Christmas season begins earlier and earlier every year. The trigger is pulled quickly in order to start decorating. From Christmas carols and movies to nativity scenes, Christmas trees, lights, garland, and stockings, there is an eagerness in the hearts of many to start the Christmas season as soon as possible. Well, how about starting it today with this interesting piece of musical history.
No song says Christmas quite like Handel’s Messiah. When it is sung, people arise from their seats as if the National Anthem was playing. What might surprise you to know is that Messiah was never intended to be a Christmas piece. In fact, it was intentionally created for Easter. It was on this day in 1742 in a concert hall in Dublin, Ireland, that this oratorio was first performed.
“The inspiration for Messiah came from a scholar and editor named Charles Jennens, a devout and evangelical Christian deeply concerned with the rising influence of deism and other strains of Enlightenment thought that he and others regarded as irreligious. Drawing on source material in the King James Bible … Jennens compiled and edited a concise distillation of Christian doctrine, from Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah’s coming through the birth, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ and then to the promised Second Coming and Day of Judgment. Jennens took his libretto to his friend George Frideric Handel and proposed that it form the basis of an oratorio expressly intended for performance in a secular setting during the week immediately preceding Easter. “Messiah would be directed at people who had come to a theater rather than a church during Passion Week,” according to the Cambridge Handel scholar Ruth Smith, “to remind them of their supposed faith and their possible fate.”1
Jennens was taking a back door approach to get the irreligious to hear the truth of God’s Word. And I like Smith’s comment: to remind them of their supposed faith and their possible fate.”
Our world is filled with people who are growing more and more “enlightened” every day. It has been called The Great Dechurching because many are leaving churches and embracing a variety of enlightened spiritual beliefs. The drift has been dramatic and contagious.
An msn.com article from the second week of March explains some of the reasons
people have left church. “Being exposed to cultures and religions can expand one’s worldview, leading them to question and reevaluate their religious beliefs. Consequently, this exploration may result in a shift from Christianity toward other faiths or even a more secular perspective…
“According to Jim Davis and Graham Michael’s book titled The Great Dechurching, over 40 million Americans stopped attending church, in “the largest and fastest religious shift in U.S. history.” Doctrines that engage in asking questions, thinking for yourself, and encouraging debate that leads to uncertainties are also another big reason why people leave Christianity. Many people nowadays follow belief systems that are rooted in evidence, and when this is lacking, it gives them other doubts that lead them away from this religion…
“The links between basic human values and political secularism talk about the growing influence of secularism and the prioritization of humanistic values. The European Journal of Political Research discusses how this has the potential to sway individuals away from their traditional religious beliefs.”2
I wonder what Jennens and Handel would say about the alleged enlightenment of our era?
While it is discouraging to see what’s happening in the church today, it shouldn’t surprise us. Paul warned in 2 Timothy 4:3-4, “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; (4) And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.”
We are seeing the realities of 2 Timothy 3:4 where people are “lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God.” The need for spiritual entertainment just keeps growing. People have a supposed faith and a possible fate.
While we cannot combat this globally or even locally, we can combat this individually. How do we do that? Though these instructions were given to a preacher, they are applicable for all believers. 2 Timothy 4:1-2, 5 says, “I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom; (2) Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine… (5) But watch thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry.”
We must be strong and determined to proclaim God’s Word, never backing down or recanting, and speaking truth during another so-called age of enlightenment. The possible fate of those with supposed faith will become a certain fate if their supposed faith doesn’t become REAL faith.
1https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/handels-messiah-premieres-in-dublin
2https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/18-reasons-why-people-stop-being-christians/ss-BB1hR7d5#image=1
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