Matthew 2:13-15 - Dec 3, 2023

And that's why we read Romans 5 21 just a little while ago, because that was a perfect description of the contrast between Jesus and Adam.

While at the same time, the basic outline is the same. You have a man who's the head of the entire human race, the head of the entire family.

He had an action or did an action that affected the entire human race. Hopefully I haven't lost you.

So again, Romans 5 17, for if by the transgression of the one death reign through the one, much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in the life of the one

Jesus Christ. So we see that the work of Jesus redeemed us all from Adam's sin. Now, it's important to know because you could then go all the way through the

Old Testament and start trying to figure out types, trying to pull typology out of these stories, but nothing, no prophecy, no prediction in the

Old Testament becomes a type until it sees some level of fulfillment in the New Testament.

And again, the reason that we're going all Bible college on you this morning right now.

And if you have questions, we can talk more about this later is because this is important for understanding the way that Matthew wrote his gospel.

And this is important for understanding the specific wording and the specific prophecies that he's using.

And that brings us back to the significance of Jesus's family fleeing to Egypt. So again, let's set aside the fact that there are practical reasons that they went to Egypt because we already know that.

And not to mention the fact that an angel of the Lord told him to go to Egypt. But if we consider the idea of typology,

I'm gonna get into a couple more things here. There is a scriptural inference.

We already talked about how Adam was a type for Jesus. Moses was also a type for Jesus because we see in the story that's coming up next week that Herod ordered all the children to be slaughtered.

Jesus would have been killed. Can you think of anything that looks a little bit like that in the

Old Testament or in the story of Moses? Yes, Pharaoh in Exodus one,

Pharaoh ordered the slaughter of all the male children in Egypt. And Moses was able to providentially escape this slaughter in very much the same way that Jesus was able to escape the slaughter of Herod.

And Moses flees and returns to Egypt as well. And then there's examples with the

Exodus also. But the point is we see a typology here in the comparison of Jesus and Moses, but we're gonna see another one that's related to this.

And we're gonna see another very dramatic fulfillment of Old Testament scripture as well.

And this is in verse 15. And verse 15 says, and he remained there until the death of Herod in order that what had been spoken by the

Lord through the prophet would be fulfilled, saying, and this is the part we're looking at, out of Egypt I called my son.

So let's look at that. Just a few words. They represent a prophecy that he's referring to now.

Out of Egypt I called my son. And this one is interesting because something that Matthew did is he combined a lot of the source documents that they had.

And he combined a lot of the understanding that his readers would have had at the time so that when he says spoken by the

Lord through the prophet, he's not exactly citing a scripture, but he kind of is.

So this is a reference to Hosea 11 .1, and it says this. When Israel was a youth,

I loved her, and out of Egypt I called my son. Now right now, each and every one of you is sitting there and you're saying,

Matty, that's not a messianic prophecy. That verse is about Israel.

It's not about Jesus. You got me. You're right.

So let's take just a quick detour to the book of Hosea because Hosea is a prophecy about Israel, and it's a prophecy to teach a lesson about the people of Israel.

So if you're familiar with the book of Hosea, the prophet,

God called him to marry a prostitute, and this book is full of, it's full of fairly colorful language just because of the nature of what's going on.

Hosea 1 .2 tells how this starts out. It says, when Yahweh first spoke through Hosea, Yahweh said to Hosea, go, take for yourself a wife of harlotry and have children of harlotry, for the land commits flagrant harlotry, forsaking

Yahweh. So Hosea goes and he marries this prostitute.

Her name is Gomer. So right off the bat, things probably aren't starting off that well because her name is

Gomer. And as commanded, he has a child with her, and then he has another.

But this lifestyle that she came from doesn't leave her easily.

It doesn't leave her just because she marries Hosea. She goes back to her old ways, to harlotry, as that verse said.

Even despite the fact that they're married and they have children, she leaves him and goes back to this.

And God tells Hosea to go back and get her. Hosea goes back and buys her for a small amount.

And this is a humiliating thing. This is one of those things that we would look at and not be able to understand why

God would be telling someone to do something like this. We've talked in five weeks, we've already talked a couple of times, even generally about biblical sexual ethics, right?

This does not align with that. And people will pull different lessons out of Hosea, whether they're right or they're wrong.

But ultimately, the book of Hosea is a portrayal of Israel's unfaithfulness to God.

Hosea is essentially playing God in this role, and Gomer is playing

Israel. No matter what Hosea does for her, no matter how he rescues her, no matter how he treats her, she continues to just spit on him, to insult him, to dishonor him, to embarrass him, to turn away from him and go to these other things.

And he still comes back. And this is a picture of God's faithfulness to a people,

Israel, who constantly turn from him. And not just in small ways, but we're talking absolute betrayal.

We're talking worshiping other gods. We're talking just ignoring God, doing things that are just as humiliating as possible.

Terrible betrayals. Yet at the same time, God remains steadfastly faithful to these people.

I mean, we talk about how mean

God is in the Old Testament. And I say that kind of sarcastically. That's what we think.

It's not really that. But we see God's wrath in the

Old Testament. But at the same time, we see God's faithfulness and we see God's love and we see

God's mercy and God's forgiveness in repeated opportunities to turn from those ways.

But again, getting back to how we cited this in Matthew, and it's not a prophecy about Jesus.

Hosea didn't know about Jesus when he wrote this. God knew about Jesus, but Hosea didn't know.

But in this, Jesus, or Israel, is being used as a type.

Going back to our concept of typology. Jesus is being associated with Israel.

But once again, I mentioned an anti -type before, right? Jesus is the opposite of Israel.

Because Jesus, as opposed to turning away from God, Jesus is bringing the people of Israel back to God.

And not only the people of Israel, obviously, but all people. And we see this in Matthew's gospel, this repeated theme.

Again, Hosea had no idea that he was writing about Jesus.

And short of what Matthew is doing here, we wouldn't be able to go back to Hosea and see that was happening.

But now we have a New Testament author who's tying these things together for us. And that's one of the big themes of Matthew.

One of the big themes is that Christ is the fulfillment of these scriptural prophecies.

So just in chapter two, in the second half, we see Matthew portraying

Jesus as the fulfillment of four prophecies. The first one, let's see, the first one was back in Micah 5, 2.

That prophecy was when they said that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. So Hosea is the second of these four prophecies.

And we're gonna look at the next two prophetic fulfillments next week, as we see how Jesus fulfills that, as we finish up the second chapter.

But I'm gonna leave off this section here with the idea that Matthew is taking these

Old Testament texts and he's using them in a big, broad way to show how

Jesus fulfills prophecy. And I heard in a sermon that Jesus fulfills something like 332

Old Testament prophecies. And one day, we'll look at all of them. It'll be a revival service where we're just, where we're just out in a tent all day long.

And, but again, this sort of goes back to that mosaic idea, right?

Taking these verses that on their own are just one color in the whole mosaic, and there

Jesus is when you put it all together and zoom out. But just to make sure that we don't get too academic or too heady or whatever,

I wanna look at some of the lessons that we can take away. We looked at three verses, but there's still lessons that we can take away here.

And some of these are essentially a continuation of what we've seen, but we're gonna use this as an opportunity to repeat them, to make sure that this stuff sticks, because it's not possible to hear some of these things too much.

And one of the first lessons that we can learn from this is we already know God has a plan, but God's plan will not be thwarted by men.

No one can stop God's plan if he wants to push it through.

Because last week we talked about God's providence, and we continue to see that in play here.

So in this example, he used an angel of the Lord again. He used that angel of the Lord in a dream to have him take his family and flee to Egypt.

Why? Because God's plan was for Jesus to die on a cross after his 33 years on earth, right?

It was not to have him die at Herod's hand as a baby or a toddler.

So God providentially moved him, because I don't think there's any doubt that Herod would have killed him, and I don't think that physically there's anything that Joseph and Mary could have done about a bunch of soldiers coming into their town and killing the babies.

But God's not gonna let that happen. Herod will not be, this Herod will not be the one who stops this plan from rolling on.

Which leads us to another lesson, and that's that God uses faithful individuals to fulfill his plan.

Last week we said if God has ordained the ends, God has also ordained the means, and you never know when you are part of that means.

We talked at length about the character of Joseph. We talked about his faithfulness. We can assume that he was just a man of tremendous faith, and maybe it's because he's already seen one miracle.

So he knows that this is real. But the thing that we know, given the limited mention of him, and he doesn't play that significant of a role once we get a few chapters down the road.

We see a lot more of Mary, but we don't hear about Joseph. But what we know about him is that God told him to do something, and he did it.

And Mary did it as well. I think about this story, and how many of you can imagine women now, it's the middle of the night, and you have a young child, and your husband says, okay, get up, we're going on a trip.

We gotta pack everything up, we're going to Egypt, because God told me in a dream, right? I can only imagine what would happen.

But they did it. And also, let's consider the fact that God could use any means at all that he wanted to help

Joseph and Mary and Jesus get to Egypt, right? He could have just teleported them there.

Like, they could have automatically, I don't know how this would have worked, we've never seen it in the Bible, but he could have just had them show up in Egypt, but he didn't do that.

We already said that the trip was somewhat difficult. Again, they had to pack things up, put it in a,

I really need to look this up so I can stop saying whatever they used, put it in a wagon or whatever they used to haul everything.

And not only that, it cost money, but God was using them to fulfill this plan.

And God providentially provided the things that they needed for this, but he still used the actions of Joseph and Mary to actually get everything happening, to actually get them to Egypt.

Now, third lesson. You can start bringing this down to you.

Think about times in your life when you noticed God providentially working, or when you noticed it and you ignored it, or when you didn't do what you know you should have done.

Lesson three, God provides the means, even when it isn't obvious. So there exists in some religious traditions or some type of churches, the idea that God is just gonna give you a pile of everything that you need when he has a plan for you, right?

You feel like God wants you to do this, so you feel like God should just plop everything you need right down in front of you.

And maybe he does it sometimes, but it might not always look the way you expect. So for example, in our example of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Matthew doesn't tell us that the angel of the

Lord told them to wake up and go to Egypt, and then they opened the door of their house, and there was the wagon loaded up and all ready to go to take them there.

No, they still had to do all that stuff, but they had the things that they needed. We talked about the trip needing money.

God provided that money, but he didn't just provide it sitting there on the seat of their transportation.

He had provided it earlier through the gifts of the magi. So it was there, and they recognized it.

But sometimes, you know that God has something he's working in your life, but you don't know how you're gonna do it.

You don't know how you're gonna make it happen, because if you're just looking without thinking too hard about it, it looks impossible.

You don't have the resources. You don't have the time. You don't have something. But sometimes, these things just take a little bit of creativity or a little bit of work.

God provides what you need. You just might have to find it. You just might have to recognize how something that you didn't understand before is part of that.

Now, on a unrelated note, there's a fourth lesson, and that's that this story, in this story,

Jesus teaches us not to judge by appearances. And what I mean by that, and we're sort of stretching back into some earlier stuff that we looked at, is that Jesus came from Bethlehem, which was a little, tiny, insignificant town.

The scripture that we looked at a couple of weeks ago said that Bethlehem was least of all in Judea, right?

It was not a big city. It was not a place where a king was to come from.

The coming Messiah was born a little, tiny infant, just like any other kid, right?

The conquering king who's gonna deliver the people of Israel? Didn't look like it. Looked like any other baby.

And consider the humility of Jesus. And if you consider

God and all His glory and all His majesty, sending Jesus to earth was sending

Him to a tiny, insignificant place. This is a big place for us, but for God this is, it's not that significant.

We see in Revelation what's gonna happen to the earth. It's gonna be destroyed. This is just a single -use vessel for God's people right now.

It's not permanent. It's not eternal. It's not the kingdom of God. And when we think of greatness and great things, we think that it has to be larger than life.

We think that it has to be grandiose, right? We think about our churches. We feel like the more people that come, the better it looks, the better the church, it must be.

We think if they have flashy things, if they have a great production, a great band, every program that we need, that that's what it has to take for a church to be great.

But we see in this story not to judge by appearances. That doesn't have to be the case.

I said revival service earlier, right? There's only one thing that matters for the purposes of revival.

And it's not the tent, or the music, or the number of people that come.

And it's not the altar call where a bunch of people walk down to the front and pray a prayer and think they've given their life to Jesus.

There's one thing that matters for revival. And there's one thing that matters for revival on a large scale, the type of revival that we all wanna see in Madison County and in Virginia and in the

United States. And that is the state of your heart, your individual heart, each one of you.

It's not a big service full of people who all look like they're having a revival and then go home and things don't look like that.

It's not the person who is addicted to drugs or alcohol or pornography or something along those lines and is emotionally convicted in a moment and goes and kneels at the altar and then two weeks later is doing the exact same thing.

It's the state of your heart. And the only way to get your heart in the place where it needs to be is to crack open the word of God and let it fill your heart and your mind.

We talked about emotions a second ago. Romans 12 too says to be transformed by the renewing of your mind because if your mind is not renewed with the word of God, you can be suckered into thinking that the emotions are the real thing when they're not.

Do we have emotions? Yes, we do. Do we get overcome by love for God or by the feelings of the

Holy Spirit? Yes, we do, but you have to understand the Bible and you have to understand what is real and what isn't before you can know that.

Salvation is purely a work of the Holy Spirit, but you can set the stage for it.

Or if it's something you've already experienced, then you can continue the work of the Holy Spirit by reading the

Bible. Colossians 3 .16 says this. Let the word of Christ dwell within you richly with all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with gratefulness in your hearts to God.

I love let the word of Christ dwell within you richly. We could have just read that part and left it there.

John 1 .2 .3 says by this, we know that we have come to know him if we keep his commandments.

But guess what? You have to know the commandments to keep them and you have to know what they actually are to keep them.

Deuteronomy 11 .18 -19 says this. You shall therefore place these words of mine on your heart and on your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as phylacteries between your eyes.

And you shall teach them to your sons, speaking of them when you sit in your home and when you walk along the road and when you lie down and when you rise up.

And the phylactery, I had to look this up too. It was like a leather pouch that Jewish people at the time wore.

It had the scripture in them and they had it with them all the time. It's telling us we keep the word of God with us at all times.

So again, if you wanna see revival in your household, well, let's take this, let's go bigger.

Let's zoom out. If you want to see a

United States that honors God with its actions, with its politics, with its entertainment, that does not come through electing

Christian politicians. Nothing wrong with them being Christians. There's nothing wrong with electing them, but they're not gonna fix it because they can't.

I was talking about this with Amy before. It was a great thing when

Roe versus Wade was overturned. Right? We don't want the government being in the business of providing abortions.

But just this last election in Ohio, we saw the people of Ohio vote to make it legal again in Ohio, right?

Or just to make it legal, make it easy to get. And why? Because you can change all the laws that you want, but if you don't change the people, it doesn't matter.

If you don't change people's hearts, if they don't have this in their heart, you can pass all the laws you want.

It frustrates me sometimes because the very people that say we gotta pass laws to make abortion illegal are the same ones that say, and I agree,

I agree with all this stuff. They say, well, if you pass gun laws, then only criminals will have guns, right?

So why does the law work for abortion, but it doesn't work for guns? There's just an inherent inconsistency in that position.

It's like, we want the laws that we want, and we don't want the laws that we don't want, which is what we all do.

Again, it's human nature, right? But the point is the laws don't change people. Hearts change people.

So politicians, not gonna change society. You get down to your state, it's the same thing.

We just have politicians. You can't vote in people that are gonna make a people moral. Well, what if everybody went to church?

Well, that's great too, but if the people in your church don't have

God in their heart and they aren't experiencing revival personally, then that's not gonna matter either.

Then you gotta step back to the family and the household. But the only way to get revival in the household is for the individuals to have this going on in their own lives, right?

So that's where it has to start. Again, we can't hold an event that will change our culture.

We can hold an event that maybe God will use to change our culture in some way. But ultimately, it comes down to revival on an individual level.

It comes down to understanding who God is. It comes down to understanding why you need Jesus and what he's done for you so that you can spread that to the people closest to you.

And then we come in here and we sit in these little family groups, which is fine.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing at all. I sit with my family. But if you have each of these little families who are doing their best to pursue

God, some of them have been changed by God, they're teaching their children, then you have the opportunity to spread it to another family.

And then that's how it takes over a church. So that was another tangent.

I guess the point was a big church with a lot of people in every program that you want might not be experiencing revival.

So let's wrap this up by tying it in. Since it's Advent, and I haven't talked at all about Advent, you know,

I'm just, it's like, I'm like a bulldozer. We're just plowing ahead with the verses that we're on.

It doesn't matter what's going on around us. This is the verse for this week and that's what we're gonna look at. Christmas, forget it.

But, that's right. But it is the first week of Advent. And Advent is significant.

And Advent is important. And Advent is packed full of meaning. And you see the candles here. Our theme this week is hope.

We read Psalm 130. And I wanna turn your attention back to verse five in the first half of verse six.

It says, I hope for Yahweh. My soul does hope. And for his word do

I wait. My soul waits for the Lord. So we see in Matthew so far, in Matthew chapter one and chapter two, up through verses one through 15, that Jesus is the fulfillment of the hopes of the world.

Amen. The hope of salvation. The hope of freedom.

The hope of redemption. And the hope of glory and eternal life.

Jesus Christ fulfills every single one of these hopes. Apart from Jesus, none of these hopes are fulfilled in you.

There is nothing you can do. Nothing you can do. And that's why we read about him.

We learn about him. We light a candle that says hope on it. We sing songs to celebrate the fact that God in his mercy sent

Jesus here for us. So let's close with this verse. This is first Peter one, three through five.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead to obtain an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled and unfading, having been kept in heaven for you, who are protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

The hope of Jesus. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for what we read here.

We thank you for everything from the

Old Testament through the New Testament. We thank you for the stories that represent a fulfillment of the prophecy of Jesus Christ.

But even more so, we thank you for the gift of Jesus as we consider the things that we individually put our hope in that aren't you and that aren't

Jesus. God, I pray that our hearts turn to understand who we are at our core, who we are as sinful humans so that we can grasp the reality and we can grasp the truth, but also we can grasp the glory and the grace of who

Jesus is. And we stand amazed at the way you've worked this story, at the way the prophecies tie together and at the way they are fulfilled all in one person.

And when we zoom out, we see the image of Jesus Christ all over scripture.

We see the image of Jesus Christ in our lives as well. And I pray for each and every individual in this room, myself included, that the

Holy Spirit would continue to do his work in our hearts or do his work in our hearts for the first time,

Lord. We know apart from you, this is not something we can do, so we ask for your work. We ask for the

Holy Spirit and we ask for a revival on an individual level so that we can be a light in the world to show them what it means to follow

Christ. Yeah, thank you for this season. Thank you for this church.

Thank you for other faithful churches in the area who are teaching these things as well. We love you and we pray all this in Jesus' name, amen.