December 16, 2025 - Good Morning! It’s Tuesday, December 16.
Do you memorize scripture? Memorization, in general, is a powerful mental discipline. Memorization of scripture is a powerful spiritual discipline. And after all, the Bible commands us to “hide its words in our hearts”. Everybody has at least some verses by memory - passages like The Lord’s Prayer and The 23rd Psalm, for instance. There’s another passage that we all know, as well, and that’s the Nativity story from Luke Chapter 2.
We’ve read and heard this story countless times. We love this story. We know this story. But still, amazingly, sometimes we get parts of this story wrong. One reason for that is that some of our Christmas carols get the story wrong. “The First Noel” tells us that the shepherds “looked up and saw the star”. Luke, however, never tells us that. The Bethlehem Star doesn’t appear in his passage. It’s featured in the story that Matthew tells, the one about the Wise Men. And the carol, “We Three Kings”, tells us that there were, well, three Wise Men - but the Bible doesn’t. Which brings us to our song of the day, “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing”.
Luke writes, “and suddenly, there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and SAYING. He doesn’t tell us that they sang. In fact, there’s not a single verse in God’s Word that explicitly describes the angels as singing. To be fair, the Bible makes it clear that one of the reasons God created the angels, one of their purposes, was to give Him praise. And we have verses in Psalms, Isaiah, Hebrews, and Revelation that describe them doing just that. And we have countless commands from God to praise Him with song.
So, it’s not a stretch of the imagination (and not unbiblical) to see, in our mind’s eye, the shepherds standing in a darkened field outside of Bethlehem on that first Christmas night, looking up at a sky filled with angels, angels who were . . . singing!
Meet you back here tomorrow,
David
cindertex50@yahoo.com
