Bible Studies

Joyfully Celebrating The Incarnation Part 1

by Doug Laird 
12/11/24
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Perhaps you are among the many who are going through a rough patch along the road of life with a heavy heart this holiday season. Maybe it’s the death of a loved one. Maybe it’s a serious health issue, or the weariness of dealing with a chronic condition. Maybe it’s the breakup of a marriage, personal relationship, friendship, or the pain of dealing with a rebellious son or daughter. Maybe it’s the loneliness that many elderly experience. Maybe it’s the result our own negative choices or the negative choices made by those around us finally catching up with us. Maybe it’s a financial problem.

Whatever the cause, it has drained you of a spirit of celebration. The joy that you see others having only seems to adds salt to your open wound.

As a spiritual warrior, you have been taken captive and removed from the battlefield of spiritual warfare that once gave you purpose and meaning to your daily life.

You are disappointed, or perhaps even angry with God, over what He has sent or allowed to take place.

As a spiritual POW, you pose no threat to the devil’s agenda, and may even be used as a good source of propaganda to spread skepticism about the significance of following Christ.

At best, you are going through the motions, keeping pace, doing what God and people expect of you, but deep down inside you are among the walking wounded, struggling to see any light at the end of the tunnel.

Like the relentless pounding of the waves on a shoreline, one would just be getting back up on his or her feet when hit again. It seems like a “good” period would be one in which nothing else went wrong.

If so, this holiday presentation is especially dedicated to you.

I have been there and done that.

In my early 20’s, I experienced the separate passing on of both parents, less than two years apart. The first holiday season without that missing person can be difficult.

During one Holiday Season, within that five-year stretch of time, my wife and I experienced the loss of a stillborn son at the end of what was thought to have been a “normal,” uncomplicated, full term, 9 month pregnancy.

In my thirty years in law enforcement, I saw the best and the worst examples of what human beings are capable of doing to themselves and others, spending more than one holiday at the scene of a suicide, fatal accident, or disaster.

In the midst of our hurt, pain, and loss, it is natural to cry out and ask God where was He when such and such a thing happened that brought such pain.

The sobering answer is that He was is in the same place where He was when His one and only Son was crucified in our behalf.

Whatever the cause of our grief may be, be it the result of self-induced misery from our own negative decisions, what the negative choices that other people in our personal periphery have made, or what uninvited adversity that God has sent or allowed to take place (1), God had a reason for sending or allowing it to take place, and has a coping solution for us to use.

Distractions in the realm of spiritual warfare can present themselves in the form of prosperity or suffering, as either one can be used to take one’s focus away from God and or the things of God, and place it on the prosperity or suffering.

Regardless of what distractions we have to deal with, Christians have a great reason for celebrating the incarnation (taking on human form) of God the Son.

THIS  is what the “joy” of the Holiday Season (and all year long) is all about.

Celebrating this joy has got nothing to do with our present good or bad earthly circumstances. In fact, the hope that comes from receiving God’s Christmas gift to us, is what sustains us during times of great loss, adversity, and disappointments, here on Earth.

God the Son, like God the Father, and God the Holy Spirit, has always been in existence (2).

The “beginning” spoken of in John 1: 2, as in the case of the “beginning” spoken of in Genesis 1: 1, is not talking about the start of Eternity past, as Eternity, like all three Members of the Triune Godhead, had no starting point.

In both cases, the beginning is talking about the start of specific events that pertain to the creation, the fall, and orthe salvation of Man.

In our self-centered arrogance, it hard for Man to imagine a time when the physical universe, as we now know it to be, and Man, did not yet exist.

Jesus spoke of the glory that He shared in Eternity past with God the Father BEFORE before the creation of the world took place (3).

The incarnation (taking on human bodily form) of God the Son, in order to provide for the salvation of Fallen Man, is what Christmas, and the celebration of it, is all about.

End of Part One

(1) Job 2: 10 (2) John 1:1-5 (3) John 17: 5