God the Son took on human flesh. And He did it for our redemption. That is the reason for the season. That is why we celebrate Christmas. God the Son came to us to “save His people from their sins.”
I have read Paradise Lost by John Milton a couple times. And in it, Milton, who was a Puritan author, attempted to portray the story of man’s rebellion against God and their redemption in an epic poem similar to the Illiad and the Odyssey. He used his imagination to think through things that we don’t often think through. And one of those places that encouraged me to use my imagination was the moment God the Son said He was going to go to Earth for the salvation of sinners. In Paradise Lost there was a commotion in Heaven and God the Son was lauded for agreeing to go to Earth for the salvation of sinners. It was beautiful. And it made me think. He made me imagine. He made me consider this as a reason for worship.
Why is it that Jesus left? Why did He go to Earth? Why did God the Son take on human flesh? He did it to save His people from their sins.
What did the angel tell Mary the reason for the name Jesus was? “…for He will save His people from their sins.”
You Are A Sinner
God created the world good. And He created people good an upright. Humans were, at creation, morally good. But things did not remain this way.
Adam sinned. We see this in Genesis 3. Adam sinned and the entirety of the human race was cast into corruption. And the description of our sinfulness is astounding. Look at what a few passages of Scripture on the topic.
for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, (Romans 3:23 ESV)
All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned–every one–to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. (Isaiah 53:6 ESV)
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? (Jeremiah 17:9 ESV)
Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned– (Romans 5:12 ESV)
For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. (James 2:10 ESV)
We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. (Isaiah 64:6 ESV)
The society we live in is constantly pointing us toward thinking that we are morally good. All we have to do is look inward and find the good. Therapists that are thoroughly secular in orientation expect you to talk, look deeply within, and then find the answers to life’s problems.
Disney movies constantly push this idea upon our children. “Follow your heart”, someone tells the hero. It seems to work in fantasy stories, but in real life it ends in disaster.
As Christians, we understand that to follow your heart is to follow something deceitful and wicked. Your innermost being is deceitfully wicked and you don’t even understand it. You can’t follow your heart into righteousness. It can’t get you there.
G.K. Chesterton once said,
“Original sin is the only doctrine that’s been empirically validated by 2,000 years of human history.”
And to that, I think we’d all agree. We don’t look around and notice that everyone is good. It is quite the opposite. We have children and it takes a good amount of work to make those little wretches into something that can live in civilized society.
We understand that the reason teaching is so hard today is because the lessons taught in the book “Lord of the Flies” are lived out within our society. Children are growing up without love and guidance from their parents and are out there figuring it out on their own. No wonder something akin to Simon’s Death or Piggy’s death in Lord of the Flies. Children left to their own devices grow up to be adults that are completely rebellious.
This is because people really are stained by the rebellion of Adam. We lock our doors at night because of the taint of sin. Some people carry firearms for the same reason. The depravity of mankind is not only found in Scripture, it’s something we witness every day.
And there is nothing that you can do to fix that yourself. Even if you figure out how to live in society without going to jail, you still have the stain of sin on your life. You are still eaten up with the disease of sin. It has still affected us to our core. And your life proves this every day.
How many days would you say have passed since you have not lied or stolen anything? How much time has gone by since you didn’t think about the hatred you have for someone or have lurid fantasies about someone?
I ask because it tells us something about you. It tells us that you are affected as well.
If I could play your thoughts over our television screens, I feel quite certain that you would run out of here in embarrassment. You and I both know the reason for that. Your thoughts just aren’t as pure as you convey to the rest of the world.
You have a problem.
And you cannot fix it.
But neither can anything else, save Christ.
Jesus Saves
The angel said that this baby was to be named Jesus because, He would “save His people from their sins”.
Jesus’s name in Hebrew is יְהוֹשׁוּעַ Joshua, Jeshua, or Jehoshua. The name literally means “Jehovah is salvation”. You may have noticed that Joshua and Jesus share the same name. And this is not accidental. It was under Joshua’s leadership that the people of Israel were brought to safety in the Promised Land. Jesus was given this name because He would save His people from their sins.
We have Jesus’s name in English, translated from the Greek, Ἰησοῦς. Because this is a Hebrew name, it means the same thing. It means “Jehovah is salvation”.
Why would this child be called Jesus? The angel says it in the text so we don’t have to guess, “for He will save His people from their sins”. The purpose given by the angel is salvation from sin. That baby that Mary would bear was here for the purpose of saving “His people from their sins”.
We celebrate Christmas because in it we see our salvation. God the Son was born of the Virgin Mary so that he could save us from our sin.
We have all sinned. All of us have rebelled against God. All of us have earned for ourselves the wrath and justice of God.
But salvation is found in Him.
That is what we celebrate at Christmas time. We were all doomed. But then God made a way for us to be saved and it was through Jesus Christ. It was through God the Son taking on human flesh that we would be saved. It was through God the Son living and dying for us.
We celebrate the fact that God the Son took on human flesh and dwelt among us. And He did this to save us from our sins.
I generally like the things that Jordan Peterson has to say. Of late he has spent more time speaking about Christianity and that has been troubling to me. He has a large male audience. He thinks about many things in a Christian way. But he doesn’t actually believe in things like the Virgin Birth and Resurrection of Christ. To him they are all interpreted as metaphors.
But the reality is that we have no hope if these things are just metaphors. If Jesus was not who the Scriptures say that He was and is then we are still lost and dead in our sins.
As Paul said in his letter to the Corinthians
“And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” (1 Corinthians 15:17 ESV)
If Jesus did not do, in history, the things that are found in Scripture then there is no hope for us. If these things were not true in history then we would have no hope.
And that is the beauty of the story here. We find in the story of Christmas something that happened in history. And because it really happened, we have real salvation and real hope.
For us today, we can have real and true forgiveness of sins because Jesus Christ really was God the Son, born of the Virgin Mary, who lived a perfect life, died for the forgiveness of sins and rose from the grave.
“And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”” (Acts 4:12 ESV)
The Response To This Message
There is no other name under heaven by which we can be saved. Jesus is the only way to be saved from sin. But how are we to respond?
There is only one response to this message and it is repentance and faith in Jesus Christ. Repentance is turning away from ruling your own life or having other rulers, and trusting in Jesus Christ.
That baby, born of a Virgin, lived a perfect life and accomplished all righteousness. He died on the cross and paid the punishment for sin. And He rose from the grave three days later. He did this so that you could be saved from sin.
Turn from ruling your own life and trust in Him.
R. Dwain Minor