"Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God" (I John 4:2).

The great truth associated with Christmas is the glorious fact of the incarnation, that the eternal Word of God, without whom "was not any thing made that was made" (John 1:3) "was made flesh, and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). The Bible warns, therefore, that anyone who denies the human nature of Christ "is not of God" but rather is of the "spirit of antichrist" (I John 4:3).

This problem is very real because "many false prophets are gone out into the world" (I John 4:1)—that is, those "New Age" teachers, gurus, rabbis, and mullahs who deny that Jesus and the Christ are eternally one, and that the Lord Jesus Christ died for our sins and rose again, and that this was a physical death and bodily resurrection.

The real message of Christmas is not about a baby or gift-giving or good will, though these elements are all there, but about the God/man, who once came "in the likeness of sinful flesh" to die in our place, and thereby "condemned sin in the flesh" (Romans 8:3). It will not do to say that any person can become a "Christ" or any other compromise that dilutes either the humanity or the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ. As the apostle John testified: "For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us" (I John 1:2).

That living Word of God "was made in the likeness of men: . . . and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also hath highly exalted Him, . . . That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, . . . every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Philippians 2:7-11). HMM