As soon as Thanksgiving is over, Christmas decorating begins at my house. My wife is the expert; I am the hired help. You can know this by examining our nativity scenes.

One is simpler, featuring the baby Jesus surrounded by adoring parents and a worshiping angel. The other is more complex, with animals, shepherds, and three Magi. I have pointed out over the years that the Wise Men were not present at the first Christmas, but since my theological observations have fallen annually on deaf ears, I have learned to keep my objections to myself.

However, here’s a nativity set I must protest: a Cape Cod artist has created what Axios calls “New England’s newest unlikely holiday sensation: the Lobster nativity scene.” Jesus is depicted as a baby lobster in a bed of seaweed inside a crab shell cradle. The stable is a lobster trap. The other figures are various versions of lobsters as well.

When I read the story, I was viscerally bothered by the crass commercialization of Christmas. Is there nothing someone won’t do to sell something in the season we celebrate our Savior’s birth?

But then I remembered C. S. Lewis’s poignant description of the Christmas miracle:

The Second Person in God, the Son, became human himself: was born into the world as an actual man—a real man of a particular height, with hair of a particular color, speaking a particular language, weighing so many stone. The Eternal Being, who knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and before that a fetus inside a woman’s body.

If you want to get the hang of it, think how you would like to become a slug or a crab.

Or a lobster.

“We hold these truths to be sacred”

Over the weekend, I read famed historian Walter Isaacson’s new book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. It is a word-by-word analysis of the Declaration of Independence’s central assertion:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

The book tells the fascinating story of the Declaration’s evolution from Thomas Jefferson’s initial draft to the document’s final version. For example, we learn that Mr. Jefferson, despite his deistic misgivings regarding the supernatural, originally wrote, “We hold these truths to be sacred . . .” However, Isaacson reports that Benjamin Franklin crossed out “sacred” and wrote “self-evident” in its place.

This is unsurprising, given Franklin’s worldview.

As Isaacson notes, the famous Founder spent more than a month in late 1771 with the famous Scottish philosopher David Hume. Here, he learned Hume’s maxim that self-evident truths are “discoverable by the mere operation of thought” rather than upon empirical observation. As a result of Franklin’s edit, our threefold right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is a “truth” in the sense that we assent logically and rationally to it.

The famed triad’s nature is defined in the same manner: the Founders created a secular republic and therefore offered no biblical or spiritual definitions for life or liberty. In his comment on the third phrase, Isaacson writes that the pursuit of happiness is also “your right—and your opportunity—to seek fulfillment, meaning, and well-being however you personally see fit.”

Christmas is proof that Jesus disagrees.

The only baby who chose to be born

The observable universe is currently estimated to be about ninety-two billion light-years across. Traveling at 186,232 miles per second, it would take you that long to travel from one edge to the other. If your mind can grasp such expansive immensity, it is more capable than mine.

And yet the Creator measures all of that “between his thumb and little finger” (Isaiah 40:12, MSG). Furthermore, it was by Jesus that “all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible” (Colossians 1:16). It is also in him that “all things hold together” (v. 17).

When Jesus unveiled even a glimpse of his heavenly divinity to his best friend John on Patmos, the apostle “fell at his feet as though dead” (Revelation 1:17). Christ is so majestic that when he returns, “on his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords” (Revelation 19:16).

And yet he voluntarily “emptied himself” of his indescribable immensity (Philippians 2:7) to become a fertilized egg the size of a pinhead in the womb of a peasant teenage girl. He grew as a fetus and was born as a helpless baby who was then laid in a stone feed trough and worshiped by dirty field hands. He was the only baby in human history to choose to be born and to choose the manner of his birth—and this is what he chose.

Three decades later, he made another fateful choice, again humbling himself “by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (v. 8). He could have been executed by stoning at the hands of a Jewish mob (John 8:59), but he chose to die for our sins by Roman crucifixion, the most painful, tortured manner of execution ever devised.

If your friend became a lobster

In short, our Savior chose to sacrifice his “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for us. Nothing about his decision was “self-evident” in Hume’s sense of rational operation. Finite human minds cannot comprehend such divine reasoning (cf. Isaiah 55:8–9).

But let’s try.

Imagine that it would somehow benefit you for a friend to come back to life as a lobster, a slug, or a crab. This is a fair analogy for the incarnation of Jesus, since the biological distance between humans and such creatures is infinitesimal compared with the infinite distance between God and us.

Here’s my question: If your friend were to make this decision, then die in your place so you could live eternally, would you ever again doubt their love for you?

Quote for the day:

“Because of his boundless love, Jesus became what we are that he might make us to be what he is.” —St. Irenaeus

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reportedly wants to meet President Trump “as soon as possible,” possibly over Thanksgiving, to finalize a joint US–Ukrainian peace agreement. The primary gap to be bridged is apparently over territory: the current twenty-eight-point US proposal concedes additional land to Russia beyond what it already controls.

The US argument is that the current trajectory of the war suggests Ukraine would eventually lose the territory anyway. White House officials stress that Mr. Trump’s primary goal is to end the war, no matter what the peace deal ultimately looks like.

Such an approach is often termed Realpolitik, a German word meaning “politics of reality.” Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was a foremost proponent, urging the US to engage with other powerful nations in a practical manner rather than on the basis of political doctrine or ethics. He famously stated, “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.”

In this view, advancing these interests is the job of a nation’s leaders, whatever ethical compromises must be made along the way. As the political philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah noted, “A value is like a fax machine. It’s not much use if you’re the only one who has one.”

Aren’t you glad God doesn’t feel the same way?

Reflecting on a staggering reality

The psalmist declared, “Give thanks to the Lᴏʀᴅ, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever” (Psalm 136:1). He did not claim that God “does” good but that he “is” good. His “steadfast love” (translating the Hebrew hesed, meaning “unconditional and unchanging kindness”) “endures forever,” meaning that it will eternally be what it is right now.

This is because “God is love” (1 John 4:8) and God does not change (Malachi 3:6). If the Supreme Being did, he would be less than Supreme and thus less than God.

Paul similarly reminds us that “God is for us” (Romans 8:31). Max Lucado comments:

Not may be, not has been, not was, but God is! He is for you. Today. At this hour. At this minute. As you [read] this, he is with you. God is for you (his emphasis).

Take a moment to reflect on the staggering reality that the King of the universe, the Creator of all the cosmos, the Lord of time and eternity “is for you” right now.

“A good that is forever giving”

No wonder the Bible commands us to continually “give thanks to the Lᴏʀᴅ,” to “offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving” (Psalm 50:14), to “magnify him with thanksgiving” (Psalm 69:30), and to give thanks “always and for everything to God” (Ephesians 5:20, my emphasis). No wonder those in heaven will spend eternity giving thanks to the Lord we worship (Revelation 4:9; 7:11–12; 11:17).

And no wonder we are called to “give thanks in all circumstances” on earth as well (1 Thessalonians 5:18; cf. Hebrews 13:15).

The Bible teaches that “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17). In response, St. Augustine asked:

What do we love? A good that words cannot describe, a good that is forever giving, a good that is the Creator of all good. Delight in him from whom you have received everything that delights you. But in that I do not include sin, for sin is the one thing that you do not receive from him. With that one exception, everything you have comes from him.

How will you respond tomorrow to those who prepare your Thanksgiving meal? What will you say to those who give you gifts this Christmas? Is thanking those who are kind to us not instinctive?

How much more should we instinctively live a lifestyle of thanksgiving with an attitude of gratitude toward our Father?

If we don’t, why don’t we?

Why I thank someone for something

I cannot speak for you, but I can be honest about my own heart.

When I thank someone for something, I am acting in response to their benevolence. I am admitting that they have offered me grace (defined theologically as “unmerited favor”). They have given me something I did not have but am glad to receive.

In that moment, they were in a sense my superior and I was their inferior. Consequently, I want to express my gratitude as a way of paying my debt and thus leveling the scales of merit.

Here’s the problem: My fallen “will to power” does not want to live in perpetual debt to anyone, even (and sometimes especially) to God. I want to be my own god (Genesis 3:5), the king of my own kingdom. I am happy to give to others and be thanked, but I am less happy to receive as a pauper before a prince, a beggar at the gate of the king.

But this is the reality of my status before an omnipotent God. The good news is, it is also just the posture required to experience his best.

“Keep your eyes open to your mercies”

Jesus paradoxically asserted, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3). This is the first Beatitude, the first foundation stone for the Sermon on the Mount and the Christian life it teaches. Our Lord’s words can be paraphrased, “Blessed are those who are spiritually destitute and starving in their souls, for they make God their king and experience life in his kingdom.”

As a fallen human, I submit to God to the degree that I recognize my need for what he alone can provide. But the fact is, I need his best in every dimension of my life, every day. I need his wisdom for every decision, his strength for every trial, his joy for every moment.

So, if I live a lifestyle of thanksgiving with a posture of gratitude to God, I position myself to receive all that my loving Father wants for me. And my changed life will glorify him and lead others to him.

In this sense, Robert Louis Stevenson was more right than he may have known when he advised,

“Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.”

How awake is your soul today?

Quote for the day:

“A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all the other virtues.” —Cicero

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• Why did Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services fail? What the outages can teach us about the spiritual realm
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