The Significance of Christmas: The Tipping Point that Split Time

This Christmas morning 2025, I awoke thinking about tipping points.

Tipping points are fascinating. They mark moments when everything fundamentally changes, yet we rarely recognize them as they are happening. What is it about these moments that makes them so elusive in real-time? What makes a moment the dividing line between “before” and “after”? When does accumulated change finally cross a threshold and everything shift?

These aren’t easily answered questions. Even when we agree on what constitutes a tipping point, we rarely agree on when the line was actually crossed. At what precise moment can we all point and say, “There! That’s the point when everything changed”? The truth is, we almost never recognize tipping points or their significance as we are crossing them. We may sense the pressure building and the momentum gathering, but recognizing the exact moment of crossing the threshold is often reserved for the rearview mirror.

Christmas is a day that commemorates history’s most significant tipping point: the moment that literally split time in two. To put this in perspective: we’re not just coming to the end of 2025, we're celebrating over 2,000 years since a baby was born in Bethlehem. Of all the things that have happened in history, His arrival was the single event that divided all of human history into “before” and “after.”

Every tipping point – regardless of scale – shares certain characteristics, and Christmas demonstrates them all:

1. Critical Mass: Small changes accumulate beneath the surface before reaching a specific threshold. Christmas was no different. Political structures, transportation networks, linguistic unity, and prophetic longing were all positioned for what would follow. The threshold was reached, and everything shifted.

2. Disproportionate Impact: The trigger is always tiny compared to the transformation that follows it. Christmas exemplifies this perfectly. The smallest input, a vulnerable infant in a feeding trough, would reorient all of human history. Within three centuries, this infant born in a stable transformed the world’s largest empire. Within two millennia, billions have commemorated His birth. The output was wildly disproportionate to the input.

3. Self-Reinforcing Momentum: Once crossed, tipping points activate feedback loops that drive themselves forward. What began that night in Bethlehem couldn’t be stopped. Persecution accelerated rather than contained its spread. It grew organically, beginning with 12 disciples, then hundreds, then throughout the known world. Over two thousand years later, the momentum continues.

4. Irreversible: Tipping points don’t just pause the old system, they create new stable states. The world on the far side of Christmas is fundamentally different from the world before it. Concepts we now take for granted: inherent human dignity, redemption of time (eternity), the possibility of transformation, didn’t exist the same way before His birth.

Christmas checks every box. It is a textbook tipping point. But here’s what makes it different from other tipping points in history: It has never been superseded.

Think about other revolutionary moments. The printing press was a tipping point that changed everything. Then it became the norm. Now it is increasingly being replaced by digital technology. This pattern was seen in other massive shifts such as agriculture, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the Internet. Each one revolutionized, then normalized, then got superseded by what came (or is coming) next.

We are always moving toward the next tipping point. That’s the nature of temporal change. Every breakthrough eventually becomes the old system that the next breakthrough replaces.

Except Christmas.

Over two thousand years later, time still splits here. We’re not measuring from a different date. It continues to stand as a dividing line between “before” and “after” that we all have the opportunity to evaluate in the rearview mirror. The meaning of this point in history can be lost to people but that doesn’t negate the significance of the event.

For those of us who hold Christian faith, this makes complete sense. The Incarnation wasn’t just another significant event in time; it was eternity entering time. God didn’t just act on history from outside; He entered history as a participant. Not as one would look for Him to enter. Instead, as a vulnerable baby entering through the messiness and chaos of life. The Creator became creature. The infinite became finite. The Word became flesh.

This moment didn’t just change what happened in time, but what time is. Its nature, direction, and purpose. The “already” and “not yet” framework proposed by Voss (1903) captures this truth: the Kingdom was inaugurated at Christmas. Everything since has been the unfolding of what began that night. We’re not waiting for something new; we are moving toward the completion of what began that night.

While we navigate the cultural shifts, technological revolutions, political upheavals – all of them happening after time split on Christmas – this tipping point remains fixed. The reference point. The dividing line. The one that doesn’t get replaced. This is the one tipping point in history that remains the tipping point, while everything changes around it.

Here’s the hope Christmas offers: the tipping point has been crossed. The decisive moment that divided “before” and “after” happened over two thousand years ago when the Kingdom broke through. The outcome was secured. What lies ahead of us is the unfolding of what is certain. While we navigate uncertain times, we do so knowing the baby in Bethlehem didn’t just offer hope, He secured it.

Merry Christmas.

Vos, G. (1903). The teaching of Jesus. American Tract Society. https://tinyurl.com/4w6xuvj5