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Signs of Christmas are now all around us.  Christmas lights are going up on homes, freshly cut Christmas trees are on sale, and of course the stores with their endless displays of trinkets and toys.  While some financial prophets of doom are predicting downturns, recessions and an affordability crisis, others are saying that the average person will spend more on Christmas than previous years.

Such thinking hopefully causes us to reflect on what was spent on that first Christmas. With the exception of the Magi’s gifts, which really came some time after the first Christmas, that first Christmas really didn’t cost anything extra. Mary and Joseph’s travel expenses would have been incurred anyway due to the legal requirement to return to Jsoeph’s hometown to register for the census. The shepherds apparently were relatively close by and unless they had to hire some one to watch the sheep while they went to worship, I can’t think of anything in the way of costs for them.

Christmas and Easter are the two largest observances on the Christian calendar. Comparing the costs of the first Christmas and the first Easter is interesting. For Christmas negligible costs, for Easter costs that our human minds can’t possibly comprehend. In Peter’s first letter chapter one verses eighteen and nineteen he tells us how our salvation or redemption was bought but there is no attempt to quantify ‘how much’, that is how much punishment did our Lord bear on our behalf to satisfy God’s wrath against our sin.  For you know that God paid a ransom to save you from the empty life you inherited from your ancestors. And it was not paid with mere gold or silver, which lose their value. It was the precious blood of Christ, the sinless, spotless Lamb of God

I was recently reading Numbers chapter thirty-one where God orders Moses to avenge the people of Israel on the Midianites. They had been instrumental in seducing the children of Israel to worship other Gods, a violation of the first commandment calling for capital punishment.  Their punishment was annihilation.  It would be hard to argue that the sin we observe all around us these days is any less rebellious toward God’s commands. If that is so, consider how much punishment our Lord would have had to take on the cross to fully pay our sin penalty. Reflecting on the ‘how much’ of Calvary should surely motivate us to be even more thankful.

                                                                                    Pastor Dave