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Confusion At Christmas
00:05:24
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| Now I'm going to ask you something I don't want to ask you, but I'm going to ask you only because I really, really want to know the answer. | |
| But we're taping this show at Christmastime. | |
| You see our Christmas trees are here and all. | |
| And would you tell us what you discovered about the confusion at the date of Christmas? | |
| Now, I'm going to press, what do you want to call? | |
| The precedent by saying I believe that December 25th is not the proper date for Christ's birthday. | |
| I believe that most science and research and biblical people believe that it was at a different time. | |
| But I've never made a big thing of it because we celebrate it. | |
| We just were celebrating the birth of our Savior. | |
| So I don't know if we have to have the right, I don't know if you guys are so narrow that you have to be on that exact date. | |
| So is that a terrible question to ask? | |
| No, no, no. | |
| And I think it's interesting. | |
| Yeah, because a friend of ours last year who has a ministry sent an email to us just asking our opinion, should I wish other Christians Merry Christmas? | |
| And isn't that a sad thing to have to ask? | |
| Wow. | |
| Because there are some who have gotten offended over recent years because of the mistaken belief that Christmas is based on a pagan holiday. | |
| And of course the most obvious one would be the Saturnalia of Rome. | |
| I think the three main questions to ask, is Christmas really based on the worship of pagan gods? | |
| When did the early church begin celebrating Christmas? | |
| And why did they settle on December 25th as the day? | |
| And I've written about this more elsewhere, but in the book I focused just on Saturnalia. | |
| The answer to the first question is, no, it's not based on the worship of pagan gods. | |
| They began the early church celebrating Christmas as early as 200 A.D. | |
| So well before Constantine, the Emperor of Constantine, so we can't blame him for this. | |
| And why did they settle on December 25th? | |
| And that's actually a very simple answer. | |
| And scholars have looked into this and found this. | |
| And by the way, I should just point out that nobody, no Christian before about the year 1100, 1100 thought there was anything pagan about Christmas. | |
| The early church, most of those early Christians had come out of pagan religions. | |
| They were very sensitive about not doing things or worshiping things that they had just rejected. | |
| If anyone had said that we're worshiping a pagan God, it would have been their early church, but not until about 1100 AD did anyone even raise the idea. | |
| December 25th, there was a traditional belief among Jews that a great prophet would die on the same day he was conceived. | |
| They call this the integral age. | |
| Okay, that's not biblical, it's not scriptural, but that was the belief among the early Jews of the Second Temple period. | |
| So a great prophet would die on the same day that he was conceived. | |
| So they tried to figure out, okay, in the early third century, when did Jesus die? | |
| And they came up with the date of the year of March 25th of AD 29. | |
| Now, that's not correct because March 25th in the year 29 was not a Friday. | |
| It was not the Passover, but that was the date they arrived at. | |
| Okay? | |
| March 25th. | |
| Add nine months to March 25th and you get December 25th. | |
| That's all there is to it. | |
| Wow. | |
| Nothing pagan about it. | |
| They were just trying to honor the date that God became flesh. | |
| They miscalculated the date, but that's all. | |
| That is how December 25th became the date that we celebrate the birth of Christ. | |
| And as far as we're concerned, it's the one time of year when you can openly proclaim the name of Christ. | |
| You can sing about Jesus. | |
| You can talk about Jesus. | |
| You can wish people marry Christ Mass of Christ. | |
| Everywhere you go. | |
| And by the way, the tree, I have the most commonly accepted story behind why the Germans started bringing in trees because it was Queen Victoria and being married to Prince Albert who brought in the tree just like her German husband did. | |
| Is that Martin Luther started it? | |
| If you want to have an argument with Martin Luther, well, good luck! | |
| Trust me, they tried and failed when he was alive. | |
| He wanted to show his children the beauty, what he saw when he walked in the woods and saw the stars coming through those trees. | |
| So he said to his wife, let's bring in the tree. | |
| I'm going to decorate it with candles. | |
| We're going to wire them to the branches. | |
| And I want my children to think about the stars over Bethlehem when our Lord was born. | |
| That's all there is to it. | |
| That's good. | |
| And by the way, we have wonderful friends who take their live Christmas tree every year at the end of the season and they take all the branches off. | |
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Without Christmas, No Cross
00:00:29
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| They form a cross out of it. | |
| And they keep it until Easter. | |
| And they use that as an object lesson for their children and all of the neighborhood children so that they understand the cross is tied to Christmas. | |
| Yes. | |
| Amen. | |
| Without Christmas, there would be no cross. | |