Every year, social media abounds with opinions on all things Christmas. If social media had existed in Dickens’ day, one can only imagine how gleefully pre-redemption Scrooge would have used it:
“I’ll keep my bah-humbug, and you keep your merry Christmas; at least mine doesn’t cost me any money. #ItNeededToBeSaid.”
But modern Scrooges, Grinches and just all-around snooty killjoys still abound in our day. So what say, right here in the midst of the season, we go ahead and rescue Christmas from a few of the more common ones?
Concerning the Christmas tree, Jeremiah 10 has precisely zero to do with it. That chapter predated Christ by around 600 years, and Christmas trees by farther than that. It is very clearly a description of an idol in the image of a man. Otherwise, Jeremiah would not have observed that it could neither talk nor walk.
Concerning Jesus, no, he was not an illegal immigrant when he and his family went to Egypt in Matthew 2. While we can certainly have an honest, cordial debate on all things immigration, to try to cast Jesus in that light is simply unbiblical, untrue and unhistorical. He was subject to Rome, and in Roman territory both in Israel and in Egypt. Further, he and his family would find a large, thriving, legal Jewish population there, many who arrived during Jeremiah’s day, and many more on up through the time of Onias IV, under whose watch a legitimate Jewish temple was raised there. Jesus and his family were also completely self-sufficient, arriving with the wealth that the wise men had laid before him just days earlier. Oh, and he also just so happened and happens to be the Lord over all the earth.