The Christmas Paradox: Wholly Natural and Supernatural

Other than through the original Christmas event, no religious teaching crosses this seemingly definitive division – the marked chasm between the natural and the supernatural. The Hindu "avatars" are claimed as brief appearances of the divine, but all the avatars insist that they are not in real human flesh. Islam directly denies that anyone can be both God and human. In Quran 5:17, the very belief that Mary's first son is also divine is definitive of infidelity against Allah, a capital offense! Taoism focuses on nature, and denies the supernatural altogether. Buddhism, Confucianism and secular humanism generally seek to avoid any serious consideration of our Creator anyway – since God does not play a significant role in their beliefs – so they ignore this marked chasm between the supernatural and natural, too.

Only through the Bible do we learn of the One who is all human and all divine – fully natural and fully supernatural – all at the same time, all the time, by God's awesome, amazing grace, poured into the Christmas event. To us finite and flawed humans, for anyone to claim to be fully human and fully divine may seem blatantly contradictory. Still, from the Biblical record this momentous, paradoxical Christmas episode of the divine-human Savior is truly prophesied and fully produced. Consequently, it is in this awesome event, at the first Christmas, that we see revealed the core truths of all of life. For starters, the Holy Spirit created a new human life in the virgin womb of Mary – the same Spirit whom our Creator chose to breathe into his shaped hunk of dirt-clay to create his first human being many, many years ago. Read more