By Ezekiel Nabieu
Isaac Watt’s words in the Christmas carol “Joy to the world” ushers us into the spirit of Christmas. It is all about joy for the lamb of God who became incarnate to take away the sins of the world. It should be noted that Jesus became MAN not only for Christians (at the time there were no Christians but Jews and Gentiles) but for the sins of the whole world including Muslims).
The Christian religion carries certain facts at its heart, and the greatest of them is this: “The word became flesh, and dwelt among us”.
Christianity is not just a religion of influences and values and principles. It is a religion of happenings; of events; of plain historical occurrences. Indeed the faith is based on such. It belongs to the very marrow of the Gospel to assist that God came at a certain hour in history and at a certain place on earth; lived and died among us, and afterwards rose from the dead (the only human being to do so). It is a fact of history. I have been to the historical sites in Israel and verified the facts which are sacred.
We have come again to Christmas-tide. Christian teachers have long insisted that, if the central truth of Christmas be grasped we have the answer to our deepest dilemmas.
Some people who lived before Christ believed in God. Socrates and Plato, two of the finest of Greeks, believed in God. The ancient eastern sages like Gautama, the Buddha, Lao-tze, the Chinese teacher; Akhenaton, the most profoundly religious of the Pharaohs did. With overwhelming intensity the Hebrew prophets did namely Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the rest of them.
They believed that God could be seen in nature. He had made the world. In many ways it was a picture of him. Indeed the most daring of them rose even to believe that the great Creator of the universe might be called a Father.
The psalmist said: “Like as a father pities his children so the Lord pities them that fear him”. They got as far as that but could not go further.
The world seems sometimes less like God’s world than the devil’s world or as though God, having created it, left it or even (terrible thought) had been excluded from his own world by some malignant enemy. How else can we sometimes explain the unimaginable evils in the world?
Listen! This is the message of Christianity. Let it stagger you if it will, but do not be in any doubt as to what it is saying. It is saying that this is the world God visited to redeem his people. It is not the devil’s world, nor yet really man’s world. It is God’s world with a limited power of the Devil by which he visits evil upon mankind.
The Christian religion says that this Jesus whom all intelligent people admire and concerning whom even some unbelievers say “His was a peerless life”, was "the express image of God". The One who when Philip said "show us the father answered ‘He that has seen me has seen the father.’ God manifest in the flesh….." (all these are actual quotations from the Bible!) "No man has seen God at any time: the only begotten son, which is in the bosom of the Father, has declared him".
Finally Christ’s coming gives us the truth about ourselves. I do not know how it is with you but I will be frank and say that whenever I meditate on myself I am brought very soon to depression.
There is such a contrast about the man I want to be and the man I am. So wide a gulf divides the ideal of holiness I carry in my heart and my meagre achievements. Even when my deeds pass my scrutiny, my motives don’t. How much have I ever done for the pure love of God? We come to the year’s end and we look back over the past New Year’s resolutions, solemnly made, earnestly pursued but O! so perfunctorily achieved. We see that we are strange beings really with something of largeness built into our natures but more of littleness coming out; with longings to be clean through and through, but covered in stains.
Christmas has been all-embracing in modern times. In Sierra Leone most people’s hopes for at least one unsullied day of joy on Christmas day can be tantalising. Isaac Watt’s “Joy to the world” may not include most Sierra Leoneans this time round even with a single-digit inflation because many citizens (the majority) are living on less than a dollar a day. Keep on hoping! Hope is the last thing extinguished in the heart of man. Be content with what you can afford and have a happy season.
(C) Politico 19/12/13
