Christmas is a reminder of a lot more than giving presents to friends and relatives.
Even though there are so many gimmicks and games in Christmas today, we still have many believers who have not fallen for Satan’s lies as the Scrooge of Christmas.
All because of a passage in the Gospel of Luke that says that God has visited His people.
We will begin with a story or a passage that seems to be sad, when in reality, it is a reminder of the love and grace of God during this Christmas Holiday; LUK 7:11- 16.
God has visited His people and that the first Christmas was full of surprises.
A pastor who had taken over a church that was really run down.
In late December a severe storm hit the church and shattered the back wall of the stage.
A huge chunk of rain-soaked plaster fell out of the inside wall just behind the altar.
They swept away the mess, but they couldn't hide the ragged hole.
That afternoon the pastor attended an auction held for the benefit of a youth group.
The auctioneer opened a box and took out a handsome gold and Ivory lace tablecloth.
It was very old and outdated from a long-vanished era and so there were only a few half-hearted bids.
Then the pastor had what he thought was a great idea and so He bid $6.50 for it and got it.
He carried the cloth back to the church and tacked it up on the wall behind the altar.
The extraordinary beauty of its handwork gave the stage a nice look for the Christmas service.
"The bus won't be here for forty minutes!" --- said the pastor
She had come from the city that morning to be interviewed for a job as governess to the children of one of the wealthy families in town but she had been turned down.
She looked up as the pastor began to adjust the great ivory and gold lace cloth across the hole.
The pastor smiled and started to tell her about the storm damage, but she didn't seem to listen.
"It is mine!" she said. "It is my banquet cloth!"
She lifted the corner and showed the surprised pastor that there were her initials monogrammed on it.
"My husband had the cloth made especially for me in Brussels! There could not be another like it."
She explained that she was Viennese and that she and her husband had opposed the Nazis and decided to leave the country.
Her husband put her on a train for Switzerland.
They planned that he would join her as soon as he could arrange to ship their household goods across the border.
Later she heard that he had died in a concentration camp.
"I have always felt that it was my fault to leave without him," she said.
"Perhaps these years of wandering have been my punishment!"
As the church began to fill on Christmas Eve, it was clear that the cloth had served its' purpose and made the stage look beautiful.
After the service, a gentle-face, middle-aged man who was the local clock and watch repairman came up to the pastor looking rather puzzled.
"It's strange", he said in a soft accent, "Many years ago my wife, God rest her soul, and I owned such a cloth in our home in Vienna and I had it made just for her."
"Can it be? Does she live?"
Together the two got in touch with the family who had interviewed her, found out her address and then drove to her home.
And as Christmas day came, this man and his wife, who had been separated through so many saddened years, were united.
Prin: To all who had heard the story, the purpose of the storm, which was a seemingly disaster, and had knocked a huge whole in the wall, was now quite clear.
The point is that sometimes it takes some heartache, disaster or difficult situation to remind us that God has visited His people.
Just like in our passage, LUK 7, it took the death of man to reveal that God was present among His people.
We live in what we call the year of our Lord 2021 approximately over 2,000 years after the birth of Christ.
We live according to a calendar that totally points to our Lord Jesus Christ.
It is so obvious that the average person never even thinks about it but just takes it for granted.
Everything points to Him, our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the center of the universe, including this most Holy Day we call Christmas remembering the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ.
We don’t live in the year of Allah, the real god of the Muslims.
We don’t live in the year of Sun Young Moon, the so-called savior of those who call themselves Moonies.
We don’t live in the year of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who don’t celebrate Christmas as the birth of the Messiah, our Lord Jesus Christ.
Their problem is that they deny the Trinity and look at our Lord Jesus Christ as a little Jehovah but not the real Jehovah.
JOH 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word [TLJC] was a God.
JOH 1:2 He was in the beginning with Jehovah but was not the real Jehovah.
The Jehovah's Witnesses were established as a religion in 1879 in the United States founded by Charles Taze Russell who was a businessman from Pennsylvania and a fraud.
We do not live in a calendar put out by the JW’s.
We don’t live in the year of Buddha who believed that human life was a cycle of suffering and rebirth but that if one achieves a state of enlightenment (nirvana), it is possible to escape this cycle forever.
We live in the year of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ who is God and who even has the calendar to remind us every day that “He is Lord.”
It's interesting that we measure time from the birth of the One who changed the world more than anyone prior to Him or anyone else that will ever come.
Realize all of the obstacles and difficulties that were overcome on that first Christmas day, the day that our Lord and Savior was born into the world.
Satan and the kingdom of darkness do their best to be the Scrooge of our Christmas and to try and rob us of the happiness of God during this time.
Now, the real story of Christmas began in GEN 3 when God declared war against Satan and the serpent as a result of the fall of Adam and the woman.
In GEN 3:15, we have the first prophecy of Christmas, the birth of TLJC or the prophecy of the coming of the Hypostatic Union.
’Her seed’ is a very unusual phrase because when the Hebrew talks about someone's seed, it is the man that is mentioned not the woman.
GEN 22:17 God said to Abraham, Indeed I will greatly bless you, and I will greatly multiply your seed as the stars of the heavens, and as the sand which is on the seashore; and your seed shall possess the gate of their enemies.
In PSA 89:4 speaking to David the Lord said "I will establish your seed forever, And build up your throne to all generations."
Israel or Jacob was called the seed of Abraham, not the seed of Sarah in PSA 105:6 "O seed of Abraham, His servant, O sons of Jacob, His chosen ones!"
Later on, it was confirmed by Isaiah who said ISA 7:14 "Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son, and she will call His name Immanuel."
This was a promise that God was going to provide a solution from the curse of sin.
There is no Grinch here, this is the greatest gift God could ever give you during this Christmas Holiday, having all of our sins dealt with once and for all by our Lord Jesus Christ.
Satan had a special agenda as far as the seed of the woman was concerned to try and destroy the seed of the woman being one of the titles of Jesus Christ.
This is the reason why there's always been so much hatred toward the Jews because Satan has promoted that hatred and prejudice in the human race.
Since the day that Satan discovered that Israel was to be the source of the first Christmas and the incarnate Christ, he has acted like a Grinch trying to steal the true meaning of this beautiful Christmas Holiday.
Yes, I did say beautiful and I mean it.
Don’t let the details of life be the Grinch that tries to take your relationship with God away.
Don’t let your husband or wife be the grinch that tries to take the true meaning of this blessed Holiday away.
Don’t let your enemies be the grinch that tries to make your holiday miserable.
Don’t lose out on the precious meaning of the Christmas Holiday but give two words to all members of the human race = Love and Grace.
Christmas is an historical and eternal relationship between the seed of the woman which points to the uniqueness of Christ and the uniqueness of Israel, the Church, and the believer.
This is the Grinch who tried to steal the first Christmas by killing TLJC which he failed to do.
Now he is trying to destroy the seeds of the woman by promoting antisemitism as he will try to kill all the true Jews who will be alive especially during the Tribulation period.
ROM 9:6 But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel;
The grinches first mission was to wipe out the Hypostatic Union, and therefore win the angelic conflict, which, of course, Satan failed to do.
Ever since the promise of the first Christmas, Satan has tried to be the grinch that would steal the true meaning away and blind people from it.
In GEN 4, Satan, the grinch, manipulated Cain to murder Abel who was to carry on the seed of the woman, 1JO 3:12, GEN 4:25.
When Cain murdered Abel in GEN 4, that was a Satanic attack on Adam's seed.
It was an attack on the first promise given to Adam after he sinned, that God the Father would provide a Savior from Adam's seed, who would come through the woman as the child bearer.
Satan and the fallen angels understood that the Savior would come in the line of Adam as true humanity through the woman.
Satan knew he had to cut off that line from Adam to Christ.
In that first generation, Satan inspired Cain to murder Abel, who was a believer.
We are told in 1JO 3:12, who motivated Cain to do this, "not as Cain, who was of the evil one, and slew his brother."
And so, After the death of Abel, God gave another son to Eve (now the mother of all living not Ishshah, the woman), His name was Seth.
The line continued on through Seth, so that Satan realized that murder wouldn't work to cut off the line.
Satan was very glad to see angels having sex with the women of this world so that they could pervert the seed of the woman to being more than human, but ½ human and ½ angelic.
The Lord could only die for true humanity since that is the only nature He would take of as God which was the nature of true humanity.
Fallen angels invaded earth and copulated with females, producing half-angel and half-human beings, documented in GEN 6:1-6.
Had all true humanity been destroyed in this way, Jesus Christ could have never come into the world as true humanity.
Only one family of eight people were still true humanity out of millions of people living on earth.
Those eight people were Noah and his wife, plus his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and their three wives.
The tracing of that family of Noah from GEN 4-11 is one of the most important chapters in our so-great salvation.
The angelic infiltration of GEN 6:1-6 was the greatest attack ever made on the virgin birth and incarnation of Jesus Christ.
Noah's sons all made great decisions, in all marrying ladies who were still true humanity.
The Flood destroyed that entire super-race of half-angels, half-men.
The greatest objective of Satan from the flood to the point of the virgin birth was to kill the Jews, especially those in the Messianic line.
Upon hearing God's promises to Abraham regarding the Savior as his descendent, as the Scrooge of Christmas, Satan has been making made many attacks on Abraham's seed.
- The first attack occurred when Sarah found herself in the harem of an Egyptian king in GEN 12:10-20.
Once He knew that the Messiah was going to be a Hebrew, in Egypt, Satan motivated Pharaoh to destroy the Hebrew children.
- The second attack occurred when Pharaoh, Thutmose III, ordered the entire male line of Israel to be killed in EXO 1:10, 15-16.
The Pharoah’s were like our presidents, Pharoah is their title, and then their names are given like Thutmose III.
This was the spiritual attack made by Satan as the scrooge of the true meaning of Christmas by attacking the line of the true humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Thutmose III's son was known as Amenhotep IV attempted to destroy all Israel in EXO 14:13-19.
Here is the Scrooge of Christmas doing what he can to destroy the human line of the Messiah.
After the line went from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Messianic line was attacked, the line of Christ was passed on through Judah, Jacob’s son.
Satan motivated the destruction of the tribe of Judah.
Within the tribe of Judah, God reveals that the Messiah would come from the house of David, so the house of David is singled out by Satan for destruction.
There was so many attacks made upon the tribe of Judah and David's family that everyone in the royal seed was killed and the only survivor who was Joash, 2CH 23:3.
At this point, the entire line of Christ was reduced to one person but the line of Christ had been preserved.
Satan, the Scrooge against Christ and the Royal line, was so close to destroying the line of Christ but Satan will learn that “close only counts in horseshoes.”
Hezekiah was childless when attacked by Sennacherib, the King of Assyria, Isa 36:1, 38:1, 39:7.
God preserved Hezekiah against death in the battle, again preserving the line of Christ.
Merry Christmas to all of you as you are seeing that another gift the Lord gives to us during this Christmas Holiday is the gift of faithfulness.
What a gift to make sure we unwrap, open, and enjoy the many blessings of the faithfulness of God.
Then there was Hamon's plot to annihilate the Jews, as found in the book of Esther.
Finally, there was perhaps the greatest attack from the Scrooge of Christianity, the final attack on the virgin Mary when she was pregnant.
There was the dilemma of Joseph when he discovered Mary's pregnancy found in MAT 1:16-25.
Satan promoted jealousy, guilt, judging, anger, bitterness, condemnation, fear, any of the MAS and the SOT.
If Joseph was a legalist, he probably would have followed DEU 22:21 and had Mary stoned.
Instead, Joseph had a marvelous, honorable attitude, for he was an aristocrat, descended from Solomon as MAT 1 states.
After the first Christmas, there was the decree of Herod to kill all children in Bethlehem, MAT 2:13-18.
Herod ordered every child in Bethlehem two years old and younger to be slaughtered.
But, God told Joseph in a dream to go to Egypt before that happened, so that Jesus Christ was spared.
Prior to the incarnation, Satan attacked the line of Jesus Christ in an attempt to frustrate the dispensation of the Hypostatic Union.
During the dispensation of the Hypostatic Union, Satan made every attempt to frustrate our Lord getting to the cross.
That's why you read "they picked up stones to stone Him; but He passed through the crowd unnoticed."
The very treatment our Lord received in His seven trials was an attempt to kill Him before He could get to the cross.
He inspired people to say, "If you are the Christ, come down from the cross. Save Yourself and us."
Also, as the scrooge of Christmas, Satan used evil people to scream and yell at the Lord while He was on the cross.
- When He was on the cross, we read about His response to the criminals or the thieves on the cross by saying Father forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.
- There was a second test from the scrooge of Christmas concerning how He handled the natural responsibilities with His family; JOH 19:17-27.
- The third saying had to deal with our Lord’s relationship with His God and Father, MAT 27:46.
MAT 27:46 And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" that is, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?"
- When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, He said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the human spirit; JOH 19:30.
- Jesus said unto the positive thief on the cross, Verily I say unto You, today you shall be with me in paradise. – Luke 23:43.
- After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, said I thirst. – John 19:28.
- And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit: and having said thus, he gave up the human spirit; LUK 23:46.]
Since the cross, resurrection, ascension, and session of Jesus Christ, Satan has only one way to win, and that is…….
By frustrating the fulfillment of the four unconditional covenants made to Israel, i.e., the Abrahamic, Palestinian, Davidic, and New Covenants.
Yet these will all be fulfilled in the Millennium.
All these covenants have in common the necessity of Jews being alive, and therefore all antisemitism is Satanically-inspired.
The Tribulation will demonstrate all the ways in which Satan tries to destroy the Jews, REV 6-19.
The Jew will be preserved by the grace of God which is why antisemitism is Satanic in every form.
Antisemitism’s purpose is to frustrate the plan of God which centers around Israel, both spiritual and natural.
Antisemitism reaches its peak in Rev 12, in the middle of the Tribulation.
Even though there are so many gimmicks and games in Christmas today, we still have many believers who have not fallen for the Scrooge of Christmas who we call Satan.
All because of a passage in the Gospel of Luke that says that God has visited His people.