Christianity Today: The Antichrist Hides in Plain Sight at Christmas, by Russell Moore:
The manger scene on your living room table might be keeping you from understanding Christmas. Those Nativity sets are, after all, how most of us want this time of year to be—safe and warm and cheery, with lowing cattle and humming angels in the background. But the actual birth of Jesus shook up the snow globe of all our expectations. In the backdrop were not little drummer boys but Roman soldiers and a bloodthirsty dictator who could not afford to lose. The Antichrist is in the Nativity too.
“I am hoping that Christmas will be a distraction this year, that I can just escape back into Bethlehem for a while and forget all the, you know, news,” a friend said to me. I get it, and you probably do too. Today’s Bethlehem is in a war zone—and it would be hard to find a place on the globe that’s not either a tinderbox or fuel for the flames. Authoritarianism is on the rise. Many, even professing Christians, now speak as if “winning” were itself a moral category. The problem for my friend—and for me—is that first-century Bethlehem is not an escape from all that. It’s the epicenter.
In the coming weeks, many of our churches will read the familiar words from Luke 2 and Matthew 2 on the birth of Christ. Many more will also read John’s words about the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us. Few, however, will remember that the Book of Revelation is a Christmas story too.
In Revelation 12, Jesus unveiled for John a picture of the entire sweep of history: a woman who cried out in labor pains and gave birth to a baby who would rule the nations, a dragon who sought to devour that child and chased both mother and baby into the wilderness. Immediately afterward, Jesus revealed the dark and mysterious vision of a “beast rising out of the sea” (13:1, ESV throughout), described in terms of a political power that seeks domination over all else. With it was “another beast rising out of the earth,” which was the religious authority giving justification for that domination (v. 11). …
Our world right now seems especially fragile. Silicon Valley tech oligarchs are giving lectures on the Antichrist even while creating systems that promise to make us gods while surveilling us like slaves. … [E]very generation thinks it is the first to face the Beast. The unsettling truth is that the Beast has been slouching toward Bethlehem since, well, Bethlehem. And the Beast always looks unstoppable. Power and domination cause even people who claim the name of Christ to conclude that only by being beasts ourselves can we stop this.
Christmas carols should remind us otherwise. The beast of human power keeps getting humiliated by a baby—even when it seems to be winning. Caesar gets his census. Herod gets his massacre. But even so, the angel screams, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:10–11).
Nothing could seem more ridiculous in a world where Caesar could crucify dissenters and Herod could chase them out of the country. The world still looks like that: Survival looks like victory, safety looks like salvation, and control looks like faith.
We should remind ourselves of this. The Christmas story reeks of blood. That’s because the Incarnation is not about crowning the warmth of humanity but about tearing down the house of the Devil (Heb. 2:14–15). The good tidings of great joy are not that darkness isn’t real but rather that “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).
Evil is in the backdrop of your Nativity set. But set your attention elsewhere. Look instead at the feeding trough, at what seems utterly unimpressive and fragile. The hope and fears of all the years are met in that box in Bethlehem. It’s beast versus baby. Only one of them will conquer.
Christianity Today: It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Antichrist, by Russell Moore
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