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Cape Cod artist creates “Lobster nativity scene” · The Daily Article

• 0:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Good day, and welcome to the Monday, December 1, 2025 edition of Dynaston forums, daily article podcasts.
• 0:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're glad you've joined us.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Chris Elkins, narrating today's daily article written by our co-founder, Dr. Jim Dynaston.
• 0:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: As soon as Thanksgiving is over, Christmas decorating begins at my house.
• 0:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: My wife is the expert, I'm the hard help.
• 0:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can know this by examining our nativity scenes.
• 0:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: One is simpler, featuring the baby Jesus surrounded by a doring parent and a worshiping angel.
• 0:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The other is more complex, with animals, shepherds and three magi.
• 0:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have pointed out over the years that the wise men were not present at the first Christmas
• 0:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: But since my theological observations have fallen annually on deaf ears, I have learned to keep my objections to myself.
• 0:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: However, here's a nativity set I must protest.
• 1:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: A Cape Cod artist has created what Axios calls, quote, New England's newest unlikely holiday sensation, the lobster nativity scene.
• 1:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: In quote, Jesus is depicted as a baby lobster in a bit of seaweed inside a crab shell cradle.
• 1:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The stable is a lobster trap.
• 1:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The other figures are various versions of lobsters as well.
• 1:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: When I read the story, I was viscerally bothered by the crass commercialization of Christmas.
• 1:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is there nothing someone won't do to sell something in the season we celebrate our Savior's birth?
• 1:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: But then, I remembered C.S.
• 1:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lewis's poignant description of the Christmas miracle.
• 1:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Note, the second person in God, the Son, became human himself.
• 1:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Was born into this 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 stones.
• 1:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: 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.
• 2:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you want to get the hang of it, think how you would like to become a slug or a crab.
• 2:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: In quote.
• 2:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Or for that matter, a lobster.
• 2:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over the weekend, I read famed historian Walter Isaacson's new book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written.
• 2:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a word by word analysis of the Declaration of Independence's central assertion, we hold these truths to be self-evident.
• 2:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain and alienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
• 2:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: The book tells the fascinating story of the Declaration's evolution from Thomas Jefferson's initial draft to the Documents' final version.
• 2:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: For example, we learned that Mr. Jefferson, despite his deistic misgivings regarding the supernatural, originally wrote, we hold these truths to be sacred.
• 3:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: However, Isaacson reports that Benjamin Franklin crossed out sacred and wrote self-evident in its place.
• 3:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is unsurprising given Franklin's worldview.
• 3:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: As Isaacson notes, the famous founder spent more than a month in late 1771 with the famous Scottish philosopher David Hume.
• 3:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here, he learned Hume's maximum that self-evident truths are, quote,
• 3:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: in quote, rather than upon empirical observation.
• 3:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: As a result of Franklin's edit, the threefold right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is a truth in the sense that we ascent logically and rationally to it.
• 3:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The famed triads nature is defined in the same manner.
• 3:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The founders created a secular republic and therefore offered no biblical or spiritual definitions for life or liberty.
• 4:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: 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, in quote, Christmas is proof that Jesus disagrees.
• 4:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The observable universe is currently estimated to be about 92 billion light years across.
• 4:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Traveling at 186,232 miles per second, it would take you 92 billion light years to travel from one edge of the universe to the other.
• 4:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: If your mind can grasp such expansive emincity, it's more capable than mine.
• 4:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: and yet the creator measures all of that between his thumb and little finger from Isaiah 40 verse 12 the message.
• 5:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Furthermore, it was by Jesus that all things were created in heaven and on earth visible and invisible according to Colossians 1 verse 16.
• 5:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: In verse 17, it is also in him that all things hold together.
• 5:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: 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 as recorded in Revelation 1 verse 17, Christ is so majestic that when he returns,
• 5:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Revelation 19 verse 16 reveals on his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
• 5:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And yet he voluntarily emptied himself of his indescribable immensity, found in Philippians 2 verse 7.
• 5:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: To become a fertilized egg, the size of a pinhead in the womb of a peasant girl.
• 5:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: 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.
• 6:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: 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.
• 6:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Three decades later, he made another fateful choice.
• 6:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Again, umbling himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross, as we read in Philippians 2 verse 8.
• 6:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: He could have been executed by stoning at the hands of a Jewish mob in John 8 verse 59.
• 6:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: but he chose to die for our sins by Roman crucifixion, the most painful tortured manner of execution ever devised.
• 6:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: In short, our Savior chose to sacrifice his life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for us.
• 6:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nothing about his decision was self-evident in the sense of rational operation.
• 6:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: finite human minds cannot comprehend such divine reasoning noted in Isaiah 55 verses 8 and 9.
• 7:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: But let's try.
• 7:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Imagine that it would somehow benefit you for a friend to come back to life as a lobster, a slug, or a crab.
• 7:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: 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.
• 7:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: So here's my question.
• 7:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: If your friend were to make this decision, then die in your place so you could live eternally, would you ever doubt that love for you?