What was the gifts of the three kings

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Then they opened their treasures and presented to the young Jesus three types of gifts: Gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Gold is a precious metal that has been used for jewelry, ornaments, currency, and idols throughout human history because of its color and shine.

Frankincense is an expensive fragrance or perfume made from trees in India and Arabia. Myrrh is a specific kind of costly perfume made from rare thorn bushes in Arabia and Ethiopia that is used as an antiseptic anointing oil and embalming fluid. In a similar way, because these gifts were expensive, they demonstrated the level of sacrificial love and worship they had for this newborn King. This was not a gesture of altruism, it was adulation.

The Magi were not purchasing anything with their gifts, they were praising. John Piper eloquently expressed it like this:. The gifts are intensifiers of desire for Christ himself in much the same way that fasting is.

I have not come to you for your things, but for yourself. And this desire I now intensify and demonstrate by giving up things, in the hope of enjoying you more, not things.

Almost ironically, though, God is clear through his word that he does not need anything that we have to offer. As the apostles preached in the Book of Acts:. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.

And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. It was a gift of faith. Begin with your myrrh. I know that I should receive the consequence of my sin, which is to be barred from your presence forever.

But you took my sin, dying in my place. I believe that. Now I ask you to accept me as your child forever. After you have done that, come with your incense, acknowledging that your life is as impure as the life of the Lord Jesus Christ is sinless. The Bible teaches that there is no good in man that is not mixed with evil. Finally, come with your gold. Gold symbolizes royalty. So when you come with your gold you acknowledge the right of Christ to rule your life.

Direct my life and lead me in it so that I might grow up spiritually to honor and to serve you accordingly. If you have come believing in all that the myrrh, incense, and gold signify, you have embarked on a path of great spiritual joy and blessing.

For those are the gifts of faith. They are the only things we can offer to the one who by grace has given all things to us. Charles H. It is impossible that our Divine Lord could have had fellowship with us unless He had given to us from His own abounding wealth and had become poor so as to make us rich.

Christmas Is for the Poor and Humble. Kent Hughes.