I wasn't sure if I'd have the bandwidth to preach or not, but I'm thankful I did. And I knew that whenever I had the chance to preach again, I'd want to focus on the core of the Gospel. And what else lends itself so perfectly to the core of the Gospel?
The Christmas story is the Gospel.
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It is the season of Advent, when we spend the weeks leading up to Christmas Day preparing our hearts and minds to celebrate Christmas. Because of that, I want to focus on the Christmas story this morning and, specifically, I want to look at how the birth of Jesus fits into the greater Gospel story.
Christmas is when we celebrate that God kept His promise to send a Savior.
Because that’s exactly what the birth of Jesus Christ is: the arrival of a Savior. And we need a Savior because we need to be saved from something: our sin.
So although we typically read and remember the story of Jesus’s birth as we know it from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, the story of Christmas actually begins much, much earlier than that. In fact, the story of Christmas begins at the beginning of the Bible. To fully understand the birth of Jesus, we need to turn back to Genesis.
The story is familiar. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. After the work of creation, the first humans, Adam and Eve, enjoyed spending time with their Creator in the Garden of Eden. But by Genesis 3, everything changed. Adam and Eve listened to the deceptive serpent, and they sinned by disobeying God and eating fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which God had expressly forbidden them to do, and had even warned them that if they ate from it they would surely die. But they did not heed the instruction or the warning of God.
They ate their way into death.
This story teaches us how serious sin is, and that the consequences of sin are also serious.
The punishment for Adam and Eve’s sin was multi-layered. First of all, their eyes were opened to their nakedness, which before had been a beautiful and liberating experience, but now became their first experience with shame. Then, to Eve, God said she would only give birth through great pain. To Adam, God said he would only produce food from the ground through painful toil and by battling thorns and thistles. Lastly, and worse than everything else, they were kicked out of the Garden – they were separated from God.
Not only that, but Death entered the world. And it’s been that way ever since.
The sin of Adam and Eve – and its consequences – teaches us why we need a Savior. We need a Savior because sin is such a problem. And why is sin such a problem? Because sin separates us from God and leads to our eternal death.
As the apostle Paul says in Romans 6:23, “For the wages of sin is death.” Or as James says, in a way that perfectly captures what happened in the Garden of Eden, “Each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death” (James 1:14-15).
This is why we need a Savior. Sin still separates us from our holy God, and sin still leads to eternal death.
This is a problem, an enormous problem. At the very beginning of everything, humanity lost all hope. What were Adam and Eve to do? Truly, there was nothing they could do. Even though humanity was the one to create the problem, it was not a problem they could fix. No one but God Himself could fix the problem of sin and death.
But would the God who’d been betrayed by Adam and Eve’s disobedience be willing to solve the problem? Would the only One who could do something choose to do something? The answer is yes. Yes! God Himself, who created the heavens and earth and who loved humanity deeply and fiercely, stepped in to offer a solution. He didn’t solve the problem right away, but He did provide a promise right away. And this is where the Christmas story comes in.
The first time the Christmas story is mentioned in Scripture is in Genesis 3, when God is proclaiming judgment on Adam and Eve’s sin. It might seem a bit odd that this sad and hopeless narrative is when the coming Messiah is first mentioned, but what better time to announce joy and hope than when the world is completely falling apart?
Listen to this: When God speaks to the serpent who deceived Adam and Eve, He says, “Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel” (Genesis 3:14-15).
This is a prophecy about Jesus Christ, who would be the offspring of Eve many, many generations later and who would crush the enemy of God by making a way for humanity to be reconciled back to God and no longer be separated from Him.
So the first person to hear the good news of Christmas, the good news of a coming Messiah who would rescue us from our sin, wasn’t a person – it was an animal. It was the snake in the creation story.
Why is this significant? First, we need to understand what the serpent represents. The serpent in the Genesis story is described as being more crafty than all the other creatures. It was a deceiver, which we see clearly in the story. In the book of Revelation (12:9), we read about an “ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray.” Other translations say he “deceives the whole world.” Sound familiar? From beginning to end, the Bible makes a comparison between the serpent and Satan.
We also know the serpent represents Satan because the curse pronounced upon it in Genesis 3 makes it clear. The curse declares that there will be enmity between the snake and humanity. There will be hatred between them. But who would hate humanity, God’s most precious creation? The enemy of God would. The enemy of God – Satan – seeks to destroy humanity, so it’s easy to understand why there would be animosity between people and God’s enemy.
But there is another thing the snake represents: sin. Listen to what the apostle Paul says in Romans 3, as he quotes Scripture from the Old Testament: “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one. Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit. The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
Sin is like a venomous snake. It harms, cripples, even kills.
So let’s ask again: Why is it significant that the serpent in the creation story is the first one to hear the good news of Christmas? Because the coming Messiah, Jesus Christ our Savior, will crush the serpent’s head and defeat sin and Satan once for all. The serpent will not be victorious in the end. And he is told this at the very beginning. From the very beginning, we are told the end of the story. The serpent knows, and Adam and Eve and all of us, that in the end, God’s enemy will be defeated.
In the end, God wins.
Not only that, but Scripture uses the serpent to teach us something else. The serpent points not only to the salvific work of our Savior, but also the redeeming work of our Savior. Imagine this: there is hope for the snake! I don’t mean Satan or sin – there is no hope for them – but the actual reptile created by God that has had a bad reputation ever since the Fall in Genesis 3.
Stay with me – I know how much people can despise snakes, and rightfully so given how dangerous many of them are. But listen to what is prophesied in Isaiah 11. First, the prophet describes the coming Messiah: “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him – the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of power, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.” This passage is about Jesus. And further down it says this: “The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper’s nest. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain.”
Alongside the promise of a coming Savior is a promise that all the wrongs of the world will be righted, including the hatred between the snake and humanity.
This is what Jesus does: he turns everything around. He restores and renews and redeems. Once sin and Satan are completely defeated, the snake – the literal animal – will no longer represent evil. The snake will return to its original purpose, which is to be good. All of God’s creation, in the beginning, was declared good – even snakes. And when Christ our Redeemer restores all things to be as they should, even snakes will be good again. Their bad reputation will go away, and even a little child will delight in a snake.
The Lord will turn even a dreaded snake into a blessing. He will turn an enemy into a friend. That is how deep the redemptive work of Christ goes.
And so the curse in Genesis 3 simultaneously declares the good news of Christmas to come. In the same breath that the serpent is cursed, God also proclaims future blessing. In the midst of hopelessness, God promises hope.
So when we turn to the Gospels to read about the birth of Jesus, we know that a baby being born in Bethlehem is the middle of the story. Much has already happened by the time Mary gives birth. And the people of God have been waiting millennia to see the promised Messiah come.
To be clear, God did not abandon humanity until such a time when the Savior would come. On the contrary, He guided them and blessed them and brought them into a covenant with Him in order to show them a godly and righteous way to live while they waited for the offspring of Eve to come and do His good work.
As we know from reading the Old Testament, sometimes people followed the Lord well, and many times they did not. If anything, the time period from the Fall to the birth of Jesus was a fairly constant reminder of humanity’s need to be rescued from sin.
It was a long, long time of waiting for the promised Messiah to come.
But He did come. Jesus was born, thus fulfilling God’s promise to send a Savior.
But he did not come as anyone expected. Once again, God turned everything around.
One would think that the Son of God would be born in a palace surrounded by comfort, but instead He was born in a lowly stable to a young, poor mother.
One would think that the Messiah’s arrival would be celebrated by those anxiously awaiting his coming, but the chief priests and teachers of the law refused to go and see Him after they learned of his arrival from the wise men; the very people who’ve carefully studied the Scriptures and the prophecies and who knew better than anyone the circumstances under which the Messiah would come did not go the relatively short nine kilometers from Jerusalem to Bethlehem to see the newborn king. Instead, God invited a group of local shepherds from the surrounding hills and foreign astrologers from the East to welcome the child and worship Him.
One would think that when the king of the land hears that the true King of the Jews has been born, he would rejoice and seek Him out to worship Him. Instead, King Herod was disturbed at the news and secretly planned to seek Him out and kill Him, which led to the massacre of all the boys in Bethlehem two years old and under.
Very little of this story makes sense. The arrival of the promised Savior came under odd and confusing circumstances at best. But if there is Good News in the fact that Jesus came, there is also Good News in the way Jesus came.
You see, Jesus is a Savior for all. The angel declared it in Luke 2: “I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David, a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.”
Jesus is not only for the kings and queens of the earth who hold royal prestige and honor. He is not only for the religious leaders who have devoted their lives to knowing Scripture and walking in the ways of God. Jesus is for them, to be sure. He is for every so-called special person, even those who reject Him in the end like Herod and the chief priests did.
But Jesus is also for the common men and women of the earth. He is for the people who know next to nothing about Him. He is for the shepherds among us, and the foreigners who don’t even know His name. The Messiah is for all people. All people are welcome to come and worship, to come and be saved.
We should note how being in the presence of the King of Kings impacted the people who met Him: Jesus turned shepherds into evangelists and astrologers into worshipers.
The Gospel of Luke says, “When the angels had left the shepherds and gone into heaven, they said to one another, ‘Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.’ So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them.”
The Gospel of Matthew says, “When the Magi saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold and of incense and of myrrh.”
Being in the presence of Jesus has the power to transform us. It compels us to fall down and worship and to share the Good News with others.
And it is Good News indeed! Christ has come to save us from our sins! Even the name Jesus means, “The Lord saves.”
So at Christmas we celebrate that God kept His promise to send a Savior. And not only did the Savior come, but He lived a life of complete obedience to God the Father and eventually sacrificed Himself on the cross as the Lamb of God. That sacrifice has secured our salvation, if we only choose to accept it.
“For the wages of sin is death,” Paul says – our sin has earned us eternal death – but the second part of that verse says this: “but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Our salvation, bought by the blood of Jesus Christ, is a gift. And the gift is eternal life. We were previously slated for eternal death, but Christ’s work on the cross has granted us eternal life.
As Paul says elsewhere in Colossians, “He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross” (2:13b-15).
One might say He crushed the serpent’s head.
Through His death on the cross, Jesus Christ defeated Death once and for all. We are no longer condemned to eternal death. “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? … But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:55, 57).
The consequence to sin in the Garden of Eden – separation from God, and death – has been reversed through Jesus Christ our Lord. He has turned everything around.
And because we have seen that He is a God who keeps His promises, let us rejoice and remain hopeful for another promise He has made, which is that Jesus will come back again and make everything right once and for all.
So as we prepare our hearts and minds to celebrate Christmas this year, let me join with the writer of Hebrews and appeal to you with this final word: “Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for He who promised is faithful” (Hebrews 10:23).
Christmas is when we celebrate that God kept His promise to send a Savior.
Because that’s exactly what the birth of Jesus Christ is: the arrival of a Savior. And we need a Savior because we need to be saved from something: our sin.
So although we typically read and remember the story of Jesus’s birth as we know it from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, the story of Christmas actually begins much, much earlier than that. In fact, the story of Christmas begins at the beginning of the Bible. To fully understand the birth of Jesus, we need to turn back to Genesis.
The story is familiar. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. After the work of creation, the first humans, Adam and Eve, enjoyed spending time with their Creator in the Garden of Eden. But by Genesis 3, everything changed. Adam and Eve listened to the deceptive serpent, and they sinned by disobeying God and eating fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which God had expressly forbidden them to do, and had even warned them that if they ate from it they would surely die. But they did not heed the instruction or the warning of God.
They ate their way into death.
This story teaches us how serious sin is, and that the consequences of sin are also serious.
The punishment for Adam and Eve’s sin was multi-layered. First of all, their eyes were opened to their nakedness, which before had been a beautiful and liberating experience, but now became their first experience with shame. Then, to Eve, God said she would only give birth through great pain. To Adam, God said he would only produce food from the ground through painful toil and by battling thorns and thistles. Lastly, and worse than everything else, they were kicked out of the Garden – they were separated from God.
Not only that, but Death entered the world. And it’s been that way ever since.
The sin of Adam and Eve – and its consequences – teaches us why we need a Savior. We need a Savior because sin is such a problem. And why is sin such a problem? Because sin separates us from God and leads to our eternal death.
As the apostle Paul says in Romans 6:23, “For the wages of sin is death.” Or as James says, in a way that perfectly captures what happened in the Garden of Eden, “Each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death” (James 1:14-15).
This is why we need a Savior. Sin still separates us from our holy God, and sin still leads to eternal death.
This is a problem, an enormous problem. At the very beginning of everything, humanity lost all hope. What were Adam and Eve to do? Truly, there was nothing they could do. Even though humanity was the one to create the problem, it was not a problem they could fix. No one but God Himself could fix the problem of sin and death.
But would the God who’d been betrayed by Adam and Eve’s disobedience be willing to solve the problem? Would the only One who could do something choose to do something? The answer is yes. Yes! God Himself, who created the heavens and earth and who loved humanity deeply and fiercely, stepped in to offer a solution. He didn’t solve the problem right away, but He did provide a promise right away. And this is where the Christmas story comes in.
The first time the Christmas story is mentioned in Scripture is in Genesis 3, when God is proclaiming judgment on Adam and Eve’s sin. It might seem a bit odd that this sad and hopeless narrative is when the coming Messiah is first mentioned, but what better time to announce joy and hope than when the world is completely falling apart?
Listen to this: When God speaks to the serpent who deceived Adam and Eve, He says, “Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel” (Genesis 3:14-15).
This is a prophecy about Jesus Christ, who would be the offspring of Eve many, many generations later and who would crush the enemy of God by making a way for humanity to be reconciled back to God and no longer be separated from Him.
So the first person to hear the good news of Christmas, the good news of a coming Messiah who would rescue us from our sin, wasn’t a person – it was an animal. It was the snake in the creation story.
Why is this significant? First, we need to understand what the serpent represents. The serpent in the Genesis story is described as being more crafty than all the other creatures. It was a deceiver, which we see clearly in the story. In the book of Revelation (12:9), we read about an “ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray.” Other translations say he “deceives the whole world.” Sound familiar? From beginning to end, the Bible makes a comparison between the serpent and Satan.
We also know the serpent represents Satan because the curse pronounced upon it in Genesis 3 makes it clear. The curse declares that there will be enmity between the snake and humanity. There will be hatred between them. But who would hate humanity, God’s most precious creation? The enemy of God would. The enemy of God – Satan – seeks to destroy humanity, so it’s easy to understand why there would be animosity between people and God’s enemy.
But there is another thing the snake represents: sin. Listen to what the apostle Paul says in Romans 3, as he quotes Scripture from the Old Testament: “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one. Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit. The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
Sin is like a venomous snake. It harms, cripples, even kills.
So let’s ask again: Why is it significant that the serpent in the creation story is the first one to hear the good news of Christmas? Because the coming Messiah, Jesus Christ our Savior, will crush the serpent’s head and defeat sin and Satan once for all. The serpent will not be victorious in the end. And he is told this at the very beginning. From the very beginning, we are told the end of the story. The serpent knows, and Adam and Eve and all of us, that in the end, God’s enemy will be defeated.
In the end, God wins.
Not only that, but Scripture uses the serpent to teach us something else. The serpent points not only to the salvific work of our Savior, but also the redeeming work of our Savior. Imagine this: there is hope for the snake! I don’t mean Satan or sin – there is no hope for them – but the actual reptile created by God that has had a bad reputation ever since the Fall in Genesis 3.
Stay with me – I know how much people can despise snakes, and rightfully so given how dangerous many of them are. But listen to what is prophesied in Isaiah 11. First, the prophet describes the coming Messiah: “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him – the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of power, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.” This passage is about Jesus. And further down it says this: “The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper’s nest. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain.”
Alongside the promise of a coming Savior is a promise that all the wrongs of the world will be righted, including the hatred between the snake and humanity.
This is what Jesus does: he turns everything around. He restores and renews and redeems. Once sin and Satan are completely defeated, the snake – the literal animal – will no longer represent evil. The snake will return to its original purpose, which is to be good. All of God’s creation, in the beginning, was declared good – even snakes. And when Christ our Redeemer restores all things to be as they should, even snakes will be good again. Their bad reputation will go away, and even a little child will delight in a snake.
The Lord will turn even a dreaded snake into a blessing. He will turn an enemy into a friend. That is how deep the redemptive work of Christ goes.
And so the curse in Genesis 3 simultaneously declares the good news of Christmas to come. In the same breath that the serpent is cursed, God also proclaims future blessing. In the midst of hopelessness, God promises hope.
So when we turn to the Gospels to read about the birth of Jesus, we know that a baby being born in Bethlehem is the middle of the story. Much has already happened by the time Mary gives birth. And the people of God have been waiting millennia to see the promised Messiah come.
To be clear, God did not abandon humanity until such a time when the Savior would come. On the contrary, He guided them and blessed them and brought them into a covenant with Him in order to show them a godly and righteous way to live while they waited for the offspring of Eve to come and do His good work.
As we know from reading the Old Testament, sometimes people followed the Lord well, and many times they did not. If anything, the time period from the Fall to the birth of Jesus was a fairly constant reminder of humanity’s need to be rescued from sin.
It was a long, long time of waiting for the promised Messiah to come.
But He did come. Jesus was born, thus fulfilling God’s promise to send a Savior.
But he did not come as anyone expected. Once again, God turned everything around.
One would think that the Son of God would be born in a palace surrounded by comfort, but instead He was born in a lowly stable to a young, poor mother.
One would think that the Messiah’s arrival would be celebrated by those anxiously awaiting his coming, but the chief priests and teachers of the law refused to go and see Him after they learned of his arrival from the wise men; the very people who’ve carefully studied the Scriptures and the prophecies and who knew better than anyone the circumstances under which the Messiah would come did not go the relatively short nine kilometers from Jerusalem to Bethlehem to see the newborn king. Instead, God invited a group of local shepherds from the surrounding hills and foreign astrologers from the East to welcome the child and worship Him.
One would think that when the king of the land hears that the true King of the Jews has been born, he would rejoice and seek Him out to worship Him. Instead, King Herod was disturbed at the news and secretly planned to seek Him out and kill Him, which led to the massacre of all the boys in Bethlehem two years old and under.
Very little of this story makes sense. The arrival of the promised Savior came under odd and confusing circumstances at best. But if there is Good News in the fact that Jesus came, there is also Good News in the way Jesus came.
You see, Jesus is a Savior for all. The angel declared it in Luke 2: “I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David, a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.”
Jesus is not only for the kings and queens of the earth who hold royal prestige and honor. He is not only for the religious leaders who have devoted their lives to knowing Scripture and walking in the ways of God. Jesus is for them, to be sure. He is for every so-called special person, even those who reject Him in the end like Herod and the chief priests did.
But Jesus is also for the common men and women of the earth. He is for the people who know next to nothing about Him. He is for the shepherds among us, and the foreigners who don’t even know His name. The Messiah is for all people. All people are welcome to come and worship, to come and be saved.
We should note how being in the presence of the King of Kings impacted the people who met Him: Jesus turned shepherds into evangelists and astrologers into worshipers.
The Gospel of Luke says, “When the angels had left the shepherds and gone into heaven, they said to one another, ‘Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.’ So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them.”
The Gospel of Matthew says, “When the Magi saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold and of incense and of myrrh.”
Being in the presence of Jesus has the power to transform us. It compels us to fall down and worship and to share the Good News with others.
And it is Good News indeed! Christ has come to save us from our sins! Even the name Jesus means, “The Lord saves.”
So at Christmas we celebrate that God kept His promise to send a Savior. And not only did the Savior come, but He lived a life of complete obedience to God the Father and eventually sacrificed Himself on the cross as the Lamb of God. That sacrifice has secured our salvation, if we only choose to accept it.
“For the wages of sin is death,” Paul says – our sin has earned us eternal death – but the second part of that verse says this: “but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Our salvation, bought by the blood of Jesus Christ, is a gift. And the gift is eternal life. We were previously slated for eternal death, but Christ’s work on the cross has granted us eternal life.
As Paul says elsewhere in Colossians, “He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross” (2:13b-15).
One might say He crushed the serpent’s head.
Through His death on the cross, Jesus Christ defeated Death once and for all. We are no longer condemned to eternal death. “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? … But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:55, 57).
The consequence to sin in the Garden of Eden – separation from God, and death – has been reversed through Jesus Christ our Lord. He has turned everything around.
And because we have seen that He is a God who keeps His promises, let us rejoice and remain hopeful for another promise He has made, which is that Jesus will come back again and make everything right once and for all.
So as we prepare our hearts and minds to celebrate Christmas this year, let me join with the writer of Hebrews and appeal to you with this final word: “Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for He who promised is faithful” (Hebrews 10:23).
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