God created this world and placed us in it. He was there in the garden with us and it was good. But we rejected him and turned to various idols. This pattern repeats again and again with the same tragic results. We turn from God to sin and to death and to those things that will never satisfy. Left alone this would be all we would ever know. Sin, death, and dissatisfaction. No amount of effort or progress could restore us back to the garden.
So God came to us. We celebrate that fact every Christmas. In Jesus Christ the God of the Exodus; the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; and the God of Israel came to be with us. We celebrate ‘Immanuel.’ And God came to seek and save the lost. This is the radical teaching of Christianity. It was beyond the world’s imagination that God would enter this fallen creation the way that he did. As Tim Keller says, “The founders of every other major religion said, ‘I’m a prophet who shows you how to find God,’ but Jesus taught, ‘I’m God, come to find you.'”
That is good news.
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