20 December 2010
15 December 2010
Christmas Away From Home
The Christmas of 2002 was a memorable one for me. I had just turned 30 (quite a milestone) and was now celebrating Christmas in one of the southern provinces of Afghanistan. It was a humble affair involving a couple of small gifts shipped in from Heather and the kids and a few exotically flavored tootsie rolls that had been provided to us from morale packages sent from the states. Of course, I would rather have been home with my wife and kids, but there were people in need of help in Afghanistan. The distress of that country required many of us to be away from our own homes and present with the Afghani people. In order to help them, we had to be where they were and experience many of the same conditions they experienced.
This is the way Jesus spent the first Christmas: away from home. The book of Galatians tells us that, “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of woman, born under the law.” (v. 4.4) It is remarkable that Jesus should be born under the law, because in His native land there was no need for such laws. He came from a land profoundly at peace and free from conflict and strife. Satan had no claim to heaven, no servants in heaven, and no influence over the hearts and minds of its citizens. What use could heaven have for laws meant to impress men’s hearts with the fact of their tragic separation from God? There is no such separation in glory. In a place of absolute perfection and virtue, what need would there be for sacrifices meant to remove sin and its effects? It is a corrupt and broken world which needs laws in order to restrain the darker impulses of it inhabitants. This is the type of world into which the only begotten Son of God was born. The distress of our home required Christ to be away from His home so that He could be present with us. We needed Him to come to our land and engage the enemy that we were powerless to dethrone. Jesus is “God with us”. He came to be with us in our country and to fight to liberate us from our accuser, our curse and ourselves. We do well to realize that Christmas is the celebration of the deployment of God’s liberation army in the form of a little baby.
As we are at home with friends and family this year many of us will remember loved ones, relatives and acquaintances in the military who will spend this Christmas far from home. It is appropriate that we do so, but let us not forget our Savior who was deployed to a distant war torn land to engage in a war that would ultimately claim His life so that He could, “free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.” (Heb. 215) He left His home on Christmas so that we might be at home with Him forevermore. That is a gift worth celebrating.
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