Birthdays

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Birthdays are an emotional human issue. Consequently, humans regard them as important and insist on celebrating them. People can give all manner of clever emotional reasons for a birthday. So, people will always want to celebrate birthdays, but that has got nothing to do with the Bible.

Birthdays can also be cruel. Having a birthday on a February 29 leap year condemns you to one birthday every four years.

Having a birthday the day before or the day after Christmas means fewer birthday presents. Having a birthday on Christmas day means you may not be noticed.

A New Year’s birthday on January 1 means most of the restaurants will be closed.

My birthday was right in the midst of the end-of-the-year exams as a schoolboy, university student, and high school teacher. With all the studying, exam stress, marking, and administration my birthday was usually a “just-no-time-for-this event”.

As one gets older and approaches retirement age, birthdays are less happy. Your birthday that announces that you have reached retirement age is like a guillotine blade hovering over your neck. I had a big happy birthday party in the staff room and a fortnight later was handed my last paycheck. That critical birthday meant that all the cheerful smiles were sending me to a future of financial insecurity as inflation is endlessly driving up prices. Was I really enjoying that birthday party?

The world suffers from massive unequal wealth distribution.

One percent of the world’s population owns 40% of the world’s wealth. But half the world has a combined wealth of only 2% of the world’s wealth. So, half the world lives in extreme poverty. A poor father takes his young daughter out for a birthday meal but can only afford one meal. As a result, he sits and watches her eat. Extreme poverty forces one to see birthdays from a very different point of view.

The rapid growth of slums is one of the biggest changes that can be observed on the Earth’s surface over the last 100 years. Period poverty means that millions of girls and women cannot even afford sanitary products. What birthday presents could they afford? Life is very unequal as they see birthday presents lavished on other people.

Mental health is an increasing problem worldwide. Loneliness and isolation have become epidemics even in wealthy countries like the United States of America. Old-age homes have many occupants who struggle to find anyone to share a birthday with. As we get older, our former friends move away or die. When lonely people see other people having a birthday party it simply intensifies their feeling of worthlessness.

Birthdays are thus a mixed blessing.

God does not think the way we think. So, we just have to accept that birthdays are not part of God’s salvation plan.

Jesus was born, yes. But He was very poor. Born when Joseph had to take his wife Mary on a journey of about 90 miles on a donkey during the last week of her pregnancy. Why? In order to pay an extra tax that was forced on them by the hated Romans. Were they thinking of birthday presents? No. The faster people had occupied all the rooms in Bethlehem. They only thought of survival and welcomed a smelly stable and a manger covered in cow’s spit. Things could not have got much worse for them. But the Bible carefully does not mention His birth date.

Herod and Pharaoh are the only birthdays mentioned. Both those men murdered someone on their birthday. Not great role models.

Herod killed John the Baptist, that great prophet who introduced Messiah. John had lived for years in the wilderness so he did not trust poisonous snakes or religious leaders. He saw no real difference between those two groups. He certainly celebrated no birthdays.

The birth of Jesus is mentioned in a messy stable in the Gospel of Luke. But no birth date is given.

The Bible never asked us to celebrate the birth of Jesus.

Shepherds were out with their sheep at night. So, it was not mid-winter as they would have frozen on 25 December.

25 December is not in the Bible but was the day chosen by the pagan Roman emperor Aurelian in AD 274 to be the birthday of the pagan Roman sun god, Sol Invictus. The Unconquerable Sun. Within a year he was assassinated.

Just before he died in AD 352, Pope Julius 1 copied the pagan sun god birthday festival by calling it the birthday of the Son of God. Catholic services are called a mass. So, this became the mass of Christ or Christ’s mass or Christmas.

Aurelian and Julius both died soon after establishing the date of 25 December. Death in great tribulation awaits unscriptural Christians.

We set up a birthday for Jesus on 25 December in order to impress God with our impressive festival. But it is all human style and glitz with no Bible substance. But typically, based on human greed and selfishness, it has become the biggest money-making season of the year.

Is God impressed?

Religion is humans telling God how they want to worship Him. We make God in our own image and deceive ourselves that God likes the things that we like.

Salvation is God telling humans to be strictly Scriptural. God wants to make us in His image. This requires us to be born again as that will make us only believe what is in the Bible.

God wrote the Holy King James Bible for a reason. He wants us to believe it the way it is written. A modified version of the Bible is a hybrid. There is no eternal life in a hybrid. Today we have over 100 different versions of the English Bible. As a result people no longer believe that any Bible is perfect.

Thus, they have no perfect Bible foundation for their faith.

The birth date of the main Person, Jesus, is not mentioned. The birthdays of two murderers are mentioned.

So, how interested is God in birthdays? He is not. He is almost silent on this issue except for two bad examples that are mentioned. No righteous person celebrated a birthday in the Bible. Christmas was never celebrated by the first church-age Christians. Our last church age of the Laodiceans (who make up their own religious celebrations and doctrines) is supposed to return to the beliefs of the first church age of the apostles.

Jesus asked us to remember His death, not His birth.

The Bible insists that we must die to self. Birthdays tend to magnify a sense of self-importance as well as a sense of greed for bigger and better presents.

Repent and be “buried” in water baptism in the Name of Jesus Christ (Acts 2:38). Then we rise up out of the water as a symbol of a resurrection to a new born-again life when the Holy Spirit fills us.

Water baptism reflects the important day in a person’s life when that person repented and accepted Jesus as a personal Saviour. That opened the Door to Heaven as He is the Door. Eternal life is the present that you receive on that day of sincere repentance.

ACTS 2:38   Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.

:39    For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call.