Like many weeks, I found myself in a small rural hospital waiting on parts to fix an instrument.

So I sat down to write a sermon or a Bible study or something on the computer.  An older gentleman struck up a conversation.

The talk was about cell phones and technology.  The old guy likes cell phones, but was clueless on computers.  I told him that I was dependent on them for work and then I showed him my Bible software and how incredible that is, and how hard it would be to give that tool up.

This is when I found out he was a retired preacher.  He presently preaches to 150 people on Sundays in a trailer park area in Texas.  He says he has a non-denominational service and is bringing people from ZERO to Christ.  The guy is doing a good work in my opinion, handing out Bibles and bringing God to the lost.

Then we got into doctrines.  He wanted to know what kind of “Church of God” we are.  We talked about the Sabbath and such and were able to do so without any friction.  He didn’t deny the 4th commandment for Christians, but used the "just pick any day" angle.  I really just wanted to chat, and was actually at work, so I let well enough alone.

I got into why I believe the way I do and how I chose the Bible over men's doctrines.  There was a Christmas tree in the lounge area and I just looked at it and asked, rhetorically, "what in the world is this doing in our country?" 

"Well, we overlook some stuff", was his response.

He knew.  He knows.  And he doesn't tell people.

I had another conversation over the internet with a blogger who had written an incredibly good piece against Santa Clause, but still in favor of Christmas.  He wanted to put the “Christ” back into Christmas and had very correctly identified Santa as a false god.  As our banter unfolded, it turned out that he knows just about everything Ramon preached about last week. 

And then he told me I needed to pray to Jesus so that I would get the right attitude about keeping Christmas.  Incredible.

Christmas is one doctrine where we have a very solid foundation to stand on in our opposition.

There is no dispute that the first Christians did not observe this holiday.  There is no record of the date of Christ's birth in the scriptures or by the ECF’s and there are no commands to be found to do anything like what our country does around this time of year.

One thing we can be confident of is that if Christ's birth was to be observed, and even if it was in the winter, which the context of the scriptures contradicts anyhow, it still couldn't fall on the same day of the year every year.  Remember those other holidays that we celebrate, you know, the scriptural ones?  Remember how we all have to keep little pocket calendars to see which date they fall on every year?  That's because those days are based on the Hebrew calendar.  Jesus Christ was born a Jew, to Jewish parents, and He lived a perfect, sinless life in accordance with the Law of God.  Jesus came for the lost sheep of Israel and Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, was a Pharisee educated Jew.  All this adds up to the fact that Jesus Christ's earthly birthday would have been recorded on a Hebrew calendar and, if it was to be observed at all, it would be done using Hebrew time reckoning.  It would simply be preposterous for the Son of God to have used a calendar based on the worship of the sun and planets instead of the calendar He created and gave to Moses.

This brings up another very important point.  There are two large churches who claim roots all the way back to Peter (not Abraham incidentally).  These two churches claim to have consecrated the Christmas holiday.  And they don't agree on the date because of a calendar issue.  The Greek Orthodox Church uses the Julian calendar which was used for nearly a thousand years after Christ and the Catholics (and us for all intents and purposes) use the Gregorian calendar.  But Jesus Christ used God's calendar!

THE sin that kept getting Israel in trouble was mixing the worship of false gods with the worship of the True God, which is what Christmas is.  When the Israelites left Egypt, even after watching the cloud show them their way while eating manna from God, they still wanted to go back.  They preferred slavery to freedom, and they preferred worshipping stuff they made with their hands or gods from other cultures to worshipping the one True God.

I think the clearest place in the scriptures to illustrate this incredible desire to worship other gods is in Jeremiah 42-44.  The set up here is that Jeremiah was with a bunch of refugees from Judah.  Judah had just been destroyed because they refused to stop partaking in pagan god practices.  Jeremiah had told them over and over that God wanted them to stop it and if they didn’t, they would get overthrown in a bad way.  Their country is still on fire and dead people are everywhere.  Jeremiah was right about all his prophesies, and you would think they would be ready to believe – to repent and follow God.  Well, that’s not how it worked out.

Let’s pick it up at Jeremiah 42:4 where the refugees have just asked Jeremiah to ask God what they should do:

Then Jeremiah the prophet said to them, "I have heard you. Behold, I am going to pray to the LORD your God in accordance with your words; and I will tell you the whole message which the LORD will answer you. I will not keep back a word from you." Then they said to Jeremiah, "May the LORD be a true and faithful witness against us if we do not act in accordance with the whole message with which the LORD your God will send you to us. "Whether it is pleasant or unpleasant, we will listen to the voice of the LORD our God to whom we are sending you, so that it may go well with us when we listen to the voice of the LORD our God."

(Jer 42:4-6)

So now, with hundreds of thousands of dead people behind them, their country still burning and occupied by the very people that Jeremiah told them would occupy the land if they did not repent, it looked like they are finally going to follow God.  Remember, they said, whatever God says through you, Mr. Prophet, we will do without question.  So, Jeremiah goes away for 10 days, comes back, and declares that they need to stay put.  God will protect them if they stay put, but if they decide to go to Egypt, they’re doomed.  Now, turn to:

But as soon as Jeremiah, whom the LORD their God had sent, had finished telling all the people all the words of the LORD their God--that is, all these words-- Azariah the son of Hoshaiah, and Johanan the son of Kareah, and all the arrogant men said to Jeremiah, "You are telling a lie! The LORD our God has not sent you to say, 'You are not to enter Egypt to reside there'; but Baruch the son of Neriah is inciting you against us to give us over into the hand of the Chaldeans, so they will put us to death or exile us to Babylon."

(Jer 43:1-3)

I can only imagine how Jeremiah responded.  In my 21st century mind, I imagine him looking at the camera as if in a sit-com or a movie to address the audience and saying something like “un-believable, can you believe this?  What is WRONG with these people?”

So, the stiff necked crowd goes on to Egypt, and Jeremiah with them.  Why he sticks with this crowd, who knows?  Does he tell them over and over on the journey that they are making a big mistake – who knows?  But, the story rapidly goes into the scene in Egypt.  Now they are settled and getting comfy – never mind their incredible disbelief of what God has said He is going to do them for not listening…. again.  And what do they do?  Flip to chapter 44.  Sure enough, there is a long decree from the LORD through Jeremiah.  It’s a lot of scripture and I hope y’all read these chapters in their entirety before long.  Again, in my 21st century mind, I read the first 14 or so verses here and I see God just shaking his head in disbelief.  I imagine Him banging his head against a wall and just hollering, “what is it going to take to get through to these people?”  Because, sure enough, He tells them to knock it off again (through Jeremiah) and He reminds them of what He did to them before, and He tells them yet again what He is going to do to them if they don’t knock it off and repent, and what is their response?  Unbelievably, let us pick it up at Chapter 44 verse 16

"As for the message that you have spoken to us in the name of the LORD, we are not going to listen to you! "But rather we will certainly carry out every word that has proceeded from our mouths, by burning sacrifices to the queen of heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, just as we ourselves, our forefathers, our kings and our princes did in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem; for then we had plenty of food and were well off and saw no misfortune. "But since we stopped burning sacrifices to the queen of heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have lacked everything and have met our end by the sword and by famine." "And," said the women, "when we were burning sacrifices to the queen of heaven and were pouring out drink offerings to her, was it without our husbands that we made for her sacrificial cakes in her image and poured out drink offerings to her?"

(Jer 44:16-19)

Yep, they refused to listen yet again and, in fact, decided to keep up with the pagan god traditions – they refused to give up their tradition. 

Now, I’m going to skip forward in history.  The true history of Christmas and its pagan traditions is so readily available that I even found it at http://www.history.com/, the internet destination for the History Channel.  Heck, they even have it available in video:

The Puritans of the 1600’s abolished Christmas in England due to excesses and such, but it came back rather quickly. Christmas was not a holiday in the New World on a large scale.  In fact, from 1659 to 1681, the celebration of Christmas was actually outlawed in Boston. Some people did celebrate it in other areas, but nothing on a wide scale. Christmas fell away in large measure after the Revolutionary War as new Americans understandably cast aside English traditions.  Congress was actually in session on the first December 25th under the new constitution.  Christmas wasn't declared a federal holiday until June 26, 1870.

Can you imagine that this country made it almost a hundred years without Christmas being a national holiday?  Now, I don’t think for a minute that Christmas wasn’t celebrated at all during these early times, but it certainly wasn’t celebrated nationally and with the decadence of today.  My guess is that many folks didn’t even feel pressure to celebrate the day until it became a national holiday.

So, we move a little further in time.  The image we all have of Santa Claus is only about 160 years old.  It came from the imagination of an American author who re-designed the character and added reindeer. The general look and feel of the Christmas celebration in the US today started around 1939 when the Montgomery Ward department store launched a marketing campaign centered on a reindeer named Rudolph.  Yep, that’s right, this tradition that Americans hold so dear isn’t even two hundred years old, let alone 1900. 

And this is the point in time where I want to concentrate for a while.  The atheists and socialists in our country today are attacking Christmas in an effort to attack Christianity and traditional values.  You see, the anti-Christian crowd knows the same history of Christmas that we do.  They know it is folly, but they also know that it is very near and dear to many of America’s Christians.  So they mock it in any way they can.

And they are right.  When it comes to Christmas, I tend to agree with some of the argument that the far lefties put forth.  I don’t think it should be a national holiday and I know it to be a phony celebration that was adopted into Christianity hundreds of years after the birth of Christ.  When mainstream Christians defend this day, they look very foolish in the eyes of the well-researched skeptics.  Trying to defend Christmas as a national holiday while saying Congress didn’t break the 1st amendment of the Bill of Rights is hilarious.  By making the day a national holiday, they essentially enshrined Roman Catholicism as a national religion - more on that on another day.

Enter one Bill O’Reilly of Fox News fame.  I watch O’Reilly when I’m on the road and catch his radio show a couple times a week.  While listening to O’Reilly’s radio show I found out that Ulysses S. Grant was the president of the U.S. who signed Christmas into law, which means that O’Reilly does know the holiday is only 138 years old.  O’Reilly and others at FNC have launched a HUGE campaign to keep Christmas in the forefront, to protect it as an American tradition, and to keep it as a national holiday.  O’Reilly and others look fondly on the days of their youth – when they remember America being really, really great, really, really conservative, and traditional family values were the order of the day.  Their contention is that everyone, Jew and Christian alike, used to say ‘Merry Christmas’ to each other.  They look longingly at the days when Christmas wasn’t quite so secularized and the entire economy of the US didn’t hinge on how much stuff kids found under the tree.  You know, back when profits were reported quarterly on paper and only brokers who took the time to read about it knew what the trends were.  They don’t much like the Christmas of today where revenues are measured seemingly by the minute and it is all commercialized.  They also really don’t like the fact that Christmas is under attack by people who dislike God.

So, I need to go in two directions here.  The first is that they are making a very similar mistake to the Jews in Egypt with Jeremiah.  Remember how those Jews told Jeremiah that they wanted to go back to the good old days, when they made cakes for the queen of heaven?  Remember how, despite how bad things got, they remembered the prosperity of when they first took to the pagan traditions?  They didn’t remember the time where their nation didn’t partake in the pagan traditions that had lead up to the prosperity, but not what actually caused the prosperity – obedience to the one True God!

The Israelites and Christianity have gone through peaks and valleys.  After the Exodus, Joshua entered the promised land and mostly followed God’s instructions, which lead to great prosperity.  Solomon started a huge downward trend by, guess what?  Yep, mixing pagan god worship with God’s people.  The two kingdoms split and had their periods of prosperity as well as darkness.  Jesus came in the flesh and made a HUGE surge of righteousness that lasted nearly 300 years.  Then we had the dark ages, followed by the Reformation and then the founding of this country.  Now, we are in a spiritual decline where Christianity is under attack from all angles, and those of us who are attempting to fashion our faith after the scriptures alone are looked upon as freaks.

The other angle I wanted to take on this has to do with the movie Star Wars.  In the recent trilogy the evil emperor character had created two armies, specifically to go to war with each other and cause inter-galactic chaos.  Both of these armies were created by and headed by the same guy.  But they didn’t know it.  In fact, the evil Emperor didn’t really care which side eventually won, because all he wanted to do was cause a huge inter-galactic mess of a war and then he would rise to power and emerge as the victor, which would make people follow him and give him great, almost god-like power.

Ahhh, now the picture is coming clear to me.  Satan may very well be doing the same thing with Christmas and other extra-Biblical Christian traditions!  This is pure speculation on my part, but I see a parallel here.  Satan infused some errors into Christianity that blew up to huge proportions, and he even did it before Christianity was founded!  These errors have become the defining characteristics of mainstream Christianity.  If you think about it, mainstream Christianity’s hallmarks are Christmas, Easter, and Sunday – none of which are scriptural and all of which are adopted from the pagan religions!  Then, Satan attacks the false doctrines he introduced into the pure faith with people who outwardly hate God!  He gets to cause incredible chaos as people choose either side of the false dichotomy (explain false dichotomy)…. But both sides are in opposition to God!

In fact, the folks who celebrate Christmas are so fired up about the attacks on the holiday, they are even writing books about it!  One of my favorite commentators, John Gibson, wrote a book about how the left is attacking Christmas.  On Wednesday, I heard a girl on the radio who actually lost her job because she refused to say “Happy Holidays” when answering the phone at her work.  She told her boss that she would either answer it with the non-holiday script or with Merry Christmas, but she refused to do it with “Happy Holidays” because Christmas is the only day she recognizes as a holiday in December because she is a Christian.  So, she got fired for insubordination and is now suing because her boss “infringed on her religious freedom”.  Wow. 

As I was working on this, a story came on the TV about 600 members of a PROTESTANT church in the Metro who are dressing up like Jesus to go about their daily activities to make a protest to put Jesus BACK into Christmas!  They showed video of people dressed up like Jesus buying stuff and walking down the street and even blessing people in Jesus’ name! Wow! Of course, they were dressed up like a grown-up Jesus, not a baby Jesus.

The effect these attacks are having on people is to cement Christmas into their lives and their minds.  People who really can’t afford to buy a bunch of stuff and have a celebration are even more motivated to go into debt buying stuff they don’t need or going places they don’t need to go because people who hate God are telling them they shouldn’t. 

This is where we come in.  Christians against Christmas is how the bumper sticker ought to read.  The false dichotomy has been laid out before our countrymen.  But there is a third answer!  Answer “c” is to choose Christ.  To choose the WORD.  To choose the faith once handed down to the saints.  To choose God over the doctrines of men.  God is real and Christmas is fake.  Take this to heart, brethren, and be encouraged.  Because our faith puts us in some awkward positions.  What to say when someone says “Merry Christmas”?  What to do when attending the annual office “Christmas” party?  Do we abstain and make a spectacle of ourselves?  Do we go along a little for convenience sakes?  I don’t know. 

It’s almost as though we are living in a Twilight Zone episode or some other science fiction work.  We’re a very small percentage of Christians who even care about such things as the scriptural basis for our faith.  We’re a minority when it comes to the Sabbath, but when it comes to refusing to accept the errors of Christmas and Easter, we are an even smaller minority.  The information is everywhere, as plain as day, for anyone to read.  The classically trained ministers know of these errors in large measure, but they just shrug and continue in error.  And if we try to tell anyone the truth, WE get mocked and suffer grief.  This is very frustrating to me, but it is the hand I have been dealt, so it is the hand I have to play.

In closing, though, there are a few things that we can bank on:

Jesus Christ was not born on December 25th.

December 25th is historically a celebration to a phony god.

We need to stand strong in these precarious times.

And our reward is not of this world.