Hello, everyone, and so we are coming close to Christmas.

And I've done many Christmas videos in the past, and so I thought we'd try to take a little bit of a different tack and look at one sentence in the Christmas story, a sentence that since my childhood, I was always confused and wondering about, and even when I was in university, I remember a professor that I had a biblical study saying,

you know, this is the kind of statement in scripture that doesn't really mean anything

that nobody knows what it really refers to and what it's talking about.

And that is the statement of the angels, the song of the angels, which is glory to God in the highest,

or glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests,

or peace to those on which he has goodwill, and sometimes it's also peace on men of goodwill.

And so what exactly does this sentence mean?

This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world.

So the context is pretty clear. We have, first of all, extremes in the very story, which is that we have these

shepherds that are, you know, tending to their sheep. We always have to remember that shepherds

in the ancient world were something like the lowest class of people, you know, peasants. And then,

and they're also tending their sheep at night.

And so you have two images of two extremes, which is the lowest type of person, but then

at the same time the darkness at night and in the heavens appears an angel and ultimately

a choir of angels or a group of angels

that announced to them that the Messiah is born in Bethlehem, that the prophecy has been revealed,

and then they start to sing this or say this, you know, glory to God in the highest,

and on earth peace to those on whom its favor rests. So you have this contrast in the situation,

which is that the glory of God shines. And so in this case, you have to really understand

the glory of God is light. So you have to think of this contrast in terms of the situation,

which is that it's dark, it's night, and then all of a sudden in the heavens appears a light.

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