Matthew 2:16-23 - Dec 10, 2023

Mount Zion Community Church

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:00

and we can jump into our sermon this week. So we're gonna be in Matthew chapter two and we're looking at verses 16 through 23.

00:10

So at this point, we have the opportunity to wrap up the second chapter of Matthew.

00:16

And so far, I think this has been just a fascinating look at the early life of Jesus.

00:23

We left off last week with Joseph being awakened by an angel of the Lord in a dream and taking his family and fleeing to Egypt in order to keep them away from Herod.

00:36

Now we don't have to recap all the stuff that we looked at last week. You know, we don't need to do it in detail. But at this point,

00:42

I do wanna give you just a reminder of a couple of key concepts that we're looking at in the Gospel of Matthew, just so that they're top of mind as we're getting ready to go through these next few verses that we're studying.

00:53

So the two concepts that I wanna remind you of that I wanna set out before you are a couple of Matthew's goals in writing this

01:00

Gospel. So the first one is that Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of what we know as the

01:06

Old Testament Scriptures. And this is important to all of us for a couple of reasons.

01:12

And one of the first reasons is this. In the modern church, in the era in which we live and in which we function, there's a tendency to discount the importance of the

01:26

Old Testament. There's a tendency to sort of back away from it and not really emphasize it.

01:31

We don't wanna teach on it too much because some of it sounds harsh or it's hard to understand or we can't see what the relevance is for us today.

01:45

You know, you'll hear people say stuff like, well, we're under the new covenant, right? We're under the covenant of Jesus.

01:51

We're the new covenant church. So we don't have to worry about the old covenant stuff. And because the

01:57

Old Testament was written so long ago and it was written in and to a culture that's so drastically different from where we are, not only chronologically, not only within time, but geographically, and even culturally.

02:16

The way things are understood is just drastically different. And because of this, because of this huge separation, it can be hard to understand or it can be hard to fit it into our worldview.

02:32

And a worldview, in case you haven't heard that term before, is essentially a set of values or a set of assumptions or a set of filters that we use to process everything that we see, right?

02:43

Because it's just nonstop information coming at us all day, every day from every corner of the universe, whether it's on the internet or coming from our phones, or it's me talking to you right now, or it's you talking to your family, or it's at work or at school or wherever it is that you are.

03:04

And the things that we experience in our day -to -day life is how we process that.

03:10

Again, because we need a shortcut. We need a way to fit these things in. And when things conflict with our worldview, a lot of times we just sort of discard, right?

03:20

Because if they conflict with our worldview and we don't have time to fully process through it, we just sort of let it go.

03:27

Right or wrong, that's how people operate. And for a

03:32

Christian, someone who is a believer and a follower of Christ, hopefully we hold what we would call a biblical worldview or a

03:42

Christian worldview, which is a worldview that runs everything through the filter of the

03:47

Bible. So this is a good thing.

03:54

It's beneficial because I would say to you that if something that we see violates a scriptural principle, or it violates

04:03

God's word or God's will, then it probably has very little utility in your life.

04:10

It's not something that you need to hold onto. It might be something that you wanna hold onto, but it's not something that you need to hold onto.

04:16

Because what you'll find is as you let this stuff in, stuff that violates your biblical worldview or stuff that comes in conflict with your biblical worldview, it can start to erode your faith.

04:32

And not only that, it can start to pull you into some kind of sin.

04:39

And it might be pulling you back into a sin that you've turned away from. It might be pulling you into a new sin, but whatever it's doing, it's not helpful in your walk as a

04:51

Christian. It's not helpful in your process of sanctification, which as we've talked about before is the process of becoming holier and holier day by day.

05:01

Never reaching perfection, but striving to be more like Christ, striving to honor God for the salvation that he's giving you.

05:09

But that was a little bit of a digression. So let's go back to the Old Testament. Taken on its own, it's a lot of different things.

05:19

It's a historical record. It really is. The Bible is history. And it's a book of laws and rules.

05:27

It's the writing of prophets. There's principles in there for living. There's wisdom literature.

05:35

And there's even a recount of God's interactions with a lot of people, including what we hold to believe are the words of God.

05:48

And a perfect example of this is Leviticus. Now, Leviticus is that book of the

05:54

Bible. It's the third book in the Old Testament. And you probably remember it because when you said in January that you were gonna read the

06:02

Bible all the way through this year, and then you got to Leviticus, you're like, I can't do this anymore. I'm gonna do something else.

06:09

It's happened to me. It's happened to everybody. Don't be ashamed. But you gotta push through.

06:17

But the reason that we wanna gloss over this, or the reason we get stuck on this is because this book is full of rules.

06:30

It's full of rules that don't make a lot of sense to us because they were given by God to Moses to the people of Israel.

06:41

And they're repeated. Some of them you see them two or three times. And it's just, it can be difficult to get through.

06:48

I understand. But rather than blowing it off, what we have to do is consider a book like Leviticus or like anything in the

06:58

Old Testament. I'm just using that as an example. We're not really talking that much about Leviticus today. So we have to properly understand it in relation to the whole

07:05

Bible, and we have to properly understand it in relation to the New Testament as well. And that brings me to another point as we're talking about the

07:14

Old Testament before we get into the Scripture. Believe it or not, there are pastors out there in the world who will say stuff like we need to unhitch our faith from the

07:30

Old Testament. They say that we need to stop relying on the Old Testament as part of the basis of our

07:37

Christianity. And the reason they say that is because this stuff is so hard to understand, and it will turn off people who aren't believers, or it'll fly over the head of people who are new believers.

07:51

But back to main point number one here. The Old Testament Scriptures are essential for us.

07:59

They're essential for establishing who Jesus is. And on the flip side of that,

08:07

Jesus helps us determine meaning of those Old Testament Scriptures. We see the fulfillment of those

08:15

Old Testament Scriptures in Jesus. And if somebody says that we should unhitch our faith from the

08:21

Old Testament and rely only on the words of Jesus, that is a strange statement because many of the words of Jesus are direct quotations of the

08:34

Old Testament Scriptures from all over the Old Testament. And we'll see that in the next couple of weeks.

08:44

But not just Jesus, not just that. But all the writings in the

08:50

New Testament rely on Old Testament Scriptures as well. Paul's writings,

08:56

John's writings, Peter's writings, the writer of Hebrews, they use the

09:01

Old Testament Scriptures because they were writing these things not to us, they would ultimately come to us, and they're still useful to us, but they were writing them to the people at the time.

09:11

And they would have understood everything in what we call the New Testament in light of the

09:16

Old Testament Scriptures. So that's part of the reason why we need to not gloss over the

09:26

Old Testament. We need to not downplay the importance of the Old Testament. But we need to look and see, like Matthew is showing us throughout his gospel, that Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of these

09:38

Scriptures. He's the fulfillment of these Scriptures through a number of prophecies. We'll talk about a couple more of those in just a bit.

09:47

And the second goal of Matthew, so two goals, right, that we're gonna focus on just for right now.

09:52

One is that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament. Two is that Jesus Christ was born a king.

09:58

Jesus is the Messiah that was promised by those Old Testament Scriptures. And we've discussed this several times, and we'll keep coming back to it because it's important to get to grasp.

10:09

But this is a huge theme and a huge focus of Matthew's gospel. This is why he started out with the genealogy, structured the way he did.

10:17

This is why we have the story of the wise men, kingmakers showing up to reinforce the idea that he was king.

10:26

And not only did they show up, but they tipped off the current king, if you recall, Herod, the current king at the time of the verses we were reading, who was ruling over the

10:35

Jews. And Herod played a very important role in this writing too. And he played a very important role in verifying the kingship of Jesus.

10:45

Now, it wasn't specifically because of anything that he said that he played an important role in verifying

10:51

Jesus's kingship, but it was the things that he did. It was the actions that Herod took that show us that he believed that Jesus was the

11:02

Messiah, or at least he believed it enough to do this. One of those actions was that he grilled the wise men.

11:08

When they came to find out where the king was, he got from them specifically when they saw the star.

11:16

He wanted to know exactly when this happened so that he could figure out when this Messiah was born.

11:24

And then when he sent them on their way, he tried to convince them to come back to him once they found

11:30

Jesus and tell him where he was. But that's not even the biggest way.

11:36

So we're gonna see probably in a twisted way

11:41

Herod's greatest testimonial to the kingship of Jesus in what happens next.

11:47

So let's go to our passage. Again, we're in Matthew chapter two, and we're just gonna look at verse 16 briefly.

11:54

Verse 16 says this. Then when Herod saw that he had been tricked by the Magi, he became very enraged and sent and slew all the male children who were in Bethlehem and all its vicinity from two years old and under according to the time which he had carefully determined from the

12:11

Magi. This is another reason that I like the way the

12:20

LSB translates the Greek. So they translated that Herod saw that he had been tricked by the

12:27

Magi. And this is a little bit more accurate probably as best we can know to what

12:36

Herod was feeling. So it's not that the Magi tricked him. They were told in a dream by the angel of the

12:42

Lord as well to go back another way. But Herod's perception of the situation was that they had pulled a fast one on him, even though the truth is that God had providentially guided the

12:58

Magi away from him. But Herod doesn't know this. As far as he knows, the

13:04

Magi are off where Jesus is and they're cooking up some kind of deal or they're coming up with some kind of plot so that when he takes over for Herod, something good happens for them.

13:15

I don't know, they get a seat in the kingdom or they get some riches or they give them their gold back or something like that.

13:22

And Herod, he thinks this, right? Because we talked a couple weeks ago about the fact that he wasn't well. Herod was not physically healthy.

13:29

Herod was not mentally healthy. He's a paranoid, unstable guy.

13:37

The Jews feared him because they knew his reactions would be bad to stuff like this. So in his paranoia and instability, the idea that the

13:48

Magi are colluding with his replacement to get him thrown out of his kingship sends him into a rage.

13:57

And that's another thing that we see here. It says he became very enraged. And the implication in the

14:03

Greek is that he essentially lost all control of his emotions. He lost all control of his temper.

14:11

This wasn't just that he was mildly upset, but he was furious, just a white hot rage.

14:21

And this is one of the ways that we see that Herod's showing through his actions that he believes that Jesus is truly a king.

14:31

And we see his response. And his response is awful. And it's probably one of the most violent things that Herod has ever done.

14:40

And that's saying a lot because Herod was known for killing his wife and killing a couple of his children.

14:48

So Herod completely loses control. And his best idea for an attempt to prevent somebody else from taking over his throne is to kill all the male children aged two years old and under in Bethlehem and the surrounding areas.

15:12

He picked this age probably obviously because what he had determined from the

15:19

Magi was that this is roughly the age that Jesus was gonna be based on the time that the stars showed up to them.

15:26

And then he probably added a couple months on the early side, added a couple months on the later side just to make sure that he got everybody covered, just to make sure that he managed to kill every male child that could possibly be a threat to his throne.

15:47

But Jesus wasn't there. Jesus was not among the male children that were slaughtered.

15:58

And that's because it was not in God's plan for that to happen. It was

16:03

God's plan to get Jesus out of there. And I said we were gonna talk about two more prophecies that are fulfilled by these verses this week.

16:13

And now we're getting to the third one. So this is four prophecies, and this is the third of the four.

16:22

In verse 17 and 18, we see this. Then what had been spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled saying, a voice was heard in Ramah weeping in great mourning,

16:34

Rachel weeping for her children, and she was refusing to be comforted because they were no more.

16:44

So that's verses 17 and 18. Now sometimes what Matthew does is he just says that it would be fulfilled by the prophet.

16:54

But in this case, he names Jeremiah. He says then what had been spoken through the prophet

16:59

Jeremiah would be fulfilled. So what are we looking at here as far as these verses are concerned?

17:07

Specifically, this is referring to what we see in Jeremiah 31, 15.

17:14

That says this. Thus says the Lord, a voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping.

17:20

Rachel is weeping for her children. She refuses to be comforted for her children because they are no more.

17:26

Again, essentially exactly what Jesus said, right? I just repeated it. But that's in Jeremiah 31, 15.

17:32

So just to add a little bit of historical context to this, a little bit of background,

17:38

I'm gonna talk about a couple of these elements that are here. So Ramah is the first one, and this is the location.

17:46

And this is kind of a fascinating thing about this set of four prophecies that are in these two verses because one thing you might notice is that each one of the prophecies is tied to a location.

17:59

So the first one was that the child would be born in Bethlehem of Judea, a location. The second was that he would be brought out of Egypt, a location.

18:08

And now the third is that a voice is heard in Ramah. This is another location. So Ramah was a town about five miles north of Jerusalem.

18:17

And the significance of this town is that this is where the Israelites were taken when they were to be deported to Babylon.

18:25

So we heard about the Babylonian exile in Matthew's genealogy. Isn't it, it's so fascinating how all this stuff is woven together.

18:35

And we keep seeing it over and over again, right? But we have to look deeper than just the words on the page sometime to understand the context.

18:43

We have to do that because the people that were reading it, the people that Matthew wrote it to, they know this already.

18:49

They probably remembered the exile or they'd read about it or heard about it or something like that. So, and where we get this from is a little later in Jeremiah.

18:58

This is in Jeremiah 40 verse one, which says, the word came to Jeremiah from the

19:03

Lord after Nebarazadam, the captain of the guard, had let him go from Ramah when he took him bound in chains along with the captives of Jerusalem and Judah who were being exiled to Babylon.

19:17

So, Ramah is a tragic location, right? That's part of the point of this.

19:24

That's why it's been pulled out specifically because it's associated in the mind of the readers at the time with something bad that happened.

19:33

Now, we also have Rachel and she is another person that you should be familiar with from the

19:41

Old Testament. Rachel was the wife of Jacob, who is also known as Israel.

19:46

And she was the mother of Joseph and Joseph's sons were Ephraim and Manasseh.

19:54

The reason they're significant is because Ephraim and Manasseh were two individuals that had tribes named after them, 12 tribes of Israel, right?

20:04

So those are two of them. John MacArthur also notes that Ephraim is often used as a synonym for the northern kingdom, which is

20:12

Israel. And again, got a lot of historical data here. The two kingdoms, the one in the north was

20:18

Israel, the one in the south is Judah. So, back to Rachel. She's the grandmother of these.

20:25

Rachel was also the mother of Benjamin. And Benjamin's tribe became a part of the southern kingdom of Judah.

20:34

So, what we have here is Rachel and the children that are associated with her because they're also associated with the tribes of Israel.

20:45

One more interesting thing about Rachel's story, Genesis 30 verse one, it says this, when

20:51

Rachel saw that she bore Jacob no children, she envied her sister. She said to Jacob, give me children or I should die.

21:00

So that was something that she was desperate for, was for children.

21:07

And God granted her those children. And we see that in granting her those children, she essentially became a matriarch of all the people of Israel.

21:18

They came as descendants of her. But what we see in her weeping, the symbolism here, if you remember last week, we talked about typology, types.

21:35

What we see here is the children that she's weeping for were sort of a prefiguring of the children that would be slaughtered in Bethlehem.

21:50

And Rachel would prefigure the mothers of these children who were experiencing a tragedy.

21:56

So all these things are linked together. So she symbolizes the mourning of the

22:02

Israelites as they are held captive and departed to Babylon and the mourning of the Israelites as their sons are slaughtered because of Herod.

22:12

Herod sent his soldiers in to kill all of these male children. And this is really dark stuff.

22:23

That's another reason that sometimes we say we're from the Old Testament, because it's hard to understand the violence and it's hard to understand the tragedy.

22:31

But as with everything else, there's a light of hope present with this.

22:37

So Matthew doesn't mention this in this prophecy, but his readers would undoubtedly have known this.

22:44

But the next two verses in Jeremiah, after what we just read in 31 .15

22:50

say this, 31 .16 says, thus says the Lord, keep your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears, for there is a reward for your work, declares the

23:00

Lord, and they shall come back from the land of the enemy. And they did come back from the

23:06

Babylonian captivity. It took years, but God brought them back out of that captivity.

23:12

Verse 17 says, there is hope for your future, declares the Lord and your children. Your children shall come back to their own country.

23:21

Again, like we just said, God did bring them back to their own country. And this prophecy is fulfilled.

23:30

We see the tragedy and the slaughter of the children, but we see the light, we see the hope in the fact that Jesus is still alive.

23:40

Jesus was not part of this slaughter, just as the prophet writes about.

23:45

There's still hope to come and there's hope to come through Jesus. I wanna talk about this a little bit more, but we're gonna save it for something toward the end.

23:56

So we'll move on to verse 19 for right now. Verse 19 says, but when

24:03

Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt saying, and this is verse 20, get up, take the child and his mother and go into the land of Israel for those who sought the child's life are dead.

24:15

So Joseph got up, took the child and his mother and came into the land of Israel. But when he had heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father

24:24

Herod, he was afraid to go there. Then after being warned by God in a dream, he departed for the district of Galilee and came and lived in a city called

24:34

Nazareth so that what was spoken through the prophets would be fulfilled. He shall be called a

24:40

Nazarene. Now, I just went through and blasted through all those verses. But in verse 19, so we see that Herod is dead.

24:48

And yet again, we see an angel of the Lord coming to Joseph to deliver him a message, right? But somehow, it's not quite that simple.

24:58

And the angel of the Lord says, go into the land of Israel, right? That's not super specific.

25:06

The angel of the Lord did not tell him, you have to go to this place. So when

25:13

Joseph looked, however it was that he found this out, to see that where he came from was now under the rule of Archelaus.

25:22

So even though Herod had died and Herod was no longer a threat to Jesus, his son is ruling on the throne.

25:30

And Archelaus took after his father in certain ways. And one of those ways was that he also was a fairly violent guy and killed a considerable number of Jews.

25:42

So maybe that's not the best place to go back to. Joseph is feeling as though they're not safe there still because one of Herod's sons is reigning.

25:56

So what we see in verses 22 and 23 is that he went to the district of Galilee to a town called

26:04

Nazareth. And once again, this is one of those prophetic fulfillments.

26:12

And once again, it involves a location. It involves Nazareth. So these four things can be taken together as a unit because they have this trait in common that he's showing these prophetic fulfillments.

26:28

That's such a strange thing to say. Prophetic fulfillments, and they all are tied to a location.

26:33

So this is the fourth prophecy that we're gonna look at in this section. Now, in contrast to what we just saw at Jeremiah, we see that Matthew didn't specifically refer to a prophet or to a very specific verse in this.

26:50

So what does that mean? It means that for Matthew and the people that were reading his gospel, they would have known what he was talking about.

27:07

And while the specific verse that says that the Messiah would be called in Nazarene is not in our

27:15

Bible, it's still something that would have been generally accepted by the people that were reading

27:23

Matthew's writings or hearing these teachings. And interestingly enough, so for our purposes, this is where the inspiration of the

27:32

Holy Spirit comes in, and this is where faith in the Holy Spirit comes in as well. The Holy Spirit determined that that's about as much as we need to know about this specific prophecy.

27:42

So talking a little bit about Nazareth, this was another town, a little bit north of Jerusalem, and the people there had kind of an interesting reputation.

27:54

In fact, to call somebody in Nazarene was actually an insult. That might be like calling them a hillbilly or calling them a hick or something like that.

28:02

You know, they were kind of a crude, violent, unpleasant people to be around.

28:09

We even see this among the disciples. So if you look at John 1, verses 45 through 46, it says this,

28:18

Philip found Nathanael and said to him, we have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote,

28:25

Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph. And Nathanael said, can anything good come out of Nazareth?

28:35

And in fact, the religious leaders of the day viewed the fact that Jesus came from Nazareth as evidence that he was not the

28:44

Messiah. They said, there's no way that our savior, the Messiah, the

28:49

King of the Jews, could come from Nazareth. It's like you guys saying, the Messiah came from Greene County.

28:56

And you're like, no, the Messiah could never come from Greene County. But Matthew, Matthew used this to show that it was yet another fulfillment of prophecy that did testify to Jesus' kingship.

29:16

And we'll see throughout the Gospel of Matthew how wrong the religious leaders were over and over and over.

29:27

So other than continuing to reinforce the themes of Jesus' kingship and being the fulfillment of scripture, what are some of the things that we can take away from these verses?

29:42

So I think I have three. We'll find out. The first one,

29:49

J .C. Ryle says this. This is something that we see through the actions of Herod. He says, the rulers of this world are seldom friendly to the cause of God.

30:02

So this was true 2 ,000 plus years ago when

30:07

Herod attempted to murder Jesus. And it's as true then as it is now.

30:14

Some of these things never change. And we look at these rulers, whether it's a president, a politician, a

30:25

CEO, a celebrity, whoever it is, that you might look at.

30:32

And we see what they have. And we envy it.

30:39

We envy the wealth and the power of these people, even if we don't want to admit it.

30:47

But we should be careful what we wish for, because we'll see later in the

30:53

Gospel of Matthew. I keep referring to these stories. I can't, it's like I can't wait to get to all of these verses.

31:01

And you know, it's gonna take a long time, but it's just, it's so exciting to me. As we'll see later in the story of the rich young ruler, if you're familiar with that one or if you remember it.

31:13

You know, Jesus says it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.

31:21

And this is not because money or riches are inherently bad.

31:29

But it's because our hearts and our motivations are inherently corrupted by sin.

31:37

So the money, the wealth, the power, it's not bad. But the corruption of sin that exists in each and every one of us is bad.

31:47

And it can make these things make us worse. You know, if we're not careful, that kind of wealth and power can corrupt us.

32:04

Or worse, we can put more of our faith or more of our trust into our money or into our position or into our stuff than we put in God, right?

32:16

We say that we trust God, but we only trust

32:22

Him so far as we have enough money saved up in our bank account to make sure that all of our needs are covered for a certain amount of time.

32:28

Then we trust God beyond that amount of time, right? And again, there's nothing wrong with being responsible, but it's where you put your faith and it's where you put your trust.

32:42

We say things like, oh, I could do so much more for the church or I could do so much more for God if I just had whatever, if I just had more money, if I just had a bigger house

32:53

I could have people over, if I just had a better job, more people would know who I am and it would mean more when

33:00

I say things. Fill in the blanks, you know, whatever it is that you want. Speaking of job, think about this one, right?

33:11

Well, I can't talk about Jesus at work because I might offend somebody, right? I can't, I don't want people to know that I'm a

33:17

Christian because then I might not get a promotion. But guess what? When I get to that next level or when

33:24

I'm in charge, I'll talk about it then because then they won't be able to do anything about it, right?

33:32

You know what I like about having everybody here? What I like? I like having the kids here and instead of being off in the back, having a separate lesson, learning something completely different, they come in here.

33:45

And while I do apologize if I create the need to have an uncomfortable conversation with your child because of something that I talked about,

33:55

I hope that it's not, you know, ever in a lewd way or in a, just a excessive way, but it's because it's something that we're pulling out of Scripture.

34:03

So again, apologies for that. If you need me to help, just let me know because I did cause it.

34:10

But I like to have the kids in here because for some of us, it's too late.

34:18

Some of us, it's too late for these lessons, right? I mean, ultimately, it's not too late totally, but we've already faced these situations and we've failed.

34:27

We didn't do what we were supposed to do. I've done it. I've backed off of stuff that I shouldn't have backed off of.

34:35

But I hope that even in some small way, your children and my children hear some of these ideas and it just lodges in their head somewhere and a few years or a decade or whatever down the road, they have the opportunity to stand up for Jesus wherever they are and to stand up for Jesus in a way that causes them risk to their reputation or to their wealth or to their position that they understand the value of doing that and they're not scared.

35:12

So we all get to hear these lessons because we talked about this last week, right?

35:22

One of the lessons, one of the takeaways that we saw in Jesus's birth is that God doesn't need some great, grand gesture.

35:35

He doesn't need something huge or flashy or showy. He can do anything with the smallest, most insignificant offering that you have with the most humble possession that you can bring.

35:49

He could take it and do great things for the kingdom with that. If Jesus, who is the savior of the world can come into the world as a baby, he wasn't doing anything as a baby.

36:02

He was doing what babies do. If he can use that, pretty much anything can happen.

36:10

And guess what? The desire, the desire to have more money or the desire to have a better job or be more important or more powerful, if we're being honest with ourselves, even if we would never say this to somebody else, that desire comes out of pride a lot of time, right?

36:36

We say it's for God, but really we just want it. And that's not a good thing.

36:43

One axiom, one saying that I've heard is that people don't change when they get more money or more power, right?

36:52

It just makes them more of what they already are. You're not gonna be more faithful to God because you have more money.

37:03

If you're faithful when you have nothing, you'll be faithful when you have everything. So that just, it speaks to that corrupting influence that I talked about of sin that dwells within each one of us.

37:20

And it means that those positions of power can be dangerous. We saw it in Herod.

37:27

We saw it in Pharaoh. We saw it in Nebuchadnezzar. And that's just to name a couple of people. And that's just to name people in the

37:33

Bible, not to name people ruling right now. And you know why? The reason that rulers are often not friendly to the cause of God is because that means that they have to, you have to, we have to acknowledge that God is in charge.

37:53

We have to acknowledge that there's a power greater than us. And we don't want to do that.

38:02

And the more people tell us how awesome we are, the less we want to admit that there's something greater than us, there's something more significant than us that we serve, to which we are a slave, not just that we serve.

38:22

I mean, it's more extreme than that. God owns everything, including you.

38:31

That should be an encouragement, but it can also be a threat. So those rulers, those rulers, they don't like that.

38:42

And we saw that. We saw every attempt to kill God's people. So we fight

38:48

God to stay in control, and fighting God to stay in control is a battle that we will never win. So that's the first thing.

38:54

Rulers are often not friendly to the cause of God. Now, the second lesson, oh man, the second lesson is that evil is a huge problem in our world, right?

39:06

And right now you're looking at me going, yeah, why are you up here telling us this?

39:13

Because that is just so stupid obvious that nobody needs to let us know this, because we see it every day.

39:18

We see it in abortion. We see it in society's attempt to destroy the family. We see it in war, rape, murder, child abuse, whatever kind of evil you can think about that you see in the news, that you see people, that you see rulers participating in.

39:34

And evil has always existed in the fallen world since Adam. I guess it didn't exist before Adam, but it's existed since Adam, and it will continue to exist until Christ returns.

39:47

But the reason I'm talking about this is because this puts a really big question in front of us, doesn't it?

39:55

And maybe some of you thought about this. And we read these things, and I could have let this go.

40:03

I could have just gotten you out of here 10 minutes earlier, but I thought that we should look at this instead.

40:12

So it gets lodged in the back of your head, even if you don't think about it. When we think about how children were slaughtered, but Jesus was saved from that slaughter.

40:20

And the question that we have goes like this. How could

40:25

God let this happen? And I think it's only fair to warn you that I'm gonna disappoint you with the answer.

40:37

Because I don't know, right? And one thing that I will say to you over and over and over again is that we will never, we will never be able to fully understand

40:50

God in his entirety. We don't have the resources for that. We don't have the capacity or the experience to understand perfect righteousness or perfect holiness or perfect justice.

41:05

Our human nature just won't allow it, but God's will. And, but still, this question just, it stares us in the face in this passage specifically.

41:21

At least it did me, because God providentially, like I said,

41:27

God providentially moved Jesus out of Bethlehem to avoid this slaughter.

41:34

But how many other babies were, how many other two years old and under were killed, right?

41:44

Why weren't they taken out? Why was part of God's plan for that to happen?

41:52

And like I said, I can't answer that, but we still have to think about it.

42:02

And we can always turn to Scripture. Here's one thing that we know, one thing that we know, whether this helps or not.

42:09

Romans 8 .28 says, and we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

42:19

And again, you won't get a final answer to this question from me, because I'm not capable of giving it.

42:26

It's not possible. So maybe it was a bad idea to open this can of worms, right? Maybe I should have just left it alone.

42:32

We can pretend everything's cool. But again, we can't, as Christians, we can't just, we can't ignore these things because they're uncomfortable, right?

42:45

Even if we can't answer them, we have to at least figure out a way to process them. So think about this too.

42:55

Scripture tells us what happens when people insist on being in sin.

43:01

Romans 1, verses 21 through 24 says this. For even though they knew

43:07

God, and in the verses before, Paul is writing about how it's evident from creation.

43:13

It's evident from the things that are all around who God is and what God has done. For even though they knew

43:18

God, they did not glorify him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their thoughts and their foolish heart was darkened.

43:27

Professing to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible

43:33

God for an image in the likeness of corruptible man and of birds and four -footed animals and crawling creatures.

43:40

So this just means that they started worshiping idols. And it doesn't have to be an animal or a bird or a man, it can be anything.

43:48

But the payoff comes in verse 24, which says, therefore, God gave them over in their lusts of their hearts to impurity so that their bodies would be dishonored among them.

44:01

These people insisted on worshiping idols, they insisted on sinning, they insisted on turning from God, and God let them.

44:10

God gave them over. But that's all well and good for the sinners, right? But what about the people who were impacted by their sins?

44:19

What about the innocent people? So here's the question that goes along with how could

44:24

God let that happen. The question is, why do bad things happen to good people? You ever heard that question?

44:31

Have you ever asked that question? Yes, you have. We all have.

44:37

And what I'm gonna say next, you might hate it, right? It might offend you, it might make you mad.

44:48

There are no good or innocent people. Not one. Not even those children.

44:57

Romans 5 .12 says, therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.

45:08

Romans 3 .23, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Now, I will tell you one thing.

45:17

I do believe that those slaughtered children are with God. Those slaughtered children were glorified with their

45:26

Heavenly Father. And this is one of those places where faith comes in.

45:36

You have to have a tremendous amount of faith. I was gonna say that you have to understand it, but that's not a fair requirement, right?

45:43

I already said we can't understand it, but there has to be an element of faith. And that brings us to our third lesson.

45:49

So we just took everything way down here, right? It's kind of depressing and it's kind of confusing and we don't know how this could happen.

45:57

But lesson three, God has provided salvation for us in spite of all that evil.

46:03

So again, can I tell you how everything works for God's plan? I cannot, but God works all these things for His glory.

46:13

And what God works for His glory is for our good, okay?

46:19

We tend to think that our good is what we think it is. As a

46:24

Christian, our good is what God says that it is and it doesn't always line up.

46:33

Any suffering, any inconvenience, any unpleasantness you've experienced will attest to that.

46:40

So what we have to avoid is trying to fit everything that happens into the little box of our understanding.

46:50

Because we don't see the big picture, we see a small picture. Think about your kids if you have kids.

46:58

I bet that if you have kids, you've had to make them do stuff that they hate, absolutely hate it.

47:05

And you had to make them do it because it was good for them, but they didn't want it.

47:11

They had to eat this or not eat that, or they had to go there or they couldn't be friends with this person, or they had to come and sit and listen to a 50 -minute sermon.

47:27

But you made them do it anyway and someday they'll thank you. But that's how it is with us and God, right?

47:35

God is the Father, that means we are children. As smart and as mature and as well -read and awesome as we think we are, we are children.

47:51

Children of God, and that's not a bad thing. Again, God owns it all and that's good because if we were in charge of it, it would not be good.

48:06

But if you want proof, I can give you this. If you want unassailable proof that God can work any evil for his ultimate good, we have it, we have that proof.

48:18

That proof is the cross, right? God saved

48:25

Jesus as a baby while not saving other babies because there was a different plan for God's glory in the life of Jesus.

48:34

Yes, the other ones died. And once again, I'll repeat this again,

48:40

I believe that they were glorified with their heavenly Father. But we still look at it and say that's not fair.

48:48

But think about Jesus, take it to Jesus. Jesus lived a perfect, sinless life, came to minister to us and they killed him.

49:06

He was tortured and murdered at the hands of sinners, sinners just like us, and guess what?

49:13

That's not fair either. But the unfair death on the cross of Jesus, our perfect Savior, provided salvation for every one of us.

49:26

It made our justification before God possible because there was no other way.

49:37

Is that fair? It's not, it's not, we don't deserve that.

49:43

We didn't deserve it and he did it anyway. That's why we celebrate his birth.

49:53

That's why we don't flinch and we don't turn away when we look at the cross and that's why we celebrate his resurrection because the resurrection was proof of that.

50:07

Nothing impresses me more, it's kind of related, nothing impresses me more than people who come out of a tragedy with their faith in God increased.

50:16

And I've met some and it's amazing. And I hope that I'm that strong if that happens to me.

50:25

So we also, again, I say it, I say it all the time, you don't believe me because I tell you something.

50:37

But we believe it because when I tell you something, I do my best to make sure that it's coming out of Scripture and not just out of my head.

50:48

We can turn to Scripture for these problems, I wanna read this, Revelation 21, verses one through eight. It says,

50:58

That means where we are, gone, gone, save the planet, nope, God's destroying it.

51:05

And there is no longer any sea. And I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband.

51:14

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, behold, the tabernacle of God is among men and he will dwell among them and they shall be his people and God himself will be among them.

51:25

And he will wipe away every tear from their eyes and there will no longer be any death and there will no longer be any mourning or crying or pain.

51:33

The first things passed away. And he who sits on the throne said, behold, I am making all things new.

51:40

And he said, right, for these words are faithful and true. Then he said to me, they are done.

51:46

I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. I will give to the one who thirsts from the spring, the water of life without cost.

51:54

This, it says, they are done. That means this is happening.

52:00

This is not a promise to be fulfilled in the future. This promise has been fulfilled. The promise has been fulfilled through Jesus Christ.

52:07

The last couple of verses, he who overcomes will inherit these things and I will be his God and he will be my son.

52:12

But for the cowardly and unbelieving and abominable murderers and sexually immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, their part will be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.

52:27

So in our lives, a lot of stuff will happen. Good, bad, indifferent.

52:34

God is over it all. We see this in the story of Jesus. We see this in the story of children being slaughtered. We see this in the story of Israelites being returned from captivity.

52:43

It's all part of God's plan. And Jesus is the fulfillment of that plan.

52:51

And that's why we can celebrate peace in this season of Advent. Peace of Jesus Christ, no matter what it is that's happening in our lives.

53:00

Will you pray with me? Father, we thank you for your word and what you have shown us in your word.

53:08

God, what I pray is that we would each continue to reflect on who you are and what this means, but not just to think about it and not just to develop our own ideas and not just to come up with our own concepts and ways to work out things,

53:22

God, but that we would turn to your word and that little by little, the blinders would be removed from our eyes and we would see you for who you are.

53:34

We would see you for who you've revealed yourself to be in scripture, for who you've revealed yourself to be through the work of Jesus Christ.

53:42

For who you are as your son on the cross and who you've revealed yourself to be as our father. God, we thank you that we can be counted as your children because you are a loving and merciful father.