A Light Has Dawned: Meditations on Advent and Christmas

Top Highlights

“The true Christmas story scares us spitless. If God undressed, we might have to join him—remove our self-sufficiency suits, pull off our health-and-well-being designer sweats. Perhaps instead of shopping we need to spend December reminding ourselves of God’s choice of vulnerability and pondering its implications. Perhaps we need to call December 25th the Celebration of the Incarnation, to greet each other with incarnation greetings—instead of ‘Happy Holidays’ or ‘Merry Christmas’ we could shout, ‘God chose flesh!’ ‘God became one of us!’” (Pages 51–52)

“Because the woman was the vessel through which God would bring his Son and our salvation into the world, she became one of Satan’s most hated enemies. She may have opened the gate that let in the enemy, but she also bore the One who would close it permanently. While she had been the one that Satan first approached as an ally in his plan to bring down God’s perfect creation, Satan would be at war with her forevermore because her seed would ultimately defeat him.” (Page 38)

“Christmas calls us to accept a life of vulnerability and simplicity in the face of God’s acceptance of our weak estate” (Page 185)

“When Paul uses the word ‘saved through childbearing,’ he is not referring to the physical survival of humanity through procreation, but to the birth of the Child, literally ‘the Childbirth,’ as William Mounce and John Stott have pointed out in their respective commentaries. The Greek use of a definite article that points to the unique, one and only nature of this childbirth, and the larger context of the discussion of Eve in the Garden in the previous two verses, bring us full circle to God’s prophecy: Through the woman would come the Savior who would defeat Satan. She would be saved, or redeemed, through the birth of the Child.” (Page 37)