Every Christmas I have to work extra hard to remind our kids of the reason for the season. The more gifts they receive the more I have to slow down and make sure they understand the reason our family celebrates the holiday. I have to remind them that we are celebrating for a very different reason than the one you see in the stores and on TV. The Christmas we celebrate is tied to Easter. We celebrate the birth of Christ because he went on to die on the cross and rise from the dead!
This is why Christians celebrate differently than the world. Our celebration is not a stand alone event. It is tied to the life of Christ. It is connected to the work that he accomplished on the cross. Christmas has to be celebrated in light of the resurrection because if Jesus never rose from the dead we would have no reason to celebrate his birth. If he didn’t rise from the dead then the main goal of his life would have failed. We would not celebrate Christmas. Instead we would have never heard about him because there would not have been a message worth passing on to the next generation.
I was thinking about this because our church just put on a Christmas musical called “The Mystery of the Manger.” It follows the story of an investigative journalist who is writing a story about what actually happened at Christmas. At the beginning, he is skeptical and considers it to be a bunch of fairy tales, but by the end he has become convinced by historical evidence and he joins the rest of the cast in celebrating his very first Christmas.
It’s a fictional story, but I discovered that it is actually based on events that happened in a former atheist’s life. His name is Lee Strobel. He was working as the legal editor for the Chicago Tribune in the 1980’s. His wife became a Christian and he decided he would research the Bible’s claims so that he could prove that they were false. After two years of interviewing experts in the fields of archeology, history, and theology he realized he had to make a decision. He went into his room and began writing down all the evidence he had compiled. He kept writing and writing until he realized the evidence pointed towards the life of Christ, not as an easily dismissed fairy-tale, but an undeniable historical fact. He read John 1:12, “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” He repented of his sin and gave his life to Christ.
Lee Strobel’s main questions were not about the birth of Christ. He spent most of his time researching the death and resurrection. He discovered four lives of evidence that even skeptics agreed with. The first was the integrity of Christ’s execution. There would be no point to talk about his resurrection if there was doubt that he really died. The second was how early the evidence was recorded for the resurrection. Alexander the Great’s biographies are considered historically accurate, but they weren’t written until four hundred years after his death. The accounts of Jesus life and death were written within decades by people who were eye witnesses! Strobel was also impressed with the historical evidence for an empty tomb. Strobel studied law and he knew that one of the strongest arguments is found in something called “Enemy Attestation.” This corroborates the empty tomb because Jesus’ enemies implicitly admitted that the tomb was empty when they said, “The disciples stole the body.” They were not denying the empty tomb. They were actually admitting it was empty by giving a different story for why it happened. The last line of evidence that led Strobel to believe in the Bible as history is when he discovered how strong the eye witness accounts of the resurrection were. The bible records that there were 515 eye witnesses of Jesus after the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15).
Strobel took his findings to skeptics and asked them to explain how an ancient book could make such a claim if it were not true. One expert named Gary Ludemann wrote, “It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.” Ludemann is confident to say they experienced the risen Jesus, but he maintains that they experienced them as hallucinations. So Strobel went to a psychologist who specialized in hallucinations and he asked what he thought. He said it is impossible for over five hundred people to have the same hallucination because hallucinations are “individual events that happen in individual minds.” This psychologist stated “Five hundred people having the same hallucination is more of a miracle than the resurrection.”
Lee Strobel had started his research as an atheist who wanted to disprove the biblical account. His conclusion, after two years of careful research, was that “it would take more faith to maintain atheism than to be a Christian. Jesus not only claimed to be the Son of God. He backed it up by rising from the dead.” The same could be said about backing up the claim that Christmas was a historical event. The virgin birth in Bethlehem can be backed up with the evidence of his death and resurrection. There is a mystery surrounding the manger, but praise God the evidence confirms the biblical account. We know what happened on that amazing night. May we take the time to celebrate it, not simply as a wonderful story, but as a supernatural historical event.
