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Welcome back to Advent of Carols from VerseNotes. I’m Jerry Towler, and today we’re looking at “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen”, the second of two carols that make you care about punctuation.

If you want to listen to the song before we dive in, you’ll find some links in the show notes.

Let’s talk about that title.

The carol is God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen, and I’m going to say it with the punctuation out loud because it matters:

God rest you merry, comma, gentlemen.

The comma comes after merry, not after you.

It’s not God rest you, merry gentlemen, like God is talking to a bunch of already-cheerful guys in a tavern. It’s more like: may God keep you merry—at rest, at peace, steady.

Merry here doesn’t mean bubbly or festive. This is an older use of the word that means more like whole and steady and unshaken.

So understood properly, this carol is not about manufacturing cheer. It’s not about yuletide mugs of ale or eggnog. It’s about being freed from fear.

And that is exactly the message that the angels bring.

So as soon as we start in verse one, we get:

God rest you merry, gentlemen,
Let nothing you dismay.

That’s basically the angel’s first words in Luke 2:

Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy.

The angel doesn’t start with rejoice. He starts with fear not—let nothing you dismay.

That’s common to angels, right, throughout Scripture, which is one reason people have always suspected that angels might be a little intense. If every time you show up you have to lead with don’t be afraid, it suggests you don’t look like a friendly golden retriever.

So God rest you merry and fear not are doing the same work here. They’re both addressing fear first.

This carol, interestingly, is not about the joy of Christmas quite yet. We’re getting to something more foundational:

Something has changed, so fear no longer rules.

And what I love about this carol is that it doesn’t just say, don’t be afraid. It says, here’s why fear is gone.

It keeps going:

Remember, Christ our Savior was born on Christmas Day
To save us all from Satan’s power
When we were gone astray.

That gone astray line is basically Romans 5 in carol form:

God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

While we were gone astray. While we were still sinners. While we were still lost. Before we even knew how lost we were, Christ died for us.

See, Christmas isn’t God rewarding us for good behavior with an eternal Savior. Christmas is God entering the darkness and sin of the world of men and moving toward us while we’re still walking the other way.

And Hebrews tells us what kind of rescue this is—what it means to be saved from Satan’s power.

Yes, this is the same Hebrews 2 I’ve mentioned over and over again this Advent, but this time the carol’s not referring to the flesh-and-blood part, but to the slavery part.

Jesus partook of flesh and blood so that, through death, he might destroy the one who has the power of death—that is, the devil.

That’s not some sort of medieval drama or God sending encouragement from a safe distance. That’s God entering the human condition and destroying our oldest enemy.

Hebrews says he delivers all those who, through fear of death, were subject to lifelong slavery.

The enemy is death. And Hebrews tells us that fear of death led to bondage.

The fear that quietly runs your life because you know it’s going to end, but you don’t know when. Fear that you don’t know what’s next, that you don’t have control.

And Christmas says you don’t have to pretend you’re not afraid. You don’t have to psych yourself into cheer.

God has done something real in history, and the fear can be gone.

That’s why God rest you merry matters.

God is offering steadiness as a gift—not because you’ve achieved peace on your own, but because Christ has stepped into death itself and broken the claim that fear has over you.

And that’s why the angel’s message actually works: it’s effective.

It’s not just don’t worry.
It’s look what God has done.

Now the rest of the carol is also interesting.

It basically tells the story of Luke 2 again, but it does it in a specific and unique way. It doesn’t stop at the announcement; it follows the shepherds’ response.

The angel says fear not and tells them that a Savior is born in Bethlehem, and the shepherds rejoice—and then they move.

Luke puts it like this:

When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.”

That’s the order: news, then action.

This carol paints it with urgency, actually:

They left their flocks a-feeding
In tempest, storm, and wind,
And went to Bethlehem straightway,
This blessed Babe to find.

They leave their flocks—their responsibility, their work, their safety, the whole reason they’re in the fields in the first place.

The carol’s point isn’t the specifics of the shepherds’ jobs; it’s their response.

Weather?
Danger?
Inconvenience?

None of that outranks this news.

And a quick note here, just to remind you that the shepherds are not exactly gentlemen.

They’re not just ordinary people—they’re the outcasts. The dirty, smelly workers out in the fields on the night shift.

And yet they go “straightway,” because God has offered them something.

Freedom from sin and death and hell—not because of who they were, but because of who He is.

And then the story lands at the manger—Mary, the baby, the animals. And after we’ve watched the shepherds respond, the carol turns and looks directly at the camera and says:

Your turn.

Here’s verse five:

Now to the Lord sing praises,
All you within this place.

Not come and see, like O Come, All Ye Faithful.
Not go and tell, like Go Tell It on the Mountain.

But sing praises.

And not just sing, but live it out. It continues:

And with true love and brotherhood
Each other now embrace.

This isn’t just a nice Hallmark ending. This is Christian ethics.

Christmas doesn’t just give you this nice private feeling of peace; t gives you a new way to treat people.

Here’s Paul in Romans 12:

Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor.

The carol’s not even done yet. We get this wonderfully spicy line at the end:

This holy tide of Christmas
All other doth deface.

Not necessarily Christmas beats every holiday—because Easter is coming—but more like: if during Christmas Christ has broken the bondage of fear, then it really resets the hierarchy of festivities, doesn’t it?

And better yet, other fears lose their authority. They don’t get to run the show anymore.

Which brings us back to the title.

God rest you merry, gentlemen.

Let’s talk about where this carol came from.

This is a traditional carol that we know of at least since the 1650s, although some sources claim it goes back to the 1500s.

It was made popular in the book we’ve seen before—1833’s Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern. That’s not Christmas Carols New and Old from 1871, but it is another one of the famous collections of Christmas carols.

The tune is a traditional English melody that was first printed in 1815, but is also probably very old—back to at least the 1750s.

And there’s a funny thing here.

The punctuation error—the thing I talked about at the beginning with the comma—is also very old. It dates back at least to 1775.

In fact, no less than Charles Dickens replaces rest with bless in his famous novel A Christmas Carol, which makes a wrong punctuation actually make sense:

God bless you, merry gentlemen.

Anyway, let’s get back to the hymn.

The angel starts off saying fear not. Hebrews reminds us that fear was slavery—bondage to death and to the one who had the power of death.

And Christmas says: This is why you don’t fear: because deliverance from that fear has come.

These aren’t just feelings. These are tidings.

This is news you can stand on. News you can rest in. Comfort and joy.

So this Christmas, God rest you merry—keep you steady—and let nothing you dismay.

That’s why we sing.

Thanks for joining me today for Advent of Carols. If you’d like to help make more projects like this possible, check out VerseNotes Commons at: versenotes.org/commons.

We’ll be back tomorrow with another Carol of Christmas.

If you’ve got thoughts about today’s carol, I’d love to hear them. You can always reach me at [email protected].

And if you enjoyed the episode, the best gift you can give me is to pass it along to someone else who would enjoy it too.

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