WWUTT 2271 The Angels Appear to Shepherds (Luke 2:8-9)

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So there were some shepherds, and they're just out there in their field, keeping watch over their flock by night, when all of a sudden, an angel appears to them, and the glory of the

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Lord shone around them. What would that have been like when we understand the text? Many of the

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Bible stories and verses we think we know, we don't. When we understand the text is committed to teaching sound doctrine and rebuking those who contradict it.

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Visit our website at www .utt .com. Here once again is Pastor Gabe.

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Thank you, Becky. In our study of the Gospel of Luke, we are continuing through the Christmas narrative in Luke chapter 2, and we're on to the part where an angel appears to shepherds, keeping watch over their flock by night.

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I'm going to begin reading here in verse 8 and go through verse 20, hear the word of the Lord. And in the same region, there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

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And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear.

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And the angel said to them, Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.

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For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is

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Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you. You will find the baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.

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And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,

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Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased.

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When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the

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Lord has made known to us. And they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph and the baby lying in a manger.

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And when they saw it, they made known the saying that had been told them concerning this child. And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them.

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But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising

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God for all they had heard and seen as it had been told them.

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What an astonishing account, and I cannot even imagine what this would have been like.

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I think we've heard the Christmas narrative so many times that we tend to lose the wonder of it, right?

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I mean, how many times have you just really sat and pondered what it was that the shepherds may have experienced on that night?

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What it would have been like with an angel appearing to them the way that he did. It's not just that an angel just shows up like he did with Zacharias back in chapter one or Zachariah rather.

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I think there are some translations that translate his name Zacharias, but at least in our translation here, it's just Zachariah.

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Anyway, if you'll recall, Zachariah was in the temple and he was burning incense. And the angel

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Gabriel appears there to talk to him, and he just shows up next to the table of incense or the altar where Zachariah is burning incense.

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At first, he's in there by himself. It's the hour of incense. It's when he's on duty to go in and light the incense.

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He's in the holy place by himself, and suddenly there's someone else in there with him. There's an angel, and Zachariah didn't know what was going on.

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But of course, it's like, I was in here by myself, and now there's another man in this place with me. But it doesn't say that the whole place that Zachariah was standing was filled with the glory of God.

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Gabriel, it just seems according to what Luke says to us here, just appears there. Here with this angel appearing to shepherds, the glory of God surrounds him.

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What would that have been like? So let's come back up to the start here as we read through this narrative and really try to imagine, try to capture in our minds, if we can, what this night might have been like and seeing some of the particular details as well.

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Don't miss some of these details. With regards to what the angel says to the shepherds, and then therefore what the shepherds relayed to the people when they came and found the baby.

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So back up to verse eight, and in the same region, there were shepherds out in the field keeping watch over their flock by night.

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Now, there are some who will say that Jesus could not have possibly been born on December 25th, and that may be perhaps the most common myth of the

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Christmas season, that Jesus was born on December 25th. Frankly, we don't know when he was born.

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It could have been December 25th. It could have been another time of the year. Those that will argue that it could not have been

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December 25th will say, because that's winter and the shepherds would not have been out in the field with their flocks in wintertime.

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That's crazy. It would have been cold out there. So therefore, this whole thing here,

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Luke 2, 8 disproves that Jesus was born on December 25th.

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Well, the whole notion of Jesus being born on December 25th actually came from the early church fathers.

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So it's not something—you know, the common explanation is that they were co -opting some sort of pagan feast day.

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The Catholic Church did this, I guess, you know, a thousand plus years ago or whatever. But the Roman Catholics co -opted that day.

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They still wanted people to come and go to worship on that day.

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You can still have your feasts and festivals, but now you're worshiping Christ. So we're going to call it Christ Mass.

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And that's where the word Christmas comes from. But they steal a pagan holiday and instead make it a

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Christmas holiday. But that isn't necessarily true. There really was not any pagan holiday that was particular to December 25th.

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And the early church fathers like Hippolytus of Rome was one who proposed December 25th as being the possible day that Jesus was born.

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Hippolytus in his commentary on Daniel, book 4, chapter 23, verse 3, he said, For the first advent of our

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Lord in the flesh, when he was born in Bethlehem, was December 25th, eight days before the calends of January, Wednesday, the fourth day, while Augustus was in his 42nd year, but from Adam 5 ,500 years.

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This is all according to Hippolytus. He suffered in the 33rd year, March 25th, eight days before the calends of March, Friday, the day of preparation, the 18th day of Tiberius Caesar, while Rufus and Rebellion were consuls.

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So there you go. That's the note that Hippolytus wrote in his commentary on the book of Daniel. So he was trying to calculate when it would have been that Jesus would have been born.

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And he's trying to do this from the scripture, based on dates that Daniel gave in his prophecies. Hippolytus was alive from 170 to 235

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AD. So this predates any pagan holiday that would have been on that particular day.

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It even predates when Aurelian got his idea to want to make

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December the 25th the day of the birth of the sun. It was the day that he chose to honor the sun god

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Sol Invictus. And so December the 25th became his birth date. But December the 21st was considered the day that the sun died.

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So then you count one, two, three days, the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th. And then

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Aurelian has his sun god rise from the dead on the 25th. Where would he get that idea from?

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A god rising from the dead after three days? Hmm. Kind of makes you wonder, doesn't it?

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But all that to say that a proposed date for Jesus being born on December 25th predates any of that.

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It's actually very, very early in church history. So it's not true to say that some sort of pagan day was co -opted and instead we're going to put

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Jesus' birthday there. So now we're worshiping Jesus. Although there's nothing wrong with that.

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There's really nothing wrong with that. I know that there are some folks that are out there, you know, the

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Hebrew Roots guys. That's one group of people. And there's some pretty uppity reformers and some independent fundamentalist

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Baptists and stuff too. They will say, well, no, you cannot worship Jesus on that day because it's a pagan holiday.

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And you can't make straight what God has made crooked. So how can a man purify a day that was turned into something evil like that?

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Well, remember, our days of the week are named after pagan gods. Thursday, that's

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Thor's day. Saturday, that's Saturn's day. Sunday, that was the day that the sun god was worshipped.

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Monday, that's the day the moon goddess was worshipped. So we have our days of the week named after pagan gods and goddesses.

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Are those days unholy? Is it impossible for us, therefore, to worship God on either Saturday or Sunday since they're named after the pagan god

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Saturn or they're named after the day of sun worship? Can we not worship God on those days?

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So the same with December the 25th. Even if it's true, I don't believe that it is.

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I don't think that there's the historical evidence for it. But even if it is true that a pagan holiday was co -opted and instead it was made into a

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Christian holiday, what's wrong with that? There have been many times, even over the course of Scripture, where a pagan icon or something that pagans would use to worship their false deities would then get changed into something

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Christian. I think one of the most prominent examples of this is in Revelation chapter 19 with the reference to Jesus returning on a white horse.

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Well, the white horse was a symbol of deity for Caesar because whenever he would come riding into the city after having defeated an enemy or when he would come riding into the games in the

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Hippodrome or the Colosseum or something like that, he would come in on a white horse and only he could ride the white horse.

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And that was an indication to the people that he was a god. And here in Revelation 19, you have the

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God who is returning on a white horse to strike down his enemies. This was

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John demonstrating that Jesus is greater than Caesar. So there you have a pagan symbol that is snatched and repurposed to show that Christ is greater than the pagans.

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And so if that was done with Christmas, praise God for that. At a time of the year when the pagans would worship on the darkest day of the year, instead we worship that the light of the world had come.

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Jesus Christ, as he's described in John 1, the light of the world has come. Wouldn't we want to celebrate that?

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Wouldn't that be wonderful that those pagan things that used to go on at that time of the year is now a season of lights, a festival of lights to the light who has come into the world?

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I think that's an amazing thing. Nobody is going to stand before the throne of judgment on that day and hear from God.

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You worship the incarnation of my son on December 25th, how dare you?

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And God will judge them for that. That is not going to happen. No one is going to face judgment because they celebrated the incarnation on December 25th.

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I don't know how long pagan festivals were going on with that particular date in mind or that time of the year.

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I don't know. And nobody does. The fact that we can't even find in history what pagan day it was that was somehow co -opted or transformed or turned into something else, and now we worship

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Christ on that day. We can't even find it. We don't even know which pagan festival it was. So it was apparently so successful that whatever it was the pagans were doing in the past has been lost to history.

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And now for 2 ,000 years almost, we've been celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ on that day.

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Praise God. I think that's an amazing thing. But once again, we actually don't know for sure.

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We really don't. We don't know for sure on what day Jesus was born.

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Maybe it was December the 25th. Maybe it could have been sometime in the spring. But it's not enough to say that because shepherds are out in the field keeping watch over their flock by night, therefore

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Jesus could not have been born on December the 25th. That is not a reasonable argument. Why not?

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Because shepherds are out with their flocks in the field in Judea to this day in the month of December.

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If you go to the Holy Land, you will find shepherds tending their flocks by night even in the month of December.

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I had a friend of mine who took a tour over there to the Holy Land. He wasn't going over there to test this theory or anything like that.

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But he did say that as he was flying in, they flew over a couple of fields.

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I don't even remember what airport he was coming into. Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, who knows? But he was coming into an airport in the

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Holy Land. And as the plane is getting lower and lower, he looked down out of the window and saw in the month of December, he saw shepherds with their flocks.

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And he said, the first thing that popped into my head when I saw that was they were in the same region, shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock.

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He saw that and he was like, what do you know? They do tend their flocks in December. Now, especially at this particular time in the winter, at this time in the first century, shepherds would have been tending sheep.

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Of course they would have because sheep were needed year round for what purpose?

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Sacrifices in the temple. And that's what these shepherds were watching these sheep for.

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Now, of course, their wool would have been used and other things. Definitely. It's not that it's not that these sheep were just used for sacrifices in the temple, but that would have been the main purpose.

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That's what the shepherds were out there watching these flocks for. They were raising sheep that were going to be used as sacrifices in the temple and and certainly had something to do with why

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God chose to have an angel appear to them on that night that Jesus was born, the ones that were attending to the sacrificial lambs.

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And they would go and witness the birth of the sacrificial lamb,

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Jesus Christ, and be the first to spread word about him. What an incredible thing.

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Like I said, how often have you really stopped and thought about all of the details of this account that's given to us?

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We've heard the Christmas story so many times. There's so much about this season and and so many myths that have come out to it.

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And even the biblical narratives, we've come to take those things for granted. And it's hardly anything that we marvel and wonder about anymore.

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When was the last time you opened up the scriptures and actually looked at the details behind all of this and coming to understand the significance of an angel appearing to shepherds out in the field in the same region?

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Verse eight again, there were shepherds out in the field keeping watch over their flock by night. Now in the same region, why would

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Luke say that? Does he even need to say that these shepherds were nearby?

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I think part of the reason why Luke details that, why he finds it necessary to have to say that they're right there in the same region, is because of how close they were to Jerusalem.

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So this is Bethlehem, which is four miles away from Jerusalem. And it could have been that somewhere in between Bethlehem and Jerusalem is where these shepherds were attending flocks.

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It doesn't say exactly where they were. It doesn't say and just outside of Bethlehem. It just says in the same region.

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So somewhere near Jerusalem, because again, they were raising sheep. They were tending to these sheep to be used as temple sacrifices.

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So very reasonable to believe they would have been pretty close to Jerusalem. An angel appears to them and when they go to see the thing that the angel said to them, they go to see this child and find him there.

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It's just a jot over to Bethlehem, maybe walking a mile or so over to Bethlehem.

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So they're in that same region, general vicinity of where all these things are taking place that we read about previously at the start of chapter two.

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They're keeping watch over their flock by night. The sheep are out there in the field. And the main reason that the shepherds are there with the sheep is to fend off predators.

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Now there's a great painting that I have seen. I don't know if you've seen this painting or not. I can't even remember who it is that does the painting.

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But there's a painting that shows a bunch of shepherds in tents out in a field.

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There's more than one painting like this. Now that I think about it, I've seen at least two, but where the angels are coming down out of the clouds to appear to these shepherds.

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And of course the angels look very feminine. You know, their blonde, long hair kind of have a feminine appearance to them.

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Pretty common for old European depictions of angels. But they're coming down out of the clouds to appear to these shepherds.

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And the shepherds have tents all around. And you see not just men, but even women and possibly even children with them as well.

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I think that's a pretty accurate depiction of shepherds being out in the fields with their flocks.

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Probably were staying in tents. They didn't take all the sheep home so that they could go to bed in their own beds.

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They stayed out there outside with the sheep. And some of the shepherds would have been on watch.

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Others would have been taking a nap. And then of course, you know, they would have gone in shifts. So then they swap and the next person takes the next watch.

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But I like that depiction with the tents out there like that. And it could have been not just men, but even women, shepherds and shepherdesses together who witnessed this great sight.

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And verse 9, an angel of the Lord appeared to them. And the glory of the

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Lord shone around them. I have no idea what this would have been like.

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What does it mean to say the glory of the Lord shone around them? Now later on in chapter 24, if we're going to draw from Luke's own style of writing.

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So we're still drawing from Luke himself. In Luke chapter 24, verse 4, this is at the resurrection of Jesus.

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The women have come to the tomb to anoint the body of Jesus. The stone has been rolled away.

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The body cannot be found. So the women are looking around and then two men stood by them in dazzling apparel.

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And as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, why do you seek the living among the dead?

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So there you have them appearing in dazzling apparel. Is that what this would have been like? I think this would have been significantly more than that because it says that the glory of the

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Lord shone around them. So the two men appearing to the women at the tomb, that was more than what

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Zechariah saw. Whereas Zechariah just had a man appear to him there in the holy place. This that the shepherds witnessed, they're seeing the very glory of the

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Lord shining around them. It would have been as if everything became as daylight. I almost kind of wonder if this is like the veil that separates the physical from the spiritual was kind of pulled back for a moment and there's an angel standing there.

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So the angel doesn't even necessarily step into their realm as much as he might be pulling the shepherds into the angelic realm.

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Because after all, we have a multitude of angels that will end up being there in that place.

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Maybe they didn't just appear there. Maybe the shepherds are standing in a place that angels inhabit and they witnessed this chorus proclaimed to them, glory to God in the highest.

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Remember that Jacob had a dream in the book of Genesis in that place called

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Bethel where he took a nap, slept on a rock, used a rock as a pillow. And the dream that he had, what

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God showed him through that dream was that in that place there were angels ascending and descending the stairs of heaven.

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And Jacob awakes and says, surely God is in this place. And so Jacob, even in a dream, he has that opportunity to step from this physical mortal realm and see beyond the veil into the spiritual.

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Maybe that's what the shepherds experienced on this night. So an angel of the Lord appeared to them.

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As far as their experience is concerned, an angel just appears there in the glory of the

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Lord shown all around them. And they were filled with great fear.

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But the angel says to them, fear not. Yeah, easier said than done, right? When we're out in the middle of this field at night and suddenly an angel appears to us and talking to us.

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Yeah, right. You try to fear not. Let me see you do it. So the angel says to them, fear not for behold,

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I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. And that's where it is that we're going to pick up tomorrow with this word that the angel shares with them.

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But let's marvel at the details that were given in this Christmas account, not moving too quickly through it as though, hey,

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I've read all this before. We're just going to blow through this narrative because I've heard it a thousand times. No, there's a good reason for us to be still and recognize the incredible things that God has done for us on our behalf.

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All of this is for our blessing, for our benefit. Because remember, the message of the angel is there is a savior that is born for you this day.

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And this is good news of great joy for all the people, including us, we who have come to believe in the savior and our sins being forgiven.

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And we are reconciled with God through Christ, our Lord, Heavenly Father, we thank you for what we have read here.

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And I pray that you continue to work these things into our hearts, that we may marvel at the work that you do and some of the things that are described here to us, things that we would like to see.

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We would love to see the angelic beings and being surrounded by the glory of the

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Lord. And one day we will behold these things also when we step from this life into the next to be with God forever.

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But we must believe in the Lord Jesus Christ in order to make it there. It is Christ that brings us through the veil, that makes us able to stand in the presence of God, in the presence of your holiness, cleansing us from unrighteousness, that we may stand in your righteousness and be with you and your heavenly kingdom forever.

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Through Jesus Christ, our Lord, it's in his name that we pray, amen. You've been listening to When We Understand the

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Text with Gabriel Hughes. Pastor Gabe is the author of 25 Christmas Myths and What the Bible Says, examining some of our most common

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Christmas beliefs and traditions and bringing them back to the truth of scripture. You can find this and other books at our website www .utt