Extraordinary Gifts

After their meeting with Herod the Wise Men followed the star which remained bright in the sky and were guided to the house where Joseph and Mary and the child Jesus were still staying. When the men were invited to see the child they went down on their knees and worshipped him. They then presented him with gifts; gold, frankincense, and myrrh. These peculiar gifts have a spiritual message for us today who understand what it means to live a life shared with God. Gold speaks to us of the nature of God. Frankincense speaks to us of prayer and worship. Myrrh speaks to us of the suffering of grief and loss.

For Jesus these were not just fancy Christmas presents to be put away as keepsakes and forgotten about. Rather, these were for Jesus, symbols of the realities of an ever present consciousness of sharing his life with an ever-present God every level of experience. We will take the gifts one by one and apply them to how to live an every-day life in the conscious awareness of sharing life with God.

GOLD  Gold speaks to us of the nature of God on display in a human life. Why? In the hierarchy of the attributes of grandeur and majesty and radiance of material things in the earth gold is ranked number one. In the same hierarchy of attributes of a heavenly being worthy of worship and awe and respect there is the idea of a god. The bible says that people who make idols makes them out of gold and silver (Psalm 115) with gold as the first choice. When the people of Israel came out of slavery in Egypt and began their trek though the wilderness they came to Mount Sinai and Moses went up the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments from God and was up there for six weeks, a very long time. They became impatient and worried that if Moses had gone then maybe his God was gone too. They wanted a god they could visibly relate to so they made a golden calf, their chief idol deity of Egypt and began to worship it. It was a wooden calf plated with gold. For that they were severely judged and punished by God. Then some weeks later God commanded Moses to make a tabernacle, a tent of worship where he people would gather daily and worship and make sacrifices. The central item of worship was the ark of the Covenant to represent the presence of the living God that was with them. 

Exodus 25:10 … Make an ark of acacia wood… and overlay it with pure gold, inside and out…

This ark travelled with them on their wilderness journey and was carried on the shoulders the priests with poles, made of acacia wood and overlaid with gold. This was not a wooden calf covered with gold, it was a piece of acacia wood, a gnarled and twisted species of timber, difficult to work, and overlaid with pure gold. The acacia wood represents the distorted nature of humanity, grown out of the soil, and overlaid with the glorious nature of God, speaking of their defects and failings mercifully forgiven and covered with the perfect and unflawed nature of God – God with us. He gave them something to see with their own eyes, but this was a shadow of things to come, and prophetically signifies Jesus, who took our distorted human nature becoming one of us and yet displaying the radiant and glorious nature of God. He became the fulfillment of what Israel had been seeing as the ark for all that time. This remained a mystery until Jesus came.

It says in Colossians 2:17 These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.  And Jesus said ‘if you have seen me you have seen the Father’. Jesus knew this gift of gold as an ongoing reality in his life. This also is prophetic of what God had in store for us, after Jesus died and rose again and sent the Holy Spirit to join us as one Spirit with him. So in the New Testament we are the twisted acacia wood on the outside and Jesus is the pure gold that dwells within us, so how do we get to be the gold on the outside, as Jesus was In the New Testament? The Holy Spirit draws that radiant nature of God through us so that as we live closer and closer with God in your heart that nature will start to shine on the outside, even though we still have that old dead acacia wood there but we choose to let Jesus do the living within us and the shining through us… we live by faith (It is no longer I that live…).  The gold appears through the trials of our faith. God is looking at us as the finished product, and we are the potential of what we can be, and what we shall be, through our growth in faith 1Peter 1:7 The tested genuineness of your faith is more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire… (also 1Peter 4:12 – the fiery trials)

INCENSE - Prayer  We see in the Bible that Incense speaks of worship and prayer. Psalm 141.1 O Lord, I call upon you. Accept my prayer as incense offered to you… Frankincense has a sweet perfumed aroma and speaks to us of sweet prayer ascending from a true heart and pleasant to God.  Revelation 8:4 The smoke of the incense, mixed with the prayers of God’s people ascended up to God from the altar. Incense was an offering, a sacrifice to God, so prayer is actually an act of giving towards God rather than an act of taking from him. True prayer to God comes from a surrendered heart. What we offer as a sacrifice is our yielded will to God – not my will but your will be done.

This is a sweet aroma to God. God wants us to bring our prayer requests to him, with thanksgiving but with a yielded heart. This releases the faith in us that knows with assurance that God is powerfully working all things together for his good will to be done and gratefully received in our lives.  MYRRH –

The presence of God restoring lost hope because of grief and loss in our lives.  Myrrh is symbolic of death and of grief and of loss. We see in the Scripture that Jesus was offered myrrh mixed with wine when he was on the cross but he refused to drink it.  Mark 15:23 And they gave him to drink wine mingled with myrrh… He knew he was going to die and that myrrh was symbolic of his death but for the joy that was set before him he endured the suffering of the cross, so he rejected the symbol of death and his heart of faith and hope was his resurrection. Accepting the reality of suffering and loss has meaning for our life when we know that God suffers with us and his presence through the Holy Spirit restores lost hope that comes through our grief and loss. We don’t always get back the very things that we have lost. What we have really lost is hope – we cannot live without hope.. The grief that all the followers and friends and family of Jesus suffered when he died on the cross was almost inconsolable. But that inconsolable grief turned into the most resounding of victorious joy at his resurrection. So the greatest human tragedy became the greatest human and divine celebration. The greatest paradox of all time.

Somewhere in between his unparalleled experience of grief and death and his exuberant joy and resurrection is the story of our life of griefs and sorrows and lost hope that can become the story of the restoration of new life and new hope and a new future. Jesus was buried, and his body anointed with myrrh (John 19), and included in his burial was all of our sin and failure and fear, all of our griefs and loss. He suffered and died and was buried for all of our disappointments and resentments and bitterness, all of our doom and gloom and depression. He wants to teach us how to bury these things and as we let them go that becomes his precious gift of myrrh to our lives. The continual burial of all of these things in our lives waits for the continual command of ‘arise’ and go forward in a new and risen life.  This is our powerful pathway of growth designed by God to give us a future and a hope that cannot be extinguished.

God wants to grow us as well as to console us.

Isaiah 61:3 To console those who mourn; To give us a crown of beauty upon our heads instead of ashes upon our heads, the oil of joy for mourning, and the spirit of praise for the spirit of heaviness…

He wants us to appreciate and to share with him in the treasure of all these precious gifts, the gold, the incense and the myrrh.