(Suggest playing a clip from Miracle On 34th St. – Where the Post office delivers mail for Santa Claus to the Court Room proving Kris Kringle to be Santa Claus)
OPEN: Is there a Santa Claus?
Nearly a century ago or more, there was a newspaper article written to a little girl named Virginia. Do you remember the opening line of that article? That’s right… “Yes, Virginia there is a Santa Claus.”
That sentiment has been the basis of more than one Hollywood movie… the most memorable of which was “Miracle on 34th St.”
However, as tender a sentiment as that be, the very concept seems to defy all logic.
In his book “Still More Hot Illustrations for Youth”, Wayne Rice wrote the following observations:
It is truly heartwarming to know that millions of people around the world believe in Santa. Sure, most are under four feet tall, but still it’s amazing that so many believe in the big guy in the red suit. Consider the following:
Around the globe, today, live approximately two billion children. Santa doesn’t visit all of them, of course. Subtracting the number of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or Buddhist children reduces Santa’s Christmas Eve workload to 15 percent of the total, or 378 million.
At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, and presuming there is at least 1 good child in each home, Santa must visit about 108 million homes.
Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth - assuming he travels east to west.
This works out to 967.7 visits per second.
That means that at each household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh…and get on to the next house.
For the purposes of our calculations, we will assume that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth. We’re talking about a trip of about ¾ of a mile between each household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles… not counting bathroom stops or breaks.
To cover that ground in 31 hours, Santa’s sleigh moves at 650 miles per second—3,000 times the speed of sound. By comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second… and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.
The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized Lego set (2 pounds) the sleigh must carry over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself.
On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. In air, even granting that the “flying” reindeer could pull 10 times the normal amount, the job can’t be done with a mere eight or nine of them—Santa would need 360,000 of them.
This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons.
600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance—this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft reentering the earth’s atmosphere.
The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each.
In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake.
The entire reindeer team would be vaporized in a little less than 5 thousandths of a second or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.
Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 miles per second in 1/1000 of a second, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 g’s.
Santa would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by more than 4 million pounds of force instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.
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And you wonder why some people don’t believe in Santa Claus.
The movie (Miracle 34th) acknowledged that there were difficulties in accepting the idea that there really was a Santa Claus. And, how does the movie solve that question? (wait for an answer). That’s right. It appealed to a higher authority…the US postal service.
Because of this and other evidence, the resulting change that took place in the lives of the main characters was the miracle in the movie. But the miracle was brought about because they found a reason to believe… a reason to believe that which had been difficult to accept.
(pause…)
Now… God knew that mankind would also find it difficult to believe what He was going to do. I mean…. the very idea that God would become flesh and dwell among us, come down in the form of an infant, in an obscure stable in an out of the way town called Bethlehem. There are many today who still find it hard to believe.
So God supplied proof. Look again with me at Matthew 1:17
“Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Christ.”
Now… did anybody notice that there was something wrong with the title of my sermon? What was wrong? (give them time to respond)
That’s right… the title of my sermon was Miracle on 42nd St…. but the name of the movie was Miracle on 34th St. (I’m about 8 streets off)
Now, why would I do that? (pause…)
Well, for the life of me, I couldn’t find any numbers in Scripture that added up to 34. But as I was looking for those numbers - I came across this passage, and I saw… 14 and 14 and 14… and that added up to…?
That’s right: 42
And in that 42 I found a miracle.
I. You see, in this one verse I saw God…
… and I saw God providing us with some of the proof that man would need to believe that which is difficult to accept.
ILLUS: I can imagine Matthew preparing his Gospel. Doing his research into all aspects of Jesus’ ministry and background. And I can see him pouring over Old Testament Scripture looking at the names of all of Jesus’ ancestors. And as he begins to gather his information together, he starts to do some calculating… and then he sees something.
What he sees gets him so excited, I can visualize him rushing into the living room and grabbing his wife by the shoulders shouting: “Hannah, Hannah, look at this!”
And then he points the information on his paper.
He’d found a pattern. It was if all the puzzle pieces had begun to fit together.
ILLUS: Have you ever worked on a jigsaw puzzle? How many of you have done that? Have you ever come to the point where nothing seems to be fitting together as it should… and then, all of a sudden, you begin to see the pattern - and all the pieces begin to fall into place. And, when that happens, you experience this sense of euphoria, an excitement as you see the pattern develop.
And that excitement was only over a bunch of cardboard puzzle pieces.
Just imagine how much more exciting it would have been for Matthew to find such a pattern… realizing, as he did so, that he’d found evidence of the handiwork of God Himself.
And that’s why, when Matthew has gotten done telling us all about the line of descendents from Abraham to Jesus he stops and he says… hey – look at this:
“there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Christ. Matthew 1:17
Between each of the major events in the history of Israel, Matthew saw the evidence that Jesus’ ancestry had never been an accident or a haphazard quirk of fate. God had planned out the entire course of human history even to the minor details, and that would have been exciting to Matthew.
ILLUS: One of the most amazing things for me – as I’ve studied Scripture – is to watch as similar patterns appeared again and again and again throughout the Old and New Testament.
Now, if these patterns had been the result of one author, you might say… well that was a literary trick, or a kind of unique trait of this or that writer.
My dad used to love books by Louis Lamoure. Western fiction written by a man who vigorously researched everything about the west that he wrote about. And because dad loved these books, I have myself have read practically every book the man ever wrote. And I really liked them… but you know, they’re all the same. You can predict the plot before you ever open the book. Because as skilled a writer as Louis Lamoure may have been, he’s predictable. He has the same patterns because he is the common author of all of his books.
But now, when patterns such as these occur several books, written by numerous human authors, over hundreds of years (as they do in the Bible) and they are so incidental that occasionally you really have to look for them… you know there is only one author for the entire Bible. Who might that be? That’s right, the Holy Spirit.
Peter wrote: “For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” 2 Peter 1:21
In other words, whenever a writer like Isaiah, or Daniel, or Zechariah wrote their books… it wasn’t really their words. They were carried along in what they wrote by the main author – the Holy Spirit.
And so, as you read along through Scripture you’ll come across these patterns, these common themes because it’s the same author of each and every book you find in Scripture. And these patterns reveal the presence of God.
II. Now, why God would even bother to make a pattern in the ancestry of Christ?
Because the line of descendents was crucial to what God wanted to accomplish. The ancestry of Christ was intended to be a paper trail. That’s why we have Jesus’ descendents listed not only here but also in Luke. God intended to leave us a paper trail.
Now, what do I mean by “a paper trail?”
ILLUS: It’s like that dramatic scene in Miracle on 34th St., where the postal workers pour out letter after letter on the judge’s desk – delivering it to “Santa” that proved that a higher authority had acknowledged this man Kris Kringle was actually who he said he was.
Here in Matthew, we see God… pouring out ancestor after ancestor after ancestor before you as proof that a higher authority was putting His stamp of approval on Jesus, acknowledging that He said He was - the prophesied Messiah, the Son of God – God become flesh.
Starting with Abraham, and going thru Judah, and David, and Solomon, again and again and again God said to each of them “The Messiah was to come thru them.
This is the paper trail. This is how you’ll know that the Messiah is who I said He’d be. These are his credentials. These are his papers of authenticity.
By being of the line of these descendents, God proved that Jesus was who He said He was.
III. Now that’s critically important for one significant reason:
Down through history - there have been many great religious leaders: Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius and others. In their day, they said powerful things that were meaningful to the people of their day and great religious movements sprang up around their teachings and personalities.
And people have often asked: Well, what makes Jesus so much better than these other great religious leaders? The answer to that question is found right here in Matthew 1. No other founder of any other great religion has EVER had these kinds of credentials.
For example:
About 500 before Jesus was born - a man named Buddha came along. He established a religion we know of as Buddhism, and many people gathered around him and tried to live by his teachings. But before he was born, nobody ever said:
“Hey somebody is going to come along and he will come from this or that family. These are going to be his credentials. And this is how you’ll know he is who he said he was.”
Mohammed was born about 500 years after Christ. He established a religion we now call Islam and many people gathered around him and tried to live by his teachings. But before he was born, nobody ever said:
“Hey somebody is going to come along and he will come from this or that family. These are going to be his credentials. And this is how you’ll know he is who he said he was.”
BUT, when Jesus came… He didn’t just pop up in history and say “Hey, I have a great idea!” Oh no. Long before Jesus was ever born, God put His stamp of approval on Him, so that we can know that all of the Old Testament looked forward to the birth of this one little boy in Bethlehem.
And because of that one child’s birth – miracles have taken place in the lives of millions of men and women.
CLOSE: Gene Dulin (a missionary in Austria) told of standing in Austria, looking at a hand carved nativity scene. The figures were a bit larger than life size and was one of the most beautiful that he had ever seen. As he stood thinking about the meaning of the nativity, a grandmother stopped with her 3 year old grandchild. She stooped over and began talking with the child. She pointed to Mary, then to Joseph, and to the baby. Dulin says he couldn’t understand her language, but he knew she was telling the story of Jesus to her grandchild. Then Dulin added, "For 2000 years parents and grandparents have passed on the story of Jesus. It has changed millions of lives and the whole world." That’s the gift of the baby.
It’s our faith in this Jesus - proven to be the Messiah, the savior of mankind - that has changed our lives. Won’t you let Him change yours?
Sermons in this series: Christmas At The Movies
* Miracle on 42nd Street - Matthew 1:1-17
* How The Grinch Stole Christmas - Matthew 2:1-20
* The Santa Clause - Ephesians 4:17-5:2
* It’s A Wonderful Life - Ephesians 2:1-20
