If you haven’t got all your Christmas gifts purchased—if you didn’t wake up early on Black Friday and get everything taken care of for your loved ones—I hope you’re bracing yourselves to navigate crowded stores or preparing yourself to spend an inordinate amount of time on websites like Amazon or Etsy. Many people, rather than fight traffic at the stores, much prefer to sit on their couch and move from one online retailer to another in hopes of getting all the bases covered without the hassle of trying to find a place to park in an overcrowded parking lot or navigate a horde of holiday shoppers.
For the giving and receiving of gifts is very much a part of this season. Exchanging gifts is a key element of our various Christmas observances. Our family get-togethers will be punctuated by stockings hung by the fireplace in hopes Santa will fill them with an array of things on Christmas morning and decorated trees with a collection of presents and gift bags immediately underneath. While it’s very easy for the true meaning of Christmas to get lost in the merchandising and dealings of the next few weeks, the fact is the sharing of gifts is at the heart of this season’s celebrations.
In order that we might more fully understand the incredible gift God gave us in Jesus I want to leverage that cultural practice. And here’s how: All of us are familiar with the Christmas narrative. We know the key players and the stream of events that caused Joseph and Mary to make the trek to Bethlehem. We know how the angels and shepherds got drawn into the narrative. We’re also familiar with the fact that, some months after Jesus’ birth, some little-known, mysterious visitors from afar showed up bearing gifts. It’s a real interesting part of the story because we don’t know much about them—where they were from or how long their journey took. We don’t understand their motivations and what compelled them to make a trip of this magnitude. We’re not sure how the celestial process worked which guided them from where they were and led them to Jesus. Nor are we sure how much they really understood about Jesus and what prompted an expression of worship upon their arrival. We’re not even sure how many of them there were. According to my grandmother’s nativity set there were three, but that’s an extrapolation based on the fact they presented Him with three gifts when they arrived—gifts that weren’t just kind gestures of goodwill, but gifts that were deeply symbolic and emblematic of who He was at a level far beyond what they and many of us understand … gifts that really embody the essence of his mission and speak to us about who He was and what God sent Him to earth to do.
What I want to do in this series of posts is look at these three gifts—gold, frankincense, and myrrh—in hopes we might more fully understand the significance and role of the One who is God’s greatest gift to us. And I want to deal with them in the order in which they are disclosed and relayed to us. So in this first post—gold. What can we learn about Jesus by the fact the magi presented him with gold? What can we discern about the intent and purpose God had in mind for His Son—what He was trying to accomplish through Him—by the fact the wise men gave him this gift?
Because of its scarcity and value, gold—in that day as in ours—is a symbol of kingship and royalty. It’s seen as a gift fit for a king. Its shiny and shimmering nature pointed to God’s radiant beauty and spiritual majesty. If you go back into the Old Testament and look at the instructions regarding the furnishings of the Temple, you’ll see how numerous items were to be covered with gold—a choice that wasn’t solely stylistic or decorative, but a choice that was full of spiritual significance … a symbol that represented the resplendence and magnificence of God. These objects and the ubiquitousness of gold—the overlay on the Ark of the Covenant, the altar of incense, the Mercy Seat and other accessories in the Holy of Holies—served as a reminder to the people of God’s radiance and splendor. Kings wore crowns and held scepters of gold to reinforce and mark their authority and dominion. By presenting Jesus with gold, the magi declared this baby was born to rule and that His kingdom would be enduring in nature … that He was not simply the King of the Jews, but that He was the King of Kings—a king whose reign would extend over all people and all nations … a king who is worthy of their highest devotion and affection … a king, as people came to find out, whose kingdom would not be marked by conquest, power, and the subjugation of the populace but by righteousness, peace, and grace.
Gold also speaks to the incorruptible nature of Jesus’ rule. As a precious and incorruptible metal that doesn’t tarnish or rust, it speaks to His unchanging and eternal nature. Unlike earthly kings whose reigns are momentary and fleeting—short-lived and often gone in a flash—Jesus’ kingship is permanent. His authority extends not just over nations, but over hearts.
In 1 Timothy 6, where Paul is challenging his audience to maintain a lifestyle of obedience until the Lord returns, he refers to God as “the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords” (v. 15). The language he uses is as forceful and powerful as the grammar allows. Jesus is the supreme authority over all the kingdoms of the world. The entire cosmos is in his hands. He’s a king like no other!
Certainly the people of his day weren’t expecting a king like him … a king who came in poverty and was born in a cave next to farm animals … a king who was raised by a common tradesman in the backwater, boondock town of Nazareth … a king who touched lepers, befriended prostitutes, and loved those the religious establishment had rejected … a king who chose some uneducated fishermen, despised tax collectors, and rebellious troublemakers to be his disciples … a king who forgave a woman caught in the act of adultery and confronted the hypocrisy of the Pharisees time and time again … a king who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, stood trial for crimes he didn’t commit, and was beaten, whipped, scourged, and stripped naked only to hang on an instrument of death in front of people who mocked him and spit on him … a king who, when faced with those circumstances, called upon God not to lambaste and chastise those who were responsible for his suffering, but to absolve and forgive them. What an unbelievably uncommon expression of kingship—one the people who associated kingship with power, privilege, and prosperity were not looking for.
The symbolism of gold also points to a purity refined through faith. Just as gold is purified by fire, so is our faith refined by trials and difficulties. Speaking on this topic, the apostle Peter says, “These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and result in praise, glory, and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed” (I Peter 1:7). What Peter is saying is it is through the hardships and adversities of life that we discover what our faith is made of … that we are often ignorant of the makeup of our faith, but it is through testing and challenge that its quality is revealed. An untested faith is a feeble and frail faith—one that is likely to be found lacking and not make the grade when the stakes are high and the pressure is on.
Jesus is a king unlike anything the world has ever seen. And when we declare him as our personal king, we are offering him the “gold” of our allegiance—the surrender of our will to His perfect leadership … the yielding of our aspirations, talents, and resources—all we have and are—to His supervision and control. Jesus said in Matt. 6:21 that where our treasure is, there our heart will be as well … it’s impossible to embrace his kingship without aligning with his administration of our lives and giving him our loyalty. Just as the magi offered their finest treasure to honor the newborn King, so our lives are meant to be “living offerings”—the freely chosen surrender of our ambitions, longings, and desires to Him because we acknowledge His rightful place as the Lord of everything. The magi’s gift of gold calls us to reflect on the essence and character of our surrender—what we treasure most and the thoroughness of our commitment to live a life of devotion and fidelity to Him.
There are three ways we can respond to Jesus—three distinct ways we can act in response to his claim of kingship. And each of them is highlighted by one of the characters in the Christmas story. The first one is demonstrated by King Herod whose response was to oppose Jesus. If you know the Christmas story, you know that when he learned from the magi of the birth of one called the “King of the Jews”, he issued a decree that all boys under the age of two in and around the village of Bethlehem be put to death … a situation that caused Joseph and Mary to become refugees and flee to Egypt with their toddler son for a season. As it concerned Jesus, Herod’s response was, “I don’t need any of that God stuff. I don’t need religion. I’m doing fine on my own and I don’t need anyone else telling me what to do.” Granted—I seriously doubt if any of you reading this post would fit into this category, because chances are you’d occupy our mind with something you deem more important or consequential. But for a number of people on this planet, that’s how they respond to the kingship of Jesus. “I’m not going to let some outdated book, or some religious principle, or some stupid church tell me how to live.” They are adamantly opposed to Jesus’ claim of kingship and dead set against it.
I think a more widespread, and prevalent, response to the kingship of Jesus in our day is the second one—a response displayed by the Jewish priests who didn’t so much oppose Jesus as they just dismissed Him. They blew him off. They disregarded him and treated him as unworthy of serious consideration. They weren’t hostile. They weren’t antagonistic or combative or adversarial. They were just indifferent and apathetic—too busy or preoccupied to be bothered. This is the response to Jesus I think is so representative of our world. There are a lot of people who have no major problem with Jesus. They have no beef with Him to speak of. They’re just disinterested and unconcerned. On the pecking order of life, there are a lot of things they consider to be a whole lot more important and significant than He is. So while they may give Him a cursory measure of attention and relate to him in a perfunctory or haphazard way, in terms of acknowledging His kingship and allowing him to shape, sculpt, and fashion their lives they’re not there. Their response to Jesus is to more or less dismiss Him.
But then we have the wise men who bowed down and worshipped Jesus as King … who related to him in the most surrendered way possible … who displayed reverence, awe, and honor and prostrated themselves before in essence saying, “It’s not about me—my throne and desires. I embrace you as the King of the Universe and with everything in me, I submit myself to your superintendence and control.” Hopefully each of us who claims to be a Christ-follower has said to Jesus, “I relinquish control of me and entrust it to you. I renounce my right to myself and authorize you to be in charge of everything that’s a part of my world. I surrender all of my ambitions, desires, and motivations to your Lordship and sign on to your agenda. I lay down my yearnings, cravings, and longings and voluntarily place them at your feet.
My belief is that when we come face to face with the incredible love of God—when we really and fully get our mind around just how much He esteems and values us—that the most sensible response is to do what the magi did … to lean into and enthusiastically embrace the person of Jesus and allow Him to assume dominion over our hearts and lives … to make Him our king and drop in a posture of submission and place that which we value at his feet.
The other day, as I was looking at some of the songs of Advent, I stumbled across a lesser-known hymn written by Charles Wesley. It’s not totally unfamiliar, but it certainly doesn’t have the profile of Hark! The Herald Angels Sing or Angels We Have Heard on High. It’s a hymn entitled Come Thou Long Expected Jesus and the second verse begins with these words: “Born thy people to deliver, born a child and yet a king.” That sentence perhaps as much as anything captures the mystery and wonder of Christmas … that this child who came into this world through an extraordinary set of circumstances was born a king—that he was of royal lineage. But then the next line continues on and says: “Born to reign in us forever, now thy gracious kingdom bring.” As king, Jesus was born to reign in us. The kingship of Jesus is not a kingdom meant to assert supremacy over nations, but one meant to compassionately assert influence over individual lives. It’s not a kingdom marked by heavy-handedness and ruling over, but a kingdom that has to do with ruling within. It’s not a kingdom characterized by power, privilege, and prosperity, but it’s a kingdom based on righteousness, peace, and grace. And when we respond as the magi responded and reverently embrace this kingdom—when we choose not to treat Jesus with disdain and disregard but opt to acknowledge His Kingship—life takes on a beauty we never thought possible and becomes a gratifying and fulfilling thing.
This Christmas lets lean into the Kingship of Jesus. Lets make sure we’re not just admirers of Jesus, but true followers because we’ve made the decision to welcome him as king and embrace His lordship over our lives. After all, that’s what the magi’s gift of gold was pointing to and encouraging us to do.