And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”
(Luke 2:13-14)
Most everyone will agree that “Silent Night” is one of the traditional favorites at Christmas time. I envision a young child in a choir robe, standing in the front of a church, holding a candle and singing “silent night…holy night…all is calm…all is bright…” While it is a lovely image, I don’t think it accurately portrays what was happening the night Jesus was born.
First of all we need to understand who showed up that night. While traditional Christmas pageants portray the attendees as a handful of angels in white robes and tinsel halos, the “heavenly host” was actually an army of heavenly warriors that “cannot be numbered” (Jer 33:22). The heavenly host have the privilege of surrounding God “on his right hand and his left” (2 Chron 18:18).
Next we need to understand why they were so excited. Consider that these angels had spent the past few thousand years delivering God’s messages of destruction, carrying out God’s orders to destroy wicked cities like Sodom and Gomorrah and waging war against Satan and his fallen angels. By that point they had spent centuries in a war against man, the devil and his followers for one reason; sin. All the while they delivered the prophecies about the coming Savior, Deliverer and King, anxiously anticipating the day it would all come to fruition.
On that night, Jesus had finally arrived on the scene thereby fulfilling all of those prophecies. He was the culmination of the entire Old Testament, a willing servant who agreed to serve as God’s peace offering to end the war He didn’t start. Those angels knew that the end of the war was near because Jesus was the Answer to the war against man and the devil that had been raging since almost the beginning of time. They knew that He was the Savior who would fulfill the old law, that His blood would be the last sacrifice required for the remission of sin, and that He would defeat Satan and death once and for all in the process.
This was no solemn procession of choir boys; it was a victorious celebration of soldiers knowing that the end of the war was at hand. When I imagine hundreds of thousands of heaven’s loudest worshipers all crying out at the top of their voices, “Glory to God! On earth peace! Good will toward men,” I have to believe that every fiber of those shepherds’ bodies was reverberating and saturated with the glory of God! I believe it was more like the celebrations that took place in May 1945, when an entire continent celebrated VE Day, signifying the end of World War II in Europe.
I encourage you to keep this in mind during Christmas, because we celebrate for the same reasons the angels did two thousand years ago; Jesus saved us from the destruction of sin and defeated the enemy once and for all.
Author Resource:-
Todd Dawalt
Bible Teacher at Sherman Full Gospel Church
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