Voice of Ukraine

From: Sergei Nakul (pastor of Big City Church in Kyiv and military chaplain)

1) Christmas shows that creation, the material world, by itself, is not sinful. Matter is not vicious and sinful. God, by becoming a real man, strikes a devastating blow on gnosticism, which sees the material world as something bad, vicious in its essence, and unpleasant to God. If that was the case, would God become defile by material flesh? Therefore Christianity, emphasizing this fact, struggled with gnostic heresies that claimed Jesus only had a visible, illusory body.

2) Christmas shows that God is not alienated and not far from creation. God, being man, brought Himself closer to creation. In the birth of the Son, in the God, the Creator meets face-to-face with creation. Yes, God is indescribably great, exalted, unfathomable and omnipotent (transcendent), yet at the same time close to us in his incarnation (immanent). The Creator did not leave creation, but came to him, entered to him in the body, and speaks to him the language of incarnation.

3) Christmas shows that the incarnation of God’s love is not an abstract expression, but literal. A love personified. Out of the excess of the heart the mouth speaks. God expressed His excess heart with the Word. And that word is Jesus! At Christmas, he showed us the heart of God. Christmas shows that the Creator loves his creation and desires to renew it by creating a new creation in Christ Jesus. This restoration encompasses the entire world building. It is not limited to the salvation of individually taken human souls and sending them to heaven, neglecting in study or practice the significance of the salvation of man in all fullness of soul and body.

4) Christmas showed us in Jesus true humanity, the true, whole image of God in all the glory of his purpose. Jesus is the mirror in which the broken mirrors of mankind can see the Father. He is the one who collects the fragments of the destroyed image of God in man and restores it.

5) Christmas shows that God is faithful to His promises. That which He prophesied through the prophets, He fulfilled at the birth of Jesus.

6) Without Christmas, there would be no perfect human life of Jesus in perfect obedience to the Father, no real suffering and death on the cross, no real burial of the body, and no real, literal bodily resurrection from dead bodies. In that case, there is no salvation, no confidence, and no hope. Christmas without the cross and resurrection is meaningless, cross and resurrection without Christmas are impossible. The Son of God is born as a man, truly literally, of flesh and blood of the body, with all physiological functions. In everything this child was like a man except sin. Only in the real, not the primary, illusory human body will He be able to save man in all completeness. There was no real, supernatural bodily birth of the Messiah, there was no then His real life in “our skin”, real death on the cross, there was no reality of the burial, and there was no reality in literal bodily resurrection. Then there is no hope for the resurrection of our bodies, but our salvation is illusory.

7. Because the purpose of Christmas can only be fulfilled by God who became a man. And this purpose is “He will save his people from their sins”.