Good News of Great Joy
Rev. Res Spears
Advent 2024 • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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I want you to imagine what the night of September 27 must have been like in Western North Carolina.
Hurricane Helene had come ashore in the Big Bend portion of Florida as a Category 4 storm, the strongest storm to strike that region in history.
By the following day, Helene had been downgraded to a tropical storm, but it stalled over eastern Tennessee and western NC.
Multiple weather stations in NC measured 30 inches or more of rain, along with winds gusting up to 75 miles an hour. Tornadoes were reported in eight different places.
As trees fell by the thousands, electric lines were snapped, cutting off power, communications, and transportation for huge areas. Mudslides swept houses from mountainsides, giving their occupants no warning of the destruction to come.
I want you to imagine how terrifying it must have been. The rain was coming down literally by the ton.
Gusting winds were blowing away anything that wasn’t carefully secured and threatening to tear the roofs off of houses. Every crashing tree must have made folks wonder if the next one would come through the house.
By the time people realized they were in danger, it was often too late to do anything about it.
Opening their doors to try to leave, many were confronted with the terrifying sight of engorged rivers and streams rushing past their doorsteps and continuing to rise.
Some who tried to leave anyway were lost when their cars were swamped and swept away by the raging currents. Others who stayed were swept away in their very houses.
Whatever peace these poor folks had in their lives was absolutely shattered in those terrible hours.
Disasters such as Hurricane Helene and the floods that she spawned remind us that things here on earth are not as they were intended to be. We have strayed far from the peace, the shalom, of the Garden of Eden.
“In the Old Testament, “peace” carries the fundamental meaning of welfare, prosperity, or wholeness as well as the absence of hostility.” [Joshua M. Greever, “Peace,” ed. John D. Barry et al., The Lexham Bible Dictionary (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016).]
And these are the conditions we see described in the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis, although we don’t see the Hebrew word, shalom, in that account.
God brought order out of chaos, light out of darkness, life from lifelessness. There was an abundance of every good thing for Adam and Eve to enjoy. There was no conflict between Adam and Eve. And they were in continual, perfect fellowship with God.
When the Bible talks about shalom, about peace, this is the example we’re intended to remember.
There were no hurricanes, no flash floods, no tornadoes. There was no fear. There was no death. All those things are evidence of the brokenness of the sin-cursed world that resulted from Adam and Eve’s disobedience in the garden.
The storm they stirred with that first sin is the most deadly of any storm in history, and it continues to rage, even today.
But the prophet Isaiah called the Savior whose advent we’re celebrating this month the Prince of Peace.
And when the angels appeared in the sky near Bethlehem on the night Jesus was born, “peace” was a central element of the message they brought to the shepherds there.
Dr. Luke records this encounter in a familiar passage from the second chapter of his Gospel account.
8 In the same region there were some shepherds staying out in the fields and keeping watch over their flock by night.
9 And an angel of the Lord suddenly stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them; and they were terribly frightened.
10 But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all the people;
11 for today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.
12 “This will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”
13 And suddenly there appeared 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 men with whom He is pleased.”
“I bring you good news of great joy,” the angel says. The Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One, the Savior God sent to reconcile fallen mankind to Himself, had been born in Bethlehem.
Later in this chapter, we learn that his name would be Jesus. In Hebrew, it was Yeshua, a form of the name Joshua, which means “salvation is from the Lord.”
We could not save ourselves from the punishment that each one of us deserves for our rebellion against the God of the universe. So, He came Himself, in the Person of His unique and eternal Son.
He came to offer forgiveness and hope. He came to conquer sin and death. He came to bring peace with God for we who were rebels against His kingdom.
As the prophet put it in Isaiah, chapter 53:
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.
There are so many ways the shalom of the Garden of Eden was shattered by Adam and Eve’s first act of disobedience there. And Scripture tells us that one day, Jesus will restore the conditions of shalom completely.
But Isaiah, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, seems to have understood that the greatest need for mankind is peace with GOD.
And that makes a lot of sense, when you think about it. The core of the problem Adam and Eve had in the Garden of Eden was that they stopped trusting God. They didn’t have a proper relationship with Him.
Lots of other things were broken when they sinned. Their own relationship with each other had been soiled by shame, distrust and criticism.
Selfless love was traded for self-love. Even mankind’s relationship with his environment suffered, as the ground itself was cursed.
But all these problems stem from that first problem: their failure to trust that God is good and the resulting choice they made to trust Satan, instead.
The most important relationship — the relationship for which they’d been created — was broken.
And we who are descended from those first parents prove that we’ve inherited their sinful character every time we sin against God, whether in large ways or small ones.
Our sins — our disobedience — make us rebels against His kingdom, enemies of God, as Paul puts it in the Book of Romans.
But Jesus, the Prince of Peace, came to establish peace between God and man. That’s what the angels were announcing on that hill outside of Bethlehem.
“Glory to God in the highest,” they said, because HE would bring peace where we brought only war. He would bring healing for we who’ve been injured by our own sins and the sins of others. HE would save us from our sins.
But salvation for us would not come cheap. As Isaiah says, Jesus would be pierced for our transgressions, foreshadowing the soldier’s spear that pierced the lifeless, crucified body of Jesus.
He would be crushed for our iniquities, Isaiah says, hinting at the beatings Jesus suffered on the night before He was crucified.
And He would be punished for our peace.
God is gracious and merciful, and He loves us, and He wants to have a relationship with each one of us. But God is also righteous and holy and just, and He cannot allow sin to go unpunished.
And if that were the end of the story, we’d all be without hope, because every one of us would have to bear the punishment for our own sins.
Every one of us would be bound for hell and eternal separation from the God who made us to be in fellowship with Him.
But from before the beginning of time — before Adam and Eve had been created, much less sinned — our triune God had a plan to redeem us from our sins through the shed blood of His sinless Son, Jesus.
He would execute justice through the most un-just execution ever. He would bring us peace by allowing Jesus to experience the most violent death that mankind could engineer.
His peace treaty with humanity would be signed in the blood His own Son shed at the cross.
For all who turn to Jesus in faith, the battle is over. Jesus has won it for you, and now His Father welcomes you not as vanquished enemies, not as servants or slaves, but as adopted sons and daughters, brothers and sisters of the Prince of Peace.
As we served the crowd in North Carolina on Thanksgiving Day, I talked with a few of the people who’d come for plates of food and various other supplies we were distributing.
And one of the things that struck me about so many of them was just how little peace they have in their lives.
I’m not just talking about the uncertainty that you’d expect following such a natural disaster. Many of the people we met have been struggling for a lot more than just the past couple of months.
They were all searching for peace. But they weren’t finding it in drugs or booze or any of the other idols people turn to when they don’t want to turn to Jesus.
And I was able to pray with some of those folks. I prayed that God would use even the terrible circumstances of the past couple of months to draw them to Jesus.
Because He is the Prince of Peace, and He bought our peace with His very life.
And that’s good news of great joy, indeed. I hope you’ll share it with someone this week. Believe me: Everybody wants peace. Everybody NEEDS peace.
