Sue Bohlin recently learned something new about biblical anointing oil, and why cinnamon is such a special fragrance.
When you walk into our Tom Thumb grocery store, there’s a flower display right inside the door. For weeks, they have had bags of cinnamon-scented pine cones and it smells like Christmas. I love it! The last time I shopped I gave in and bought one of the bags and put in on the hearth in our living room.
I discovered that unfortunately, one little bag with a few pine cones does not a Christmas make. You need a bunch more.
Christmas MUSIC, on the other hand-now, that’ll get you in the Christmas spirit! My husband’s Christmas music playlist has been on full blast for weeks. Which includes Handel’s Messiah.
We hear the word “Messiah” a lot more during the ramp-up to Christmas, but do you know what it means? It means “Anointed One.”
In the Old Testament, in Exodus 30:22-33, God gave the formula for a perfumed anointing oil to be used ONLY for sacred things and sacred people. Moses smeared it on the tabernacle, the ark of the covenant, and all the pieces of furniture in the holy place. And Aaron and the other priests were anointed with this oil.
It was a fragrance set apart—that’s what “holy” means—from all other fragrances. When people smelled it, they immediately thought of God. They thought, “Oh, that’s what God smells like!”
If I were to ask you, “What does Christmas smell like?” I bet the first thing to come to mind is cinnamon, right?
Well, that was one of the elements of the anointing oil as well.
For many hundreds of years, the people of God used this sacred anointing oil that wordlessly proclaimed, “This is what sacred smells like. This is what God smells like.”
At the same time, they looked for the promised Messiah to come, and Messiah meant “Anointed One.” So the sacred smells of the anointing oil were another signpost pointing to Jesus.
Every time you see or hear the term “Jesus Christ,” you can think “Jesus Messiah,” because “Christ” is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word for “Anointed One.”
When Jesus came, He showed us what the Father was. He smelled like the Father.
He smelled like God.
And here’s the interesting thing. After He went back up to heaven, people started calling His followers “Christ-ians,” which means “Little Christs.” Little anointed ones.
2 Corinthians 2:15 says, “For we are to God the sweet aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing.”
Just as Jesus smelled like God, so do believers in Jesus!
Not literally, but our lives are a fragrant aroma of Christ that point us to God.
We may not smell like Christmas, but smelling like God is even better, don’t you think?
(Major thanks to my favorite female theologian, Dr. Nika Spaulding, who shared this insight connecting the dots about anointing, Jesus Messiah, and God-smelling Christians in her Substack teaching on the book of Exodus.)
This blog post originally appeared at on blogs.bible.org/what-christmas-smells-like-and-us-too/, Dec. 23, 2025.