Christmas Did Not Begin In Bethlehem
Most Christians instinctively locate Christmas in Bethlehem. A child. A manger. A star pinned to the midnight sky. The heavenly hosts arriving to herald the birth of the cosmic King. That instinct is not wrong—but it is incomplete. The reason is because Christmas does not arrive on the shores of earth suddenly or randomly, as if God determined a new solution to the sin of man. The Spirit of Christmas and the hope of Advent began as ancient promises, made millennial beforehand, emerging slowly in time, deliberately in the mind of God, after centuries of expectation and longing. Christmas came as the flowering of a promise planted when the world was still brand new.
So in that since, the story of Christmas begins, not with angels singing, but with God speaking hope into the midst of ruin.
For instance, when Adam sinned, creation wasn’t undergoing a setback. It broke and totally fractured. Harmony dissolved. Death entered history as an uninvited guest who refused to leave. The ground rebelled, work groaned, marriage strained, and humanity found itself exiled east of Eden with nothing but a faint memory lingering behind it and nothing but the ever present malaise of coming judgment hovering ahead of it. And yet, it was in that very moment—before any good repentance had been offered, before obedience could be recovered—God made a Christmas promise strong enough, powerful enough, to keep the fractured universe from ripping apart at its seams. A Seed would come. A child of Eve would be born. He would be obedient where His parents failed. He would be wounded in their place. But, in so doing He would also triumph over all. And the serpent would experience a totalizing fall (Genesis 3:15).
From that moment forward—when Adam and Eve were driven east of Eden—the world entered its long Advent. History became an extended season of waiting: at times bright with hope, at times crushed by sorrow; sometimes marked by eager expectation, sometimes dulled by ignorance and apathy. But, God did not hurry the fulfillment of His promise. He let it take the deepest roots, sink into the depths, and grow strong beneath the slow turning of the centuries.
He began to teach His people to recognize salvation when it came.
Think also of another moment. When judgment once again covered the earth in the days of Noah, God fashioned salvation out of wood and pitch. An ark rose upon the waters—not as a monument to human ingenuity, but as a floating confession that life is preserved by divine mercy alone. Within its narrow walls, a family was carried through judgment and delivered into a cleansed world, passing from death into new creation. The vessel itself was plain, even unimpressive, yet it bore an everlasting truth: when God saves, He does not ask His people to swim—He gathers them into the refuge He Himself has made.
That same pattern quietly reappears at the incarnation of Jesus Christ. The manger—humble, wooden, and unimpressive to the world (much like the ark before it)—cradles the world’s Deliverer. Just as the ark carried eight people through judgment (eight being a symbol of new creation), so the Child born in Bethlehem will bring new creation into a dying world. The form of the ark was cast on a smaller manger sized scale in the birth of Christ; but the mercy and salvation it delivered infinitely outpaced it. In Noah, the whole world died and only a few would live. In Christ, He would die so that the whole world would eventually live.
Take, for instance, another example, from 2000 years before the birth of Jesus. God calls Abram out of Ur and speaks words so expansive to the man that they strain our ability to believe them. He told the childless wanderer that all of the families on the earth will eventually be blessed through his own seed. Yet Abram had no child, no inheritance, no visible foothold for such a glorious future. What he did have was time—long, quiet years of waiting for the promised son to be born, yet long stubborn years in which nothing appears to happen. But in the decades of longing for the promises of God, God was forging faith in the patriarch and heightening his expectation for the promises of God.
When God finally leads Abram beneath the stars and asks him to look upward, He gives him more than imagery. He tells him that his offspring will be as numerous as the largest stars in the heavens, more numerous that the smallest grains of sand on all the world’s beaches. And even without seeing the child of promise come, Abram believes, and God counts that faith as righteousness. Not because Abram understood all the mechanics of how it was going to work out, but because he trusts the character of the One who made the promise.
And in this way, Abram’s waiting grows larger than the boundaries of his own life. His long decades of longing for Isaac become the pattern for Israel’s centuries of expectation for the true Seed of Abraham. His private ache swells into a national hope. As Abram waited for the miracle child, so Israel would wait—through exile and oppression, through prophetic silence and weary generations—for the promised miracle Son. Abram’s life thus becomes a living parable, teaching the people of God what faithful waiting looks like: that God’s greatest gifts are often given only after hope has been stretched, humbled, and taught the slow, holy discipline of patience.
And then, after thousands of years of yearning, in the fullness of time, the Child is born.
He is the Seed promised in Eden.
He is the salvation foreshadowed in the ark.
He is the miracle long awaited by Abraham.
Jesus Christ does not merely inherit Abraham’s promise; He fulfills it. Through Him, blessing flows outward—into families, into nations, into the farthest corners of a fallen world destined for restoration. The manger marks the moment when the ancient promise takes on flesh and breath, vulnerability and glory, humility and kingship.
Christmas, then, is not an interruption in history. It is its coherence.
When we celebrate Advent, we are joining a line of saints who learned to wait well—who trusted God’s word when fulfillment seemed distant, who anchored hope not in appearances but in covenant faithfulness. Abraham waited beneath the stars. Israel waited beneath prophecy. We wait beneath the reign of Christ, confident that the same God who kept His word once will continue to keep it until the earth is filled with the knowledge of His glory.
Bethlehem stands as quiet testimony: God remembers His promises.
And because He has already kept the greatest one, we may wait with joy—certain that the world Adam lost is being reclaimed, patiently and inexorably, by the Seed who came at Christmas and reigns forever.
