Grace, mercy and peace be unto you from God, our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Dear friends in Christ, a few years back the Houston Museum of Natural Science had an exhibit called "The Birth of Christianity," and in their radio advertisements they say that you can come and see "the oldest known copy of the New Testament Book of Luke, including the earliest known version of the story of Christ's nativity." There is an important fact in there: the oldest copy of Luke's Gospel that we possess contains the nativity story in Luke 2 that we will hear on Christmas Eve, this coming Saturday evening.

The only copies of St. Luke's Gospel that do not contain the nativity story are those that were corrupted by an early church heretic named Marcion (see Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 4, pg. 516). This fellow lived from the late first century AD through the mid second century and in his day was one of the biggest enemies of orthodox Christianity. Beyond his own lifetime, the Marcionite heresy thrived well into the fifth century, and I will explain in a minute that, unfortunately, his legacy lives on today.

So what did Marcion find so offensive about the beloved Nativity story that we love to hear each year? First of all, Marcion didn't believe in the Virgin Birth, but even more, he hated the Old Testament, and the story of Jesus' miraculous conception and birth is just dripping with references and allusions to the Old Testament. Marcion believed that the God of the Old Testament, the Creator who in the Old Testament is called YHWH or Jehovah, "the LORD," was obsessed with justice to the point of being almost cruel and merciless, and that YHWH could not have been the loving Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, Marcion reasoned that the New Testament references to God the Father spoke of an entirely different God—a good, kind, and loving God—who had sent His Son Jesus to save the world from the damnation of the Old Testament God, YHWH. So Marcion actually believed in multiple gods, which certainly is incompatible with the Old Testament as well as the New.

No one has ever argued that Marcion was a good Bible scholar, but he was an effective evangelist for his message. As he spread his heresy throughout the Roman Empire, he preached that the Old Testament and the New Testament were contradictory, and that Jesus could have had nothing to do with the Old Testament. Therefore, Marcion insisted that the Old Testament should not be used in the church, and on top of that, Old Testament influences in the New Testament should be cut out as well. So, he cut out the infancy narrative of Jesus; in fact, he chopped out the entire Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and John. Marcion's canon—his list of books to use in the church—only included his condensed version of the Gospel of Luke and ten letters of St. Paul.

I said before that Marcion's legacy still lives on today. One Marcionite error is the frequent attempt by people to edit out certain parts of Scripture that they don't like, and say that they aren't really God's Words. Just read the Religion section of any newspaper for examples of this.

Another fascinating example of the Marcionite "pick and choose your own Scriptures" is the Thomas Jefferson Bible, which he entitled "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth." Jefferson called himself a Christian but by his writings he showed that he was not an orthodox Christian but rather a Deist; he confessed that he did not believe that Jesus is truly God, didn't believe in the Virgin Birth, or the miracles of Jesus, or even His resurrection. So Jefferson took out a scissors and cut out all references in the Gospels to things that Jefferson could not conceive of happening. The end result is a choppy book of actions and sayings of a truncated Jesus, stripped of His divinity. (By the way, you can still buy copies of the Jefferson Bible today or even find it on the Internet if you want to look at it.)

I know that none of us is going to take a scissors to the Bible, but the devil does tempt us to ignore the parts of the Bible that we don't like; perhaps we even struggle to agree with some of its teachings. But the part of Marcion's legacy that most concerns me this morning is the rejection of the Old Testament, which Thomas Jefferson certainly had no use for either. I know that none of us here would outright reject the Old Testament, but in practice, how do we treat it? How much do we use it? How much do we understand it? Do we think it even matters?

If the Old Testament is truly God's unbreakable Word, as Jesus Himself says it is in John 10:35, then He certainly still has things to say to us through it. And if Jesus has any say in the matter, we learn from Him to search the Old Testament Scriptures and find Him, as He said that they "bear witness about Me" (John 5:39) and instructed His apostles to interpret the Old Testament this way: "Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, He interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself" (Luke 24:27).

But how does the Old Testament bear witness to Jesus? There are many answers to this question, but we will focus on two. The first has to do with God's name, YHWH or "The LORD," and the second has to do with Jesus being the Prophet that Moses spoke of in this morning's Old Testament reading.

First, when we confess "Jesus Christ is Lord" (Philippians 2:11), or in the Nicene Creed, that we believe "in one Lord Jesus Christ," that little word "Lord" should take us back into the Old Testament. In our Old Testament reading from Deuteronomy 18, the first verse has Moses saying, "The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers" (Deuteronomy 18:15). If you look at the bulletin insert, you'll notice that the font is slightly different for the name "LORD"; that is significant. Any time you see LORD in your Old Testament in that font, it is a translation of YHWH or Jehovah, God's name that He revealed to Moses at the burning bush, when He said, "I AM WHO I AM" (Exodus 3:14). LORD in that small caps font is a signal that God is using His personal name, which He gave to Israel to call upon.

And Moses told Israel, "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4). He is the only God and His name is YHWH, and this is who St. Paul refers to in 1 Corinthians 8:4 when he says, "there is no God but one." But then Paul goes on to make an amazing comment about the One True God: "For us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist" (1 Corinthians 8:6).

Here Paul confesses "one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth" but also "one Lord Jesus Christ" who also is the agent of the creation of the world and the Person through whom we exist. Paul affirms the oneness of God, while also confessing the divinity of the man Jesus, for he calls Jesus the LORD, YHWH, through whom we exist.

St. John makes this same point with different words when he says, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…All things were made through Him…And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:1, 3, 14). And in our Christmas Eve Gospel the angel announces to the shepherds, "unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord" (Luke 2:11). Here we see the deep mystery of the Incarnation, that the man Jesus of Nazareth, born of the Virgin Mary, is LORD, YHWH, creator of heaven and earth and the God of Old Testament Israel, and He is at the same time the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One that God promised would come to Israel in the flesh as Savior. Marcion and Thomans Jefferson never could confess that deep connection between the Old and New Testaments, that identification of Jesus as the LORD, but this is the most basic confession of the Christian faith and our salvation depends on Jesus being not merely a man but the God-Man.

The Old Testament prophet Joel said, "Everyone who calls on the name of the LORD (YHWH) shall be saved" (Joel 2:32) and that passage is quoted by Peter in Acts 2:21 and Paul in Romans 10:13 in reference to Jesus. We call upon the name of the LORD when we call upon the name of Jesus. Just think about how we call upon Jesus in our Divine Services through Confession and Absolution: "Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord, and Thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin" (Psalm 124:8, 32:5). And after confessing your sins, you are absolved in the name of the LORD, "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost," the full name of the LORD, which the LORD Jesus Himself revealed to us.

So Jesus is LORD, but as we learn at Christmas, He is also truly is a man, born of the Virgin Mary; He is "the Prophet" that God promised would come in Old Testament reading; He is the Christ, the Messiah of Israel. Moses said, "The LORD said to me…I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. And whoever will not listen to my words that he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him" (Deuteronomy 18:15-19). In our Gospel reading, the Jews came to John the Baptist and asked him, "Are you the Prophet?" They were asking whether John was the Prophet that Moses had written about. John denied that he was The Prophet, and instead he pointed to Jesus as the One who would be even greater than Moses.

It's interesting today that even Jews and Muslims are happy to say that Jesus was a great prophet, but they expressly deny that He is The Prophet of God. For Jews, "the prophet" is Moses, and for Muslims, "the prophet" is Mohammed, while for them Jesus is just "a prophet" among others and certainly less than Moses and Mohammed. But we learn from the apostolic preaching in the New Testament (Acts 3:22; 7:37) that this passage about "The Prophet" like Moses is about Jesus. In Hebrews we learn that in the Old Testament God spoke to Israel through His various prophets, but now in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son, His only-begotten Son who was born of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit. And the fact that Jesus is "The Prophet" promised in the Old Testament is clearest at the Transfiguration of Jesus when God the Father says, "This is My beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. Listen to Him!"

Now in order for this Prophet to be like Moses, he would have to be a man like Moses, who had the LORD's words in his mouth and spoke in the name of the LORD. This is the clearest prophecy from Moses about the Messiah, the Christ, who would come to Israel and speak once and for all on behalf of the Father to mankind. But unlike Moses, this spokesman for God had words of eternal life to proclaim, as St. John says in the Gospel for Christmas Day: "the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ" (John 1:17). Jesus is The Prophet who comes to us with a better Word than Moses or any of the other prophets, a Word of everlasting life.

And Jesus gives this amazing promise about what He would speak in the Gospel: "The words that I have spoken to you are Spirit and life" (John 6:63), words that are full of the life-giving Holy Spirit and able to create faith in our hearts to save us from eternal death.

But as Moses had said, whoever refuses to listen to the words of the Prophet greater than Moses will have to answer for that disobedience. Jesus said, "The one who rejects me and does not receive my words has a judge; the word that I have spoken will judge him on the last day. For I have not spoken on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment—what to say and what to speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life. What I say, therefore, I say as the Father has told me" (John 12:48-50).

And so Simon Peter confessed to Jesus, "Lord (YHWH!), to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God" (John 6:68-69). This Holy One of God, Jesus, is the One who has defeated sin, death, and the devil by His death and resurrection. By His death He answered for all of your sins and the sins of the whole world and has turned away God's wrath against you. By His resurrection, He has destroyed the power of Satan and releases you from the fear of death. By His divine power, He protects you from the devil and all who would seek to destroy you. By the words that the Father has commanded Him to speak, He gives the assurance of eternal life. His words give life, for the Prophet from the Father says to you this morning: "Whoever believes and is baptized shall be saved."

He says, "I forgive you all of your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost."

He says, "Take, eat, this is My body given into death for you; this cup is the new testament in My blood, shed for you for the forgiveness of sins."

He says, "Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life" (John 5:24).

So listen to the Prophet, this Christmas season and every day of your lives, because whatever He says will happen; and what He most wants to do is save you, for as the angel announced at Christmas, He is your Savior, Christ Jesus the LORD. In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

And the peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus unto life everlasting. Amen.