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The Peace of Christmas - Dec. 14th

Rich Trotter

Isaiah 53:6; 2 Corinthians 5:19

Way back when I was a kid attending public school, the teacher would lead the class in singing religious Christmas carols during the holiday season. One of my favorites was “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.”

The first line of the song is “Hark! the herald angels sing, glory to the newborn King.” Those words made complete sense to me as a young child. I understood the fact that Jesus was Lord of the universe even from the time of His birth. But at that time, the next line had me quite baffled: “Peace on earth and mercy mild, God and sinners reconciled!” At that point I was clueless.

Singing that Christmas carol with my classmates raised all kinds of questions in my mind. This talk about peace on earth didn’t make any sense to me. A few days after singing the song, we all had to go out into the hall for an air-raid drill and practice sheltering in place--just in case we were attacked with a nuclear bomb by a foreign adversary. Where’s the peace in that? Pretty scary stuff for a young kid!

Other questions I had were, “What did it mean for God to have mercy?” “Didn’t He automatically forgive everyone?” I thought when we were bad, God would simply say to Himself, “Oh well, boys will be boys. People are people--they’re all human. After all, nobody’s perfect!” Then I believed in my mind that God would just wink at our sin and look the other way.

Still another question: “Who were the sinners the Christmas carol was talking about? Bums on Skid Row?” And the term “reconciled”? Forget it! Just another big word with an unknown meaning.

It wasn’t until quite a few years later after I heard the message of the gospel that the words of the familiar Christmas carol made sense.

When the truths of Scripture were pointed out to me, I realized that in the eyes of a holy God, every single one of us has fallen short of His perfect righteousness. “All of us like sheep have gone astray. Each one of us has turned to his own way.” (Isaiah 53:6 NASB)

In the Bible I saw how serious our sin is before God, whether it’s something very great or something seemingly insignificant. Scripture speaks of being eternally separated from God for any sin--not just those that are “really bad.”

So that means every one of us is guilty before an all-knowing God. None of us is exempt from God’s righteous anger in response to our willful disobedience to Him. In other words, on our own we do not have peace with God because of our sin.

As wandering sheep there’s a price to be paid for our unrighteousness. But in God’s mercy, He doesn’t give us the punishment we deserve. The debt we owed to God was paid for by someone other than ourselves. Thankfully we can read the rest of the verse in Isaiah 53:6. “But the Lord has caused the wrongdoing of us all to fall on Him.” And 2 Corinthians 5:19 says, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them.”

As we place our faith and trust in Christ for the forgiveness of our sins, our relationship with God is made new. Peace with God is possible! Peace with God among those who genuinely believe in the reconciling work of Christ on the cross--that is the true peace of Christmas!

Read and reflect on the following verses: Luke 2:14, John 14:27, Romans 3:23, Romans 5:1, Romans 6:23, and James 2:10