[From Dww-work]… SILENT NIGHT?

Take a look at this quote, taken from John Eldredge’s book, Wild at Heart. It’s interesting. It may change your perception of “Away in a Manger.”

*********************

Most of you probably have a Nativity scene that you take out over the holidays and place on a mantel or coffee table. Most of these scenes share a regular cast of characters: shepherds, wise men, maybe a few barnyard animals, Joseph, Mary, and of course, the baby Jesus. Yes, ours has an angel or two and I imagine yours does as well. But that’s about as far as the supernatural gets.

What is the overall mood of the scene? Don’t they all have a sort of warm, pastoral atmosphere to them, a quiet, intimate feel like the one you get when you sing “Silent Night” or “Away in a Manger”? And while that’s all very true, it is also very deceiving because it is not a full picture of what’s really going on. For that, you have to turn to Revelation 12:1-5, 7-9

A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment it was born. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne.

And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down-that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.

As Philip Yancey says, I have never seen this version of the story on a Christmas card. Yet it is the truer story, the rest of the picture of what was going on that fateful night. Yancey calls the birth of Christ the Great Invasion, “a daring raid by the ruler of the forces of good into the universe’s seat of evil.” Spiritually speaking, this is no silent night. It is D-Day. “It is almost beyond my comprehension too, and yet I accept that this notion is the key to understanding Christmas and is, in fact, the touchstone of my faith. As a Christian I believe that we live in parallel worlds. One world consists of hills and lakes and barns and politicians and shepherds watching their flocks by night. The other consists of angels and sinister forces” and the whole spiritual realm. The child is born, the woman escapes and the story continues like this (Revelation 12:17):

Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to make war against the rest of her offspring-those who obey God’s commandments and hold to the testimony of Jesus.

Behind the world and the flesh is an even more deadly enemy…one we rarely speak of and are even much less ready to resist. Yet this is where we live now – on the front lines of a fierce spiritual war that is to blame for most of the casualties you see around you and most of the assault against you. It’s time we prepared ourselves for it!

*********************

This has been a quote from pages 153-155, Wild at Heart. from the Dickersons

CHRISTMAS; ELDREDGE, JOHN; SPIRITUAL WARFARE; PEACE; WAR