Can you become something you are not?

In November a 69 year old man began a legal challenge to lower his age on his birth certificate. Dutchman Emile Ratelbrand says he is disadvantaged by being 69 and would like to lower his age to 49 to give him a better chance of attracting women on Tinder. He says he is even prepared to give up his pension to do it. However, he is unlikely to succeed in his bid for fresh youthfulness. For a start, the authorities in the Netherlands have so far shown they are not going to buy into his falsehood and change his birth certificate, but higher courts in Europe will probably come to the same conclusion. And on top of that, I don’t reckon the women he contacts will be impressed when they finally encounter him, and will feel that he has tried to dupe them.

We may smile, but there is a contemporary logic to his craziness. He reasons that if it is acceptable for a man to say that he is now a woman, as is the case with a transgender woman, why can he also not say that he is another age? If you can change one area of your identity legally and become something you are not, why not another? Well, whatever happens in this case we recognise the falsehood that is being pushed on us. He is trying to change what he is, and deceive others by becoming what he is not.

At Christmas, however, we are celebrating a change that is much more dramatic, completely successful, and far more meaningful for us. We learn from Scripture that God became one of us. He didn’t cease to be God, but took all the features of human nature upon himself when he came in the person of Jesus Christ. He shared our birth, lived as a man in relative poverty, experienced temptation, suffering and death. The only thing he didn’t share was our sins.

This is a “becoming something else” that none of us could have predicted, that God became a human being for our salvation. He didn’t come to show us how to live; that would be no help at all, since we cannot become what we are not. Our sin clings to us and we cannot get rid of it. Rather, he came to give himself so that we might have eternal life. He lived the life that we could not, and then suffered our death on the cross. No animal sacrifice could do that for us; it has to be one like us. So he became a man, stepping down from heaven’s glory to be made in human likeness, taking the very nature of a servant, and humbled himself to death on the cross for us
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This is what Christmas anticipates and it is the reason that the season is filled with joy. Jesus became something he was not in order to rescue those who could not change themselves. His salvation not only brings forgiveness for our sins. It also begins a transformation process in us that will be completed in heaven. He is making us into what we could not become. He is transforming us in a way that no change of birth certificate or surgery could ever accomplish. He is making us like Jesus. Happy Christmas indeed!