Luke 2:13-14 A Song of Peace
12/4/16 D. Marion Clark
Introduction
What on earth would astound angels? These are the creatures who stand before the glory of the Three-Person God in his throne room. These are the creatures of another dimension who see into mysteries that we can but vaguely guess at. What on earth would they find mysterious? Their “song of peace” clue us in.
Text
13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,
14 “Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”
This brief angelic song is composed of two parts – a doxology and a benediction. A doxology is a spoken or sung word of praise to God. A benediction is a blessing bestowed upon another. We sing each week a doxology in our service and always close the service with the pastor bestowing a benediction upon the worshippers. And so the angels are doing – giving glory to God and bestowing blessing. Consider first the doxology.
“Glory to God in the highest.”
Pronouncing glory to God – it is what angels do.
Ascribe to the LORD, O heavenly beings,
ascribe to the LORD glory and strength.
Ascribe to the LORD the glory due his name (Ps. 29:1-2).
In Isaiah’s vision of God in his throne room, he beholds the angels saying, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” (Isa. 6:3).
Angels glorify God – and for good reason. They stand in the presence of God in the highest heaven. They behold his glory…as well as they are able; the seraphim in Isaiah’s vision cover their eyes with their wings. Angels know little of faith for they see what we cannot. They see God’s majesty; they experience the presence of God’s holiness. They were present at the creation of the world; they behold displays of God’s power beyond what we can begin to imagine.
So yes, “Glory to God in the highest!” Such a simply doxology sums all that can be said in praise to the God whom they know as fully as can be known by a creature.
Now what of the benediction: “and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!” or as the NIV has it: “to men on whom his favor rests.”
It is easy to view the song as one part focused on heaven and the second part on earth. The angels are caught up in praise to the God of heaven, and, oh, yes, there is earth too. “Bless you, humans, down there. Peace to you.”
We have already noted that the angels are always giving glory to God, and we have noted the good reasons for doing so, but here it is evident that the angels have broken out in praise to God precisely because of what is happening on earth. What is happening? The first angel has told the shepherds: There is “good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” (2:10-11).
The long-awaited Messiah (Christ) has come! Remember as children when September rolled around and it popped into your mind that Christmas was in distant sight? November arrived and it seemed so close yet so distant in time. Finally, after long weeks of waiting, St. Nick apparently had arrived – the evidence was around the tree. I don’t know how angels measure earth time, but even for angels it must have seemed a long time since God first spoke of the Offspring of Eve who would bruise the head of the serpent Satan (Genesis 3:15). That Offspring has been born! Glory to God in the highest!
The Messiah is a Savior, indeed, the Savior. All other saviors were but signals of this great Savior. Moses delivering his people through the ten plagues, the crossing of the Red Sea, the leading through the wilderness – he but prefigured the Savior who would deliver his people out of the greatest bondage of sin and who would fight the great enemies known as Satan and death. David, the king who established the kingdom of Israel in security, winning victory over all of Israel’s enemies – he was but the symbol of the Great King who would establish the kingdom of God and sit on the throne forever. This Savior King has come! Glory to God in the highest!
The Savior Messiah is the Lord! Now we enter the mystery which would have astounded the angels. They understand just who the Messiah is: he is the Mighty God spoken of in Isaiah 9:6. To be precise, he is God the Son, the second person of the Trinity. It is this reality that staggers the imagination even of angels. J. I. Packer, in his classic book Knowing God, expresses well the wonder of this truth.
The supreme mystery … lies … in the Christmas message of incarnation … that Jesus of Nazareth was God made man – that the second person of the Godhead became the “second man” (1 Cor. 15:47), determining human destiny, the second representative head of the race, and that he took humanity without loss of deity, so that Jesus of Nazareth was as truly and fully divine as he was human. Here are two mysteries for the price of one – the plurality of persons within the unity of God, and the union of Godhead and manhood in the person Jesus. It is here, in the thing that happened at the first Christmas, that the profoundest and most unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie. “The Word was made flesh” (John 1:14); God became man; the divine Son became a Jew; the Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, unable to do more than lie and stare and wriggle and make noises, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. And there was no illusion or deception in this: the babyhood of the Son of God was a reality. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the incarnation.
What J. I. Packers writes, and we agree with, is what we hold by faith and by reading Scripture and by reasoning with our minds. The angels know the divine Son; they have bowed before and worshiped the second person of the Godhead. They have stood in his presence, covering their eyes before the glory of this holy God. And now he is incarnated; he has taken fully the flesh of man and is a baby. Glory to God in the highest!
But there is more to astound the angels, for consider from their perspective what God became – a human being. It might astound us that God became one of us, on the same level of us. It truly astounds the angels that God became a “creature” who is on a lower than themselves. As David said of man: “Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings” (Ps. 8:5). The writer of Hebrews picks up on this: “But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus” (Heb. 2:9). Lower than angels? What mystery! Glory to God in the highest!
Oh, but more. For it is not only that God would become a creature on a lower order than angels that astonishes them, but that God would dwell among sinful man. Man – both male and female – had been made in the image of God, and God would walk with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. But after the Fall, man is sin-filled. Man is cast out of the Garden. It is challenging enough for angels to stand in the presence of the holy God, how then can God dwell with sinful man? This is where the physical circumstance of the baby lying in a manger helps us with some understanding. We are awed by the humble circumstance of Jesus’ birth, and no doubt those in the healthcare field think of the unhygienic circumstance. The angels find incredulous the unholy circumstance. The God of whom they cry out in his heavenly temple, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty,” (Isa. 6:3 NIV) has come to earth to dwell as man among sinful men. Glory to God in the highest!
And still the wonder of the first Christmas swells the astonishment of the angels as they contemplate the reason for the incarnation. God the Father is sending God the Son to save these sinners. There is no record of God doing the same for the fallen angels who joined with Lucifer. However much we might wonder how God could hold all mankind accountable for the sin of Adam, what we well know is that the history of mankind is a history of sin – war, murder, jealousy, immorality, lying, stealing. There is no time period and no community that exists or has existed in which peace reigns. And as much as we might like to depict ourselves as victims of sin, Romans 5:8, 10 describes us certainly in the way angels see us: sinners and enemies of God.
And so, when the angels said, “on earth peace,” though they were faithfully delivering the message they were given by God, surely they were passing it on out of wonder at such an incredible message. Peace is coming to earth! Peace is lying in a manger! The event and message could have been that of the angels to Lot regarding Sodom and Gomorrah. And the angels would have understood such a message and have cried out, “Glory to God in the highest,” as justice was finally consummated in Judgment Day. But justice was not their message: it was mercy; wrath was not their proclamation but peace. Glory to God in the highest!
To whom is the peace for? “Among those with whom he is pleased.” We humans question this. Isn’t the peace supposed to be “for all men (and women).” That is how the King James Version translates the message and is now instilled in all of our carols. Even so, the ESV and the NIV Bibles reflect what most translators believe is the right wording. But for the angels, they would question, not why the peace is limited to those with whom God is pleased but that God could be pleased with anyone! We humans are all sinners. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). No one is righteous; no one is justified in the sight of God. How then can God be pleased with anyone?
Evidently, God can be pleased with anyone on whom he has determined to place his favor. There is no working for the favor, no redeeming oneself for being a sinner. God – in spite of everyone being a sinner – still determines to bring the peace of reconciliation to many. He is determined to achieve reconciliation and the instrument of that reconciliation is found in the baby lying in a manger. Glory to God in the highest!
And how does the peace come? What must the Messiah do? Why must God become man? What is the purpose behind this mysterious, glorious event? I am not certain that the angels know at this point. Did they know that the Son of God was born for the purpose of dying? That the glorious victory over death would be won by succumbing to inglorious death on a cross? Could they understand the temptation to sin as experienced by the Messiah when he took on our frail flesh? Could they understand that giving in to such temptation would be the battle waged between the Christ the Lord and Satan? Could they understand the concept of faith – believing what one cannot see, considering that they see all that we cannot? How faith would be the key to sinners becoming justified; that the salvation brought by the Savior meant that his people would not have to rely on the same kind of obedience as the angels? Could they understand fully the gospel – the good news of great joy they proclaimed? 1 Peter 1:12 says that this good news of salvation contains “things into which angels long to look.” If they are still longing to look after Christ the Lord’s death and resurrection, what did they not know at his birth?
For all that the angels knew as creatures who stand in the presence of God; for all the power of God displayed at creation; for all the glory of dwelling in heaven and whatever dimensions they inhabit – it is the good news of Christ’s birth that exceeded their comprehension. The depth of mystery that the angels were able to plunge only took them to mystery where they could not delve. The height they rose to led them to learn that God’s nature and God’s power are truly the highest, far higher than they could go. Glory to God in the highest!
Lessons
And you? Do you, will you, glorify God in the highest? Let me read the full context of that passage in 1 Peter about angels.
Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look (1:10-12).
Prophets longed to understand the very prophecies of the Messiah. All that they knew was that the good news of the Savior was for you. The prophets were serving you in your time, not theirs. The angels on that Christmas morning were serving those shepherds and you, not their fellow angels when they proclaimed this gospel that they long to comprehend fully. This glorious, incomprehensible mystery – God becoming man, the infinite God becoming a small baby – was enacted for your sake, was given as a gift to you. What can you do but exclaim with the angels, “Glory to God in the highest!”?
And you who have thought the story but a quaint myth on par with others told at Christmas time – can you, will you, look into the glory of such good news? Just ask yourself, what if it were real? What if there is something more than this material world? What if there is real glory, real mystery, real mercy and love and peace that lie as a gift from your Creator?
What if you could join in with all of your heart and cry out with the angels, “Glory to God in the highest!”?
