Celebrating the wrong Jesus of Christmas

When I became a Christian at age 19, I was kind of a mess, doctrinally speaking, especially where my view of Jesus was concerned.

Did I believe that Jesus is the Son of God? Check. My Savior? Check. Crucified and rose from the dead? Of course.

But I did not, at the time, understand that Jesus is God or get the doctrine of the Trinity. I thought “Son of God” meant that Jesus was somewhat less than God the Father, pretty much like the Jehovah Witnesses teach when they retranslate the first verse of the Gospel of John in their rewritten bible to be: “The Word was in the beginning with God and was a god,” instead of the true translation which is: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1).

To them, Jesus is a “mighty god” but not God Almighty; He’s the first direct creation and made all other things for God. They follow in the footsteps of the heretical 3rd-century teacher Arius, who caused such a stir with that teaching that the Emperor Constantine called an assembly of bishops (the First Council of Nicaea) to deal with it, which ended up condemning Arius’s doctrine and formulating the original Nicene Creed of 325.  

Thankfully, I found my way to the truth of Jesus’ person through the direction of the Holy Spirit, and came to understand what “Son of God” meant — something Thomas Aquinas summarizes well in his commentary on John: “It is also clear that since in every nature that which issues forth and has a likeness to the nature from which it issues is called a son, and since this Word issues forth in a likeness and identity to the nature from which it issues, it is suitable and appropriately called a “Son … We call him ‘Son’ to show that He is of the same nature as the Father.”

Once that sank in for me, I became so excited that I took a yellow dry marker and went through the entire Bible, highlighting the places that referenced Jesus’ divinity (which are all still there in my current Bible). And there’s a lot more yellow than most people think.

Unfortunately, many professing Christians still don’t comprehend the true and eternal nature of Christ. For example, a Lifeway Research article just a few years ago notes:

“In relation to Christmas itself, there’s confusion about Jesus’ eternality. While 80% of Americans say Jesus is the Son of God the Father and 72% say the birth of Jesus is a historical fact, only 41% believe the Son of God existed before Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Even among Evangelicals, just 65% agree … More than half of Americans (55%) say Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God, according to the 2022 State of Theology study. What’s worse, Evangelicals are more likely to agree (73%) and have been more likely to agree since the first State of Theology study in 2016.”

Yikes. That means there are a lot of people out there celebrating the wrong Jesus this Christmas.  

If that’s you, then let me provide some biblical truths to consider where Jesus’ personhood is concerned. While I can take you to many passages that speak to the true Jesus of Christmas, let me go to the one that firmly settles the matter.

I AM

In the eighth chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus just told the Pharisees that the devil is their father (which I’m sure went over well) and goes on to say that if they were like their beloved patriarch, Abraham, they would feel much differently towards Him. John records what happens next, starting with Jesus saying: “Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.” So, the Jews said to him, “You are not yet 50-years-old, and have you seen Abraham?” Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.” So, they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple” (John 8:56–59).

What?

Jesus’ shocking attempted stoning isn’t actually shocking (and wasn’t the first — see John 5:18) because He had just claimed equality with God by using the name for Himself that God conveyed to Moses back in the book of Exodus: “Then Moses said to God, “Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I will say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you.’ Now they may say to me, ‘What is His name?’ What shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM”; and He said, “Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you’” (Ex. 3:13–14).

The Hebrew word hayah used in the passage for “I AM” means “to be,” is represented by the consonants YHWH (Yahweh), with the technical theological term being the tetragrammaton, the personal, ineffable name of God in Scripture. Theologians explain the core of it as communicating that while many things can have existence, only one thing can be existence.

And Jesus said that’s Him.

That frying pan in the face of the Pharisees was just one of more to come, including: “Therefore I said to you that you will die in your sins; for unless you believe that I am He, you will die in your sins” (John 8:24); “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30); “Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9); “Father glorify Me in Your presence with the glory I had with You before the world began” (John 17:5, cf. “I am the Lord that is My name! I will not give My glory to another” — Isaiah 42:8). 

Add to those statements the things Jesus did such as accepting worship nine times in the Gospels, forgiving sins (Mark 2), telling His followers to pray in His name (John 16:23-24), saying He was Lord of the Sabbath (which God created; Mark 2:28), commanding followers to be baptized in His name (Matthew 28), and unlike other prophets before Him, never saying “Thus says the Lord,” but rather “I say.”

That’s the true Jesus of Christmas.

C. S. Lewis highlights what a bombshell His God-Man claim was to those back in His day when he writes:

“Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean, that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside the world Who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.”

Jesus went “about talking as if He was God” because He is. Don’t let that critical fact escape you this Christmas. John MacArthur puts it simply: “You know something? If God became a man, He would be Jesus and He was. And that’s the whole meaning of Christmas.”