Peace on Earth, And Good Will Toward Men

Either the angels were mistaken, or we have misheard them.

Every December the world repeats one sentence it does not understand. It prints it on cards. It sings it to children. And it repeats it while the ground of the earth is still warm from what men did to one another in November.
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.
In Peace on Earth, and Good Will Toward Men, Balthasar Basileia takes the most sentimentalized verse in scripture and puts it back in the field where it was first spoken. What he finds there is not a Christmas wish. It is a military bulletin.
The "heavenly host" of Luke 2:14 is stratia - the ordinary Greek word for an army. Heaven did not send a choir over Bethlehem. Heaven mobilized. And the anthem those armies delivered contains no verb at all: no let there be, no there shall be. The angels were not wishing for peace and they were not predicting it. They were reporting that it had arrived, one hour earlier, in a stable.
Once that is settled, a harder question opens. If peace came, what has been sold to mankind under the same name ever since - and who profits when the word is emptied out?
This book answers from the text, and only from the text.

• Luke 2:14 translated clause by clause, from doxa and kabod to shalom, eirene, and eudokia
• Why Luke drops the earth out of the sentence thirty-three years later, and why Christ wept over it
• The peace God makes versus the peace the world enforces - and Ezekiel's test of the untempered mortar
• The man of sin, the son of perdition, drawn from Daniel, Paul, and John rather than from the headlines
• Daniel's six words on the whole strategy: by peace shall destroy many
• Why the white horse rides before the red one, and what that order costs the world
• Why the last war in human history will not be a battle at all, but a sentence pronounced

He comes against the Most High at once. He loses. But between now and then he deceives, and he deceives most successfully with the very word the armies of heaven sang.
Scripture quoted throughout from the Authorized King James Version.
Read this book and come away frightened of him, and the author has failed. Come away unable to be deceived by him - that is the labor.