Christmas Eve Every Day

In the little devotional for December 24 in Our Daily Bread, James Banks retells one of my all-time favorite and true Christmas stories. I think it’s worth repeating here—even if you read it last week. It’s just that good! I hope you agree.

On a cold Christmas Eve in Belgium in 1914, the sound of singing floated from the trenches where soldiers were dug in. Strains of the carol “Silent Night” rang out in German and then in English. Soldiers who earlier in the day had been shooting at each other laid down their weapons and emerged from their trenches to shake hands in the “no man’s land” between them, exchanging Christmas greetings and spontaneous gifts from their rations. The ceasefire continued through the next day as the soldiers talked and laughed and even organized soccer matches together.

The Christmas Truce of 1914 that occurred along World War I’s western front offered a brief glimpse of the peace the angels proclaimed on the first Christmas Eve long ago. An angel spoke to terrified shepherds with these reassuring words: “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you.” Then a multitude of angels appeared, “praising God and saying ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.’”

We still need peace today. Not the kind of temporary or conflict-avoiding peace the world tries to sell us. We need the joyous peace the angels proclaimed that first Christmas Eve. It is both something we receive and something we pursue.

Jon Bloom from Desiring God explains.

The Bible calls Jesus the “Prince of Peace” (Isaiah9:6). And the Prince of Peace, the Son of God, said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God” (Matthew 5:9). How far did the Prince of Peace, the Son of God, go to make peace with us? To the death. Jesus made peace between us and God “by the blood of his cross” (Colossians1:20). When we were still sinners (Romans 5:8).

How far should the sons of God go to make peace? To the death. What does that mean? It depends on the nature of the conflict. But at the very least it means, “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you” (Colossians 3:5). It means, “Love one another with brotherly affection” and “outdo one another in showing honor” (Romans 12:10). It means, “Bless those who persecute you,” “live in harmony with one another,” “never be wise in your own sight,” never “repay . . . evil for evil,” and “do what is honorable in the sight of all,” never seeking revenge when wronged, treating our enemies with graciousness and compassion, and, so far as it depends on us, living “peaceably with all” (Romans 12:14-21).

 After accepting the incredible personal gift of peace Jesus gives us, our peace with God, it seems to be a crazy kingdom irony that we then have to fight—to strive— so hard for peace around us, for peace among us. But that is what the author of Hebrews insists we do.

This is what it looks like to “strive for peace with everyone” (Hebrews 12:14). Most of the time, when a conflict is brewing, we should assume it is avoidable and do everything to pursue peace. We should assume the best of the other(s) and assume we are misunderstanding something or being tempted by warring passions. We should not enter into conflict as such until we have clear confirmation that it is unavoidable in the biblical sense. And even then, we speak the appropriate truth in the appropriate form of love, whether it be tough or tender (Ephesians 4:15). Peace requires a rigorous, disciplined commitment to being quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry.    

This is hard. Like all forms of spiritual endurance and warfare, we must strive. We must die. But this kind of dying to make peace is blessed. It’s what sons of God do. And God’s reward to his peacemaking sons will be out-of-this-world wonderful.

It will be like that 1914 Christmas Eve miracle.

Someone took that first step into no man’s land that wintry night. Someone extended their hand in friendship to their sworn enemy first.

I’d like to think that “someone” was a son of God, a humble peacemaker who had come to personally know the peace of God through the redemptive work of Jesus, the Prince of peace. So on that lonely, war ravaged field, he remembered the message of the angelic hosts. He remembered he was a peacemaker. He had peace from God to share.

In the midst of a broken, painful, miserable situation, even for an only brief season, there was peace.

May we find—and create—those precious moments of peace in our families, in our neighborhoods, in our work places, and in our church.

After all, we know the Prince of Peace.

In fact, we are His sons and daughters.

May your new year be filled with His incomprehensible and overwhelming peace.

—Eileen Hill

*Please be advised that this blog represents the views, opinions and beliefs of the writer and does not necessarily reflect those of our church leadership or denominational affiliation.

Schindler’s Christmas List

Video essayist Jack Nugent, on his YouTube Channel Now You See It, refers to the film Schindler’s List (Universal, 1993) as “The story of the color red.” I’d like to consider this thought and how the Bible can be viewed in the same light.

In this Christmas week, as we see poinsettias at home and in the malls—if we’re brave enough to venture out—we ought to consider how red is used as a visual in the Bible, in much the same way it is used in this film (and others). If we comprehend its significance, we can better understand the season we’re now in.

* * *

If you’ve seen Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, you know that it is filmed almost exclusively in black and white, not color. However, it is bookended by two scenes filmed in color.

 These scenes include a Jewish family gathered for prayer and the lighting of two candles, as well as the epilogue, showing current-day Jews laying stones and a rose on Oskar Schindler’s grave, in Jerusalem. The film also includes two pivotal scenes where the color red represents a turning point in the heart of the businessman who would save nearly 1,200 Jewish lives, during World War II.

Spielberg makes conspicuous use of red in these middle scenes. It stands out in a predominately black and white film much more so than, say, the woman in red, in The Matrix; Dorothy’s ruby red slippers, in The Wizard of Oz; or the red doorknob in The Sixth Sense. It is not merely one color among many, as in these other films, but the only color to be seen, at this point in the film.

So, the director is obviously making a deliberate choice to use that color. In so doing, he demands his audience consider his use of it and its meaning.

As Jack Nugent says, “Schindler’s list perfectly embodies all the symbolic uses of red: its origins in fire and blood; the religious significance developed from pagan rituals, all the way to Christianity; and the harnessing of the color’s dual meaning”—i.e., that of life, passion, and love, as well as death, horror, and punishment. (See Nugent’s essay, “The Meaning of Red in Movies,” here).

When we see red in the middle of this mostly black and white film, it is attention-getting. It screams to us of what is happening: not in the visible world, but in the invisible heart of the man who would become savior to many.

We see red in the coat of a three-year-old girl, just as Oskar Schindler witnesses the liquidation of the Krakow, Poland ghetto. This is the point in the film where the Jews, already rounded up from within and around Krakow and placed into the ghetto, were forcibly removed from their homes to be murdered—either there, on the spot, or else in Auschwitz, after being loaded onto nearby cattle cars. Schindler sees the girl separating herself from the crowd; we see her re-entering an apartment building, and hiding under a bed.

This is also the point where Schindler—who may, up until this point, have viewed the Jews as a collective workforce—began to view them as a collection of individual lives worth saving. This journey toward understanding began, from Schindler’s point of view, as he lay perched above the city, on horseback, witnessing Krakow, Poland’s Kristallnacht, or The Night of Broken Glass, as it has come to be known, and took note of the girl in red.

Schindler’s journey ends when he later sees the lifeless body of the same girl being hauled away on a cart, to be burned along with many of her former family members and neighbors. There, she is no longer the representation of lives about to be extinguished. She has become the symbol of the lives that will be lost unless Schindler does more than merely employ them in his enamelware factory. This is why he is horrified, grief-stricken, as she is carted off toward the flames, right before his eyes.

As the film begins with red, the last color seen in the last burning candle on the Jewish family’s table, it concludes with red, as shown in the red rose placed on Oskar Schindler’s grave. If the color red were a thread pulled tight, it would be center-stitched into the blood-red heart of Schindler, in the scenes mentioned above, where the girl in the red coat is burned onto the conscience of the man who would save many from the Nazi holocaust.

* * *

As Schinder’s List may be considered a story of the color red, so may the Word of God. Some consider this the Bible’s Scarlet thread.

In many instances, the Bible includes the color red as an important thematic element contained in the story of man’s fall and redemption. In this context, red is used to convey the same things seen in Schindler’s List: life, passion, and love, as well as death, horror, and punishment.

Judah and Tamar were to have twin sons. Zerah, about to be delivered, held out his hand but was brought back into the womb, to be replaced by his brother Perez. The momentary appearance of Zerah was marked by a scarlet thread tied to his wrist by his mother’s midwife, indicating he had been replaced by his twin brother Perez, the ancestor of Jesus (Matthew 1:3).

Scarlet is also mentioned as belonging to the temple, where the ritual sacrifices were made, and as belonging to the priests, those who performed the sacrifices. “You shall make the tabernacle with ten curtains of fine twined linen and blue and purple and scarlet yarns” (Exodus 26:1, ESV). “And they shall make the ephod [apron / breastplate] of gold, of blue and purple and scarlet yarns, and of fine twined linen, skillfully worked” (Exodus 28:6, ESV).

Before the Israelites took the city of Jericho, spies were sent in. They were later given refuge and safe passage out of the city through a window in Rahab’s house and let down the city wall by a scarlet thread. This was the same scarlet thread used to tell Joshua, when they reentered the land, that she hadn’t told the authorities they were there, earlier, and to remind her that she and her family would be kept safe from the invading Israeli army.

This red sign marked Rahab’s family safe from the death and destruction to come upon her family. It was a reminder of how the scarlet red markings on the doorposts of the Israelites had marked them safe from the death angel about to ravage Egypt, killing all of its firstborn.

The scarlet thread of Rahab extends back to the Exodus and beyond, all the way to the garden, where animals were sacrificed by God, covering the sin of Adam and Eve. It extends forward to God’s ultimate sacrifice, that of His Son, sent to redeem mankind. It includes the scarlet worn by Jesus’s uncle Zacharias, clothed in the same ephod of his ancestors, as he performed his priestly duties in the temple, the year that Jesus was born.

* * *

This brings us back to where we had started: the Christmas story. As with the twins, Zerah and Perez, the Lord, whose arrival is heralded by “a multitude of the heavenly host” (Luke 2:13), does something similar. He ties a scarlet thread around the wrist of those willing to recognize that He is their substitute on the cross, for the punishment they deserve, even as Perez was substituted for Zerah.

As with Rahab, we had been prostituting ourselves with the ways of the world. But we are now rescued by the scarlet blood of the lamb, He who had been slain from the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8). He who could not be sacrificed unless He was first born to a woman and placed in a manger (Luke 2: 7,12,16) extends the scarlet thread of Rahab toward us. He does so that we might be rescued, saved from the destruction that will ultimately come upon the world—much as it came upon Jericho, with every wall of separation torn down and every loved one who would be saved forever rescued from eternal devastation.

The scarlet thread is woven throughout the fabric of the Bible. It tells us how the love of God reaches out to the lost and rescues them, giving them life in place of death. It speaks of how God’s great passion redeems His people from death and the horrors of eternal punishment. It is seen in the garden, the lineage of Jesus, and the redemption of the gentiles. It is visible in the temple, the priests, the blood-loss coming from Mary in her delivery of Jesus, and in her Son’s death on the cross.

Oskar Schindler, a flawed and fallible man, rescued hundreds once he looked to the scarlet threads woven into a young girl’s coat, once he permitted her plight to work its way into his heart. Jesus, our perfect and infallible Savior, whose birth we remember this week, wants to take the plight of lost humanity and work it into our hearts this Christmas. He asks that we might comprehend the message of the Scarlet Thread and convey it to others, that they, too, might be rescued.

* * *

Shall we, the rescued, not take the Scarlet Thread’s message, the Gospel, to those in desperate need of it, this season? Perhaps we need an epiphany, as Schindler had, when he saw the certain death facing the Jews and permitted his heart to be moved, so that he might rescue them.

If we haven’t had such a moment, we need to ask God to provide us one. The eternal lives of one or two, or perhaps hundreds, depends on such a moment being birthed within us.

*Please be advised that this blog represents the views, opinions and beliefs of the writer and does not necessarily reflect those of our church leadership or denominational affiliation.

Weary of 2020? What to do?

This week I want to invite you to consider Clarissa Moll’s blog on this relevant question. She posted a blog yesterday in the Gospel Coalition website. In answering the question of what to do if you are weary and exhausted coming to the end of the year 2020, Clarissa invites us to do more than get good rest, though that might be necessary. Her insight was refreshing to me, and I hope it is to you as well. To read her blog click here.

—Diego Cuartas

*Please be advised that this blog represents the views, opinions and beliefs of the writer and does not necessarily reflect those of our church leadership or denominational affiliation.

Noisy Cows and Goats

Long ago, after the Jews had gotten out of Egypt, there was a woman named Hannah who begged God for a son. God blessed her, and she did have a son, and this was Samuel. Hannah promised God that she would dedicate Samuel to Him. After he was weaned, she took him to the temple and left him with Eli, who was a judge over Israel for 40 years. Samuel helped Eli with his work, and was very close to God.

But the people saw that all the surrounding nations had kings, and they decided they wanted a king, too. So God showed Eli the man He should appoint as king, and that was Saul, the first king of Israel.

Now, when the people were traveling from Egypt, one of the countries they passed, Amalek, treated them poorly, and God told Saul to take his army and destroy every Amalekite and everything in their country. After this war, Samuel went out to meet Saul as they returned from battle. But Saul had gone to the town of Carmel to build a monument to himself! And God spoke to Samuel and told him that He was sorry He had ever made Saul king, because Saul had not been loyal to Him and refused to obey God’s command! Samuel was very upset and the next morning went to meet Saul. Saul was very proud of himself, and bragged about how he had obeyed the Lord’s command! But Samuel demanded,

“Then what is all the bleating of sheep and goats and the lowing of cattle I hear?!

And Saul answered, “It’s true the army spared the best of the livestock, but they are going to sacrifice them to your God! We destroyed everything else! And I brought back King Agag!”

But Samuel replied, “What is more pleasing to the Lord;

                                   your burnt offerings and sacrifices

                                  or your obedience to His voice!

                                  Listen! Obedience is better than sacrifice,

                                  and submission is better than offering

                                                      the fat of rams

                                  Rebellion is as sinful as witchcraft,

                                       and stubbornness as bad

                                      as worshiping idols.

                                 So because you have rejected the

                                       command of the Lord,

                                He has rejected you as king.”  

Well…how does this apply to me? I’m not a king. I don’t have a Samuel to tell me what God wants me to do.

No, but I have far more than Samuel ever had. I have Jesus Christ, who sent me the Holy Spirit! And I have my blessed Bible, which provides me with all the instruction I will ever need! MY problem is this: when I KNOW what God wants me to do, will I find a reason to do it a little differently? Or a little later? Or with the wrong attitude? Or with any one of a number of changes that are more appealing to ME?

Obedience, I sometimes find, is as hard for me as it is for my precious little great-grandsons.

—Norma Stockton

*Please be advised that this blog represents the views, opinions and beliefs of the writer and does not necessarily reflect those of our church leadership or denominational affiliation.

Her Prayer, Our Foundation

Mary, did you know? Every year I hear that song around the Christmas season, and the song reminds me of good questions we can ask Jesus’ mother. This year, however, as I read Luke 1, I have a new question for her: Mary, did you know that your prayer reveals so much about who God is?

This is what Mary prayed in her desire to magnify the reality of God:

“My soul magnifies the Lord,

    and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.

    For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;

for he who is mighty has done great things for me,

    and holy is his name.

And his mercy is for those who fear him

    from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm;

    he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;

he has brought down the mighty from their thrones

    and exalted those of humble estate;

he has filled the hungry with good things,

    and the rich he has sent away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel,

    in remembrance of his mercy,

as he spoke to our fathers,

    to Abraham and to his offspring forever.”

I have identified at least 10 realities Mary’s prayer reveals about God: (perhaps you will find more!)

1. God saves!

2. God considers the humble.

3. God is mighty—He does great things for us.

4. God is Holy.

5. God is merciful toward those who fear Him.

6. His strength is often quiet—He has scattered the proud in their thoughts.

7. He brings down the “mighty” and exalts the “humble”.

8. He fills our hunger with good things.

9. He remembers mercy—even when we fail to be faithful to Him.

10. He speaks through each generation!

While this year, 2020, has shaken up so many things about our existence and even take up lives with it, I find that the more I reflect on God’s character, the more I want to see Him magnified, exalted over my thoughts, interpretations, and even feelings. 

If Mary was here today perhaps she would ask us, “Did you know that your God and Savior is like this…? 

May the Spirit of the Lord give us clarity to know Him as He wants to be known in this season.

—Diego Cuartas