The Bad News of Christmas: Peace On Earth

My family grew up celebrating the day before Christmas Eve as “Christmas Adam.”  It was just an extra day tacked on to our festivities in order to help us five children count down the days to Christmas.  We used to say it was because Adam came before Eve in the Bible, so the day before Christmas Eve was obviously Christmas Adam.  As a 23-year-old I wished my friend group a Merry Christmas Adam and quickly discovered how much Christmas Adam was “not a real thing.” 

This year though, I was thinking I wished it was a real thing.  I’ve been enjoying all the Christmas festivities and Andrea traditions like sugar cookies, Christmas music car karaoke, making a new craft décor, picking out an ornament that reflects the last year for me, watching the token Hallmark movie and making homemade bread, cider and eggnog. I’ve attended the parties and seen the lights at night.  I intentionally drown in nostalgia this time of the year.  I did one thing more intentionally this year than I’ve done in the other years. 

I did an advent devotional in the mornings.  One that didn’t just talk about the basics and logistics of the birth story in the Bible but talked about the story as a whole.

As I was thinking through some of these topics this month, I kept coming back to the thought and topic of “the bad news of Christmas.”

The bad news of Christmas goes clear back to that garden at the beginning, where the world was created and was good and perfect.  It also goes back to the very story of Adam and Eve, where choices were made and humanity broke as mankind was separated from God.

See, the bad news of Christmas is that we ever needed it to begin with.  We celebrate the birth of a baby, and sometimes edit out the messiness and the need for the birth to begin with.  To grasp the beauty of the story and the celebration of the story, we have to realize the darkness of it first.

The darkness of a couple in a perfect garden who would have known what it was like to literally live in paradise with God.  They would’ve known the heartbreak of sin as it changed their relationship with each other, with God and with mankind forever.  They experienced the devastation of going from the garden to our broken world.  We have to realize the darkness of sin in ourselves and that we can’t do anything to change that on our own.

There are times that we all discuss peace in general or peace on earth as a desire.  We would like to have no war, no family fights, no broken homes.  We would like to have everyone agree or at least disagree civilly.  We would like true peace.  The bad news is, this will never actually be a real thing.  We will always mess it up.  We will always sin because ever since the garden it has been in our nature, deeply rooted.  If we were the ones in the garden then we’d be the ones making the wrong choice as well.   There was also a promise made in the garden though.  In the very midst of the curse God promised a savior would come.

In the Bible, the Old Testament continues to point towards a Savior coming who will set up a kingdom and save them.  But when He did come, it wasn’t what they expected.  It wasn’t to give them the physical comfort of peace on earth or establish a lavish kingdom to rule them all.  It was to save us from the brokenness and the sin.  It was to redeem us and restore us to a relationship with God as we could never do it ourselves. 

When we recognize the complete story of how lost we are as sinful humans; when we recognize the depths of the darkness in ourselves, then we grasp the bad news.  That we are uncapable of saving ourselves.  Which leads us to the good part.

I love the Christmas pageants and Sunday school children reciting the Christmas story.  My heart is filled with joy every time a little girl dressed as a sheep steals the baby doll from the manger or all three wise men don’t make it down the aisle as one runs off to the safety of mom and dad.  It makes my heart sing.

It should make all of our hearts sing as it made angels sing in praise to God. It’s a beautiful story.  

The story tells of how Jesus has come and is the only true Peace on Earth.  Not that he has come to reform government and end suffering, but has come to redeem us and restore us to God and be our peace in the midst of this broken world.  As our hearts grasp the entire story, we can see the beauty of God’s grace as our brokenness is covered completely and a relationship restored by His finished work.

I pray that this year we could see the bad news of Christmas, that leads us to the beautiful news of Christ being born.  A birth worthy of angel choirs, cosmic changes in the stars, and traveling kings; yet taking place in the humblest of places.  Peace on Earth.