A Christmas Contract



How many times have you heard in folklore, read in a book, seen in a movie, or even witnessed in your own life someone trying to make a contract with God? It normally takes the form of "God if you get me out of this situation, I will never do wrong for the rest of my life" or something like that. I find it interesting that people in fiction or in real life acknowledge that they knew there might be a God around but have refrained from testing that knowledge, in a sense ignored God, until they find themselves in a sticky situation. The other scenario we might find is when someone needs something or needs guidance making a plea to God like, “God, if you make this happen for me then I will go to church for the rest of my days.” One might be forgiven to think that this kind of contracting with God is found in the latter verses of Genesis 28 where following a dream Jacob makes this vow, “If God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father's house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God, and this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God's house. And of all that you give me I will give a full tenth to you.” But it isn’t like that at all because God has already made the contract with Jacob (and formally with Abraham and Jacob) when he appears to him in a dream in verses 13-15, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring. 14 Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land. For I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” Jacob response after the dream is him seeking reassurance, not making a contract, he is wanting to be sure that it was God after all and not, “A slight disorder of the stomach……an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato” that has made him dream like this. 

At this point bringing Ebenezer Scrooge into my treatise might further my point as this is a story that may be familiar. In Dickens, A Christmas Carol, it is the spirits that make the contract and one that has unhappy consequences on Scrooges part if he rejects it; he needs to change his miserly and wicked ways or end up sad, lonely, and dead with no one to mourn him. A frightful prospect. When he finally wakes from his dream where he is visited by the spirits of Christmas and his partner Jacob Marley, he embraces a new life with joy and metaphorically signs the contract, embarking on a changed life of philanthropy and love for his fellow man (and woman). It is interesting that when the ghost of Christmas past appears Scrooge, “made bold to inquire what business brought him there. “Your welfare!” said the ghost. Scrooge expressed himself much obliged but could not help thinking that a night of unbroken rest would have been more conducive to that end. The Spirit must have heard him thinking, for it said immediately: “Your reclamation, then. Take heed!” 

All that Scrooge experiences in that long night are because Jacob and the spirits seek his welfare, his reclamation. In our case God has already made a contract with us, and his motive is our welfare and our reclamation. God has already honoured his part in the through the life of his Son, Jesus. There are no other contracts we can make with God, no other appeals, no other vows, no other petitions. Our choice, made with our own free will, is simple and that is to honour our part of the contract, which is included in one of the most evocative passages of the Bible, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

BELIEVE!!!




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