I think angels are the coolest part of the Christmas story. In chapter 2 of Luke’s Gospel, we read that an angel appeared to some shepherds on the night that Jesus was born. Now, we personally don’t have any experience with angels appearing to us. (Please don’t tell me that you have experienced angels appearing to you.) But that’s what happened to the shepherds the night when Jesus was born. Let’s look at some of the details of the story.

First, there is a single angel who appeared to the shepherds. And along with this angel, there came “the glory of the Lord.” Other passages in the Bible also talk about the glory of the Lord. In the Old Testament, the glory of the Lord is experienced as a cloud and as a fire, when God came down from heaven to dwell among his people in the tabernacle, and when he led the people from Egypt to the Promised Land as a cloud by day and a fire by night. The glory of the Lord is bright, so bright that Moses had to wear a veil over his face, so bright that the people could not look at Mount Sinai when God came down to give the Ten Commandments. The glory of the Lord is big and full. When King Solomon dedicated the temple, the priests could not even enter because it was already full of the glory of the Lord. The prophet Isaiah equated the glory of the Lord with his majesty.

So, an angel comes from heaven to tell the shepherds of the birth of Jesus, and when he came, the glory of the Lord came with him: thick as a cloud, strong as a fire, so bright you couldn’t look at it, so big and full that you could feel it, majestic and terrifying. Then after he told them that a Savior, Christ the Lord, had been born in Bethlehem, he is joined quite suddenly by a “multitude of the heavenly hosts”. The one angel spokesman is joined by a multitude. Suddenly, there were thousands of angels. The Bible calls them the “heavenly host”. This is an interesting term. It has a military feel to it. You see, God is often called in the Bible the Lord of hosts, which means the Lord of armies. The heavenly host is a term for the armies of angels that stand before God in heaven. The Book of Revelation speaks of Michael the archangel and his angels fighting against the Devil and his armies of demons in spiritual warfare. Could these angels that appeared to the shepherds that night have been bearing swords? Were they arrayed for battle? Maybe. We don’t know. But those shepherds saw a multitude of God’s army of angels.

And notice that the Bible never says that the angels were in the sky. We assume that, and they may very well have been. But the Bible doesn’t say that. They could have been standing among the shepherds. They could have surrounded the shepherds. We don’t know. And we have always thought that the angels were singing, that this was a choir of angels. But that’s not what Luke’s Gospel says. It actually says that the angels were “saying”, not “singing”. So, as soon as the first angel make his announcement to the shepherds, he is joined (and I say “he”, because angels are always depicted as men in Scripture, not as women, and certainly not as fat little cherubs holding harps!) by thousands of angels, an army of them, strong and mighty, ready for battle, standing among, around, and above the shepherds. And they were saying, talking to the shepherds—and to each other, and to all the created world. And I can’t imagine that they were speaking quietly, whispering. They had come to accompany the most important announcement in all of history—a Savior, Christ the Lord, had been born. Besides, even if they spoke with a normal volume, there were thousands of them. This was a loud cacophony of voices, praising God.

But finally, look at what they said. “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased.” The first angel announced that a Savior, Christ the Lord, had been born. The long-awaited One, God in the flesh, had finally come to save His people from their sins. And now this army of angels responds in two-fold fashion. First, they praise God. Glory to God in the highest, in the highest place, in heaven. They had just come from the presence of God, and now they were continuing their refrain of praise to all who would hear. But secondly, they declare peace to God’s people, to those with whom God is pleased. What a wonderful pair of contrasts: glory to God in heaven, peace on earth to God’s people. You could say it like this: when God in heaven gets glory, God’s people on earth get peace. For that matter, the converse is also true: when God’s people on earth get peace, God in heaven gets glory.

So, my question is this. Why would the multitude of angels respond to the announcement of Christ’s birth this way? What is it about the birth of the Savior that would cause the angels to say, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased.” They could have simply declared God’s glory, his majesty, his might. Or they could have simply rejoined the announcement of the first angel. “The Savior has come. The Savior has come. The Savior has come.” But they didn’t.

You see, two things happen when Jesus comes, as a baby in a manger, to be our Savior. God gets glory. God gets glory because the enemies of his people—sin and death and the Devil—are defeated. The King has come, God himself in the flesh, and he has come, as the old carol says, to make his blessings flow, to make the nations prove the glories of his righteousness and the wonders of his love. He has come to establish his kingdom and to conquer his enemies, and that brings him great glory. But second, we, as God’s people, get peace. When God came for us as his people, we became the great recipients of all the benefits that relationship entails, the greatest of which is peace. Because of that baby in the manger, God is pleased with us. We are his and he is ours. Where there had been distance between us and our Creator, there is now peace. That’s why the angels left heaven and spoke with all their might to simple shepherds on a hillside. “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased.”