The text of the message is actually Zechariah 6, verses 9-15. I'm not going to read that now. I am going to read for an opening Scripture from Galatians 4. References was already made this morning at the table. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. Tuesday last, December 19, my friend Ted Mathis, who is pastor of the Pueblo West Baptist Church, wrote the following on his Facebook page. The Bible records angels praising God at the birth of Jesus, Luke chapter 2 verses 13 and 14. And that is revealing to us then that the Incarnation is worthy of praise, of God coming into the world born in human flesh to redeem us to God. And the angels praise God for that birth. And that is definitely worthy of praise. But, as he says, nowhere in the New Testament do we see commands or the practice of annually observing Jesus' birth. In fact, only two books, Matthew and Luke, of the 27 books of the New Testament give us any details of that event. While a gloriously mysterious event is definitely worthy of our praise, the absence of any divine command to annually celebrate the Incarnation is loud silence. Compare that silence with the Lord's explicit command to Israel to annually observe the Passover, complete with detailed menu. He went on then to say that keeping traditions developed over centuries is fine. Nothing wrong with that. I'm going to celebrate Christmas. There's nothing wrong with that. He says it is accompanied by a platter full of freedom. Then he added, in fact, we are so free, Christmas caroling in August with ice cream to follow would be no less Christ-honoring than a candlelight Christmas Eve service December 24th. And that's true. Then he closed the article by citing a warning from Colossians chapter 2 verses 8 and 9. I quote verse 8. See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception according to traditions of men, according to the elementary principle of the world, rather than according to Christ. In other words, we obey Christ, not tradition. Of course, Christians are free to celebrate or to not celebrate these holidays. The scriptures are also very clear on the importance of the birth and resurrection of Christ. These events must be celebrated, as Ted himself noted from Luke 2 and the angelic chorus praising God at the birth of the Savior. However, caution, and here is This is important. Caution must be applied. Many do not understand the spiritual nature of many of the traditions that have been introduced into these two main Christian holidays in our Western culture, Christmas and Easter. I use the term spiritual to describe the subtle effort of the enemy to corrupt these holidays by introducing into the celebration things that are pagan and contemptuous of biblical truth, such as Santa Claus and Easter eggs. These additions are designed to distract and to deceive the observer. But the nature of this holiday corruption is part of a spiritual war that's ongoing, that commenced with God's judgment of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. And the glorious truth is that God is sovereign over this war. He's letting it play out. And He is letting it play out to its ultimate result, which is triumph. the triumph of the truth, the triumph of Jesus Christ over evil in the establishment, and this is what I'm looking forward to, the establishment of a new Garden of Eden that will be far more glorious than the original. Are you looking forward to that too at the second coming of Jesus Christ? In considering that, first of all, notice here the enmity that is necessary to the restoration. God said there in Genesis chapter 3 and verse 15, and this is where the spiritual war started, Genesis 3, 15, I will put, I will, God is speaking, I will put enmity between you, and he's speaking to the serpent, Satan. Iím going to put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and her offspring. And her offspring is ultimately Jesus Christ, as I will show. Enmity, however, I want you to note, is hostility. Weíre in a war. There are enemies. Enmity is hostility. In fact, we get the word enemy from this word enmity. Hostility that's born of hatred. And God Himself divided the world between these two people groups and setting them at enmity with each other. The woman and the serpent, her seed and his seed. The verses that here was spoken to the serpent, as I said, who tempted Eve to disobey God by eating the forbidden fruit, and in doing so he hijacked the created order for himself. God intended that Adam and his posterity should have dominion over the works of his hands. But Satan said, No, I want it for myself. And so, as the scriptures are clear, that he is the God of this world. He even offered to Jesus the kingdoms of the world, and Jesus didn't argue with him that he didn't have a right to them. He just said, no, you just mind your manners. I'm going to get them myself. I'm going to defeat you to get them. That's part of the war. So his offspring here are who? Satan's offspring, the serpent's offspring are all of Adam's posterity that remain unregenerate. You got Eve to sin. Adam and Eve sinned. Their posterity carry that sin. And unless they are born again from above, they will, all the posterity of Adam, which includes us, will remain unregenerate. Now, let me throw in a little aside here concerning this enmity. Believers must understand that they will be the object of this hatred. Believers. Are they to respond with hatred? No. In fact, the followers of Jesus must not hate in return. They are to love their enemies and do good to those who oppress them. But we've got to keep in mind that they still are enemies. Now, the woman in this text represents the source of a new race, a people in the image of God. In fact, Adam called her Eve, the mother of all living. So this new race, this people here which will be born from above in the image of God. In fact, God originally created man in his image, but now this image needs to be restored and it is restored through regeneration that is being born again from above. The woman is represented by Eve here, who gave birth to Adam's first offspring. And it's interesting, there are two sons that come of this union, Cain. And Eve put a lot of hope in Cain. She called him Cain, and Cain means to acquire. Because she said, I have acquired this man from the Lord. God said that there would be an offspring of the woman who would defeat the devil. So she, I really believe, thought that Cain was that offspring. Then she had another son that apparently she didn't think quite so highly of. She called him Abel. You know what the word Abel means? Vanity. Vanity. But we see the war here because this is the first stage of the enmity and Cain rose up and killed his brother because, as Hebrews tells us, Abel's works were righteous whereas Cain's were not. Wow. So did that thwart God's plan? Satan tempting this first son of the human race to kill his brother? That first son that you thought would be this child that was promised by God? acquired of the Lord? No. God gave her another son to replace him. Seth. You know what Seth means? Compensation. She replaced. God replaced Abel with Seth. Of whom Eve said, God has appointed for me another offspring instead of Abel. That's Genesis chapter 4 verse 25. Seth had a son, Enosh. Enosh simply means man. But we read of Enosh there in verse 26. At that time people began to call upon the name of the Lord. Now here's a verse that is greatly misunderstood. As I read from the commentators, it does not mean here that men started to pray to the Lord, but that men started to call people by the name of the Lord. Now what does that mean? I believe it is in a contemptuous manner, as we see sometimes done today when someone says, he is a Christian, with a sneer. In fact, according to Acts 11 and verse 26, the disciples in Antioch were first called Christian. That was not to honor them. That was derogatory. In fact, Peter follows up in 1 Peter 4 and verse 16 by saying, If anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed. People hate you for being a Christian? Don't be ashamed. But rather let Him glorify God in that name. Christian. 1 Peter 4, 16. So here the hostility first revealed in Genesis now continues throughout Scripture. As God works His plan to defeat Satan, and evil in order to restore righteousness on the earth. And interestingly, this plan involves women. Isn't that interesting? Women. Eve was the object of Satan's attack. But Adam, where was he? The scripture says that he was with her. But he didn't step up. He didn't defend her. He didn't push the devil away. He just stood there and did not intervene. And thus I believe God determined to defeat Satan through a woman. Through a woman. Revelation 12. We have this vision of the sun-clothed woman with a crown of twelve stars. She gives birth to a male child, obviously Christ, because he is described as one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron. Verse 5. In the vision, Satan is depicted as a red dragon and he attempts to devour this child. But the child is caught up to God and thus Satan is thwarted. This vision is a brief description of the conflict of the ages that will result in ultimate victory. The woman is the one referred to in Genesis 3.15, and it's a composite of women God used then to play this progressive role in His restoration plan. Four of them. Let me just cite them for you. The first. as previously noted, was Eve, the mother of humanity. Although she sinned, she did so because she was deceived. Paul explained this in 1 Timothy 2, verses 13 to 15. For Adam was formed first, then Eve, and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor, yet she shall be saved through childbearing. And I think that is a reference to Mary and her bearing her son Jesus Christ. Eve's salvation is implied even there in Genesis when God replaced hers and Adam's fig leaves because that was their effort to cover their own nakedness. He clothed them with skins of animals. there in Genesis 3 21 but due to their sin he drove them out of the garden and they're not going to come back to the garden until God creates the new heaven and new earth and the glorious new garden. The second woman is Sarah the wife of Abraham So God begins the process here of bringing this Son into the world that He promised there in Genesis 3.15 through Sarah. And God promised Abraham great blessings. He promised him land. He said, walk up and down through the length and the breadth of this land. All of this I'm going to give you. Then He took him out and He said, look at the stars. See if you can count them. Look at the sand on the seashore. See if you can count the grains of sand. So shall your offspring be. And he explained to him that he would be the father of nations. And kings would come from him. Wow. A worldwide influence. But all of this depended on his having offspring. But what do we read? Sarah was barren. She had no child. Genesis 11 verse 30. And continued in that way for quite some years until she was well past the age of childbearing. Here again we see the greatness of God in that He supernaturally enabled her to bear a son in her old age, Isaac, of whom God promised, through Isaac shall your offspring be named. Paul explains this in Galatians 3.16. The promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring it does not say and offsprings referring to many but referring to one and to your offspring who is Christ Galatians 3 16 so see we're seeing this promise now beginning to take shape now the third woman then that's involved in here in this is of course Mary the mother of Jesus. Here again the great miracle of the virgin birth is witnessed. The angel Gabriel visited her in Nazareth after she was betrothed to Joseph. She was betrothed to Joseph. He's still away from her and preparing a place for her. But before this marriage then, here's the problem. Here's the message of Gabriel to her. Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you. Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And, behold, you will conceive in your womb, and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus." Now Mary was troubled by this because she had not yet known a man. would this be? That's her question. How shall this be, since I'm a virgin? No. Here again, like with Sarah, God is going to do a miracle. She's going to bear a son. And as the prophet Isaiah declared there in chapter 7, verse 14, A virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and you shall call his name Immanuel. God with us. Mary's pregnancy then subjected both she and Joseph to ridicule. See, here again. Mary, for the supposed immorality she committed, I mean, she's pregnant and she has been totally innocent. And for Joseph, for failing to deal with it according to Levitical law, to put her away. He wanted to do so privately. Until Gabriel told him, no, you take her to be your wife. For that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. However, they were submissive to God. resulting in the Word becoming flesh and tabernacling among us. Emmanuel, God with us. John chapter 1 verse 14. Now, the fourth woman. Yeah, there's a fourth woman. Who is that? The church. The church of Jesus Christ. And while technically it's a new covenant reality, because Jesus founded the church there in Matthew chapter 16 verse 18 and birthed the church at Pentecost when the Holy Spirit came upon the believers in Acts chapter 2. But the roots of the church go way back into the Old Testament and include many of the righteous remnant, many of whom are mentioned in Hebrews chapter 11, the whole of faith. And it's interesting how the Old Testament closes with Malachi who described this righteous remnant. As Malachi was pronouncing judgment upon the hypocritical priests of the temple, we hear that God took note of those who feared him. So we read, Then those who feared the Lord spoke to one another, and the Lord paid attention to them. And a book of remembrance was written before the hymn of those who feared the Lord and esteemed His name. They shall be mine, says the Lord of hosts, in the day when I make up my treasured possession. And I will spare them as a man spares his son who serves him. Then once more you shall see the distinction between the righteous and the wicked. See, here again, these two people groups. To which of these two people groups do you belong? The righteous or the wicked? Malachi chapter 3, verses 16 to 18. This reference again. makes this distinction between the two classes, the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God and one who does not serve Him. The righteous remnant of all of the ages makes up the Bride of Christ. Paul spoke of this mystery in Ephesians 5, exhorting husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church. He closed this section by quoting Genesis chapter 2 verse 24. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. And then Paul makes this interesting statement. This mystery is profound. And I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. The wedding was announced in Revelation. Let us rejoice and exult and give Him the glory for the marriage of the Lamb has come and His bride has made herself ready. That's us. Revelation 19 7 that brings me to this to the next point here and That is Zechariah's vision He has actually nine visions. I'm not going to go into all nine of them I'm just going to talk about two of them here one that we already read we read about that there in our in the Scripture reading but Zechariah was a post-exilic prophet and He was sent to encourage the Jewish people to repent of their covenant violations and to renew their commitment to God. The focus of both these post-exilic prophets, Haggai and Zechariah, was the temple, which symbolized God's presence, dwelling, God's dwelling with His people. That's in the word Immanuel. Sadly, those who returned from the Babylonian captivity were guilty of the very covenant sins that brought their ancestors under judgment and exiled to the land of Shinar. So Zechariah's message was to rekindle their messianic hope. Guys, repent. Get back to the covenant. God's sending you a Messiah. The incarnation of the Son of God, that is, God taking on human flesh, would be the realization of that hope. However, the Jewish people rejected their Messiah, even with all the prophecies they were given. Why? I mean, Zechariah warned them. Why did they not get it in their minds what God was doing? The answer is to be found in this enmity with God established between the woman and the serpent. The woman and her offspring represent the righteous remnant, and what many students of Scripture fail to understand is that Satan invaded not only the Garden of Eden, But he invaded the natural offspring of Abraham to thwart the promised seed of Isaac, which was Jesus Christ, the Messiah. Zechariah reveals this truth in an interesting vision, the woman in a basket, in chapter 5, verses 5-11. Let me read that vision. Then the angel who talked with me came forward and said to me, lift up your eyes and see what this is that is going out. And I said, what is it? He said, this is the basket that is going out. And he said, this is their iniquity in the land. And behold, the leaden cover was lifted, and there was a woman sitting in the basket. Not laying there, sitting there. And he said, This is wickedness. And he thrust her back into the basket, and thrust down the leaden weight on its opening. And he then Then I lifted my eyes, and saw, and behold, two women coming forward. The wind was in their wings. They had wings like the wings of a stork. And they lifted up the basket between earth and heaven. Then I said to the angel who talked with me, Where are they taking the basket? He said to me, To the land of Shinar, Babylon. to build a house for it. Remember, he's talking about the people who needed to build a temple, the second temple in Jerusalem. Build a house for it, this basket. And when this is prepared, they will set the basket down there on its base. In other words, its home. Shinar is symbolic for Jerusalem and the second temple where the false doctrine of the Jews led to their rejection of the Messiah, putting him to death on the cross. So without going into many details, this vision explains that the religion of the Sadducees, and this is what a lot of people don't understand, The religion of the Sadducees of Jesus' day originated in Babylon as a rejection of the supernatural nature of the faith that God gave to the Jewish people in his word. They said no. They even denied the resurrection and the Holy Spirit. This rejection then developed into full atheism, as is evidenced by many Jews today. That was the priests of Jesus' day. So the woman in the basket is the same woman that John sees in his vision in Revelation, the Babylonian harlot who rides the beast's system. The woman sitting in the basket is how God sees her. The woman riding the scarlet beast in all her beauty and splendor is how the world sees her. Then Zechariah's vision reveals that the judgment of God was upon her. She is in a basket. Now, this is important. Get this. She's in a basket. What is this? It reveals the character of her influence on the religion of the Jewish people. How so? The basket is a special basket and that was used to measure grain. The food that was necessary to maintain physical life, and it's referred to as iniquity. In her iniquity, the spiritual food of the Word of God was substituted with empty religion. The lead lid depicts the divine suppression of her wickedness. And taking the basket back to Shinar speaks of the Babylonian origin of their false religion as recorded in the Babylonian Talmud and Mishnah. They threw the Bible out and adopted their own scriptures, the Talmud and the Mishnah, which replaced the scriptures as their religious authority. The religion of the Jews in Jesus' day was a total corruption of the truth in doctrine and practice. No wonder they rejected Jesus. We say, well, what about the scribes and the Pharisees? If that was the Sadducees, wasn't it the scribes and the Pharisees that really rejected Him? Yeah. Well, how do they come into it? They enter the picture after the captivity in response to the Egyptian and Syrian efforts to destroy the Jews during the post-Alexandrian Greek Empire. In an effort to purify Judaism from priestly apostasy, the Pharisees, leaning on the same corrupt doctrines developed in Babylon, developed a system of rule-keeping, prideful rule-keeping, and refused to be corrected by Jesus during His earthly ministry. Just about everything Jesus said was to correct them, and they refused to be corrected. So we read there in John 1 verse 11 and 12, He came to His own and His own people did not receive Him. However, and this is important, to all who did receive Him, who believed in His name, He gave the right to become the children of God. So we have this two people groups again. Those who rejected Him and those who believed in Him. The ones who believed in Him became children of God. So the vision here of Zechariah reveals the judgment of the woman sitting in the basket by being carried off by two, two women, the number of witness, the witness of truth against them. Women symbolized here as agents of the restoration, taking the basket back to Babylon. And take note that Revelation calls her the Babylonian harlot. which refers to the corrupt Jewish doctrine developed in Babylon that still plays a major role in these last days. Beware of the doctrine of the Pharisees. Jesus said that to his disciples. Beware of the doctrine of the Pharisees. And we say, ah, that's back there. No, it's not. It's still in force today. Second here, Zechariah's last vision, the text that we read earlier, reveals the triumph of the Messiah. Yeah, we see the judgment of the harlot, but we also see the triumph of the Messiah. This is Zechariah's message. It's not gloom and doom. It's, hey, God's in charge, we're winning, and here's what it looks like. A crown is made from silver and gold taken from exiled priests who have returned from Babylon. From these precious metals a royal crown was constructed and placed on the head of Joshua, the son of Jehozadak, the high priest. Joshua. That's Jesus' namesake. Yeshua. It means Yahweh heals. He's the son of the high priest. And here's an interesting thing. To put a royal crown, and this is what it was, it was a royal crown placed on the head of a priest, was a big no-no in the Levitical system. Priests and kings were not to be confused. But Jesus is a king and a priest, a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek, not Aaron. And in this vision, he is also referred to as the branch, a reference to the netzar of Jesse, the root of Jesse, promised in Isaiah. And what's he going to do? It tells us he's going to build the temple of the Lord. Now this is what Zechariah was all about. Guys, get busy. God wants you to build him a house. Well, they weren't going to do it the right way. And God destroyed it in 70 A.D. But this branch is going to build God a house. What is the house that God's building? the church. And he's going to use Gentiles to do it because they're described as those who come to him from afar to help him. That's Gentiles. So he bears royal honor. He makes peace as the Lord of hosts or armies, which means he's victorious. He's going to make peace. It's the victor that makes the peace, not the vanquished. He's going to make peace as the Lord of armies. Thus the vision closes with a warning and admonition. And you shall know that the Lord of hosts has sent you, and this shall come to pass, you diligently obey the voice of the Lord your God. Zechariah 6, verse 15. The Jews of Jesus' day did not obey. Many in the Church do not obey. Our modern churches do not obey. Jesus is coming again. We heard that at the table. Are you listening? Are you being obedient to His voice? Merry Christmas. Father, thank You for the truth that has been set forth so clearly and plainly in Your Word. Oh, that we might have ears to hear, eyes to see, hearts open, minds clear, that Your truth may come to us, that we may rejoice in this plan, this plan of the ages that involves our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, and involves us as God saves us and puts us into His army to go forth into this world to represent Him in the world as His people. Father, I thank You for each one who is here this morning, and I ask God that You'd send us out in this holiday season with a testimony for Jesus Christ on our lips, a prayer in our hearts that he should be glorified in every way. And we'll praise you and thank you in Jesus' name.