The Comfort of Christmas
Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.
Isaiah 40:1–2
God always works according to a plan. Before He created the world, we read that He had a plan to save a people out of it. Before He called Abraham, He had a plan to make him the head of a new nation of people to whom He would entrust His law and His covenants and through whom He would send a Savior.
Before He sent that Savior, in the person of His own Son, God prepared the world for His arrival. Everything in the history of the world was arranged by God to prepare for the coming of Jesus Christ. And every event since His coming gains its significance in relationship to the life and work of Jesus Christ.
Today our faith looks back to what God has already done in sending His Son into the world. But Christians do not live in the past. We look forward with hope and joy to the return of Jesus. Our hope and joy are based on what God has already accomplished for us in Christ. In that sense, Christians face the future with great confidence, knowing that in Christ our best days are yet to come.
While speaking words of coming judgment to them, God did not leave His Old Testament people in the dark. He gave them comfort. He gave them encouragement to look to the future with hope and expectation. The main way He did that was by sending prophets who declared God’s promises to them. Isaiah was just such a prophet. He spoke to the nation of Judah both to warn them of impending judgment (which the first thirty-nine chapters of his book record) and to comfort them with assurances of coming redemption (which are found in chapters 40–66). Chapter 40 serves as the pivot from judgment to comfort, as verses 1 and 2 announce.
The hope that undergirds Isaiah’s prophecies center on Jesus Christ. The coming of the promised Messiah into the world provides encouragement to all God’s people. This was true for those who lived before His coming, and it remains true for us today. God both commands and supplies comfort for His people. He delivers this comfort through a message. The content of the message contains three elements. The first is expressed as a cessation of war. The message that God wants communicated to His people is that their “warfare is ended.”
The life of sorrows and trials that God’s people endure is compared to a military tour of duty. It is hard, trying; it is warfare, but it is temporary. There is an appointed stop date. When Isaiah spoke these words, the people of Judah were going downhill in every way. They were turning away from God and being intimidated by neighboring empires.
But the Word of the Lord comes to those living in this kind of ongoing difficult circumstance and says, “Your warfare is over. You will not have to live like this forever!” This is a word of hope. It is a word of comfort.
“Her iniquity is pardoned.” Literally this means that the iniquity of God’s people “has been paid, redeemed, restored.” It is like a transfer of funds into your account that is more than adequate to pay all your debt. A sacrifice that is sufficient to pay for all your sins has been accepted by God, and your iniquity has been pardoned.
Imagine how this must have landed on the ears of those in Isaiah’s day. “Could it be true that a once-for-all atonement has been made that has fully paid for all our sins? Has all our iniquity really been paid for in full? Are we really redeemed? Free?”
During the best of times, life under the old covenant was hard. All those monotonous ceremonies and rituals would wear you down if you scrupulously observed them. Day after day you had to offer sacrifices. Year after year you had to go to the temple. No matter how many times you offered something on the altar as a sacrifice, it was never enough. It always had to be repeated.
The message of comfort from God to every believer is, “Yes. Your iniquity is forever pardoned.”
The third element of this message of comfort is that their blessings are superior to their sufferings. At first, it sounds like He is saying that the people have paid twice for their sins, but we know that cannot be true because it would be unjust. God always does what is right. He is a God of strict justice.
“Double” is not to be taken in a strictly literal sense. It means that it is more than adequate or abundant. We see this in how Isaiah 61:7 speaks about abundant blessing: “Instead of your shame there shall be a double portion; instead of dishonor they shall rejoice in their lot; therefore in their land they shall possess a double portion; they shall have everlasting joy.” What that passage seems to be saying is this: “You will receive blessings that will be much greater than all the afflictions that you have experienced and all the sin you have committed.”
Try to imagine how this would have sounded to Isaiah’s hearers. These things would have seemed too good to be true. But this was God’s very message to them. All the comfort that is proclaimed to God’s people is based on the coming of Jesus Christ into the world. The Old Testament people of God were called by God to look forward to all that He would do for them with the coming of Jesus Christ into the world.
Through the coming Messiah, their warfare would be ended, their sins would be completely forgiven, and blessings would be so abundant that they would far outweigh the sufferings. Believers today look back to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and realize that all these things are true for us already. Through Christ we have “peace with God” (Rom. 5:1) and in Him we have the “forgiveness of our trespasses” (Eph. 1:7). Further, we can be sure that “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom. 8:18).
It does not always seem that way, and there certainly is still some fighting going on—against the world, the flesh, and the devil. But it is the fighting that takes place from victory, not in hopes of gaining victory. It is the mop-up campaign that must take place in any war. The war is over, the victory is assured, all because Jesus Christ has come and has conquered! But there are still skirmishes to be fought, and the wounds you receive in the skirmishes hurt just as badly as the ones inflicted during the fight for victory. At times these skirmishes can be so intense that they look and feel like defeat. But God has promised His children that victory is ours. The outcome of the war is not in doubt. Believe it. Set your hope on that fact. And be comforted by it.
(This article is taken from Tom Ascol’s most recent book, “As the Darkness Clears Away”. This is available now at press.founders.org.)
