Christmas 2021: Abraham

Intro to Series

Genealogy from Matthew: why is it there? Why start your story about the life of Christ with 32 names?

Christmas is so much more than celebrating a random birth. It can be easy for us to get caught up in all the modern excitement around the holiday, but it’s important for us to remember that Jesus coming to Earth is the climax of an ancient story that started back in the garden of Eden.

In many ways, we are celebrating the beautiful fulfillment of thousands of years of promises and the answer to thousands of years of pain.

World Cursed

At the beginning of the story, it doesn’t take long for the world that God made to be caught under a curse.

State: Mankind and the whole Earth is cursed in Adam- Gen 3:16-19.

This leads to God’s people living in slavery, being hated by the world, hating each other, and hating God. Death enters, life is full of suffering, and nothing seems to be the way it ought to be.

Transition: But even that curse was softened with a promised human that would come to defeat our enemy and lift our curse.

World Blessed

When God comes to Abraham, he comes with an update on the promise that he gave to Adam and Eve in Gen 3:15.

Even in the midst of this suffering world that is full of evil, God tells Abraham that his lineage will bring blessing into this cursed world. Gen 12:1-3

Genesis 12:1–3 ESV

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

Though things are not how they are meant to be, God continues to make his promise that everything will be made right again.

Later on this is picked up in Isaiah

English Standard Version Chapter 53

Surely he has borne our griefs

and carried our sorrows;

yet we esteemed him stricken,

smitten by God, and afflicted.

5  But he was pierced for our transgressions;

he was crushed for our iniquities;

upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,

and with his wounds we are healed.

6  All we like sheep have gone astray;

we have turned—every one—to his own way;

and the LORD has laid on him

the iniquity of us all.

Now we know that this promise is central to the faith of God’s people in the OT. God’s people experienced judgement in many ways because of their own sinfulness, but they always had faith in the promise that God was going to undo all that they had done.

Now we look back at this promise to Abraham, and the later prophecy through Isaiah, and we know that God was going to do this through his Son Jesus Christ.

So, when we celebrate the Christmas holiday, we are celebrating God finally flipping the curse that hung over the world to a blessing for a blessing over the world. We are seeing the reversal of all of the pain, sin, and death that had been so powerful over the course of history.