It was the day after Christmas and three years ago today. It stunned the entire world while many were lazily recuperating from the holiday just hours earlier. And it was the deadliest disaster of the modern age. When the monster waves from the devastating Indonesian tsunami subsided, the death toll world-wide would reach a sobering 230,000, with even higher numbers being likely.
Today, foreign governments are still helping Indonesia rebuild. They are also providing high-tech communications equipment and installing a series of strategically placed buoys that would give Indonesia’s coastal communities some warning of an approaching tsunami.
The great disaster of 2004 took the world by surprise. But the timing of the event, being the day after Christmas, underscores what the holiday it so closely followed is really about. The coming of the Christ is ultimately about His death and resurrection. Had he only come to be born as He was, we would be left with merely a touching miracle about God becoming human flesh. We would have the Creator God wrapped in human flesh, but be left without a “Savior”. What would be the point?
Christ’s amazing entry was only half of the story. The rest of the story is revealed in Romans 5:8-9. “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him.” And the utter importance of this other half of the account is later substantiated in 1 Corinthians 15:17, “And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins!”
Only the saving power of Christ can properly ready an individual through faith to enter eternity. And that fateful day after Christmas 2004 still serves as a chilling reminder of the reality of Proverbs 27:1, “Do not boast about tomorrow, For you do not know what a day may bring forth.”
God has more than adequately warned of the need to be ready now to face him. And whether death comes slowly and peacefully or suddenly and unexpectedly, the words of Hebrews 2:3, despite their setting in a slightly different context, are just one of God’s many early warnings. “How shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation.”
Another pointed caution for those living today is voiced in Mattew 24:37-39. "But as the days of Noah were, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be. For as in the days before the flood , they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and did not know until the flood came and took them all away, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be."
Christmas, as the hymn writer put it, is about “Joy To The Word”. And Christ Himself said of joy through the writer John in 15:11, "These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full.” Christmas is also, as Christ put it in John 14:27, about peace. "Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid."
True peace with God and supernatural joy come only through the One who dissected time, then died in it for us, that we might someday live beyond it eternally with Him.
Bill Breckenridge
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