Christmas is good I news—the best of all good news. It tells us what God is like, it tells us what man is like, and it tells us what the Christian life is like. This is all man needs to know to live and die by—but he needs to know all of it.
Most people, including many Christians, are turned off by theology, even a theology of Christmas. While I was teaching a Sunday school class, a young carpenter interrupted me saying politely but firmly, “Theology is just not where I’m at. I work hard all week long and when I come to church on Sunday, I need my heart warmed and not a lecture on some fine points of ancient theology. I need something practical to tell me how to live when I return to my job tomorrow morning.” Although that Sunday school lesson may have been unreasonably dry and remote, the Christmas story as sketched by the Apostle Paul in the second chapter of Philippians could not be more practical. It penetrates right to the essence of the Christian life. It hits man exactly where he is. The apostle affirms that life at its highest and best flows out of a right relationship to God: “For me to live is Christ.” Then in verse five Paul defines this best and noblest of all living in a short but stiff lesson in theology—a theology of Christmas.
“Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bondservant, and being made in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore also God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those who are in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:5–11, NASB).
Christmas Begins With God
Though this passage is not ordinarily identified with the Christmas story, the biblical author begins his lesson in theology where the true story of Christmas must always begin—with God. Jesus Christ, he declares, existed before his birth at Bethlehem in the form of God. The word form in the Greek world had as many meanings as it does in our world. The philosophers had a specific meaning for the term. They believed everything had form and matter. Matter was what made something real rather than imaginary. Matter was the stuff of which something was made, and form was what distinguished one unit of matter from another. A chair and a table, for example, may have been identical in matter, both composed of wood. But a chair was certainly not a table, and a table was not a chair. It was its form that made the chair a chair instead of a table.
In biblical vocabulary, form was often used as a synonym for image. It referred to an outward appearance that reflected its true nature. By the form of God, therefore, Paul is not speaking of a theophany such as the Greek gods and goddesses who sometimes appeared to be what they really were not. Nor is he referring merely to the external appearance by which God made his presence visible, as in the burning bush Moses saw. Christ was the exact replica of God the Father. He existed long before his birth into the human race at Bethlehem, and he existed the way God existed—in all the divine glory and majesty of Jehovah himself. For Paul, Jesus Christ embraced whatever it meant to be God. He was the Lord of glory (1 Cor. 2:8) and in his own right displayed the glory of one uniquely begotten of his heavenly father (John 1:14).
The second half of verse six reinforces the same thought, although its meaning is often obscured by faulty translation. Scripture does not say that Christ was less than God’s equal. Nor does it say that because he was humble, he did not seek the exalted state of deity. Instead, the passage teaches that Christ did not think a grasping nature was part of God’s nature. No doubt, a popular Greek misconception saw God as inclined to seize for himself everything within his power, but that is far from the true God revealed in the Bible. Here the divine Christ, far from grasping the prerogatives of glory and majesty appropriate to him as deity, deliberately chose to empty himself of his divine glory in order to become man.
The passage carries no suggestion that in doing so he ceased to be God. Indeed, if he was truly and fully God, this would be a contradiction in terms. Rather, he who was God and rightly possessed as his own the glories of the supreme deity, chose not to hold onto these glories but to come down into this world and take upon himself a God-created form of being—the antithesis of God in glory and honor.
Beyond this, the exalted Christ chose to become a servant or slave—the lowliest social level of man. And eventually he permitted himself to be put to death on a cross—the most ignominious and shameful of deaths. On a hill of infamy outside the ancient city of Jerusalem he was crucified on a cross between a thief and a murderer.
Without the Bible story we could, perhaps, imagine how God might have made his entry into our planet, if indeed, we could ever imagine such an unthinkable thing as God becoming man. We would surely imagine him as a super-Caesar descending from the heavens with a panoply of splendor that would surpass the czars of Russia. There, the object of rapt adoration by all the world, he would descend into our sphere to set mankind straight. But that’s not how it was. He became a helpless baby lying in a dirty stall of barnyard animals. Like any slave, he stood at the beck and call of every human being. Eventually he was nailed to a tree and left to die a death too debasing for any freeborn Roman citizen. Christ the mighty maker became the lowly slave.
Why? Because he loved you and me. Despite our sin and alienation from a holy God, he loved us. He wished to redeem us and to win us back to himself so that we might be his people and enjoy fellowship with him forever. That is why he chose to come down into this world, to be born as a baby in Bethlehem, to be led out to Calvary, and there to die for our sins. This love is the central meaning of Christmas—the heart of its theology.
But God did not abandon his Christ there. The final verses of this passage tell us that God the Father exalted this self-sacrificing God who had become man in order to redeem lost humanity. The God-man—known to us as Jesus, the crucified slave—now reigns, and one day he will have uncontested reign over the entire universe—the adored and only deity of all beings.
So much for the theology of Christmas. Now for the application. How can I relate to this improbable story of Christmas—a story about the God of heaven and earth born into this world over two millennia ago as a tiny helpless baby? How can we apply this theology of Christmas to living in the twentieth century?
Christmas Tells What God Is Like
First of all, Christmas tells us what God is like. Despite what many philosophers have conjectured, God is not a remote being in the heavens, uninterested in the daily toils and agonies of humankind. Rather, he is a person who acts, loves, grieves, rejoices, suffers, and enters fully into the stress of history. Most important of all, the God of the Bible in his essential nature is self-giving love. Holy? Yes, he is holy. But he is holy-love and, by God’s own standard, his greatest glory was his greatest humiliation; his greatest humiliation brought his greatest exaltation. The God of the Bible, the only God who is really there, is a god of infinite, self-sacrificing love. The creator and sustainer of the universe, whose existence gives ultimate structure to all reality and in whose being we all live and move and have our being, is infinite, absolute love.
The God who reveals himself in Jesus has at the quintessential center of his being, pure, passionate, sacrificial love for us. Renowned theologian Karl Barth once summarized his understanding of what Christianity was all about like this: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” God loves us and in the person of Jesus came down into this world to tell us so, to redeem us from our sin, and to claim us for himself in eternal fellowship.
Christmas Tells What Man Is Like
Second, this passage also tells us what man is like. According to the Bible each human being holds infinite value. Of course, he also sins. The context of this passage and of the entire Bible will not permit us to overlook it. We are lost in our sin and alienated from God. And it is the infinite worth of a human soul that renders sin so infinitely and unutterably tragic.
Man lives with a paradox in this century. He is capable of walking on the moon, sending space probes to other planets, and even reaching out beyond the stars. Yet he cannot find meaning and direction for his life. “I will tell you what human life is: It is an unpleasant interruption of nothingness,” Clarence Darrow once said. And H. G. Wells, known in the early years of his life as the world’s greatest optimist, came eventually to the despair of a man who lives without God. “Here I am at sixty-five,” he wrote in his autobiography, “still searching for peace; but a dignified peace is but an empty dream.”
On our university campuses thirty years ago, it was essential to warn against human pride and to stress that man, as a sinner, is helpless to transform himself into ultimate good. But in 1978, the mood of modern man is radically different. Today’s student needs to recognize the worthiness of life. The temptation is to conceive of oneself as nothing. It is peculiarly a temptation that attacks the middle-aged. What does my life count for? Nothing! That is a lie of the devil. God himself declared that we are of infinite value to him. And what he has declared to be true, we dare not deny.
Christmas reminds us that we are the kind of being in whom God could and, indeed, did become incarnate. The infinite God of heaven was born into the human race, to which you and I belong. The biblical doctrine of man revealed in the story of Christmas is mind-shattering.
Christmas Tells What The Christian Life Is Like
Third, this passage teaches us the essential nature of the Christian life. Man’s greatest good is found in a life of humble self-sacrificing love for God and for our fellow men. Do not be misled by the word humble. Humility has never been a popular virtue. A humble person never seems to get his share of life’s good things or recognition for what he has accomplished. Humility has also been devalued by our misunderstanding of what the Bible means by humility.
Not Self Debasement
We tend to think humility calls us to think, “I am nothing. I am no good and can do nothing worthwhile.” Jesus didn’t do that. He knew he was the divine Son of God. And his humility consisted not in his refusal to admit who he was but in his willingness to give up his station—to suffer terrible loss for our good. Scripture avows our identity and our infinite value. We are the kind of being in whom God himself became incarnate. We have no right to despise God’s creation. Biblical humility, the humility of Jesus Christ, is a willingness to sacrifice for the service of God and our fellow human beings because we love them.
Not Loss Of Selfhood
Similarly, the Christian life is not based on a Buddhistic denial of one’s selfhood, an absorption of one’s identity into the all of the universe. This view sometimes surfaces even in Christian circles, and it is often based on a false interpretation of Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (NIV). But biblical ethics involve a denial not of self but of selfishness. In selfishness everything in the world is evaluated on the basis of what it will contribute to me. God calls the Christian to renounce selfishness, not his personal identity. God doesn’t desire to obliterate the Christian’s personality, but to perfect and enoble it. The Christian, then, is not to become Christ and thus to cease having his own personal existence, but is to become Christ-like and thus enjoy an eternal fellowship of holy persons.
Not Asceticism
Asceticism likewise fails to constitute the ideal Christian life. According to asceticism, we develop our inner self and find the good life by denying all things good and beautiful. The biblical ideal is just the reverse. It encourages us to enjoy these things. Denying ourselves these things is wrong in two ways. It is wrong, first, because it keeps us from recognizing the goodness of God’s creation. God made things beautiful for us to see, good for us to taste, and delightful for us to hear and to touch and to smell. He delights in our enjoyment of them.
Asceticism errs for another and more basic reason. It is at heart merely another form of selfishness, since it still concentrates on self. It seeks to promote one part of me by cutting out another part. It keeps me wholly consumed and guided by selfish concern for myself. Since asceticism centers all my concern on myself, it tends to make me a small, hard, proud person who is inconsiderate and perhaps cruel to others.
The biblical servant of God invariably concerns himself with others—God and his fellow men. His love for others motivates his thought and action. The servant of God may, for the sake of discipline, give up some things to serve others better, but he will never deny God’s good creation. He will enjoy God’s good things when he can share them with others and when they do not keep him from serving God and others. All that we are and have we are to share in service to God and man.
Not Legalism
The biblical theology of Christmas also frees us from legalism. By definition, of course, Christians would agree good works save no one. Christian ethics are based on the fundamental assumption that love is mightier than fear. The Christian does not live out his life in suspense waiting for the final judgment of God. Rather, a Christian’s life begins with full forgiveness and acceptance by God. He lives free from fear of divine punishment. He lives filled with the forgiving love of a holy God.
Yet he may slip inadvertently into the sub-biblical view that the Christian life is developed by keeping the law. Benjamin Franklin had that idea. Each week he tried to develop in himself a particular virtue. All too often, contemporary Christians judge their progress in the Christian life by how rigorously they obey rules. This understanding of the Christian life embraces something less than the wholeness of life and the complexity of human responsibility. Such legalism de-personalizes the Christian life. The Christian life calls us to a relationship with a God who loves us, not a set of detailed rules for right living. The Jewish rabbis counted 613 laws in the Old Testament and the New Testament adds many more, but no one achieves goodness merely by obeying a code of conduct. As used in both testaments, the root meaning of law is instruction. God’s law is his instruction; it tells us what perfect love means.
The Lord taught his disciples that the greatest commandment is to love God. The next greatest is like it: to love our neighbor as ourselves. The royal law of love functions in a double manner. It enables us to know exactly what ought to be done. We ask “What is, in fact, the act of love?” And the commandments of the Bible tell us in practical and precise detail what is truly the act of love toward God and toward our fellow men.
Love also moves us to do what ought to be done. Frequently we know what love requires and fail to carry it out. The Levite in the story of the good Samaritan knew very well what love required of him. As a religious leader of the Jews he knew the Old Testament commandment “Love your neighbor.” So he knew that love would require him to get off his donkey and help his fellow Jew lying helpless by the side of the road. With vivid imagination, Soren Kirkegaard pictures the Levite as glorying in the wonderful moral beauty and excellence of the law of love as he made his donkey walk by on the other side of the road. He knew the law of love. He lacked only one thing: love itself.
But Not License
Though the Christian life frees us from legalism, it offers no life of license despite prevalent caricature. As evangelicals, we are sometimes faulted for teaching that we are saved by faith without good works and, therefore, we can live wicked and licentious lives with no fear of eternal punishment or accountability. Yet the Bible teaches something very different from this. He who brings us to faith also creates new life within us. God does not do one without the other. The Bible teaches that good works always accompany true faith. Nevertheless, the Bible also teaches that only faith, not good works, is the condition for Christian salvation.
Not Imitation Of Christ
Furthermore, the Christian life is more than the imitation of Christ’s earthly life. The so-called example theory of the atonement errs at this point. It advocates that the Christian ask in each situation, “What would Jesus do?” No doubt every Christian would be better if he followed the pattern of what Jesus did, but the twentieth-century Christian seldom can follow exactly in his steps. God rarely wishes us to be put to death. The Philippians passage does not teach that our life is to be a life of imitation. But as with Christ, our guiding principle is to be love informed by the Holy Scripture. Self-sacrificing love, not a desire to imitate Christ, ought to motivate our thought and action. Like Christ, we are to serve: first God and then all people. For man, as for our Lord, the way up to the greatest exaltation and fulfillment is the way down to humble, loving service.
The Conclusion Of The Matter
This passage in Philippians—the story of Christmas—brings us face to face with the paradox so utterly devastating to those who spend their lives in relentless hedonism. He who selfishly seeks his own good all his life never arrives at the greatest of human satisfactions. Yet, he who loses his life will save it. Christ showed this to us, for with the joy of anticipating our salvation, he gave himself to die in our behalf.
The believer must realize that God may lead him to some harsh corner of the earth and there ask him to live out his life and eventually die there. God did just that to his well-beloved son, Jesus Christ. Dare we demand he treat us differently? In the end, God will fill our lives with joy and blessing. This is the paradox of the Christian life. The deepest joys of eternal life are not found in seeking pleasure but in self-forgetful love for others.
And that is what the biblical story of Christmas tells us about the Christian life. And that is what it means to live in the spirit of Christmas.
G. Douglas Young is founder and president of the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. He has lived there since 1963.
