What can the Prince of Peace offer a mostly peaceful nation?
For every boot of the tramping warrior in battle tumult and every garment rolled in blood will be burned as fuel for the fire. Isaiah 9:5
It’s easy to pick on the secular world’s misunderstanding of the message of Christmas. Anyone with a Keep Christ in Christmas lawn sign or a He’s the reason for the season bumper sticker can point out that Christmas in the culture has been hijacked by corporate marketers and Hallmark movie script-writers. But I think that what is truly worth deploring is that the culture has now completely lost sight of the Christmas promise of Peace. Christians would be wise to cling to this particular hope and recall that when Isaiah prophesied the birth of Christ 700 years ahead of time, he proclaimed that one of the titles He would be awarded was Prince of Peace.
How could that possibly still be relevant to us in the West today? You ask. Well, let’s think about the socio-cultural climate in Israel 2,700 years ago… The prophet Isaiah was addressing the people of Judah, the southern half of the divided kingdom of Israel, at a time when, after a long stretch of political stability and peace in the region, international relations were starting to feel frayed. Major superpowers were flexing their expansionist muscles and the little nation of Israel was smack in the middle of three of them. All three were posturing for supremacy: The past-its-prime superpower of Egypt, the mighty Assyrian Empire, and the ruthless Empire of Babylon. Israel was starting to feel a little claustrophobic in the region.
Another important dynamic was that the people of Judah had drifted away from God in their affluence. They had largely abandoned their faith, and had started to believe that it was their own worldly wisdom that had secured their safety and prosperity. They believed in brokering deals with other nations and forming alliances. They thought that all they needed to do was to form the right pacts, strike the right deals to keep themselves safe.
Finally, rejection of God and the embrace of sin had taken hold of their hearts during this time of ease, and as a result they had drifted further and further into moral decay. Sound familiar? You really could think of Isaiah’s social context as quite similar to our own day and age.
And Isaiah was prophesying that Israel’s time of ease, prosperity and peace was coming to an end. Isaiah was foretelling that they would be taken into exile, they would be stripped of their land, and of their freedom. Since they had lost sight of God who had granted them these gifts in the first place, they would experience an unwinding of the Exodus. Isaiah paints a picture of hopelessness that would take hold of God’s people as they looked around and saw their leaders mismanage the nation, their prospects dimming, their prosperity evaporating, their sovereignty and their freedom threatened. And eventually they would know only despair, the gloom of anguish, the thick darkness (Isaiah 8:22) was going to envelop them… God was going to let his people be taken out of the land he provided them, and let them be taken back into exile. And they would know that they had squandered all of God’s blessings.
No wonder we put Isaiah out of our minds at Christmas time! I get it, once we get into the Christmas spirit, we want to keep it light and cheery, and the context of the book of Isaiah is anything but light and cheery. But just like a jeweler places a diamond on a black cloth to make it sparkle all the more, the dark background of this amazing book makes the jewel of Christmas sparkle brighter than all the shopping mall Christmas trees in the world. Christmas is not about trying to put your problems aside so that you can ignore them for a season before plunging right back into them. It is not about trying your hardest to make everything merry and bright. The message of Christmas is a message of light shining into darkness. It is a message of hope that is found in the most desperate of circumstances. And that is truly worth celebrating because it means that there is hope for all of us who find ourselves in darkness. And despite what we might try to project, the holiday season cannot cast out the darkness. Only the light of Christ can illuminate the dark. Whether it is the shadow of strained and painful relationships, the gloom of financial stress, when we find ourselves abandoned by the false promises of consumerism, or even the darkness of our own making, sin is at the root of all darkness in this fallen world. So even if you have ended up lost in the darkness after a relentless season of fleeing the light, pursuing your own sinful impulses, you can find refuge in the light of Christ.
When Isaiah announces the arrival of the Prince of Peace, he tells us that an important aspect of the light shining into darkness is the light of peace shining into the darkness of war. This is why the government should be on his shoulders and not ours. Peace in our country, in our land, in our relationships, in our families, in our churches, in our hearts… But most importantly: Peace between us and God.
Isaiah promises that every boot of the tramping warrior in battle tumult and every garment rolled in blood will be burned as fuel for the fire (Isaiah 9:5), which is not exactly the Hallmark picture of the family gathered around the fireplace for a cozy family Christmas, is it? This is an image of the war-weary family, ravaged by violence and suffering, gathered around a bonfire of the defeated oppressing army’s blood-soaked uniforms in celebration of peace. An end to the bombs, the pain, the anxiety and the oppression. What a promise to a war-torn nation! There is rest in your future, there is peace. Your suffering is not the end of your story, Christ is walking through your affliction with you and leading you to Peace.
And we can be tempted to think that this promise is uniquely relevant to war-torn nations like Ukraine or Gaza. We can look around and see that our circumstances here are good, that we live in a peaceful nation, that we live in politically stable times and think that this really does not have anything to offer us. But you have to remember that the prophet Isaiah is not speaking to a war-torn nation, rather he is addressing a prosperous nation that has been lulled into a false sense of security and has drifted away from God. Think about what it is that we rely on for the stability, safety and prosperity of our nation. Are they truly reliable? Where does our anxiety stem from? Our anxiety is rooted in the fact that deep down inside we know that we cannot trust our current circumstances to endure. When we hear rumblings of wars and political instability in neighbouring nations, we know that this house is built on sand. Isaiah is here to remind you not to let your comfort, wealth, ease and stability blind you to the true Hope of Christmas.
When we proclaim Peace on earth, Goodwill to man, we are not talking about a peace that is held together by international treaties, continental alliances, ballistic defense systems, or even 2% of GDP spent on the Department of Defense, but we are talking about peace that is granted to us by God. Peace that was purchased at an excruciating cost and paid for by this child whose birth we celebrate at Christmas. This child who went on to lead a perfect sinless life, and who willingly marched towards Golgotha, knowing what awaited him.
The Prince of Peace delivers peace, not just between us and our neighbors, but peace between us and God! Make no mistake: In our sinful state, we are at war against God. And the Prince of Peace came into the world to offer reconciliation between us and our creator. God the Son was born on Christmas Day as a baby to take on the full experience of human life in this fallen world. He lived an entire life free from sin, and yet took on the punishment that we deserve from God on our behalf for all the sin of the world. Even if you are not yet a Christian, you know that sin, you see it everywhere you look: Anger and hate and pain and suffering and depravity, that is the dark backdrop to all of our Christmases. That’s what Jesus willingly died to save us from. He willingly went to that cross, knowing the humiliation, the torture and the suffering he would be subjected to, so that you would not have to. That was the cost of peace between us and God. And through his resurrection, Christ ensures we are eternally at peace with God, and that allows us to be at peace with each other. Christ rules a kingdom of peace.
What a source of hope! Isaiah tells us that the zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this, we will find these hosts of angels at the nativity: There we find the angel of the Lord, making the actual birth announcement of this child, saying: “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.” 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 among those with whom he is pleased!””
That is a hope worth clinging to!