Think about this.
We all know that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. . .”
Right? Christ was ‘present’ in the world FROM THE BEGINNING.
Therefore, everything on this earth, from its beginning, has been ‘rooted’ in that Word.
Until the
incarnation of that Word, people lived lives that either recognized some kind of ‘higher power’ or (very rarely) had no type of thinking that could be characterized as ‘religious’.
But at a given point in history, God made a covenant with His chosen people (the Jews). At that point, with Abraham, we then have a situation where there are people who are part of the covenant (whether they are actually ‘following the covenant’ in their practices or not) who are monotheistic --and then there are still those other groups which recognize a (or some) higher power of some sort (Buddhists, Hindu, Shinto, Zoroastrian) or who have no ‘religious’ thinking. All of the people not ‘monotheistic’ (at that point really only Jews) and members of the covenant are then classified as ‘pagan’.
Then with the birth of Jesus, His life, death, and resurrection, something happened. Now many Jews embraced Jesus as Messiah and became Christian --and also, many ‘pagans’ or Gentiles likewise became Christian.
Point is:
- Before Abraham, by strict definition, all people were ‘pagan’. Therefore, even the Jewish people have ‘pagan’ roots.
- But even those ‘pagans’ have ‘Christian’ roots which PREDATE their pagan practices and lives, because:
In the beginning was the Word.
Therefore, that ‘tree’ was made in a world where Jesus was, ‘in the beginning’. But from that beginning, trees were cut, trees were decorated, trees were utilized. . .and while the first practices were made because of a dim recognition of a ‘higher power’, and then later some
particular,
isolated groups of people may have ‘decorated’ a tree for a
particular,
isolated "idol’, that practice neither ‘retros’ back to make the people who decorated trees BEFORE a Biblically mentioned parenthetical notice of a particular isolated group’s not-even-fully-delineated-or described- practice ‘idol worship’, nor does it make the people who decorate trees AFTER practice ‘idol worship’.
IF people were specifically taking the Christmas tree and in their hearts, souls and minds equating it with God, were decorating it because they felt it was a god, it would be wrong.
But they are not.
Those Jews who built the ark of the covenant ‘felled trees’, ‘carved trees’, and then DECORATED those trees with gold, silver, and bronze. They made GRAVEN IMAGES of cherubim. They dressed THEMSELVES in beautifully woven garments.
The ark was wood. Why are the Jews not condemned for ‘worshipping and decorating wood’? Because, of course, the REASON for the decoration and the images was the worship and glory offered to GOD.
