Matthew 2:16-23 - Dec 10, 2023

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

Why the Old Testament Still Matters for Christians

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

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, 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.

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 gospel. So the first one is that Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of what we know as the Old Testament scriptures.

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

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

You know, you'll hear people say stuff like, well, we're under the new covenant, right? We're under the covenant of Jesus. We're the new covenant church. So we don't have to worry about the old covenant stuff.

And because the 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.

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. 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?

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.

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

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. Right or wrong, that's how people operate. And for a Christian, someone who is a believer and a follower of Christ, hopefully we hold what we would call a biblical worldview or a Christian worldview, which is a worldview that runs everything through the filter of the Bible.

So this is a good thing. It's beneficial because I would say to you that if something that we see violates a scriptural principle or it violates God's word or God's will, then it probably has very little utility in your life.

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 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.

And not only that, it can start to pull you into some kind of sin. 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 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, never reaching perfection, but striving to be more like Christ, striving to honor God for the salvation that he's giving you.

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. It's a historical record.

It really is.

The Bible is history. And it's a book of laws and rules. It's the writing of prophets. There's principles in there for living. There's wisdom literature. 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.

And a perfect example of this is Leviticus. Now, Leviticus is that book of the 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 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. It's happened to me. It's happened to everybody.

Don't be ashamed.

But you gotta push through. 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. 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.

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.

I understand. But rather than blowing it off, what we have to do is consider a book like Leviticus or like anything in the 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 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 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 Old Testament. They say that we need to stop relying on the Old Testament as part of the basis of our 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. But back to main point number one here.

The Old Testament Scriptures are essential for us. They're essential for establishing who Jesus is. And on the flip side of that, Jesus helps us determine meaning of those Old Testament Scriptures. We see the fulfillment of those Old Testament Scriptures in Jesus.

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

And we'll see that in the next couple of weeks. But not just Jesus, not just that. But all the writings in the New Testament rely on Old Testament Scripture as well. Paul's writings, John's writings, Peter's writings, the writer of Hebrews, they use the 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.

And they would have understood everything in what we call the New Testament in light of the Old Testament Scriptures. So that's part of the reason why we need to not gloss over the 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 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. And the second goal of Matthew, so two goals, right, that we're gonna focus on just for right now. One is that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament.

Two is that Jesus Christ was born a king. 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.

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

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 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. Now, it wasn't specifically because of anything that he said that he played an important role in verifying 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 Messiah, at least he believed it enough to do this. One of those actions was that he grilled the wise men. When they came to find out where the king was, he got from them specifically when they saw the star.

He wanted to know exactly when this happened so that he could figure out when this Messiah was born. And then when he sent them on their way, he tried to convince them to come back to him once they found Jesus and tell him where he was.

But that's not even the biggest way. So we're gonna see probably in a twisted way Herod's greatest testimonial to the kingship of Jesus in what happens next. So let's go to our passage. Again, we're in Matthew chapter two, and we're just gonna look at verse 16 briefly.

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 Magi.

This is another reason that I like the way the LSB translates the Greek. So they translated that Herod saw that he had been tricked by the Magi. And this is a little bit more accurate probably, as best we can know, to what Herod was feeling.

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

But Herod doesn't know this. As far as he knows, the 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.

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. 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. Herod was not mentally healthy. He's a paranoid, unstable guy. 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 Magi are colluding with his replacement to get him thrown out of his kingship sends him into a rage.

And that's another thing that we see here. It says he became very enraged. And the implication in the Greek is that he essentially lost all control of his emotions. He lost all control of his temper. This wasn't just that he was mildly upset, but he was furious, just a white hot rage.

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. 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.

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

He picked this age, probably obviously, because what he had determined from the Magi was that this is roughly the age that Jesus was gonna be based on the time that the stars showed up to them. 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.

But Jesus wasn't there. Jesus was not among the male children that were slaughtered. And that's because it was not in God's plan for that to happen. It was 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.

And now we're getting to the third one. So this is four prophecies, and this is the third of the four. 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, Rachel weeping for her children, and she was refusing to be comforted because they were no more.

So that's verses 17 and 18. Now sometimes what Matthew does is he just says that it would be fulfilled by the prophet. But in this case, he names Jeremiah. He says then what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah would be fulfilled.

So what are we looking at here as far as these verses are concerned? Specifically, this is referring to what we see in Jeremiah 31, 15. That says this. Thus says the Lord, a voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping.

Rachel is weeping for her children. She refuses to be comforted for her children because they are no more. Again, essentially exactly what Jesus said, right? I just repeated it. But that's in Jeremiah 31, 15.

So just to add a little bit of historical context to this, a little bit of background, I'm gonna talk about a couple of these elements.

That are here.

So Ramah is the first one, and this is the location. 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.

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.

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

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. 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.

We have to do that because the people that were reading it, the people that Matthew wrote it to,.

They know this already.

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. This is in Jeremiah 40 verse one, which says, "'The word came to Jeremiah from the 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.'".

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

Now we also have Rachel. And she is another person that you should be familiar with from the Old Testament. Rachel was the wife of Jacob, who is also known as Israel. And she was the mother of Joseph.

And Joseph's sons were Ephraim and Manasseh. The reason they're significant is because Ephraim and Manasseh were two individuals that had tribes named after them, 12 tribes of Israel, right? So those are two of them.

John MacArthur also notes that Ephraim is often used as a synonym for the northern kingdom, which is Israel. And again, got a lot of historical data here. The two kingdoms, the one in the north was Israel, the one in the south is Judah.

So, back to Rachel. She's the grandmother of these. Rachel was also the mother of Benjamin. And Benjamin's tribe became a part of the southern kingdom of Judah. 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.

One more interesting thing about Rachel's story, Genesis 30, verse one, it says this, when Rachel saw that she bore Jacob no children, she envied her sister. She said to Jacob, give me children or I should die.

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

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. 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.

And Rachel would prefigure the mothers of these children who were experiencing a tragedy. So, all these things are linked together. So she symbolizes the mourning of the Israelites as they are held captive and departed to Babylon and the mourning of the Israelites as their sons are slaughtered because of Herod.

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

But as with everything else, there's a light of hope present with this. So Matthew doesn't mention this in this prophecy, but his readers would undoubtedly have known this. But the next two verses in Jeremiah, after what we just read in 31 .15 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 Lord, and they shall come back from the land of the enemy.

And they did come back from the Babylonian captivity. It took years, but God brought them back out of that captivity. Verse 17 says, there is hope for your future, declares the Lord and your children.

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

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

God’s Providence in Herod’s Violence

For something toward the end. So we'll move on to verse 19 for right now. Verse 19 says, but when 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. 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, 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 Nazareth so that what was spoken through the prophets would be fulfilled. He shall be called a Nazarene.

Now I just went through and blasted through all those verses but in verse 19, so we see that Herod is dead 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 and the angel of the Lord says, go into the land of Israel, right?

That's not super specific. The angel of the Lord did not tell him you have to go to this place. So when Joseph looked, however it was that he found this out to see that where he came from was now under the rule of Archelaus.

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

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. So what we see in verses 22 and 23 is that he went to the district of Galilee to a town called Nazareth and once again, this is one of those prophetic fulfillments 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, that's such a strange thing to say, prophetic fulfillments and they all are tied to a location.

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

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 and while the specific verse that says that the Messiah would be called in Nazarene is not in our Bible, it's still something that would have been generally accepted by the people that were reading Matthew's writings or hearing these teachings.

And interestingly enough, so for our purposes, this is where the inspiration of the 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.

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. 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. You know, they were kind of a crude, violent, unpleasant people to be around. We even see this among the disciples.

So if you look at John 1, verses 45 through 46, it says this, "'Philip found Nathanael and said to him, "'We have found him of whom Moses in the law "'and also the prophets wrote, "'Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.'.

And Nathanael said, "'Can anything good come out of Nazareth?''. And in fact, the religious leaders of the day viewed the fact that Jesus came from Nazareth as evidence that he was not the Messiah. They said, there's no way that our Savior, the Messiah, the King of the Jews, could come from Nazareth.

It's like you guys saying the Messiah came from Greene County. 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's kingship.

And we'll see throughout the Gospel of Matthew how wrong the religious leaders were over and over and over. So, other than continuing to reinforce the themes of Jesus's kingship and being the fulfillment of Scripture, what are some of the things that we can take away from these verses?

So, I think I have three.

We'll find out.

The World’s Rulers and the Danger of Wealth and Power

The first one, 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. So, this was true 2 ,000 plus years ago when Herod attempted to murder Jesus.

And it's as true then as it is now. Some of these things never change. And we look at these rulers, whether it's a president, a politician, a CEO, a celebrity, whoever it is, that you might look at. And we see what they have.

And we envy it. We envy the wealth and the power of these people, even if we don't want to admit it. But we should be careful what we wish for, because we'll see later in the Gospel of Matthew. I keep referring to these stories.

It's like I can't wait to get to all of these verses. And it's gonna take a long time, but it's just 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.

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. And this is not because money or riches are inherently bad. But it's because our hearts and our motivations are inherently corrupted by sin.

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

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? We say that we trust God, but we only trust 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.

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. 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 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 I say things.

Fill in the blanks, you know, whatever it is that you want. Speaking of job, think about this one, right? 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 Christian because then I might not get a promotion.

But guess what?

When I get to that next level or when I'm in charge, I'll talk about it then because then they won't be able to do anything about it, right? 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 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, I hope that it's not, you know, ever in a lewd way or in a just excessive way, but it's because it's something that we're pulling out of Scripture.

So again, apologies for that. If you need me to help, just let me know because I did cause it. But I like to have the kids in here because for some of us, it's too late. 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 failed. 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, 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.

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

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

We say it's for God, but really we just want it. And that's not a good thing. One axiom, one saying that I've heard is that people don't change when they get more money or more power, right? It just makes them more of what they already are.

You're not gonna be more faithful to God because you have more money. 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.

And it means that those positions of power can be dangerous. We saw it in Herod. 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 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. We have to acknowledge that there's a power greater than us and we don't want to do that.

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.

I mean, it's more extreme than that. God owns everything, including you. That should be an encouragement, but it can also be a threat. So those rulers, those rulers, they don't like that. And we saw that.

We saw every attempt to kill God's people. So we fight 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. Rulers are often not friendly to the cause of God.

Why Evil, Innocent Suffering, and the Cross Point to God’s Salvation

Now, the second lesson, oh man, the second lesson is that evil is a huge problem in our world, right? And right now you're looking at me going, yeah. Why are you up here telling us this? Because that is just so stupid obvious that nobody needs to let us know this because we see it every day.

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.

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. But the reason I'm talking about this is because this puts a really big question in front of us,.

Doesn't it?

And maybe some of you thought about this. And we read these things and I could have let this go. I could have just gotten you out of here 10 minutes earlier, but I thought that we should look at this instead.

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. And the question that we have goes like this.

How could God let this happen? And I think it's only fair to warn you that I'm gonna disappoint you with the answer 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 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. Our human nature just won't allow it. But God's will.

But still,.

This question just,.

It stares us in the face in this passage specifically. At least it did me. Because God providentially, like I said, God providentially moved Jesus out of Bethlehem to avoid this slaughter. But how many other babies were, how many other two years old and under were killed?

Right? Why weren't they taken out? Why was part of God's plan for that to happen? And like I said, I can't answer that. But we still have to think about it. And we can always turn to scripture. Here's one thing that we know.

One thing that we know, whether this helps or not. 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. And again, you won't get a final answer to this question from me because I'm not capable of giving it.