My family grew up celebrating the day before Christmas Eve
as “Christmas Adam.” It was just an
extra day tacked on to our festivities in order to help us five children count
down the days to Christmas. We used to
say it was because Adam came before Eve in the Bible, so the day before Christmas
Eve was obviously Christmas Adam. As a 23-year-old
I wished my friend group a Merry Christmas Adam and quickly discovered how much
Christmas Adam was “not a real thing.”
This year though, I was thinking I wished it was a real
thing. I’ve been enjoying all the Christmas
festivities and Andrea traditions like sugar cookies, Christmas music car karaoke,
making a new craft décor, picking out an ornament that reflects the last year
for me, watching the token Hallmark movie and making homemade bread, cider and
eggnog. I’ve attended the parties and seen the lights at night. I intentionally drown in nostalgia this time
of the year. I did one thing more
intentionally this year than I’ve done in the other years.
I did an advent devotional in the mornings. One that didn’t just talk about the basics and
logistics of the birth story in the Bible but talked about the story as a
whole.
As I was thinking through some of these topics this month, I
kept coming back to the thought and topic of “the bad news of Christmas.”
The bad news of Christmas goes clear back to that garden at
the beginning, where the world was created and was good and perfect. It also goes back to the very story of Adam
and Eve, where choices were made and humanity broke as mankind was separated
from God.
See, the bad news of Christmas is that we ever needed it to
begin with. We celebrate the birth of a
baby, and sometimes edit out the messiness and the need for the birth to begin
with. To grasp the beauty of the story
and the celebration of the story, we have to realize the darkness of it first.
The darkness of a couple in a perfect garden who would have
known what it was like to literally live in paradise with God. They would’ve known the heartbreak of sin as
it changed their relationship with each other, with God and with mankind
forever. They experienced the devastation
of going from the garden to our broken world.
We have to realize the darkness of sin in ourselves and that we can’t do
anything to change that on our own.
There are times that we all discuss peace in general or
peace on earth as a desire. We would
like to have no war, no family fights, no broken homes. We would like to have everyone agree or at
least disagree civilly. We would like
true peace. The bad news is, this will
never actually be a real thing. We will
always mess it up. We will always sin
because ever since the garden it has been in our nature, deeply rooted. If we were the ones in the garden then we’d
be the ones making the wrong choice as well.
There was also a promise made in the garden though. In the very midst of the curse God promised a
savior would come.
In the Bible, the Old Testament continues to point towards a
Savior coming who will set up a kingdom and save them. But when He did come, it wasn’t what they
expected. It wasn’t to give them the
physical comfort of peace on earth or establish a lavish kingdom to rule them
all. It was to save us from the brokenness
and the sin. It was to redeem us and
restore us to a relationship with God as we could never do it ourselves.
When we recognize the complete story of how lost we are as
sinful humans; when we recognize the depths of the darkness in ourselves, then
we grasp the bad news. That we are uncapable
of saving ourselves. Which leads us to
the good part.
I love the Christmas pageants and Sunday school children reciting
the Christmas story. My heart is filled with
joy every time a little girl dressed as a sheep steals the baby doll from the
manger or all three wise men don’t make it down the aisle as one runs off to
the safety of mom and dad. It makes my heart
sing.
It should make all of our hearts sing as it made angels sing
in praise to God. It’s a beautiful story.
The story tells of how Jesus has come and is the only true
Peace on Earth. Not that he has come to
reform government and end suffering, but has come to redeem us and restore us
to God and be our peace in the midst of this broken world. As our hearts grasp the entire story, we can
see the beauty of God’s grace as our brokenness is covered completely and a
relationship restored by His finished work.
I pray that this year we could see the bad news of Christmas,
that leads us to the beautiful news of Christ being born. A birth worthy of angel choirs, cosmic changes
in the stars, and traveling kings; yet taking place in the humblest of places. Peace on Earth.
