For Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, we will have no posts about economics, politics, or cultural woes. We will just contemplate and celebrate the incarnation of God.
I always find it odd that so many Christians, even, tend to think of God as an abstraction or as someone gazing down from up above. As if He had not come down from Heaven to share our humanness, to suffer with us, to redeem us.
It makes a huge difference to believe in a God who became man. It’s how Christians are different from Muslims and from Deists. Consider the problem of evil. How could God allow so many evils and so much pain in the world? This is a stumbling block to non-believers, and even Christians, of course, often struggle with this questions. But the question assumes a particular view of God, that He is purely transcendent and detached from His creation. But if God became flesh in Jesus Christ, this complicates the question profoundly. This is a God who Himself suffered at the hands of evil men, who Himself experienced physical and emotional pain, who on the Cross was tortured, abandoned, and despaired. More than that, He bore the full brunt and consequences of human evil. He also bore the afflictions of the whole world throughout history. Jesus, true God and true Man, is Immanuel, “God with us.”