We cannot think of the Christmas season and not the name of God in the Bible as ‘Messiah.’
Most of the Old Testament is written in Hebrew, and in Hebrew Messiah means literally ‘the anointed King.’ This is another name for God. He is the anointed King.
When Samuel anointed David the shepherd boy as the next king of Israel, he anointed his head with oil. It was a practise of the time to show kingship. David wasn’t made king immediately, but he was the anointed one for that time. God made the promise that David would be the one through whom God’s throne would be established forever. It was through the line of David, ‘the anointed king’ that the ‘Messiah’ or ‘anointed King’ would come.
2 Samuel 7:16 “Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever.”
And this, of course, was Christ. John 7:42 “Does not Scripture say that the Messiah will come from David’s descendants and from Bethlehem, the town where David lived?”
Surprisingly, the Greek word for Messiah is Christ. When the Hebrew terms were translated into Greek, Messiah was translated as Christ meaning, ‘anointed one.’ So, when we are promised the coming of the Messiah, we are promised Christ. When people would refer to Jesus as the Christ, they were recognizing that He is the promised Messiah or anointed King. And in the Greek alphabet, the first Greek letter for Christ is chi represented by the letter X. Hence, Merry Xmas is literally Merry Chi-mas or Christ-mas.
Messiah—in Judaism this is the expected king of the Davidic line who would deliver Israel from foreign bondage. And isn’t that exactly what God has done? Through the giving of the Messiah He has delivered us from the bondage of sin and death, and instead reconciled a dying world to Himself.
Christ-mas. The birth of the Messiah. The coming of the promised anointed King who would one day die for us. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this. While we were yet sinners, Christ (the Messiah) died for us. Romans 5:8
This is truly the advent of hope.
Our song for today is Jesus Messiah by Chris Tomlin.