“Christ” comes from the Greek word meaning “Anointed One”, or one set apart by God for a special purpose. This is the title given to Jesus in the New Testament of the Bible. In the Old Testament, he is called the “Messiah”, a Hebrew word meaning the same thing. In the Old Testament, before Jesus came to earth, the people who followed their Creator, God, were told to expect this Messiah who would bring salvation and set them free. Throughout history, up until the time that Jesus arrived, many people believed this savior sent from Heaven would give them political freedom – that He would become their powerful king and destroy their enemies and bring them physical peace on earth.
But when Jesus arrived, He came as a humble baby. Born of God and woman, He was both fully divine and fully human. His arrival was only known by a few people – His mother and adopted father, Mary and Joseph, and some despised and lowly shepherds on the hillside outside of Bethlehem to whom God’s angels appeared to communicate the news. A couple of years later, the news was also discovered by some pagan astrologers, far from Israel, who traveled a long distance to find the One a very special star seemed to be indicating was the fulfilled prophecy for the king who would be the Messiah.
For the next 33 years that He walked the earth, Jesus Christ revealed His true mission. He hadn’t come to be a political ruler. He didn’t come to remove the burdens caused by a tyrannical government. He came to remove the much deeper, more powerful burdens of sin and death. And His victory over those enemies would bring salvation to all people, because all were under their tyrannical rule.
You see, from the beginning of time, God was always primarily concerned about our hearts, that we would be committed to Him and His ways and experience the blessings found in uninhibited relationship with Him. That was how things were at the beginning. Adam and Eve were placed in the perfect Garden of Eden. God’s very presence and all of His life-giving blessings were at their fingertips. However, those blessings were never forced upon them. Humans were given a unique ability not found in anything else in God’s good creation – the ability to choose.
They were allowed to eat of any tree in the garden, except for one: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God told them that if they were to eat of it, they would die. The tree represented the existence of the opposite of “good”. “Evil”, too, could be introduced into the world, but not because God desired it – it would only come if humans desired it.
And unfortunately, they did. Adam and Eve allowed themselves to be deceived into thinking God’s Word didn’t matter, and that somehow doing things their way would make their lives even better – they would gain some sort of supernatural power that would make them equal to God.
But in doing so, they also went completely against the natural order of things. The entire world became twisted – corrupted – in an instant. They had earlier been instructed to have dominion over the earth and to rule it for God. Instead, they wanted to take God’s place. However, a created being can never be the same as the eternally existing Creator. Humans created a new, upside-down world, now infused with sin.
But in God’s mercy, He had a plan to eventually turn the world right side up again. And He would start in the very place where sin had first entered – the human heart.
THAT is why Jesus came. As the “Christ”, His special purpose was to “save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21).
Many didn’t understand it at the time. Many turned against Him because He didn’t prove to be the political savior they thought He would be. Others turned against Him because they didn’t like that He was questioning their motives, revealing their corrupt hearts, and challenging their long-held traditions and beliefs.
But there were many who came to understand the importance of Jesus’s true mission. He called people to repentance – to turn from the sin that kept their hearts imprisoned in hopeless darkness – and to receive the forgiveness that would truly set them free by restoring them to relationship with God.
The gift Jesus Christ came to bring was not primarily or ultimately a better life on this earth. After all, we are all going to die, and such a gift would only be temporary anyway. Instead, He came to bring eternal life. He willingly subjected Himself to execution on a Roman cross in that first century A.D. He had not sinned, so the execution was not justified in human terms. But it was because He had not sinned, and because His kingdom was not of this world (see John 18:36) but of Heaven, that He could also overcome the power of sin on earth. Jesus Christ, as the Son of God, also had the power to overcome death. When He resurrected from the grave, He restored to us the possibility of, and the way to, eternal life.
This possibility was never something that we could have created for ourselves. We are born as slaves to sin and are heading to a dead end, but God provided a gracious gift in Jesus Christ. By putting our faith and trust in Him and His saving work, we can have eternal life (see Romans 6:23) in an everlasting Kingdom where there will be no more effects of sin.
In that day, “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away” (Revelation 21:4).
Jesus, the Christ, came with the mission to rescue us from sin and death. That is the reason for CHRISTmas, and the reason we can celebrate.