It must be self-evident to most people that humanity needs rescue from sin, violence, and death. A God who participates in sin, violence, and death is not other than fallen humanity but a projection of our worst fears and hatreds.
A God who liberates us from sin, violence, and death is good and welcome news from outside ordinary human experience and thought. Such a God would be light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made. And it is the Incarnation that makes this God known to us, and makes this God real for us.
For it is the nails driven into the flesh of Christ by humanity and spirits of darkness that decisively counter and make vain all human, demonic, and anti-Christian imagination that the Father who creates and upholds the world by love is in some other part of himself the one who destroys the world or his Son.
There is a destroyer but his false, homicidal way of violence, abuse, coercion, and death is defeated by the humility of God acting in Jesus Christ.
He is the father of detestable instruments of death like nuclear weapons, for only a “god” who hates humanity and creation would author such abominations, and in sin we partnered in their “creation” with this god’s hatred of the image of God in humanity and in human civilization, his hatred of creation, his contempt for the Incarnation.
The nails driven into the flesh of Christ are also the nails driven into the coffin of the idea that the Living God sends evil or participates in darkness or desires the death of anyone.
Gloria in excelsis Deo. Happy Second Day of Christmas.
The Rev. Kenneth Tanner is pastor of Holy Redeemer in Rochester Hills, Michigan. This article originally appeared on Huffington Post HERE. Follow him on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kennethtanner