“Our sins, when laid upon Christ, were yet personally ours, not his,” said John Bunyan, ‘so his righteousness, when put upon us, is yet personally his, not ours.”
Arthur Christmas and John Bunyan might agree on this point. Well, kind of. At least one scene from Arthur Christmas preaches a better gospel than many well known Christian authors and speakers today. I watched Arthur Christmas with my twins on the big screen last year. We rented it and watched it again yesterday to kick off the Christmas season.
I was struck by a scene, a seemingly insignificant one in light of the rest of the movie, that I had completely forgotten about. Early in the movie the audience is exposed to Santa’s new modus operandi. No reindeer needed here, Santa is flying a state of the art space ship. His elves do more than the prep work, they do, pretty much, all the work. And this leads me to Arthur’s gospel.
Instead of a good and bad list, elves now scan children to see if they are over the good threshold and thus deserving of a gift and not coal. One elf scans a sleeping boy, and when his goodness isn’t quite good enough, he turns the scanner on himself to make up the deficit. And herein is a powerful illustration, not a perfect one, but nonetheless, a picture of “imputed righteousness.”
This wonderful doctrine simply says that in order to be good enough for God, that God had to take our sin upon himself and impute Christ’s righteousness to us. We’re not good enough. And so God turned the scanner on himself. This doctrine is at the heart of the Incarnation.
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We should have seen it coming. Back in 1989 two young activists pushing for the normalization of homosexuality coauthored a book intended to serve as a political strategy manual and public relations guide for their movement. In After the Ball: How America Will Conquer its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90s, authors Marshall Kirk [...]
Jesus once told of a wealthy man who went on a long journey. Before the man left, he entrusted his wealth to three servants. To one he gave five units, to another just two units, and to the last he gave only one. Each received “according to his ability,” Jesus said. The servant with the [...]
