Greetings to you, one and all, and I hope you have sufficiently ransacked the Big Box store for those must-have last-minute Christmas purchases, so that you and your people can swamp those same stores again after Christmas with your returns and exchanges.
Today, I’ll bring you a word from a theologian, Professor J. I. Packer, in a statement that amazed me when I first read it almost 50 years ago. Dr. Packer’s words continue to clarify to me today one of the great mysteries of the Bible. This is from Packer’s book Knowing God, copyright 1973. It is in the chapter called God Incarnate, page 45.
“…the resurrection [of Jesus… seems] to many a stumbling-block. How, they ask, can we believe that Jesus rose physically from the dead? Granted, it is hard to deny that the tomb was empty — but surely the difficulty of believing that Jesus emerged from it into unending bodily life is even greater?
But in fact the real difficulty, because the supreme mystery with which the gospel confronts us, does not lie here at all. It lies, not in the Good Friday message of atonement, nor in the Easter message of resurrection, but in the Christmas message of incarnation.
The really staggering Christian claim is that Jesus of Nazareth was God made man… It is here in the thing that happened at the first Christmas, that the profoundest and most unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie.
“The Word was made flesh” (John 1:14); God became man; the divine Son became a Jew; the Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, unable to do more than lie and stare and wriggle and make noises, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child.
And there was no illusion or deception in this: the babyhood of the Son of God was a reality. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the incarnation.
This is the real stumbling-block in Christianity… Once the incarnation is grasped as a reality, these other difficulties dissolve…
It is not strange that He, the author of life, should rise from the dead. If He was truly the Son of God, is it much more startling that He should die than that He should rise again…
The incarnation is in itself an unfathomable mystery, but it makes sense of everything else that the New Testament contains.
And that’s what I have to say about that, or at least, that’s what J. I. Packer has to say about that.
Meanwhile, enjoy your Christmas weekend! We never know how many more we will get!
Don’t miss the Santa Claus interview on Monday, Christmas morning. We will not only air the interview but also some “Santa Backstage” footage you won’t want to miss.
I don’t think we’ll post anything else next week, so look for us again after New Year’s.
Merry Christmas!
Christmas Message 2023