The Nightmare Before Christmas

Imagine waking up in a world where your spouse, your best friend, the most important things in your life that transcend physical property, had never existed. But it goes beyond that. There is also a profound feeling of emptiness, isolation, and hopelessness. The sense of protection is gone, leaving you exposed to all the terrible enemies who would not have dared cross the one you have lost, but are now free to hound and haunt you openly and mercilessly. There is no Christmas. 

Such a vivid, realistic dream-world would be a nightmare of unimaginable horror. But now imagine actually waking, this time out of the nightmare back to the real world where they are still there. The emptiness is suddenly filled with a torrent of their love, the isolation is replaced with their intimacy, and the hopelessness is shattered by a deep hope for everything they ever promised you and more. Fear flees from the warmth and light of their protective care. “Happy Christmas,” he says to you as you wake.

The scary thing is that such a nightmare world did exist before there was Christmas. Yet by God’s grace and love, the real world described above is now the reality in which we live…should we accept waking up to it.

Before Christ, the curse of sin literally surrounded us, thanks to the fall of man in the Garden of Eden. Because of this, The Holy Spirit, the Comforter, was all but a completely foreign concept to us, and we were almost completely cut off from God, as He cannot coexist with sin. The closest we could ever get was an altar of blood and sacrifice, and a mysterious place hidden behind a thick, separating veil. We were on our own, with salvation and hope seeming so far away, if they even exist. Such was the nightmare before Christmas.

When Christ died, He did so with no sin of His own to pay for, thus making His death (the ultimate definition of which is separation from God) free to take the place of our own. The sin that kept us from God was gone, and His love of which we had sung and hoped was now tangible and real in our own personal lives! The Word had been with God, the Word was God, but now the Word was with and within us! In fact, this new closeness was so profound that it affected the physical separation, as the Bible tells us the aforementioned veil was literally torn apart the moment Christ died. Can you imagine being one of the apostles in the upper-room of Acts 2, having lived before the full hope of Christ’s salvation and intimacy, suddenly feeling the most dramatic shift in reality with Holy Spirit suddenly flooding the room, the world, and their hearts?

This month, we celebrate the advent of the hope we have in Christ in the holy-day (from which we get ‘holiday’) of Christmas. The nightmare is gone, and Jesus has given us a new way to be human, intimately and personally close to God, and free from our bondage to the curse of sin. Whatever dreams you may have the night of Christmas-Eve, wake to this truth, and have a wonderful Christmas!