Christian Heritage News

 By Kyle Borg - Posted at Gentle Reformation Well, it’s that time of the year. The holidays are drawing near and with them some of the usual hustle and bustle. Cards are arriving in the mail, festive music floats through the air, lights are strung on gutters and railings, and ornaments are hung with care on trees. And, of course, adorning many front yards or placed on the table is the iconic nativity scene whose center is focused on a baby. A baby that is likely wrapped in sheets, and who sometimes has a halo or at other times is straining its neck beyond the natural capabilities of a newborn child. You don’t have to be a Christian to know that this baby represents Jesus Christ. God becoming man — or what Christians call the incarnation — is at the heart of the faith we profess. Without it there is no salvation. In order to bring Holy God and sinful man together one must represent both. This is precisely what the eternal Son of God did when he took to himself a human nature. As Augusti

By Rev. Martyn McGeown - Posted at Reformed Free Publishing Association : Around this time of the year, liberal churches like to focus on certain aspects of the story of Christ’s nativity in order to make political commentary. One of the favorite approaches of such liberal commentators, whether the pope of Rome, the archbishop of Canterbury, or liberal churches in the USA and Europe, is to present the baby Jesus as a migrant or a refugee . For example, a church in Massachusetts recently erected a “nativity scene” in which “the baby Jesus” was locked up in a cage, separating him from Mary and Joseph, while the “three wise men” were blocked from reaching Jesus by a wall or a fence. Such a scene was designed to provoke a conversation about immigration, constituted a protest against the separation of children from their parents by U.S. border control, and was designed to raise awareness about the plight of caravans of migrants attempting to cross the same U.S. border. It is not m

Posted at The New Geneva : I love the Christmas season! One of my favorite things to do is take walks through the “Candy Cane Lane” in our neighborhood. What a delight to the senses to feel the cool winter air, smell the wood fireplaces, and see all the colorful Christmas decorations and lights. Several years ago I noticed more and more Nativity scenes being displayed to honor the birth of Jesus. After becoming Reformed, I began wondering if somehow images of Jesus were a violation of the second commandment (which prohibits images of God). I tried to dismiss this thought by telling myself that since Jesus was the “reason for the season,” these images can’t be wrong. When I first mentioned this to my wife, she scoffed at me! Why would it be wrong to have a miniature figurine of the baby Jesus in our home? A manger had always been one of her favorite things to display by the fireplace. But then—one Christmas season—the baby Jesus happened to disappear from our manger! Hmm…