The Glory War

Life on this side of eternity is one constant glory war. 

“I am the Lord; that is my name; my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to carved idols.” – Isaiah 42:8

“Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory, for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness!” – Psalm 115:1 

You and I were hardwired by God for glory. We are attracted to glorious things. That’s why we love a great meal, an overtime championship game, a beautiful dress, a dramatic movie, or a multihued sunset. God has packed his world full of glorious things and given us the ability to take in those glories. But every glorious thing God has created points to his glorious glory. We were never intended to live for our own glory or some created glory. Our glory orientation should drive us to the Lord, so that his glory would finally satisfy the glory hunger in our hearts. 

Sin causes us to search for glory satisfaction outside of our Creator, but God will not share his glory with another. God is jealous for his glory to be the one glory that captures our hearts, and this should shape the way that we live. His holy jealousy for his glory is clearly communicated in a single statement repeated in Ezekiel 25–26: “Then you [or they] will know that I am the Lord” (Ezek. 25:7, 11, 17; 26:6). God is pronouncing judgment on the nations that surround Israel. He exercises his holy justice so that these nations will know that he is the Lord. God exercises his power for his own glory. 

Does this bother you? It is wrong to live for your own glory because, as a creature, you belong to the one who made you. You exist by his will and for his purpose. But God is not like you. He reigns in glorious majesty over everything and everyone he has created. His zeal for his own glory is the hope of the universe. It is in living for his glory that we are rescued from our bondage to our own glory, a glory that will never satisfy our hearts. 

Only by the power of God’s delivering grace are we liberated from our bondage to the glories of creation to find our hope, life, and satisfaction in living for the glory of our Maker. In 2 Corinthians 5:15, the apostle Paul reminds us that we find that grace in the person and work of Jesus. He came so that we would live no longer for ourselves “but for him who for [our] sake died and was raised.” 

Prayer:

Lord, help me to live for your glory. Rescue me from the bondage of my own glory, which will not satisfy. I thank you for being my hope, my life, and my satisfaction. I praise the name of Jesus, the one who died and was raised for my sake. May I live for his eternal glory alone, even as I pray in his name, Amen. 

(from Paul Tripp’s Everyday Gospel: Christmas Devotional)

Pearl Harbor: A Day That Lives in Infamy

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese Imperial Navy bombed the US Naval base at Pearl Harbor. It was one of the most successful—and failed—surprise attacks in military history. 

The attack shocked America and the world. President Franklin Roosevelt described it as “a date which will live in infamy.” 

An armada of six fleet carriers, equipped with some 350 combat aircraft, crossed 4,000 miles of rough winter seas to reach its destination. Neither American radar operators on the island nor intelligence officers who had broken many of the Japanese naval codes had an inkling of the approach. Flying out of the bright early morning sun, two waves of bombers sank four battleships of the US 7th fleet, damaged four others, and killed over 2,300 American sailors and soldiers. The Japanese suffered minimal losses of just 29 aircraft. 

The attack was brilliant. But it did not achieve its goal—for two reasons: 

One: By a twist of fate, the three American aircraft carriers based at Pearl—the ships the Japanese most wanted to destroy—Enterprise, Lexington, and Saratoga—were all out to sea on the 7th—and safe. 

Two: The Japanese didn’t finish the job. 

To put the base out of commission required not two, but three attack waves. This final wave would have destroyed a full six months’ worth of stored naval and aviation fuel, dockyards, and maintenance shops, and truly set the Americans reeling. Yet, at the last moment, Admiral Chūichi Nagumo concluded that the risks were too great—his planes and ships too vulnerable to a counterattack. He made his way back to Japan, leaving the Americans bloodied, but not fatally so. 

Why did the Japanese attack at all? What did they hope to accomplish? 

The answer is that Japan intended to dominate and control all of Asia: its people and its resources. To do that, it believed it had to neutralize America. 

From the hindsight of history, this appears suicidal. But at the time, it almost made sense. 

To begin with, in 1941 the United States was, militarily speaking, in a sorry state. The ships in its Pacific fleet were few and many were outdated. The Japanese fleet, in contrast, was newer, bigger, and stronger. 

Second, America had no appetite for overseas conflict. 

Like the rest of the world, the Japanese had watched most of Europe fall to the Nazis while America did little to stop it. If the US wasn’t going to fight in Europe where it had many alliances, why would it fight in Asia where it had few? How much more so if Japan were to destroy most of the Pacific fleet! Surely, the Japanese reasoned, America would sue for peace. 

Other current events also went into their thinking. 

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, it assumed—again, quite reasonably—that Hitler’s forces in Russia would quickly capture Moscow and take the Soviets out of the war. This would remove any threat the Russians might pose to Japan’s conquest of Manchuria and China. 

A new fascist world order appeared to be on the horizon. Germany would rule Europe; Japan, Asia. 

But just as Hitler underestimated Soviet strengths and overestimated his own, the Japanese underestimated American strengths and overestimated their own. 

Instead of cowing America, the Pearl Harbor attack enraged it. The nation woke up with a fearsome start. 

Within six months General Jimmy Doolittle led a surprise bombing raid on Tokyo, an astounding feat no one at the time, including the Japanese, considered possible. American carriers simply did not have enough runway to launch a long-range bomber. But somehow Doolittle managed it. The raid did little actual damage, but it boosted American morale and sent a stern message to Japan: America would not be intimidated. 

By August 1942, a mere nine months after Pearl Harbor, American forces shifted to offense, landing Marines on the island of Guadalcanal. Meanwhile, at home, the nation was gearing up for the greatest industrial renaissance in the history of civilization. 

In little more than 3 years the United States would build more warships and support vessels than all the navies in the world combined. 

America was entirely unprepared for the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Thanks to the strong, uncompromising leadership of President Roosevelt, it brought its economic and moral might to bear and turned the war around with astonishing speed. 

In the hindsight of history, it seems like the allied victory was inevitable. Maybe it was. But victory came at a terrible price. Over 110,000 American servicemen died and over 250,000 were wounded to win the war in the Pacific—and another 21,000 spent time in horrific Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. 

Preparing for war is expensive, but not nearly as expensive—in blood and treasure—as fighting a war. That’s one of the many lessons to be learned from what happened on the fateful day of December 7, 1941. 

I’m Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, for Prager University.

Where Did Jesus Get His “Y” Chromosome?

“Despite our efforts to keep Him out, God intrudes. The life of Jesus is bracketed by two impossibilities: a virgin’s womb and an empty tomb. Jesus entered our world through a door marked ‘No Entrance’ and left through a door marked ‘No Exit." - Peter Larson

A Virgin’s Womb

This first “impossibility” was prophesied seven centuries before Jesus’ birth by the prophet Isaiah. He wrote, “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.“ (Isaiah 7:14)

Its fulfilment was described in the Gospel of Matthew with these words, “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet” (Matthew 1:22) and then Matthew quotes the verse from Isaiah adding that the word “Immanuel” means “God with us”.

However, the term “virgin birth” seems to be a contradiction and scientific impossibility. Virgins, by definition, don’t give birth. The mother of Jesus (Mary) understood this when she was first told by an angel that she would conceive and have a a baby.

Her first reaction was to ask, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” (Luke 1:34)

To this, the angel replied, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.” (Luke 1:35)

This was an intellectual obstacle for Christian apologist and philosopher William Craig Lane when he was young. He said, “I thought it was absurd. For the virgin birth to be true, a Y chromosome had to be created out of nothing in Mary’s ovum because Mary didn’t have the genetic material to produce a male child.” Craig still became a Christian even though he couldn’t resolve this dilemma. Later he would write, “If I really do believe in a God who created the universe, then for Him to create a Y chromosome would be child’s play.”

ADDENDUM: Where did Jesus’ Y chromosome come from? Mary only had X chromosomes. The angel, however, was a step ahead of her and already knew the answer to this: “And the angel answered and said The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born^[b] will be called holy—the Son of God.”(Luke 1:35) So at some point shortly thereafter, God created the Y chromosome and the 22 others that would have come from a human father and inserted them into Mary’s egg, and the Son of God was begotten.

An Empty Tomb

The second “impossibility” mentioned above was the empty tomb discovered by Jesus’ followers early in the morning on what we now call Easter Sunday. Before the invention of CPR techniques, dead people (by definition) didn’t come back to life again. However, all four Gospels affirm that Jesus was resurrected from the dead after spending parts of three days in a tomb.

The apostle Paul stated that the Christian faith stood on the truth of the resurrection. Otherwise, he admitted it would be useless, futile, vain and essentially a hoax (see 1 Corinthians 15:12-19). Some atheists have taken up this tantalizing challenge to disprove Christianity. When they do serious research on the evidence for the resurrection and the alternative explanations, they become believers themselves (check out the books of Lee Strobel, Josh McDowell, Frank Morison and James Warner Wallace).

The Bottom Line

So, what do we do with these two “impossibilities”? One response is to conclude that these events simply did not happen. After all, normal people are not born from virgins and normal people do not rise from the dead.

A second response, however, is to conclude that these unusual and normally “impossible” events did happen because the Person they happened to was not a normal person but rather Someone very special, unique and (in fact) supernatural. Jesus once said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:26)

When you think of it, if Jesus truly was the Son of God (divinity in human form), wouldn’t you expect His arrival and departure to be rather special too?

by Rob Weatherby is a retired pastor and columnist for Sudbury Times (Toronto, Ontario)

Why was the God of Heaven in a Feeding Trough?

Birth announcements are big business. There are so many ways to announce the entrance into the world of your little one—Pinterest, Shutterfly, WhatsApp, Tiny-Prints.com. You can take hundreds of pictures, magnify and crop them, and send them round the world. It becomes a competition. “Here’s our new arrival in her crib. Here she is in her first nappy. Here she is having her first bath. Here are her footprints.”

Well, if you happen to have a baby next year, here’s how to outdo everyone else. Forget emails. Forget a photograph on Facebook or an entry in the New York Times. Here’s how to win the announcement competition: have an angel announce the birth. Have an angel coming down the street in the middle of the night, waking your neighbors to tell them what’s just happened, and then follow that up with a whole choir of angels providing celebratory backing vocals.

That’s how to win. And (although sadly the angels aren’t taking bookings right now) that is how the arrival of Mary’s baby was announced on the night he was born:

8 There were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. 9 An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10 But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. 11 Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. 12 This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

13 Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,

14 “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.” (Luke 2 v 8-14)

God’s Name

The angel told these shepherds who it was who had been growing in Mary’s womb, and who was now “wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.” He described the baby's job—“Savior”: Redeemer. He announced the baby's title—“Messiah”: God’s King promised for centuries to his people, promises recorded for us in the Old Testament. And he revealed the baby's identity—“the Lord.”

And that word, “Lord,” is making a staggering claim, because it is the word that was used by Greek-speaking Jews to translate the Hebrew word “Yahweh”—the personal name of God, by which he had introduced himself to his people for centuries. “God” is not God’s name, any more than “Pastor” is mine. My name is Alistair, and my friends call me that. God’s name is Yahweh, and it’s what he told his friends, his people, to call him. In other words, here’s the deal: good news, great joy for all the people, has come because a Redeemer, the ultimate Ruler, has been born. And he is God Almighty.

Every so often at Christmas, we hear about a wealthy businessman who’s gone and served in a soup kitchen, or about a very successful athlete who spends some time on Christmas Eve in the children’s hospital. And everyone says, “That’s great—what an amazing and kind and humble thing for him to do.” And it is. But now see what this angel is saying: The God who made you, who gave you your DNA, who woke you up this morning, who has sustained your life—that God, in the person of Jesus, stepped down into time, making himself accessible.

On the first Christmas night—and this is the heart of the Christmas story, and the heart of the Christian faith—God took on flesh. The voice that made the cosmos could be heard crying in the cradle. The hands that placed each star in its place grabbed hold of Mary’s fingers. Her son was fully human, and fully God. In this man, divinity met humanity.

So, unlike every other conception and birth, this was not the beginning. God the Son had always existed, equal with and eternal with the Father and the Spirit—one God in three persons, what often is called the Trinity. God the Son—the “Word”—predates his birth; he is older than his conception, or what is often called his incarnation:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. (John 1 v 1-2)

I remember my daughter when she was young once asking me, “Where was I before I was born?” And the answer is, “You did not exist before you were conceived and born.” (I avoided mention of the conception part when I answered my daughter.) But that’s not what happened with Jesus. He did exist before he was conceived and born. What happened that night was the birth of God the Son as a human. But it was not the beginning of the person God the Son. This is unparalleled. It is unique. It is mysterious. And Luke is claiming that it is historical.

A Virgin Birth—Really?

Perhaps this is where you struggle with the Christian faith. You are prepared to accept Jesus as a great teacher, a religious leader, or a brilliant philosopher. You are prepared to accept that he spoke for God, perhaps. But you struggle to accept that he is God—that as Mary and Joseph peered into the manger, they were looking at the eternal Son of God. You struggle with the idea of a virgin birth and a miraculous incarnation.

Well, if your starting point is that there is no God, then the incarnation question is irrelevant. If there is no God, he could not have been born as a baby in Bethlehem. But if your starting point is that there is (or even that there might be) a God who created the entire universe, then surely he is capable of entering his universe. Why would we be surprised that he can do what he wants to do? After all, in the last century or so humanity has worked out how to bring about conception without sexual intercourse. A hundred years ago, that idea would have seemed impossible and not worthy of being believed. Now it seems plausible and obvious. If doctors can do it in their way, do we really want to say that God cannot do it in his? God the Son taking flesh is a mystery that we will never understand. But not being able to understand how God became one of us is not proof that he did not become one of us.

Of course God’s ways are mysterious and at times inexplicable to us! He would not be much of a God if our limited minds could reason out everything about him.

No, this is mystery, because it is divinity; it is God—but it is also history. Heaven is breaking into earth. The shepherds would find the Creator of the universe wrapped in strips of cloth. Here is the answer to the human predicament, the solution to our slavery to sin and our separation from God. God bridged the gap by coming from heaven to earth. This is how much the mighty God cares about us. Love was when God spanned the gulf. Love was when God became a man. Love was when God surprised those he had created by being born as one of them—as a baby.

The God of Surprises

But that is not the only surprise. The place where God’s Son was born is also a surprise, and the people to whom God sent the angels is a third surprise. And they show us something of what God is like.

First, look where the God-child is. “You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.” It was not unusual to have a baby in swaddling cloths. It was unusual to lay a baby in a food trough.

In human terms, the reason why Mary had her child in a shack (or very possibly a cave) used for sheltering animals was straightforward. In distant Rome the emperor, Caesar Augustus, had ordered a census be taken, obliging Mary and Joseph to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem, and there was no room for them to stay anywhere else. Augustus meant “worthy of adoration.” According to an inscription on a stone carved in around 9 BC and found in a marketplace in what is now Turkey, Augustus’ birth “gave the whole world a new aspect.” He was regarded as a “Savior.” He encouraged the worship of his adoptive father, Julius Caesar, as a god, and allowed himself to be styled as “the son of God.” So great was his power and his impact that the inscription continued that “from his birth a new reckoning of time must begin.”

And so, the shepherds must surely have been struck by how vastly different this child in a manger was from the power and majesty of the Roman Emperor, from this Caesar Augustus figure – from the person who established the glory of his name and the might of his empire at the head of his armies, and who could move his subject peoples around at the stoke of a pen. And yet here in this food through lay the one who really is worthy of adoration, whose birth changes everything, who came as Savior and really is the Son of God – and whose birth-date is the way we still reckon our time 2,000 years later.

He was not born to a queen, in a palace. He was born to a girl, in a cave, and his cradle was a food trough. The Son of God came to be just like us, among us, rather than to lord over us. If you have known poverty, so has he. If you have known what it feels like to be an outsider, so has he. His was not a gilded, protected existence. He knows what life is like. As Jesus himself put it when he had grown up, he “did not come to us to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

The second surprise is where the announcement was made. God did not make his announcement to Augustus. It came to a group of poor shepherds. We might expect that God would be most interested in those who had status, those who were powerful, those who were mighty. In actual fact, throughout Luke’s Gospel, we discover again and again he goes for the least and last and the left out. He works in a way that we might not anticipate him working. And we have to allow him to surprise us: to be different than a god we would make up, and to work differently than how we would if we were God. This is the real God, and you and I are not him. People find it perfectly easy to tolerate Jesus just to the point where he contravenes their expectations – and then they to have a very different response.

Peace Offer

So that’s the message of the angel – but no sooner have the shepherds picked themselves up off the ground that the reinforcements appear. The Redeemer has come and the angels of heaven are there to announce it for him.

And the choir declares what this baby will achieve: “on earth peace.” Augustus has established what was known as the “Pax Romana” – an empire at peace and guaranteeing safety (unless you happened to be a slave or a rebel). But the peace of Rome was about to be dwarfed by the peace of God. Epictetus, a first-century philosopher, observed rightly that:

“While the emperor may give peace from war on land and sea, he is unable to give peace from passion, grief, and envy; he cannot give peace of heart, for which man yearns for more than even outward peace.”

Caesar Augustus could not transform any of his subjects’ hearts or change any of their eternal futures.

But, the angels say, this baby could. Here is an announcement of a peace that goes deep within and lasts beyond the grave – the peace “for which man yearns.” The peace of God that invades a life based on the discovery of peace with God.

Today, our newspaper are filled with all kinds of attempts at peace. Peace between husbands and wives, between family members, between nations, and so on. But Epictetus is still right – peace of heart proves elusive. No matter how well we do at trying to establish peace with each other, until we discover what it is to have peace with God, we’re not going to discover the peace of God.

And, since we are separated from God – since we have declared independence and rebelled against our rightful Ruler – this is a peace that can only be brought about by the intervention of God himself. We may try to find peace without God in our own way – peace through owning stuff; peace at the bottom of a bottle. We may try to find peace with God in our own strength – peace through playing religious rules or through being “good people,” But the truth is that only God can give us true peace with himself. The angels tell us where his offer of peace was made. This is a peace that isn’t found in something. It’s a peace that is found in someone. And it is a peace that pursues us, seeks us, comes knocking on the door of our lives.

But it’s a peace that so many miss out on because they fail to make room for the one who brings it. Remember why Jesus was lying in a manger in the first place? Why was the God of heaven in a feeding trough? Because there was no room anywhere. No one had made room for him. He made the entire universe. He came into his universe. And there wasn’t a place for him.

Let’s be honest; in the lives of many of us, it’s no different. We have no room for him either – not if it makes life in any way uncomfortable for us, not if his presence brings any inconvenience to us, not when his actions and words surprise us. But our response does not change the truth. God has visited his world. He has come as one of us, to bring peace to us by redeeming us from our sins. Will you say to him, “No room?”

 

By Alistair Begg, Christmas Playlist: Four Songs that Bring You to the Heart of Christmas