We prize our possessions the more sometimes by asking ourselves what would be our situation were they all taken away. Recently we were thinking of this in connection with our Saviour’s birth. Therefore as a Christmas message we ask, “What would now be our condition as a race and as individuals if Jesus had not come to earth?”
The resulting picture is not a happy one to contemplate. Indeed, it would be appalling! First among all results would have been the fact that all prior revelation from God would have been, in the minds of men, by now wholly discredited. Then, all confidence in that revelation having been lost, it woudl now seem to all who had knowledge of it, if any knowledge of it at all remained, to have been nothing but a monstrous and cruel lie. Thinking of that revelation as a lie, all men would have been utterly at a loss to find any meaning in human existence: life would seem to be inexplicable, purposeless, futile. More, the whole world would now be in the grasp of uncontradicted atheism or of crass heathenism, most of the “gods” worshipped being, like their creators and worshippers, self-centered, capricious, cruel, lustful, perfidious; a few perhaps like Mohammed’s Allah, or Gautama’s Buddha, or a system of ethics exalted to the place of religion sucha as characterized Confucianism. But, by now practically every man would have re-echoed Pilate’s careless question, “What is truth?” and would find no answer. All men would feel that from outside man himself, “no ray of light hath pierced this immemorial gloom.” There would be no Churches, no Missions, nothing approaching Christian civilization to give an answer. Jewry could not have maintained itself in the land or out of it and no Gentile would believe it if it had: man’s unaided reason could not have found God; creation’s testimony would have been ignored. Indeed the changes in human life would have been so vast that in all probability great numbers of earth’s present people would never have come to existence at all.
These are some of the principal differences it would have made if Jesus had not come. They are staggering. But there would have been lesser ills also. There would probably have been no hospitals, almost no schools, and such as there were would be for the powerful and wealthy only. The present-day world system of banking and credit which is based on confidence and integrity could not be maintained. Slavery would still be world-wide. War would be many times more frequent and more cruel, whole populations being exterminated at the will of the victor, adn the whole utterly unrelieved by pity or care or chivalry. Tyranny and oppression would be everywhere. Can you imagine the hopelessness, the despair of existence in such a world?
But, friend, rejoice! For the angel’s announcement, “There is born to you this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord,” was true. Jesus did come, and came in the fullness of time. He did live that marvelous, sinless, perfect life. He did offer Himself a sacrifice. He did die on the cross. “He was made sin” for you and for me. He did rise from the dead. The Old Testament revelation concerning Him, concerning man and concerning the purpose of life has been confirmed; and surely, as it foretold, “He has sent borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” and “with his stripes we are healed.” He has sent forth the Holy Spirit into our lives to cry, in us and for us, “Abba, Father.” And this same Jesus will come again. He said so and His previous life on earth guarantees it.
Truly there are great contrasts between what the world would have been and what your life would have been if Jesus had not come, and what that life is now, imperfect as it may be. Let the realization of these contrasts fill your heart with love and joy as, at this time of year, you think especially of Christ’s birth. Let that realization also fill your heart with a pity akin to His for all who have never yet learned that “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him, should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
