A few days ago I began a new book on the history of the Assyrian Empire and it has been a fascinating read so far, but there was one thing that called my attention more than anything else: the book contains translations of cuneiform inscriptions!
This is exciting for me because in many respects it give us a window inside a world that we have no access to. And the most fascinating thing about these translations is that they are tablets, what we today would call letters in the mail, that deal with day to day life issues.
So for example there is a tablet that was discovered from around 5000 BC, in which one young man writes to his mom to complain about the fact that his friends do have new clothes while he himself has to walk around with the same old ragged set of clothings. The letter seems to end with the son indicting the mother because she does not love him as he deserves.
There is another tablet from around the same or earlier period (I can’t recall of the top of my head), in which one of the women left behind to take care of the business by her husband writes to her husband complaining that there is a plague in the city and that the money he left behind is running out, she has no food, and she is still in need of sustenance. She ends the letter telling the husband to better send off money quickly so she can go and buy food.
If the first letter draw a smile on my face because after all “there is nothing new under the sun…” (Ec. 1:9). The second one brought my heart to a place of lament.
I was lamenting because this woman who had existed almost 7000 years ago (if we can trust our metrics for measuring time), was facing plague, hunger, famine and perhaps a certain death and the most important part of it all: she was an inhabitant of the city of Ashur, meaning, she was a pagan and had not heard about the God of Israel!
This is the though that lead to my dread: she probably died and went into eternity without Jesus Christ. This is what life in the Old Testament looked like: you were a pagan and would have died happy under the fangs of the devil because at that time salvation was contained in the line of of Israel, or more precisely: on the line of the Shemites (Gen. 10:1).
Those were times in which Satan had a hold of the world and was actively deceiving the nations, in which the light of the Gospel would have shone only on the people of the promise and it was contained within the people of the promise, and would continue in such a way for a long while still.
This, of course was God’s purpose and good plan. He has His good reasons for all that He does even if it turns out difficult for us to understand. In fact, even inside the life of the nation of Israel we often find that it is rare the times in which we find pagans walking inside the Light of the Gospel as it is shining through Israel.
True, God does call the pagans into His fold, but those are exceptions, they are not the rule. We hear about Caleb, the woman from Jericho, some soldiers from among David, Naaman the Assyrian, the widow from Zarepthath and others, but we don’t hear about the nations actively flocking to Israel.
Again the world was under darkness, God allowed them to walk in disobedience and ignorance (Acts 17:30, Rom. 1:21), and therefore they perished without hope.
To be clear there are mentions in the OT about the flocking of the nations into God’s people but all of those mentions are prophecies, have to do with a time that at that time was still to come, not a time that had yet arrived.
So the question is: when did that time finally arrive?… And the answer is found in the story of Christmas and the Incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Often times we forget about this reality. We feel the warm and sentimental feelings that we get from hearing Sinatra or Bubble singing: “Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!” We love to hear Cosby singing about a “white Christmas” but in all of that we often forget the cosmic change that took place on Christmas.
Christmas is not just the birth of Jesus, as important as His birth is, that is not the whole of the story, at least not if we want to see the picture with Scriptural lens.
The story of Christmas is the story of Heaven Itself breaking loose and entering this world through the adoption of a human nature. Christmas is a rupture in the history of the world, the end of an era, the beginning of the destitution and destruction of an enemy that had a hold on the world.
Christmas is the time in which we commemorate and celebrate the fact that the history of the world will never be the same again. It is the celebration of a cataclysmic event that shook the spiritual world but that few in the physical world felt.
Christmas is then the celebration of the Lord Jesus Christ’s birth. The announcement to this world that God the Father will not allow His creation and creatures to rot. That the powers of evil were about to be defeated and that they will be defeated through that little baby boy who at the same time was the Creator of the Universe.
There is a reason why we divide the world’s history in two parts Before Christ and After Christ, we do so because nothing is nor will ever be the same after Christ.
The scene of that woman or that boy whose letters I mentioned before who were allowed to die in ignorance and darkness will never repeat again.
The birth of the Lord Jesus Christ changed the whole curse of the world. Before the nations followed suit after Satan and he had them under his control, authority given him by God Himself, albeit for a time.
But in the birth of Christ we come to see the powerful intervention of God in the world. Before He merely sustained the world and shone His goodness in a general way, but in the coming of Christ, the strong man has been tied up, the nations can no longer be deceived, and the good news of the Gospel are preached to every nation.
This is one of the benefits of Christmas, the world has never been the same since that day. Jesus was born, He came to this world as a Conqueror and conquering. And all of it started with a baby on a manger…
This Christmas then, I want to bring a different invitation to you, not only to feel happy about the season and to enjoy it, but to think deeply about the wonderful mystery that the Incarnation of Christ brought to the world, because truly after His birth the world has never been the same.
With much love,
Rev. Cristian Garcia
Da Lucem Domine!