The Christmas Message in a Nutshell

Two Sundays ago someone asked my Sunday school class to sum up the Christmas message in as few words as possible. They wanted the Christmas message in a nutshell, and I immediately thought of the single word, “Immanuel.”

Dr. Brian Labosier teaches Sunday School at his local church and instructs seminary students at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary and Bethel Seminary of the East. He loves the Lord, his family, and enjoys his canoe. Here are his thoughts on Christmas.

“Immanuel” is actually a compound word in Hebrew, where the first two letters, “im” is the English preposition “with,” the letters “manu” is the personal pronoun “us,” and the final two letters, “el” is a shorted form of “elohim” or “God.”  So this single Hebrew word literally means “God with us.”

Incidentally for you trivia lovers, this word is spelled with an “i” making it “Immanuel,” if it is taken from the Hebrew, where it is used in such verses like Isaiah 7:14, and with an “e” making it “Emmanuel,” if it comes from the Greek, as it is found in the Greek Septuagint translation of the OT or in the Greek NT in verses such as Matthew 1:23.  It would seem that when native Greek speakers heard the Hebrew word “Immanuel,” the initial vowel sound sounded to them closest to the way they pronounced their “e” so they ended up spelling this word “Emmanuel.”  This is the reason why we find both spellings in English today.

Last week I found myself wrestling with the recent cancer diagnosis of a friend and then the mass murder of so many school children and teachers in CT, and all this combined with the general weariness I often experience after a long and busy term at school.  Before I knew it, I was struggling with a sense of distance and un-connectedness in my own relationship with the Lord. 

Then the thought came to me how the meaning of the Christmas message is really all wrapped up in the meaning of this name “Immanuel,” not as an interesting linguistic phenomenon, but as a description of how the Creator God of this universe (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) has come to be “with us.”  And this idea of “God being with us” means far more than simply the reality that the Son “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14, ESV) as an historical event involving Jesus coming to earth as a human being on that first Christmas some 2000 years ago. 

Instead this word, Immanuel” points us to the far more important truth of our union with Christ and how the God of this universe is the one who has taken the initiative and made it possible for us to live in a personal relationship with him where we can walk with him through all of life, both the good parts that we often celebrate this time of year, as well as the trials and tragedies of life that also come our way.  Through Christ, we can at least partly recover the original pre-fall experience of Adam and Eve walking with the LORD God in the garden now that God has come in Christ to be a part of our lives.

So this is the Christmas message in a nutshell, God has made it possible for us to know him and live all of life in a moment-by-moment existential relationship with him where we can trust him and find his hope in every experience of life that comes our way.  The possibility of this new life all began in eternity past in the mind and heart of God, but a key event in redemptive history took place that night in Bethlehem so long ago when the prophecy was fulfilled, “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel" (which means, God with us)” (Matthew 1:23, ESV).  This is the reason for the season, as we are often told.  But even more than that, this is the reason for life itself—to savor the presence of God walking in union with us right here in the midst of all of life’s experiences.

Trust that you too will have a special time this season celebrating the reality of Immanuel in your daily life.

Enjoyed this post? Try the History of Mary Worship.

Photo by: Bruce Guenter