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Four Reasons Christmas Almost Didn’t Happen!
The story of Christmas didn’t begin when the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary.
It began in the Garden of Eden.
After Adam and Eve sinned, God pronounced a curse upon the serpent who was according to the book of Revelation is Satan.
He said,
If this was all we knew, it would be hard to figure out who this person would be.
Over the course of time God revealed a detail here and there to enable us to understand He was talking about Jesus.
That’s why the story of Christmas really started in Genesis 3.
At that time, it isn’t likely that Satan understood God’s plan any better than Eve, but He did understand that one of Eve’s offspring, meaning a human, would bring about his destruction.
So, he set out to thwart God’s plan.
If he had succeeded there would have been no Christmas.
1.
The threat by the sons of God Genesis 6
We read about Satan’s first threat to Christmas in Genesis 6.
This passage is difficult to understand because of the reference to the “sons of God.” Are they spirit beings or humans?
The modern enlightened world view doesn’t believe in God, the supernatural, in angels or spirit beings.
Consequently, some suggest the “sons of God” to refer to men.
The problem with that view is that the Old Testament consistently uses the term “sons of God” to refer to angels.
If they are angels, then the problem is how did angels take on human form and impregnate women?
We aren’t told because that isn’t the point of the story.
This story describes an attempt by fallen angels to corrupt humanity.
It may be that if they continued, they would have destroyed the human race and prevented the offspring of the woman from being born.
This happened because Satan believed God when God said the seed of the woman would crush his head.
Yet God is in control.
We God’s response to this beginning in verse eight.
God chose Noah to keep His plan going.
God intervened in the history of humanity with the flood and the result was that he started over with this godly man, his wife, their three sons and their wives.
After the flood humanity continued to grow and God’s plan continued.
Then we meet a new character in the Christmas story, Abraham.
He’s introduced in Genesis 12.
God made some amazing promises to Abraham, in particular the last one, “all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
All peoples are everyone from the past, present and future.
No mere person could fulfill this.
It could only be Eve’s promised offspring.
The blessing would be the destruction of the enemy Satan, but it wouldn’t be limited to that.
It would also be the blessing of salvation available to everyone.
Now we know the seed of the woman won’t be any person in the world, he will be a descendant of Abraham.
Satan understood this, too, and focused his attempts to prevent God’s plan from happening by trying to destroy the Jews, Abraham’s children.
God reveals some additional information about His plan through Abraham’s grandson, Jacob.
Jacob moved his family moved to Egypt to survive a famine.
In Genesis 49 we read,
Jacob pronounced blessings and gave predictions about his sons and their descendants.
One prediction was this,
“The scepter will not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until he to whom it belongs shall come, and the obedience of the nations shall be his.”
Genesis 49:10
A scepter is a staff used by rulers and is a symbol of their sovereignty.
When Jacob said, “the scepter will not depart from Judah,” he was prophesying that one of Judah’s descendants would be a king.
This prophecy adds two more details to the Christmas story.
First, the one whom God promised would descend from Judah, and second he would be a king.
2. The threat by Pharaoh Exodus 1:8-21
Jacob’s descendants, the Jews, lived in Egypt for the next 400 years.
They were shepherds and lived isolated in Goshen because the Egyptians looked down on shepherds.
This enabled the Jews to maintain their own distinct family heritage.
God blessed them as he promised Abraham and they grew to over a million people.
There didn’t appear to be any reason for Pharaoh to feel threatened by the Jews.
They did nothing provoke his fear.
His motivation likely was satanically inspired.
If Pharaoh succeeded in killing all the boys, it would have been the end of the Jews and God’s promise to Abraham couldn’t happen.
One would have expected that Pharaoh, arguably the most powerful man in the earth, could have wiped out the Israelites.
But he didn’t.
God used faithful women to prevent Pharaoh from destroying the Israelites.
God’s plan continued.
We learn a new detail about the Messiah a few hundred years later.
The second king of Israel was David, called a man “after God’s own heart.”
David wasn’t perfect but was wholeheartedly devoted to God.
God told him this,
David’s kingdom would endure forever.
This promise was like the one God made to Abraham.
But it wasn’t humanly possible that David, or any of his earthly descendants, all of whom died, could have a throne that endured forever.
These words are about the Messiah.
The offspring of the woman, promised to Eve, then to Abraham and after him to Judah, would be from the royal line of David.
Solomon followed David as king.
Then Rehoboam followed Solomon.
This continued for several generations until something else happened to threaten God’s plan.
3. The threat by Queen Athaliah 2 Chronicles 22:10–12.
King Jehoram, one of David’s descendants, married Athaliah, the daughter of the wicked King Ahab.
Their son Ahaziah followed Jehoram as king then died in a battle.
Then Athaliah shocked everyone.
She tried to eliminate any descendent of David who had a right to be king.
Queen Athaliah’s grandson, Joash, was a descendent of David.
God spared Joash and God’s plan continued.
From that time on the kingdom of Judah got progressively worse and turned away from God.
He judged them by allowing the Babylonians to conquer them and take them into exile.
Later, the Babylonians were conquered by the Persians.
God’s plan, the story of Christmas, faced one more threat when they lived under Persia rule and is described in the book of Esther.
4. The threat by Haman in Persia (Esther 3:1-6).
King Xerxes of Persia deposed his queen, because she was disrespectful to him.
After a long search the king chose Esther to be his new queen.
Esther was a Jew, but she kept this fact hidden at the advice of her uncle Mordechai.
It would become a key part of the story.
After these events, King Xerxes honored Haman son of Hammedatha, the Agagite, elevating him and giving him a seat of honor higher than that of all the other nobles.
2 All the royal officials at the king’s gate knelt down and paid honor to Haman, for the king had commanded this concerning him.
But Mordecai would not kneel down or pay him honor.
Why wasn’t Haman satisfied with just killing Mordecai?
We see Satan’s fingerprints all over this.
If Haman had his wish, he would have all of Mordecai’s people, the Jews, killed, not only in Persia but throughout the whole kingdom.
There would be no descendent of Abraham to fulfill God’s plan.
But it didn’t happen as Haman planned.
In the end, King Xerxes hung Haman from gallows constructed to hang Mordecai and King Xerxes allowed the Jews to destroy their enemies.
One might wonder if we could ascribe all these events to Satan.
The Scriptures do not tell us that Satan did them.
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