With the Christmas season upon us, along with all the accompanying materialistic distractions, I find it helpful to focus on Scripture verses that teach God’s reasons for the season.
Here’s one of my favorites:
“No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.” (John 1:18)
Why was Jesus born? God the Son took on human flesh to reveal God the Father to us. Or, as the NASB translates the verse above, Jesus came to “explain” God.
We need divine help to understand who God is. So in his infinite wisdom, God the Father sent God the Son to provide the perfect manifestation of himself in the person of his Son. What a great idea!
This is why Jesus said, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).
When we look at Jesus, what do we see? We see all that God is, starting with his holiness.
The angel Gabriel told Mary, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35).
The holiness of Jesus is mentioned repeatedly in the New Testament. Peter calls him “the Holy and Righteous One” (Acts 3:14). While praying, the believers called him “your holy servant Jesus” (Acts 4:27, 30). Even a demon cried out in his presence, “I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” (Mark 1:24).
What does it mean that Jesus is holy? The writer of Hebrews captures the essence of Christ’s holiness, describing him as “one who is holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners, exalted above the heavens” (Hebrews 7:26).
The word “holy” means separate, set apart, and unique. It refers to the transcendence and “otherness” of God. He’s in a class by himself. It would be impossible to quantify the difference between Jesus and his creation because the gap is infinite. “Who is like you—majestic in holiness, awesome in glory, working wonders?” (Exodus 15:11).
Holiness also means moral perfection. Jesus is blameless and pure. He “knew no sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21) because he has always been and forever will be “without sin” (Hebrews 4:15).
I love reading about the holiness of Jesus. Here’s what A.W. Tozer, one of my favorite authors, has written on the holiness of God in The Knowledge of the Holy.
“God’s holiness is not simply the best we know infinitely bettered. We know nothing like the divine holiness. It stands apart, unique, unapproachable, incomprehensible and unattainable. The natural man is blind to it. He may fear God’s power and admire His wisdom, but His holiness he cannot even imagine.
“Holy is the way God is. To be holy He does not conform to a standard. He is that standard. He is absolutely holy with an infinite, incomprehensible fullness of purity that is incapable of being other than it is. Because He is holy, His attributes are holy; that is, whatever we think of as belonging to God must be thought of as holy. God is holy and He has made holiness the moral condition necessary to the health of His universe. Sin’s temporary presence in the world only accents this. Whatever is holy is healthy; evil is a moral sickness that must end ultimately in death. The formation of the language itself suggests this, the English word holy deriving from the Anglo-Saxon halig, meaning, ‘well, whole.’
“Since God’s first concern for His universe is its moral health, that is, its holiness, whatever is contrary to this is necessarily under His eternal displeasure. To preserve His creation God must destroy whatever would destroy it. When He arises to put down iniquity and save the world from irreparable moral collapse, He is said to be angry. Every wrathful judgment in the history of the world has been a holy act of preservation. The holiness of God, the wrath of God, and the health of the creation are inseparably united. God’s wrath is His utter intolerance of whatever degrades and destroys. He hates iniquity as a mother hates the polio that takes the life of her child.
“God is holy with an absolute holiness that knows no degrees, and this He cannot impart to His creatures. But there is a relative and contingent holiness which He shares with angels and seraphim in heaven and with redeemed men on earth as their preparation for heaven. This holiness God can and does impart to His children. He shares it with them by imputation and by impartation, and because He has made it available to them through the blood of the Lamb, He requires it of them. To Israel first and later to His Church God spoke, saying, “Be ye holy; for I am holy.” (End of A.W. Tozer Quote)
Mr. Tozer has made the connection between the holiness of God and the incarnation of Jesus. Because God is holy, he hates sin and must take action to “put down iniquity and save the world.” This he accomplished by sending his Son, born of a woman to be crucified on a cross so that we could receive his holiness by faith and be reconciled to him without compromising his holy justice.
What a God. What a plan. This is why Jesus came to earth. All praise to the Holy One of God!
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