Why Do We Celebrate?

Why Do We Celebrate?

The day has been lost to history perhaps this was God’s plan so that we would not worship the day. Nevertheless, Christians have chosen to celebrate Christ’s birth on December 25^th. Oh there are those that say, why should we celebrate the birth of Christ on a day that was for celebrating the pagan holiday dedicated to the return of the sun? The answer is really quite simple, so let’s take a quick look.

When God (the pre-incarnate Christ) created the world (John 1:1-3; Hebrews 1:1; Colossians 1:15-17) He did so knowing full well that mankind would sin, separate themselves from their creator. We see this played out upon the pages of sacred Scripture in Genesis chapter three where it tells of Adam and Eve running from God after they discovered that they had broken that trust between them and God by eating of the fruit from the tree of The Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Yet knowing all this, the triune Godhead still chose to create this earth and the crowning jewel of this creation was the Pre-incarnate Christ personally coming down from heaven and forming mankind from the dust of the earth and then breathing into Adam the breath of life (Genesis 2:7).

God clearly stated the penalty for sin was death and when Adam and Eve sinned they could have suffered instant death, but God chose another way. He chose the way of mercy, a concept that heretofore had never before been shown or acted upon. This was a new concept for all of heaven and proved the claims made by Satan that God was unfair and unjust were unfounded.

In the heart of this tragic story as given in Genesis chapter 3 of Genesis is a promise, a promise of hope. To Adam and Eve, who were looking at a life separated from their creator and God. This simple text nestled in the heart of Genesis 3 is the reason we all celebrate Christmas, it is the reason for the season of celebration.

The passage actually starts one verse before the promise, so let’s look at these two verses. “So the LORD God said to the serpent: ‘Because you have done this, You are cursed more than all cattle, and more than every beat of the field; On your belly you shall go, and you shall eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between your seed and her (the decendants of Eve or a second way to look at it is God’s true church) Seed: He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel’” (Genesis 3:14-15).

Let’s look at the word “Seed” for just a moment. Throughout scripture, seed refers to the descendants of someone. In the Case of Abraham, his seed (Isaac) and Isaacs children and their children are all seed of Abraham, until we finally have the children of Israel.

But nestled within verse 15 is the word seed and also Seed. Why would one be capitalized and the other is not? Is it possible that the one which is capitalized referred to a specific person that was born through the descendants of Adam and Eve through the line of Seth? This is absolutely what is being implied in the text and with the use of the capitalized S. All through sacred history, references to God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are capitalized and so this promise of a Seed that is coming is referring to One that is coming that will eventually crush the head of the one who is the cause of all this pain and suffering, death and destruction that has been in this world since Eve and then Adam first fell under the curse of sin.

God promised a descendant of Adam, through the line of Seth, Noah, Shem, Abraham, Jacob, Judah, and then David the King, would eventually be born and that this would be the promised one as foretold in Genesis 3:15. This is the reason we celebrate the birth of Christ, the gift from heaven that came born as a baby, that someday the results of sin, will be eradicated from this earth. But it all had to start with a Baby being born in the town of Bethlehem, who was a descendant of David the King, the descendant of Judah, the son of Jacob, the son of Isaac the son of Abraham the descendant of Shem the son of Noah, the descendant of Seth the son of Adam who was created in the likeness of God.

Jesus took on the likeness of sinful man that he could restore that which was lost, not because of His birth, but because of His sinless life and sacrifice on the cross that would not have been possible if he had not been given as a gift to mankind, of being born as a baby, that we through him might gain eternal life which was lost in the garden home of our first parents.