During the yearly, seasonal celebrations of Christmas and Easter, I always feel a secret, quiet happiness for God that He did these things one time and will never, ever have to do them again!
While Jesus Christ was offering Himself on the cross,* He loudly proclaimed, “It is finished.” Done. Once and for all. As He breathed His last breath, the heavy curtain dividing the Holy of Holies from the rest of the temple was supernaturally torn from top to bottom,** vividly, in physical terms, depicting the removal of the spiritual boundary between God and man. The apostle Paul later explained:
“For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us,
that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” (2 Cor 5:21)
We were “unrighteous,” but now we have been made “righteous;” no longer God’s enemies, but through faith in this supreme sacrifice, His friends.
Wow.
Those of us who know Christ as our LORD and Savior, having put our trust in his death and resurrection for the forgiveness of our sins, celebrate the birth of Jesus with joy, because without the birth there could be no death and no resurrection and no forgiveness of our sins!
“Advent” - from God’s Perspective?
I don’t mean to presume, but think of it! Since the fall of man in the Garden of Eden, this plan of salvation had been in place. The plan was devised by God, and the price of the plan was all on Him. He would be the Father to send the Son to live among sinful men in a sinful world and then have to turn His back on Him while He offered Himself up on the cross to receive God’s judgement for sin, AND He was the Son of God on the cross being judged by the Father at the same time! (Thinking about all of this can make your head hurt!)
I have to think that, for God, this is centuries of anticipation of the ultimate agony to come. When Jesus Christ was born, I can imagine – in human terms – a dreadful feeling of sickness in the stomach of God. Here it is. We are on the threshold. The drums are beginning to roll.
And yet, for all of my imagining that He would be filled with dread, He did it with heroic passion! It was He who sent the angels to proclaim to the shepherds the tidings of great joy which would be for all people. In that, alone, I can sense a proud Hero – the Creator of the universe – thundering into time and space with all of the vigor, power, and every resource it would take to accomplish such an outlandish feat! A feat that by any other design would have been impossible!
For this, oh, how we love Him!
The apostle John would later write, “We love Him, because He first loved us.” - 1 John 4:19
When Jesus Christ was walking the earth, He said: “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.” - John 15:13
And so He did. There is no greater love - and no greater way to demonstrate that love - than the plan of salvation He put into play from the beginning of time and executed flawlessly.
“It is finished.”
And, so at Christmastime and at all times
“O come, let us adore Him, Christ, the LORD!”
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*John 10:18 “No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This command I have received from My Father.”
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