A Christmas Story

God was not happy with Adam and Eve. He wasn’t happy with the snake either. Because they disobeyed, God put a curse on the man and the woman and the snake and everything else. He kicked Adam and Eve out of the garden paradise he had made for them. It wasn’t possible for people so bad to live with a God who is so good. That’s why they had to leave.

Every Christian loves the story of Christmas. We love to hear about the angels and the shepherds. We love the think about noble Joseph and humble Mary. We love the wise men and the star of Bethlehem. We love the whole nativity scene. Most of us know the story so well we smile just to hear the name Quirinius (whether its pronounced correctly or not).

It’s a great story because it’s a familiar story. It’s a true story. And Christmas is wonderful because it’s not the beginning of the story. In fact, the more you know about the stories leading up to The Story, the richer and deeper and sweeter Christmas will be.

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Once upon a time there lived a man and a woman. They were actually the only people alive at all. There names were Adam and Eve. God made them. And like everything else God made, he made them good. But they didn’t stay that way very long. On one very bad day, they ate from the only tree they weren’t supposed to eat from. It was a terrible day, the second worst thing that’s ever happened in the world.

A snake had tricked them and told them a lie about the fruit. He said they would be like God if they ate it. But actually the opposite was true. When they ate the fruit, the were separated from God. It would never be as easy to be close to God as it had been before that day.

But before they left, God made a promise. He promised that the evil serpent, the Devil, would always be at war with Eve and her children. Now that doesn’t sound like a very nice promise, that bad guys and good guys would fight all the time. Who wants to be in a war that never ends? But that’s where the good part of the promise comes in. God promised that one of Eve’s children would, some day, eventually, sooner or later, crush the head of that nasty serpent. Nobody knew when or how, she would have a child to put things right.    Continue at Kevin De Young