The story of Christmas begins, not with the manger of Bethlehem, but many thousands, perhaps millions of years before, in the mind and heart of God. “I’m lonely,” James Weldon Johnson has God say in his play, God’s Trombones. “I think I’ll make me a world.” That’s exactly what God did. God made a world . . . a beautiful garden world with birds singing and flowers blooming, mountain streams flowing and mighty oceans glistening under a bright golden sun. In the midst of that garden, God placed a man and a woman His highest creation with every good thing to sustain life.

That first man and woman should have lived happily ever after. So should we all. But it was readily apparent that there was a problem in paradise . . . a problem within the heart of humanity. For, you see, God created man an…