What can the Prince of Peace offer a mostly peaceful nation?

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 cel