Will she give birth to a son and call him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins?(Matthew 1:21).
We don’t need to go any further to understand the meaning of Christmas, it’s all in the child’s name.
- According to the earlier account of the Gospel of Matthew.
- The name of Jesus Christ was given by the angel Gabriel when he announced his birth to Joseph.
- Married to the Virgin Mary.
- Gabriel not only said that Mary was pregnant with the Holy Spirit of God.
- But he also ordered Joseph to call his son “Jesus.
- “.
The reason for this name, which means the Hebrew root?It is that this child, son of Mary and Son of God, would save his people from their sins, as the angel announced.
We don’t need to go any further to understand the meaning of Christmas, it’s all in the child’s name. In his name Jesus we have the reason for his birth, his identity and the mission of his life, that is, what Christmas really represents.
The reason for his birth is simply this: we are sinners, we are lost, we cannot solve this problem on our own, and we desperately need a Savior, someone who frees us from the past, present, and future consequences of our mistakes. He responded to our need by choosing a man like us to be our representative and savior, someone who shared our humanity and was one of us, this man was born two thousand years ago in this nursery in the city of Belém, in a remote country, in the Old East and was named after Jesus for that reason.
His mission was to take our place as our representative before God and suffer all the consequences of our sins, mistakes, iniquities, deviations, and disobedience. Instead of punishing us for eternal death, as we deserve, God would experience it in our place, that he would experience all the pain and suffering that results from our sins. This mission was revealed at birth by the angel Gabriel when he recited his name to Joseph: Jesus.
To save us from our sins, he must suffer and die, be buried, be under the influence of death, and thus fully pay our debt to God; only then can we be saved from the eternal consequences of our disobedience. In order for the benefits of his suffering and death to be transferred to other human beings, he could not have sinned or blamed because otherwise, when he died, he would simply receive the pay of his own sin. But if he were innocent, sinless and perfect, his death would be of value to sinners, so he was begat by the Holy Spirit in the bosom of Mary, still virgin, Son of God, without sin. The Savior had to be God and man.
When a chronicler, who opposes the supernatural birth of Jesus, recently wrote in a widely circulated newspaper in Sao Paulo that virgins do not give birth every day, he was more certain than he thought. That’s the only case. Jesus is unique. God and man in one person, neither before nor after virgins became supernaturally pregnant, just as God does not create worlds every day, does not generate saviors of virgins every day, that is enough for us.
The famous Swiss theologian Emil Brunner said that every man has a problem in the past, present and future. In the past, guilt. In the present, fear and in the future, death. Jesus saves us from all these consequences of sin: he forgives us the guilt of our past mistakes, he frees us in the present from fear by walking with us and he will free us from death because he rose from the dead and lives at the right hand of God. One day, he will bring us back to life.
This is what Christmas represents, that is why Christians celebrate it with such gratitude and joy: the Savior was born. Jesus was born! How happy is this announcement the heart of the guilty, scared and knowing that they are going to die!