A Christmas Surprise (A Christmas Eve Message)

"A Christmas Surprise"

December 24, 2010: Christmas Eve

And so the familiar cast is assembled once again: minister, congregation, guests, shepherds, angels, magi, Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, asleep in a manger, just as we have been told...over and over and over again. What could be more familiar than Christmas? I know it's beautiful and all—but year after year, it's all the same: the same decorations, the same carols, and the same old story. There's nothing surprising here. All the dramatic wrinkles have been ironed out in the retelling of it.

Oh no! Mary and Joseph must travel to Bethlehem while she is "great with child"? Oh no! There’s no room at the inn? Oh no! Herod doesn't really want to worship the child? We’re no longer surprised, are we? We've heard it all before...many, many times. For all too many of us, it's simply one more holiday decoration—something inherited from our parents, perhaps, like that chipped ceramic Santa—something to be taken down out of the attic, dusted off, and displayed briefly—maybe even for just one night—before being mothballed for another year.

If that's the case, if there's nothing surprising about the Christmas story for you, then we’ve missed something, we’ve lost something; and maybe the church isn't doing its job very well. If somehow we've managed to domesticate the shepherds and angels and wise men, then I'm sorry. I’m sorry for you and I’m sorry for me. Because Christmas should be the most surprising story of all.

Granted, some elements of the story remain painfully familiar some 2,000 years later.

Think about it: Teenage girls still turn up pregnant, and are still subject to public disgrace. Governments still run roughshod over their citizens. The poor are still treated less like persons than cattle. Political leaders still co-opt spiritual authority to shore up their own power. And religious institutions still sell their souls for a piece of the action. Some things don’t change all that much, do they? These parts of the story are too familiar.

But somewhere along the way, maybe, we threw the baby out with the bathwater. In the safety of our certainty, we may have lost sight of the surprise; after all, sweep aside the centuries of holly and ivy that have grown up around Him, and it's still Jesus there at the heart of the story. He is the surprise Christmas present whose delivery is meant to shock us—shock us back to life, shock us with the full extent of the love of God. This squirming, squealing little baby is the living sign that the Lord God Almighty, the power behind the universe, cares enough about you and me and the world and all its problems to show up. This is Jesus, whose prophetic name was Immanuel, “God with us.”

The good news which should be of great joy for all the people is that God doesn't stay high up and far away, like some king surveying the scene of a disaster from the heights of a distant mountain. Instead, in Jesus, God dwells among us, as one of us, flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone. The beating heart of the Gospel is that in Jesus, God shares our joys and concerns, our anxieties and our thanksgivings, because God loves the world—loves us, loves you—so very much.

This Christmas, I invite you to dare to believe that there is more to this story, this faith, than you've been led to believe. Please, by all means, enjoy the familiar sights and sounds of this night. I know I do. But in the weeks ahead, I invite you to set some of your certainties aside and go to God with the shepherds. Just listen to the same inexplicable sounds that they heard, and then wander on down to Bethlehem to see what they saw.

It will take more than a Christmas Eve to do it. Later tonight and tomorrow, you’ll be consumed with the wonderful rites of the season—presents, parties and pumpkin pie and the lights—lights on the tree and in the faces of children.

But maybe, right now, as you’re here, you can make a mental note. Put a bookmark in this moment. Promise yourself to come back to this moment when the whole idea, the reality of Jesus, the Son of God, came over you.

Just think: if this Christmas thing is true, then it changes everything. If God is real, and if Jesus is God in the flesh, if He came on a mission to change the world by changing our lives, then Christmas changes everything.

Ever heard of the story, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever? It’s a fine little book by Barbara Robinson. One Christmas our whole family was with Lynann’s parents and Lynann’s sister’s family, when someone thrust the book in my hands and told me to read it—to read it out loud. Now it’s about 90 pages long and I’d never read it before but I was soon captivated. The story starts,

The Herdmans were absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world. They lied and stole and smoked cigars and talked dirty and hit little kids and cussed their teachers and set fire to Fred Shoemaker’s old broken-down tool house.

The narrator tells us that one of the Herdman kids, Imogene, was in the same grade as her…

As far as anyone could tell, Imogene was just like the rest of the Herdmans. She never learned anything either, except dirty words and secrets about everybody.

Well, the narrator’s mother gets in charge of the annual Christmas pageant. And the Herdman kids show up. They jostled and bossed their way into most of the lead rolls. But unlike all the church kids, they’d never heard the Christmas story before.

Leroy: Who were the shepherds? Where did they come from?

Claude: What was the inn? What’s an inn?

Mother: It’s like a motel where people go to spend the night.

Claude: What people? Jesus?

Alice: Oh, honestly! Jesus wasn’t even born yet! Mary and Joseph went there.

Ralph: Why?

Imogene: What happened first? Begin at the beginning!

And so the mother explains the story. For these kids, it’s all fresh. They interrupt again and again and ask all the questions that surprised people ought to ask. The story goes on…

The night of the pageant there was the usual big mess all over the place—baby angels getting poked in the eye by other baby angels’ wings and grumpy shepherds tripping over their costumes. But everything settled down, and at 7:30, the pageant began…

When we were finished singing "O, Little Town of Bethlehem" Ralph and Imogene were there, only for once they didn’t come through the door pushing each other out of the way. They just stood there for a minute as if they weren’t sure they were in the right place—because of the spotlights I guess and the church being full of people. They looked like the people you see on the six o’clock news—refuges in some strange ugly place, with all their boxes and sacks around them. It suddenly occurred to me that this was just the way it must have been for the real Holy Family, stuck away in a barn by people who didn’t much care what happened to them. They couldn’t have been very neat and tidy either, but more like this Mary and Joseph.

…next came Gladys from behind the angel choir pushing people out to the way and stepping on everyone’s feet. Since Gladys was the only one in the pageant who had anything to say she made the most of it.

Gladys: Hey! Unto you a child is born!

I almost wished for the pageant to go on with the Herdmans in charge to see what else they would do that was different. Maybe the Wise Men would tell Mary about their problems with Herod, and she would tell them to go back and lie their heads off. Or Joseph might go with them and get rid of Herod once and for all. I was so busy planning new ways to save the baby Jesus that I didn’t notice Imogene at first. When I did I almost dropped my hymn book on a baby angel. Imogene Herdman was crying. In the candlelight her face was all shiny with tears and she didn’t even bother to wipe them away. She just sat there—awful old Imogene—in her crookedy veil, crying and crying and crying. I guess Christmas just came over her all at once, like a case of chills and fever. And so she was crying.

…Well. It was the best Christmas Pageant we ever had. Everybody said so, but nobody seemed to know why. When it was over, people stood around the lobby of the church talking about it. There was something special—they couldn’t put their finger on what.

…When we came out of the church that night it was cold and clear, with crunchy snow underfoot and bright, bright stars overhead. And I thought about the Angel of the Lord—Gladys with her skinny legs and her dirty sneakers sticking out from under her robe, yelling at all of us, everywhere:

Gladys: Hey! Unto you a child is born!

Do you know what my prayer is? That Christmas would just come over us all, all at once, like a case of chills and fever. That the amazing story would be amazing to us all again. And that we’d want to shout, “Hey! Unto you a child is born!”

Walk with us from here to Easter, from the cradle to the cross, and beyond, and see if God doesn't surprise you along the way. See if you don't find God’s grace in a new way. Come again to discover the miracle of God’s love and the power of God’s peace. Discover the reason that you are here and what life is about.

Hey—unto you a child is born!

The Tree of Life

Advent Series: Four Christmas Trees

Part Four: The Tree of Life

It’s the last Sunday of the year. That makes it the “Omega Sunday.” Omega is the last letter of the Greek alphabet. Back in 1971, Charlton Heston starred in a movie called The Omega Man. Guess what? It’s about the last man on earth. Kind of depressing, huh?

But I have good news. In the Bible, Omega is good news! In Revelation 22:13, Jesus says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.” Jesus, from beginning to end; the “A to Z”, the alpha and omega. Don’t think of Omega as “last” so much the fullness, the conclusion, crossing the finish line. It’s not bad news when the game is over and your team won!

The world as we know it is going to end. The game is going to be over. It’s going to have its omega day. Genesis is the book of beginnings—the kick off; Revelation the book of endings, of fulfillment; it’s the award ceremony at the end. And in it all, Jesus is Lord. He’s there, from Genesis to Revelation. He was there when the word was called into being; He will be there for us at the end of this age, and He’ll be there for us for all eternity to come.

And it’s a funny thing: the story of our world begins with a tree in a garden, and it concludes with a tree in the new earth.

These last few weeks we have been looking at the story of God’s love in Jesus through what I’ve called “biblical Christmas trees.” Is it possible to tell the Christmas story through these biblical Christmas trees? Here are the four Christmas trees we’ve used this season:

· The Eden Tree: how we got into this mess

· The Family Tree of Jesus: the plan of God moves forward

· The Calvary Tree of Jesus: The Cross

· The Tree of Life: God’s Plan is fulfilled

To get to the end, you have to go back to the beginning. If you go back to Genesis, you’ll discover that there were two trees mentioned in Eden: The tree of the knowledge of good and evil and as well as the tree of life. We read in Genesis 2:8-9:

⁸Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. ⁹And the LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

There were two important trees in the garden: the one God told the first humans not to eat from, and this tree, the Tree of Life. As a matter of fact, the Tree of Life gets first billing here.

What’s this Tree of Life all about? Well, the Bible gives us a lot to go on here. The Tree of Life is mentioned numerous places in the Bible. For example, in Proverbs 3:18, we read,

She [wisdom] is a tree of life to those who embrace her; those who lay hold of her will be blessed.

Two other places in Proverbs use the phrase “tree of life” and in each place the meaning is clear: a tree of life is a source of life that comes from God Himself.[1]

So the main idea of the Tree of Life is this: trust God for guidance. Trust Him for wisdom. Trust Him for knowledge. He’s the giver of life, the source of life, as a matter of fact, Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6). That’s what the tree of life is all about: knowing God and enjoying Him forever.

One thing that’s interesting to think about: Adam and Eve were never told not to eat from the tree of life. A lot of people presume that they didn’t, but I think the most straight-forward reading of Genesis is that they did eat from this tree, on a regular basis. It was a symbol of the life they shared with God, the gift of life they enjoyed, and the relationship with God they enjoyed. But after they sinned, God barred the way to the tree of life; after all, the Bible defines eternal life as fellowship with God[2], and that’s exactly what the first humans lost when they sinned against God. They had life with God; then they lost it.

Now, much later in Scripture we have the book of the prophet Ezekiel. Ezekiel 47 has a vision of the end of the age which includes fruit trees growing on the shore of the once very dead Dead Sea that now sprout and bear fruit every month of the year.[3]

In Revelation, the apostle John sees beyond what Ezekiel saw. John sees the image of the Tree of Life in full bloom in the Omega book, the book of Revelation. To the faithful of the church of Ephesus, Jesus makes this promise (Revelation 2:7):

He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.

Then, in the last chapter of the last book of the Bible, we have three references to the Tree of Life. The first and most important is in the opening verses, 1-6, and you really have to read the whole section to get the full force of it. The context is—this is the final state of the blessed; this is the new heaven and the new earth, what you can think of us complete, final heaven. Revelation 22:1-6:

¹Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb ²down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. ³No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. ⁴They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. ⁵There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever. ⁶The angel said to me, "These words are trustworthy and true. The Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, sent his angel to show his servants the things that must soon take place."

Just like a flag can be both a real thing (a piece of cloth) and a symbol (standing for a country), so we should understand the Tree of Life in Eden and the Tree of Life in New Earth as both a real tree and as a symbol.

John sees “the river of the water of life” flowing from God’s throne—from the throne of God the Father and God the Son, the Lamb. He’s the source of all life, and especially here the source of eternal life.

Springing from the river (just like in Ezekiel’s vision) is the Tree of Life. It’s funny how it’s phrased, though: the tree is on both sides of the river. You have the tree on both sides of a river of blessings. What was present in “embryo” in the garden is now growing without limit all the banks of the river of God. You go from one tree to a whole grove of trees.

Again, just as was said in Ezekiel, we read that the tree bears a crop each month of the year, and that the leaves are for the healing of the nations.

So we have a real throne, and a real river and a real grove trees, but rivers and trees can’t do these things: they are symbols that go beyond themselves and point back to their source: the One on the throne. Right now you can eat fruit from a tree and be nourished. Well, the tree of life stands for receiving the blessings of God that nourish not only the body but the soul as well. The fruit we eat now can sustain us from a few hours or a few days at most; the fruit of the tree of life never runs out, never fails to sustain, and never disappoints.

In Revelation 22:3, we read,

No longer will there be any curse.

That also takes us right back to Eden. The curses that come with the arrival of sin are cancelled. They are done with. They’re in the dumpster.

So the last two weeks, we saw the road to get from Eden to Eternity. God doesn’t just flip a switch to end the curse of sin; there is a pathway and a plan. The pathway was the family tree of Jesus: from Adam to Noah to Abraham to David to Jesus. There was also a plan. God became man to take the full force of the curse on human sin; that’s the second Biblical Christmas tree: the cross. By His stripes we are healed.

From the cross to tree of life: that’s the time we are in right now. Just as there was a long time from Adam to Jesus, so there’s a long time—2,000 years so far—from Jesus’ first coming to His second.

There must have been plenty of times when old Israel longed to see Messiah’s coming and felt that God, maybe, had forgotten His promises. But God hadn’t forgotten.

Ever feel like sometimes that maybe God’s forgotten His promise? The last Christmas tree—the tree of life—is a reminder to us that He hasn’t forgotten any of His promises.

Jesus said He was preparing a place for us. He’s also planting trees for us! This is the hope we live by.

C.S. Lewis wrote,

Hope is one of the theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth, and you will get neither.

Hope forms us, and in very good ways. Hope keeps us moving forward. Without hope, we collapse. When you say a situation or a person is hopeless, you are slamming the door in the face of God. And there is one hope that towers over all others. In Titus 2:13, Paul calls the second coming of Jesus is called the “blessed hope.” Biblical hope isn’t wishful thinking; it’s confident expectation. Hope is a command as much as faith is a command. We have a sure hope in the return of Jesus. He shall come, the dead will rise, the nations will be judged, and there shall be a new world adorned by the tree of life.

On this Omega Sunday of the year, let’s think about the fact that Jesus is coming back. This is our sure hope.

Biblical prophecy provides some of the greatest encouragement and hope available to us today. Just as the Old Testament is filled with prophecies about Christ’s first coming, so both testaments are filled with references to the second coming of Jesus. One estimate is that there are 1,845 references to Christ’s second coming in the Old Testament, where 17 books give it prominence. In the 260 chapters of the New Testament, there are 318 references to the second coming of Christ—an amazing 1 out of every 30 verses. Twenty-three of the 27 New Testament books refer directly to the second coming. For every prophecy in the Bible concerning Christ’s first advent—Christmas and all that followed, there are 8 which look forward to His second!

The Christmas season is often called Advent. Christmas marks the advent, the coming, of the Messiah into the world. The Bible tells us again and again that a second advent is on the way; not that Jesus will be born again in a barn in Bethlehem, but that He will come in power to judge the world and to take His people to Himself, to build a new world in which all the promises of Eden will come true and will be far exceeded.

There is a wonderful word that you will only find one place in the Bible. It’s a word of great, confident hope. The word is maranatha, and you will only find it in 1 Corinthians 16:22, and then only in certain translations. The NIV translates it as “Come, O Lord”, but really it should be left untranslated. Let me explain why, and let me explain why this word is important, and why this one word deserves a place on this last Christmas tree.

You see, the New Testament was written in Greek, but there are a few places where it records Aramaic words. Aramaic was the language spoken in Israel in the time of the New Testament. It was similar to Hebrew, but not quite the same.

There are a total of 12 Aramaic words or phrases that get into the New Testament untranslated into Greek. For example, you read this in Mark 5:41:

He took her by the hand and said to her, "Talitha koum!" (which means, "Little girl, I say to you, get up!”).

Mark records what was surely a personal recollection (probably Peter’s) of the exact words Jesus said in Aramaic, and then translated it to Greek for His readers.

But some words take on a life of their own from one language to another. For example, we all know what aloha means, even though it’s a Hawaiian word. We’ve adopted it into English and we use it without thinking.

Maranatha seems to be a word like that. Even though it’s Aramaic, Greek-speaking Christians knew what it meant. In Aramaic, it’s a prayer: “Our Lord, come!”

Paul doesn’t have to explain the word to the Corinthians. They knew it already; it must have arrived along with the gospel itself. That meant that the earliest believers, the ones who spoke Aramaic, from the very beginning of the church, were longing for the return of the Lord Jesus: “Marana (our Lord), tha (come)!”

And now, we hope. We have a confident assurance that Jesus is coming back. We pray, not with desperation, but with a smile on our faces, “Maranatha!” The dead in Christ will rise, we shall be caught up to be with Him, and He shall reign. And the day will come when we gather to swap stories in the shade of the Tree of Life.

Abraham Davenport was the Speaker of the Connecticut House of Representatives. It was May 19th, 1780, and the sky above Hartford darkened ominously. Some of the representatives, glancing out the windows, saw a sky so fearful that they wondered if the end of the world was at hand. As some called for immediate adjournment, Davenport rose and said, "The Day of Judgment is either approaching or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for adjournment. If it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. Therefore, I wish that candles be brought."

Have no fear, church. For now, on this Omega Day, be faithful. Keep seeking His kingdom and His righteousness. Simply obey in hope. Maranatha!

PRAYER

END

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[1] Proverbs 11:30; 13:12

[2] John 17:7

[3] Ezekiel 47:12

The Calvary Tree

Advent Series: Four Christmas Trees

Part Three: The Calvary Tree

There’s something awkward about taking about the death of Christ in the season in which we celebrate the birth of Christ. There’s something difficult about considering the cross at the same time that we are fixed on the manger. There’s something uncomfortable about discussing crucifixion at the same time that our attention is drawn to welcoming angels, Christmas pageants and boughs of holly.

The Christmas story itself, as we find it in the gospels, seems to recognize this tension. In Luke’s gospel, we have the journey to Bethlehem, the birth, the angels and the shepherds’ visit. And that is often where we stop. But Luke goes on to describe Jesus’ circumcision, at age eight days, and then 40 days after the birth, following the Law of Moses, Joseph and Mary and Jesus go to the temple in Jerusalem. Their purpose was to make an offering for Mary’s post-childbirth “purification”, as commanded in the Law. While there, they encountered two older saints, Simeon and Anna. Let’s look at Simeon’s prophecy.

Simeon’s prophecy is found in Luke 2:29-31. He sees the baby Jesus, takes Him in his arms, and says:

²⁹"Sovereign Lord, as you have promised,
you now dismiss your servant in peace.
³⁰For my eyes have seen your salvation,
³¹which you have prepared in the sight of all people,
³²a light for revelation to the Gentiles
and for glory to your people Israel."

It’s a simple, wonderful prophecy; as Luke tells us in vs. 26, the Holy Spirit had told old Simeon that he wouldn’t die without seeing God’s Messiah. Now he does see Him, and He sees that Jesus would be “a light of revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to Your people Israel.”

So far, so good. But then we read this in vs. 33-35:

³³The child's father and mother marveled at what was said about him. ³⁴Then Simeon blessed them and said to Mary, his mother: "This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, ³⁵so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too."

Suddenly, there is a dark turn in the prophecy. Falling and rising; a sign spoken against. And to Mary, this ominous word: “A sword will pierce your own soul too.”

That word “too” tells us that Mary would be second in line when it came to suffering—that the child, as a “sign spoken against” would suffer first of all. There is a cross-shaped shadow falling over them.

In Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus, we have the visit of the Magi, which probably occurred when Jesus was between a year and two years old. And there is another cross-shaped shadow here as well. Down the centuries, the three gifts that the wise men brought have been discussed and the significance of the gifts—why the Holy Spirit moved them to give these specific gifts and why the Spirit moved Matthew to record what there were—is powerful.

Those gifts were gold, frankincense and myrrh (Matthew 2:11). Gold speaks to the kingly nature of Jesus. The incense speaks to His role and priest; it was one of the same incenses used by priests in the temple. But myrrh—it has long associations with great suffering. It’s a resin derived from a tree sap, and in ancient times was used as a powerful pain killer.

And it shows up at the cross of Jesus. In Mark 15:21-22, we read,

²²They brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means The Place of the Skull). ²³Then they offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it.

Jesus faced the pain, and turned down wine doped with myrrh as He hung on the cross. He faces the suffering of the cross without the pain-killing myrrh.

So the story of the birth of Jesus, the accounts in Matthew and Luke, has foreshadowing of the cross of Jesus, the suffering of Jesus. As much as we would like to cover the Christmas season in a blanket of heavenly peace, the Bible itself keeps the cross just a step away from the manger.

So these last few weeks we have been looking at the story of God’s love in Jesus through what I called biblical Christmas trees. Can you tell the Christmas story through biblical Christmas trees? Here are the four Christmas trees I’m using:

· The Eden Tree: how we got into this mess

· The Family Tree of Jesus: the plan of God moves forward

· The Calvary Tree of Jesus: The Cross

· The Tree of Life: God’s Plan is fulfilled

We’ve seen the Eden Tree: what Genesis calls the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. When the first human beings disobeyed God and ate from the tree God had forbidden, this became the I’ll Decide for Myself Tree. Instead of looking to God for what’s right and wrong, we decided that we could do that for ourselves.

Then we looked at the Family Tree of Jesus from Matthew 1. We saw that the story and mission of Jesus can be told from His family tree: that the family tree is a royal family tree, a real family tree (with all kinds of “wild monkeys” in its branches) and a redemptive family tree—that is, not the story of people getting their act together so that God comes to love them; but the story of human sin and tragedy and error and mistake, and God just keeps at it to love us and win us and woo us back to His love and into His family.

But how would that redemption happen? How would God bring us back in to His family? How would we experience the love and grace and peace of God? It would happen through the cross of Jesus.

Interestingly, the cross is called a “tree” several times in the New Testament, that is, in most translations. OK, this is going to get a little technical, but bear with me. Four times—three in Acts, and once in 1 Peter, Peter says that Jesus died on a “tree.”[1] He seems to like to use that term for the cross. The Greek word he uses is zylon, which is a kind of generic word meaning “a piece of wood.” (“Timber” may be the closest English word to zylon.) So sometimes it stands for what we would call a tree, and some other times in stands for something made of wood.

There’s another Greek word that is more specific, the word stauros. That’s the Greek word for cross (the Romans used the Latin word crux). That’s the word—stauros—most commonly used for “cross” in the New Testament.

Peter uses the Greek word zylon instead of stauros. Paul does the same thing once, in Galatians 3:13. Why? What’s this about?

Well, it seems that both Peter and Paul had one particular Old Testament passage in mind. That passage is Deuteronomy 21:22-23:

²² If a man guilty of a capital offense is put to death and his body is hung on a tree, ²³ you must not leave his body on the tree overnight. Be sure to bury him that same day, because anyone who is hung on a tree is under God's curse. You must not desecrate the land the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance.

In ancient times, when someone was executed it was common to leave the body hanging on a tree, or a city wall, or some other public place for days or even weeks or months (think of the smell!) In the Law of Moses, God says that if someone is executed, the body has to be taken down before nightfall, “because anyone who is hung on a tree is under God’s curse.” To leave the body out longer would desecrate the land that God gave them.

So in the mind of a first century AD Jews like Peter and Paul, there was an association with execution, a tree and a curse. Since Old Testament era Jews had never encountered crucifixion, they applied this Old Testament law involving a tree to the horror of the cross. So Jews would often refer to the cross as a zylon, a tree instead of the common Greek word, stauros.

So Paul writes in Galatians 3:13-14:

¹³Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: "Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree." ¹⁴He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit.

What Paul is saying is that by hanging on the cross—the “tree”—Jesus takes the full force of the curse of God that falls on all spiritual rebels (that’s us).

That’s the Calvary Tree of Jesus. The Eden Tree tells us why the Redeemer had to come; the Family Tree tells us how He came to us and what He came to do; the Calvary Tree—the cross—tells us how He redeems us.

He redeems us by being our substitute. He became “a curse for us” says Paul. Substitution lies at the heart of the Biblical teaching of the cross of Christ. He comes into the world to show the love of God, to teach the ways of God and to display the kingdom of God, but if we leave out the fact that Jesus came as our substitute on the cross, we have missed the heart of His mission.

This is not new; just as the prophets foretold that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2), so the prophets foretold the substitutionary death of Messiah. When we looked the Eden Tree, we saw that foreshadowed in the suffering of Enmity, the child of the woman, who would crush the head of the devil (Genesis 3). But later prophets were far more explicit. There’s a principle here, called “progressive revelation.” The farther along we get in Scripture, God tells us more and more.

So five hundred years after the time of Moses, we have Psalm 22, where David foresees one whose hands and feet are pierced. And three hundred years after that, you have the prophet Isaiah. Nowhere is the mission of the Messiah as suffering for us as clear as in the great Suffering Servant passage of Isaiah 52:12-53:12. We can’t go into the whole passage, but let’s look at just a few verses.

Isaiah 53:5 says,

⁵ But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.

Did He die for His own sins? No, it was for “our transgressions, our iniquities.” “The punishment that brought us peace was upon Him.” It’s hard to imagine a clearer statement of the substitutionary atonement of Jesus. Well, maybe there is one—in vs. 6 of the same chapter:

⁶ We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.

Here’s what this means. Take a book in your hand—go ahead, take a hymnal or a Bible. Hold it like this. That’s your sin, and it holds you down. It separates you from God. It makes you unhappy. It brings you misery.

Now what does God do? Isaiah 53:6 says “and the Lord laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” “Iniquity” means “really bad sin, crookedness.” So take the book and transfer it from that hand to another like this.

The other hand stands for Jesus. The Lord—God the Father—laid on Him—Jesus, God the Son—the iniquity of us all. He takes it, and it dies with Him on the cross. The cross—the third Christmas tree.

This brings us full circle back to the Eden Tree. That’s where iniquity started. The Family Tree brings us to the cross. That’s three Christmas Trees: Eden, Family, and the Cross.

Mark Lowry is a very funny guy. He’s recorded about a dozen comedy CDs and he’s also a pretty good singer. On one of his CDs, he observed that Mary’s silence at the cross always amazed him. He said that if he were being crucified in the middle of town, his mother would have "pitched a fit", but Mary never said a word. Lowry wondered if maybe what made the difference for her was remembering back to that first Christmas, remembering touching his little hands and feet and counting his fingers and toes.

Lowry says: "I wonder if she realized then that those were the same fingers that had scooped out the oceans and formed the seas. Mary probably counted those little toes; I wonder if she realized that those were the same feet that had walked on streets of gold and had been worshipped by angels. Those little lips were the same lips that had spoken the world into existence. When Mary kissed her little baby, she wasn’t just kissing another baby—she was kissing the face of God. Thirty-three years later she’s standing on a hillside watching blood pour from His veins, from the side of her own son... and she didn’t open her mouth. What a great testimony to the fact that He wasn’t just a great prophet, He wasn’t just a great preacher, He wasn’t just a great teacher, He was the virgin-born son of God. He was our Savior. And He didn’t just die for us; He died for His own mother. [She realized that] the baby boy she had delivered on that first Christmas was now on a cross delivering her."

There is a straight line from Bethlehem to the cross. I once went to the Reagan library and they had a display of Christmas trees from all over the world. There was something like a hundred of them. Some of them were spectacular. But I have no doubt: the cross, this tree, is the greatest Christmas tree of all.

PRAYER

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[1] Acts 5:30, 10:39 and 13:29; 1 Peter 2:24.