What is Christmas about? It's all about family. Not merely Joseph and Mary and baby Jesus. Rather, it is about God's Holy Family.
So wrote Prof. David J. Engelsma back in an editorial in the Standard Bearer. His reflections on this Holy Family of God are still fitting in this Christmas season 2019. Ponder these words and then go on to read the rest of this article, marveling at the amazing grace and mercy of God to sinners such as ourselves.
The birth of Jesus Christ is about God the Holy Family. It makes known that there are in God two distinct persons who are Father and Son to each other and that this Father and this Son are bound together in love by a third distinct person, the Holy Spirit.
For the baby of Bethlehem lived before He was born. He lived in (and as) the being of God. He lay in the bosom of the Father. He lay there as the one eternally begotten of the Father, that is, as the Son. The birth of Jesus Christ was not His beginning. He was sent into the world; the Father sent His Son (John 20:21). He came into the world; the Son came from His Father (John 16:28).
God is Father and Son in the Holy Spirit in Himself. This is family. The one, true living God, made known as He really is by Jesus Christ, is family. This is the truth about God. This is the most profound, the central, the unique truth about God.
Theologically, this is the doctrine of the Trinity. But the meaning of the Trinity is family, God as family.