What are the Top 10 Christmas Questions? - GotQuestions.org Podcast Episode 54

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Welcome to the Got Questions podcast, and Merry Christmas. This time of year, every

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December, we get the same questions year after year after year.

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Most of them are great questions, and we really enjoy answering some of them, not so much. On this episode, we're going to go through the top 10

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Christmas questions that we receive. They may not always every year be in this exact same order, but generally speaking, these are the top 10, and generally speaking, these are in the approximate order that we're going to go through today.

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On the episode, I've got with me our regulars, Jeff and Kevin. Jeff is the administrator for BibleRef .com,

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and Kevin is the managing editor for Got Questions. We'll each be taking a few of these just to give you the

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Christmas top 10. Kevin, why don't you go first? Yes, I'd be glad to.

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Number 10 for the top questions that we field during the Christmas season is, does giving gifts take away from the true meaning of Christmas?

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I think I know where this question usually stems from. Probably, it's coming from the idea that the materialism that we see in our world and the commercialism that has sprung up around Christmas time really does damage to the true meaning of Christmas.

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Jesus is the reason for the season, and we lose sight of that when we get all caught up in buying expensive gifts and spending all of our time shopping and fighting the crowds or maybe online shopping too.

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All of that just snowballs into losing sight of Christmas.

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I understand the question, and I think it's a good question from that perspective because materialism and commercialism is a danger that we have, but overall,

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I would say no. Giving gifts does not detract from the true meaning of Christmas because the true meaning of Christmas is the fact that God gave us a gift, and it was a very meaningful gift.

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My wife and I recently adopted a daughter, and we had an open house celebration for her.

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We invited the church family. We invited the community. She had a lot of people come in support of her, and of course, many of them brought gifts.

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When it was all said and done, my daughter's comment was very interesting.

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That night, she was talking with my wife, and she said, all of my gifts meant something.

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By that, she was meaning they were all thoughtful gifts. They were all well -planned.

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They were personalized gifts, and she wasn't surprised of the number of gifts.

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She was surprised at the fact that they were all meaningful and thoughtful.

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When God gave us the gift of His Son, that was the most meaningful and personal gift anybody has ever given.

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We needed a Savior. God gave us a Savior. He gave us Himself. He gave us

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His only begotten Son. The wording of John 3 .16, God so loved the world that He gave.

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Our God is a giving God. We see this in Christmas.

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Isaiah 9 and verse 6, for unto us a child is born, to us a son is given.

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So there it is again. God gave us this wonderful gift, this indescribable gift, 2

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Corinthians 9 verse 15, the gift of His Son. Jesus spoke of the gift of eternal life.

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John 4, He's talking with the woman at the well. He says, if you knew the gift of God and who it is who is asking you for a drink, you would have asked

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Him, and He would have given you the living water. But Jesus spoke of the gift that He was giving, that gift of eternal life.

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We are to give as God's people. 2 Corinthians 8 and verse 7, see that you abound in this grace.

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And in the context, He's talking about giving, the grace of giving, and we are to abound in this.

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What a perfect time Christmas is to be giving and to show the love of Christ, the love of God the

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Father, as we give to others from the heart. And of course, the

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Magi gave gifts to Christ. They brought the three gifts that are mentioned in Matthew.

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And so there we have a precedent right there in the Christmas story of gift giving. So no, giving gifts is perfectly in line with the

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Christmas spirit. Well, and that leads to question number nine, which was the question of what was the star of Bethlehem?

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Now this was what the wise men, the Magi saw that inspired them to come and visit

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Jesus. This is what led them to actually meet Him in person. The actual answer to this really is that we're not a hundred percent sure what the star of Bethlehem was.

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There's a few different options that people give. One is that it was something entirely supernatural.

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One is that it was something entirely natural. And then there are those who suggested it might be some combination of those.

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Now the Magi said that the star was the reason that they came to see Jesus. Strictly speaking, that doesn't mean that they had to physically follow it like a beacon.

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It wasn't necessarily something that they had to literally follow all the way from where they were all the way to where Jesus was.

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At least at first, it was just the sign. This was the thing that told them something has happened and we now need to go.

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And they probably got that because of Daniel's influence in Babylon. We read in Daniel 9, 24 through 27,

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Numbers 24, 17, some prophetic ideas that bring that up. We also have to remember that this star appeared probably two years before the wise men actually arrived to see what was going on.

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So there was some sort of a time delay in between there. The things that we see in scripture kind of give us options on both sides.

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Some people suggest this might've been a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the sky that led the wise men to make this trip.

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Some people think it might've been something like a supernova, a very bright star that otherwise wouldn't have been seen and then disappeared.

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At the same time, we read that after the wise men spoke with Herod, they saw the star and the star led them to the exact spot where Jesus was.

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Now that side of it has a clearly supernatural element to it. That's not something that you're going to get from what's in the sky.

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My own personal sort of view of that is I sort of like the idea that there could have been a dual aspect to this, that there was an actual astronomical sign that these men saw that made them say, this is what we were looking for.

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We need to go. And after they talked to Herod, actually, when you read the scripture, it says that after they talked to Herod, when they saw the star, it says they were extremely happy.

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They had some sort of large emotional reaction to seeing the star after they talked to Herod. At that point, it makes sense to say that now they're seeing something that is an angel or the

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Shekinah glory of God or something like that. That's leading them there. So, and all in all, we're really not sure exactly what the star of Bethlehem was.

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The only thing that we're really told is what it did and what its function was in the story. We're not specifically given the details about what it was.

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Yeah. So question number eight is what should Christian parents tell their children about Santa Claus?

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And often with this question, someone will ask something to the effect of, is it wrong?

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I feel like I'm lying to my children. It's like, well, there's a simple solution to that. Don't lie to your children.

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Typically my advice to parents is you know your family, you know your children, this is a decision you need to make.

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But if you would ask me, I would say do a little research, tell them the true story of who

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St. Nicholas was and what he did. It's a great story based in history.

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I mean, I'm sure it's been embellished over the centuries, but no, the person from who we get

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St. Nicholas from was a real person who did some wonderful things in the name of Christ. So tell them that story and then perhaps tell them so all the stuff you see today about Santa Claus and the person at the mall or whatever, we're just pretending.

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And you can link that that way. But again, this isn't something that each Christian parent needs to decide for themselves.

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I think it's better to communicate like what Kevin was talking about with question number 10 with the gift giving that no, it's not some mythical person coming down your chimney, giving these gifts.

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It's no, it's your father and I, or for single parents, it's me giving you these gifts as a reminder of the precious gift that God gave us in Christ.

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So this is a matter of discernment that each Christian family needs to decide for themselves. But no, I do not think it's wrong to work

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Santa Claus as a fun aspect of Christmas. But again, point it back to the truth, the true story of who

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St. Nicholas was. That's how I'd approach it. Nice hat,

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Shea. You just, you work on the white beard a little bit and you'll be, you'll be ready to go.

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Well, number seven in our list of the most popular questions during this time of year was why wasn't

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Jesus named Emmanuel? And that's a good question because of the prophecy in Isaiah 7 verse 14, the

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Lord himself will give you a sign. The Virgin will conceive and give birth to a son and call him

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Emmanuel. So right there in the prophecy, it says his name's going to be Emmanuel. And then

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Matthew actually quotes that prophecy in Matthew chapter one, the story of Joseph.

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And Matthew says that all this was happening in fulfillment of that prophecy that the

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Emmanuel was going to be born. Well, Matthew of course knew that Jesus was not commonly called

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Emmanuel. Matthew spent time with Jesus and called him Jesus or rabbi and did not go around calling him

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Emmanuel. In fact, right there in the very same passage that Matthew wrote, the previous verse says that the angel told

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Joseph to name him Jesus. So of course, Matthew knew that the personal name of Christ was

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Jesus. There's a difference between a name proper and a name descriptive, or we might call it a title.

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We use titles and nicknames all the time. In baseball, if we speak of Jolton Joe or the

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Yankee Clipper, then baseball fans know we're speaking of Joe DiMaggio.

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And Joe's parents did not name him Jolton Joe, but that was a name that he earned due to his skill on the baseball field.

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And so Jesus had a given name. He had also a descriptive name.

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His name proper was Jesus. That was his earthly name, his human name, his given name by his parents.

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But then he had descriptive names that he earned because of his skill, because of who he was.

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And we have a whole list of them in scripture. Isaiah 9 and verse 6 lists several of them. Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

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Emmanuel is just one more of those descriptive names. And if you refer to Jesus as Emmanuel, which means

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God with us, then you are exactly correct. That's exactly who Jesus is.

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He is God with us. He's God in the flesh. He came down from heaven to earth and lived among us.

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We were not left alone to die in our sins, but God visited us in Jesus Christ.

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And so Merry Christmas. Praise the Lord for Emmanuel. And definitely praise the

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Lord because, as you said, what we're celebrating at Christmas is the idea that Jesus came here.

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Now we celebrate on December 25th. That leads to question number six, which is, was Jesus actually born on December 25th?

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The really short answer to that is we're not sure. There is some literary evidence that came up that suggests that one of the early church fathers had access to the actual census records from the

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Roman times, and those indicated that Jesus actually was born on December 25th. On the other hand, that's not universally accepted.

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And we do have some indications that people suggest, for example, the shepherds were out in the fields watching their flocks.

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And some scholars say that that might not have been a usual thing to do in December, given the actual environment that was there, that that was something more likely to happen in spring or summer.

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At the end of the day, it really doesn't make any difference. Scripture does not specify an exact specific date for Jesus' birth because the date in and of itself is just not an important part of the story.

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The fact that he came is what's important. And to be able to say that it's ultimately irrelevant, a parallel for that would be something like the

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Declaration of Independence. Here in the United States, we celebrate the 4th of July as the date of the

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Declaration of Independence. And yet there's historical arguments about whether or not the men who signed the

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Declaration of Independence actually signed it all on July 4th or whether the full vote was really held on July 4th.

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And all of those things ultimately don't make a difference. The document is what it is, and it says what it says.

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Jesus Christ is who he is. He was who he said he was, and he accomplished what he did. So we're not 100 % sure exactly when he was born, but whether or not he was born on December 25th, that's the we choose to celebrate his birth into the world.

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So question number five is, should we have a Christmas tree? And again, similar to the first answer about Santa Claus, this is a matter of discernment and conviction.

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There's no biblical command for or against getting a Christmas tree. Now, some will point to a verse in Jeremiah 10, which talks about cutting down a tree and then in a sense, kind of decorating it and bringing it into your home.

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Well, if you actually read the full context, it talks about cutting down a tree, fashioning it into an idol, and then actually worshiping the idol.

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So what is being described in Jeremiah 10, it's not talking about the Christmas tree. So obviously if you're cutting down a

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Christmas tree or putting up a plastic tree and then worshiping it, that's a major issue. No matter what time of year you do it, but that's not what's happening.

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I don't know, I've never seen anyone literally worship a Christmas tree. If it's just something pretty, you can bring in your house, a place to put the presents under.

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There's some symbolism that even goes back to Protestant Germany about the evergreen nature of the tree, reminding us that even though winter is here and everything's dying, that the life we have in Christ is everlasting.

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So there's even some Christian history behind Christmas trees. So again, it's a matter of discernment.

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Be sure to communicate even to your kids what this tree means so they don't get too focused on it.

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And yeah, keep the focus on Christ in Christmas. And then some of the cultural trappings we do kind of on the side don't become nearly as important.

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So should we have a Christmas tree? Really, that's up to you. It's not a right or wrong issue. It's a matter of conviction, perspective, and again, communicating why we do this and what it means to us as a family.

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Question number four on our list of most popular questions this time of year is what does the

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Bible say about the three wise men or the Magi? And the answer is really not a whole lot.

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All that we know comes from Matthew chapter two. But as we read through that chapter, we see that they were from the

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East. We see that they were members of a special class of people honored in the

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East. And they were known as Magi or wise men or astrologers. They were students of the sky, the heavens, and they were an honored class.

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They recognized back home, they recognized a unique sign in the heavens that they interpreted correctly that this was a sign that the

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King of the Jews had been born in Israel. So that tells me that they must have been familiar with some of the

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Old Testament prophecies to have made that connection. So we also know that they traveled to Jerusalem, some great distance that they traveled, and they traveled to Jerusalem, not

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Bethlehem, which is also interesting to me, which tells me that they were not familiar with the

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Micah prophecy that Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. So they go to Jerusalem, natural place to go, the capital of Israel, and they inquire there, where is the

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King of the Jews? We want to join the celebration. They assume there would be a celebration, probably.

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Well, they rejoiced to meet the Lord Jesus. They gave gifts to the

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Lord Jesus, and they worshiped him. And they honored him with those gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, very valuable gifts that they had brought with them, gifts fit for a king.

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We also see that they feared God more than the king, because at the end of the story, they disobey

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King Herod, and they travel back home a different route. They do not go back through Jerusalem.

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They bypass that, and so they disobey the king, but they obey God, and that's the important thing.

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It's interesting, though, that no number of the Magi are given. We don't know that there were three. The Bible never says that.

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No specific country is given as to where they're from. It just says they were from the east.

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No camels are mentioned. All of these things are just products of our imagination as they traveled that distance.

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We also know from Scripture that they went to a house, not the stable. So anytime we think of the wise men going to the stable to meet the newborn

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Jesus on the night of his birth, it's probably not correct. They went to a house, and so probably

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Joseph had moved his family from the temporary dwelling, the temporary shelter of the stable, to a more permanent dwelling, and I think also we see the

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Magi kind of hinted at in some of the prophecies in the

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Old Testament. One example would be Isaiah 60, verses 2 and 3. See, darkness covers the earth, and thick darkness is over the peoples, but the

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Lord rises upon you, and his glory appears over you. Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.

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And then Simeon's prophecy after Jesus was born there in the temple area of Jerusalem, in Luke 2, in verse 32,

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Simeon says that Jesus would be a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and I think that the visit of the

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Magi to the young Jesus was simply a foretaste and a sign that Jesus' salvation was for all people all around the world, not just for Israel, and we praise the

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Lord for that. Now we talk about tradition, and I know that the

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Nativities that I saw when I was growing up always had the wise men at the stable, and I always listened to songs like We Three Kings, and there's a difference between tradition and what's actually in scripture, and that ties into question number three, which is do some

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Christmas traditions have pagan origins? This is one of the questions that people bring up because they are told, or they see connections between some of the things that we do at Christmas traditionally that are supposedly directly related to or come directly from pagan practices.

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Now there's a lot of disagreement on exactly where some of these traditions come from, and that's sort of what you would expect.

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When we're talking about traditional practices and family events from thousands of years ago, there's going to be a lot of fog of history of knowing exactly when something started and when it didn't.

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We also have to remember there are only so many ideas or themes in the world. When we talk about things like celebrations, food, bells, candles, presents, decorations, those get generic enough that anything that a person does at some point in time, you could find a connection.

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That's not to say that there aren't some things about Christmas that we do see some connections to. There was a celebration called

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Saturnalia in the ancient world, which never happened on December 25th, but there's some evidence that one of the things

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Christians were doing in the early centuries of church was providing a deliberate alternative to pagan celebrations, somewhat like some churches who object to ghosts and goblins kinds of costumes at Halloween will have something like a fall celebration or a fall festival at their church.

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It's on the same day, but it's celebrating something very different. So there are some things about Christianity that you could argue, yeah, that may have had a root in pagan ideas, but it's clearly not being used for those purposes now.

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It has been deliberately repurposed for something good. And lest people think that that's something that is a special exception, you know, we need to keep in mind that this is not something that's a special exception.

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There are pagan origins to a lot of things. Chemistry as a scientific discipline grew out of alchemy, which is a quasi -spiritual approach.

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Astronomy came out of astrology in a little bit of the same way. We see the same thing in a lot of things that Christians take very seriously.

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Wedding rings weren't really popular in the Christian church for centuries after Jesus. And the whole concept of wearing wedding rings and wearing them on a particular finger is based in a sort of a pagan concept of the connection between the heart and that particular finger.

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Having churches in buildings was something that was not common in the early church, but it developed partly in response to our natural tendency to want those things.

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Church sermons. A lot of people are uncomfortable with the idea that the word homily or homiletics is directly related to what

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Greek pagan orators called their craft. The idea of having one person deliver a specific message all by themselves in a one -way speech on a regular basis with a particular format.

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That's not something that scripture explicitly says that we have to do, but it was a reflection of some of the teaching style of the time.

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Doesn't mean at all that there's anything wrong with any of those things. It just means that just because we can find some esoteric connection, even an origin in something that's not explicitly

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Christian, doesn't mean that we can't repurpose it for something good. It is better in some circumstances to say, we're going to take that thing and we're going to claim it, reclaim it for Christian purposes.

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So there again, as with anything else, there's a lot of Christian liberty involved. If a person's really concerned with or offended about the signal that we're sending by using some particular tradition, then it's good not to do that.

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At the same time, just because somebody believes that candles and trees are pagan does not mean that anybody's actually assuming that when they see the

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Christmas tree. And we don't need to necessarily obsess over every little detail of what people were doing with those 2000 years ago.

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So question number two, should Christians celebrate

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Christmas? And I'm actually not going to touch on this one because the three of us are going to do a full episode where we discuss this in depth.

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This is probably either the most frequent or on this list, second most frequent, and a lot of heat can be generated in this one.

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So we want to cover this one at a little more depth. So that'll be probably the next episode after this one. So come back for that.

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But the number one question, at least in the last couple of years, the most popular Christmas related article that we have is actually what is the true meaning of Christmas?

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Which is, I think, I'm glad this one is number one versus some of the ones we've talked about because to me, this really can focus in Christmas on Christ.

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The true meaning of Christmas is John 3, 16, for God so loved the world that he gave us his son.

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Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Jesus because while the Bible nowhere tells us to celebrate

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Christ's birth, we have freedom to, but without Christ's birth, we could not have the

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God -man. We could not have Jesus, God in the flesh, who eventually died to pay the penalty for our sins and rose from the grave to demonstrate his victory over sin, that his sacrifice was perfect and complete to save us from our sins.

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So to me, Christmas is the prerequisite to the gospel and that we Jesus to come into the world as a human being,

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God in the flesh, so that he could be our Savior. So without Christmas, we don't have

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Good Friday, we don't have Resurrection Sunday. So to me, that's what Christmas is all about.

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Jesus coming into the world, the most perfect gift God could give to eventually provide for our salvation, that through faith in him, by trusting his sacrificial death and his resurrection as the full payment and the demonstration of the acceptance of that payment, so that we can be saved.

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That's the true meaning of Christmas. If you have any questions about any of the things we've talked about, we have articles on all these that go into a little more depth than we discussed today.

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Please also feel free to ask us a question at gotquestions .org. This has been the

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Got Questions top 10 Christmas questions episode. Hope you found it encouraging, edifying to your faith.

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The three of us just want to say, Merry Christmas. So however you choose to celebrate, even if you choose not to celebrate at all, be grateful that God sent his son as the perfect gift and the eventual perfect sacrifice.

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This is the Got Questions podcast. Got questions? The Bible has answers.