During this time of year there is no shortage of Santa Claus fan faire. Netflix even released “The Christmas Chronicles,” starring Kurt Russell as a more hip and rustic Claus. What strikes me about the folklore of the Santa mythos is how is borrows from Truth. The adage “Santa’s keeping a list and He’s checking it twice,” and that all girls and boys names are in a book has marked similarities to the books in heaven, “And I saw a great white throne and the one sitting on it. The earth and sky fled from his presence, but they found no place to hide. I saw the dead, both great and small, standing before God’s throne. And the books were opened, including the Book of Life. And the dead were judged according to what they had done, as recorded in the books. The sea gave up its dead, and death and the grave gave up their dead. And all were judged according to their deeds. Then death and the grave were thrown into the lake of fire. This lake of fire is the second death. And anyone whose name was not found recorded in the Book of Life was thrown into the lake of fire.”(Revelation 20:11-15). In fact, in the Christmas Chronicles there is a Book of True Believers, that contains the family trees of those who truly believe in Santa. On one hand this was inspiring, to think that somewhere in heaven we may have a book containing our family tree of faith, those who trusted in Christ. However, there are some possible blasphemous implications of the Book of True Believers in “The Christmas Chronicles,” which has markedly similar tone to The Lamb’s Book of Life that contains all true believers, “'He who overcomes [stands firm in the faith] will thus be clothed in white garments; and I will not erase his name from the book of life, and I will confess his name before My Father and before His angels,” (Revelation 3:5), and “For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him.There is no judgment against anyone who believes in him. But anyone who does not believe in him has already been judged for not believing in God’s one and only Son. And the judgment is based on this fact: God’s light came into the world, but people loved the darkness more than the light, for their actions were evil. All who do evil hate the light and refuse to go near it for fear their sins will be exposed. But those who do what is right come to the light so others can see that they are doing what God wants.” (John 3:16-21). My concern is as always that the mythos of Santa desensitize children and can make them distrust us when we teach them about the True and Living God.
The real man who wore a red robe and sported a beard was not a jolly fat man with a sleigh, but a Man of Sorrows (Isaiah 53:3-5) who is the Son of God that was slain for our sins. Everything about Santa is counterfeit, he asks for kids to believe in him, when children should believe in the real Jesus Christ (John 6:40). He wears a robe of red that people associate with him, when the only One who wore a robe of red was Jesus, “Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the common hall, and gathered to him the whole band of soldiers. And they stripped him, and put on him a scarlet robe.” (Matthew 27:27-28). Santa Claus asks children to believe in magic that makes his sleigh fly or to fill his toy bag, when Jesus says what will become of magic users, “But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars--they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.” (Revelation 21:8). Santa tells children if they are good enough he will reward them with presents, Jesus says only God is good (Mark 10:18), and we can never be good enough so God became a man and died for our sins and rose from the dead and if we trust in this grace we shall be saved (Acts 15:11, Ephesians 2:8-10, Philippians 3:9, 2 Corinthians 5:21). It is evident that Santa Claus as he stands in 20th and 21st centuries is an antichrist! In greek, antichrist means to “replace christ,” hence why the Man of Lawlessness claims to replace God in his blasphemy, “the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God.” (2 Thessalonians 2:3-4). Is that not what Santa is doing? Mr. Claus asks children to believe in him, when the only one that you should believe in is Jesus (Acts 4:10-12, John 3:16-20). Santa wields magic which Christ condemns (Revelation 21:8) and former witches burned their magic books when they became Christians, “And many of those who practiced magic brought their books together and began burning them in the sight of everyone; and they counted up the price of them and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. So the word of the Lord was growing mightily and prevailing.” (Acts 19:19-20). Santa tells kids to merit gifts via good deeds, when God did the greatest deed on the cross once for all (2 Peter 3:18, 1 Peter 2:24) and gives us the free gift of grace and eternal life! (Ephesians 2:8-10). Santa Claus has fallen far from the Christian inspiration of St. Nicholas, a Turkish bishop who saved three virgins from the sex slave trade and who invented gifts in stockings, and has instead become more like Oiden the Wanderer and an artifice of Satan to distract children from faith in Christ and approbate it to the mythological Santa (Satan) Claus.
Christmas had been hijacked by the antichrist spirit, seeking to steal children’s attention away from the Reason for the Season, Jesus Christ. The devil is cunning, through commercialism (his invention, see Ezekiel 28:11-18) he has taken the attention of the true-existing God Jesus Christ and placed it on a myth named Santa Claus that teaches children to believe in magic which God hates and punishes (Revelation 21:8) and to be good to merit possessions when God cared for us and loved us when we weren’t friends of His, “For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. And not only this, [g]but we also exult in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation.” (Romans 5:9-11, NASB).
Mr. Claus or Santa is going to the Lake of Fire. He practices magic, and here is what happens to practitioners of magic, “But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars--they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death” (Revelation 21:8). Worse he has been used by the dark powers to convince children magic is good when it is only evil. Like Pan, Mr. Claus has seduced kids into antichrist activities. It behooves us to put a stop to the Santa traditions in our Christians homes. To say a present comes from Christ not Mr. Claus, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change,” (James 1:17), and “Whatever you ask in My name, that will I do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it.” (John 14:13-14). That is another counterfeit, that Santa Claus tells kids to “ask him for what they want,” when only Christ is the one who you can ask! We need to take back Christmas and cease misleading the young with the mythos of Santa! Pull down the red robed jolly fat man named Santa, and lift up the Son of God who wore a red robe and bore our sins! Amen.
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