Full Transcript

Welcome to Share the Word, a Great Commission project bringing you the big ideas of the New Testament chapter by chapter. Matthew chapter 2 is not only about tragedy, cruelty, and the slaughter of infants, but the road you’re about to take with Paul is definitely more about perception, expectation, and, as always, so much more. Matthew chapter 2: A Tragic Misunderstanding. It’s time for school to start back up as I write this, and in honor of that, I have a pop quiz for you. Are you ready? Name someone who’s been a powerful figure in the Middle East who had a ruthless disregard for human life.

I’ll give you a minute. Sorry, you shouldn’t need long if you’ve been paying attention to the news over the last decade or so. You’d be correct with any number of answers: Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, probably some other bad actors too. But I wonder if anyone thought of Herod the Great. These men could all qualify, although the crimes of Herod are not as well known today. But in Matthew chapter 2, we learn about an atrocity he caused as tragic, as reprehensible, as anything these other guys I mentioned are responsible for.

Sometime after Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Judea, a small village only a few miles from Jerusalem, some curious visitors arrived in Israel’s capital, men from the east, as Matthew calls them, and they were asking questions around about the birth of a long-promised leader, someone ancient prophets wrote about and religious Jews had prayed for for centuries. We’re not specifically told where these men came from or on what specific information they were acting, but I think a reasonable guess would be Persia or perhaps ancient Babylon, which are to the east of Israel. And that’s my guess because many Jews driven from their homes centuries before had ended up in those places, and the information these men were acting on had to have been learned from Jews or from the writings of Jewish prophets.

Their inquiries quickly came to the attention of King Herod, who had listening ears everywhere in his kingdom. Matthew says Herod was disturbed by this and quickly called together advisers and scholars more familiar with prophecies than he was. When they convened, what Herod wanted to know more than anything was where the promised Messiah was to be born. Was there anything prophesied about that? One of them told him the prophet Micah had written that it would be in Bethlehem, a village famous as the birthplace of King David, Israel’s greatest ruler of the past. Concerned, Herod sent messengers to locate and invite these visitors from the east to come to his palace, and they did.

The old king was charming and feigned interest in what had brought them from such a distance. He listened intently as they told him about the appearance of an unusual star and why they connected it with prophecies about the birth of a Messiah in Israel. When they’d finished, Herod told them that it was in Bethlehem, not Jerusalem, where prophets had said the Messiah would be born. But that’s only a short distance from here, a few miles. Why don’t you go and continue your investigation there, see what you can find out. And if you discover anything interesting about such a child, come and tell me, so that I myself may pay homage to him.

You probably know the story. The wise men, as we call them now, were providentially led to the place Mary and Joseph were staying, by the way, not by a distant star like we see in the night sky or a conjunction of planets, as some have speculated, looking for a natural explanation. Whatever they were seeing in the sky moved and was bright enough that they could see it even in the daytime. It was something God was making visible in the sky just for this unique situation, in the same way that he had led ancient Israel through the wilderness after they left Egypt by lights in the sky. Anyway, they came to Bethlehem and found Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus, and they presented him with gifts fit for a king, and they also worshipped him, which shows they regarded him as more than an earthly prince. And they were right about that.

Jesus had not only come as Jewish Messiah; he was God with us, as Matthew has wrote in chapter one. And the inclusion of these men from the east in our birth stories, nativity stories, illustrates that Jesus had come for people beyond Israel too. He would be a savior for the whole world. Those wise men who came from afar, they represent all of us, all of us who have come to worship him. God was not about to allow them to be used as Herod’s pawns, though, and he warned them in a dream not to report back to the king, but to instead leave the country at once by a different route. At the same time, Joseph was warned of the king’s bad intentions too, that he needed to get Mary and the baby Jesus to safety and quickly.

So Mary and he hurriedly packed what they had, and they fled in the middle of that very night southward through the desert of Gaza to the land of Egypt, where they would be out of Herod’s reach. After a couple of days, Herod heard nothing back from the wise men, and he became troubled and angry. Then he did the kind of thing that tyrants do who feel threatened. He sent hardened soldiers to Bethlehem, who on his orders went through every house, taking any male child who looked to be two years old or younger and murdered them. To be sure, he eliminated the child prophesied about if such a child existed. What an incredible tragedy.

Matthew writes at verse 18, Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more. Rachel was the wife of Jacob, who God named Israel, one of the patriarchs of the Jewish people. In fact, the father of the twelve tribes. So Rachel then was the grandmother, we might say, of the Jewish people. Ramah was a village not far from Bethlehem, from where, in poetic language, Jeremiah is saying loud wails of anguished mothers could be heard. Someone ordering such an atrocity?

Man, that’s almost impossible for us to believe. Do you think that really happened, Paul? Well, let me tell you a little bit about this man who is the villain in the Christmas story. Herod was the son of a powerful warlord named Antipater, and they were from Edom, a desert kingdom to the southeast of Israel. The decades prior to Jesus’ birth were a time of tremendous political upheaval, during which the Roman Republic turned into the Roman Empire. Wars were fought with factions vying for control.

Antipater grew in influence through that period by deftly allying himself with whoever seemed to be the stronger players, ultimately ending up on the right side of Octavian, who came out on top of these struggles, the man history knows as Caesar Augustus. In 37 BC, Herod was then given the title King of the Jews and became the Romans’ client king over the area that is today Israel, as well as parts of what are now Jordan and Syria. For the next 40 years, he did everything and anything necessary to consolidate his power and his influence. The tragedy we read about with the infants in Bethlehem, sadly, that’s not inconsistent with other actions we know Herod took when he felt threatened. And it didn’t matter who he felt threatened by either.

In different situations, he killed his father-in-law, a brother-in-law, his second wife named Mariamne, even two of his own sons when he thought they were disloyal and too ambitious. So, killing the children of some peasants he didn’t know at Bethlehem, that was certainly not beyond him. I titled this podcast A Tragic Misunderstanding. The tragedy is obvious, but the misunderstanding? Well, remember when the wise men told Herod they were looking for the promised Messiah King whose birth they connected to the appearance of that unusual star. That’s what set Herod off.

He took their Messiah talk as an immediate threat and reacted in ways he always reacted when he was threatened. And therein is the tragic misunderstanding, because we know now Jesus did not come 2,000 years ago to take Herod’s throne or wrest political control from his descendants. That was never his intention. Verse 14 says that when Joseph took his young family to Egypt, I’m quoting now, they stayed there until Herod died. Then an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, Joseph, get up and take your child and his mother now back to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child’s life are now dead. But learning that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father, he was afraid to go back there.

Being warned in another dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, and they lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene. Herod died, by the way, a very miserable old man. After trying and failing to commit suicide, he eventually died of what sounds like the descriptions anyway, stomach cancer. Archelaus, the son who next ruled over most of Herod’s kingdom, had the same kind of character as his father, and so Mary and Joseph didn’t want to return to live in Bethlehem, but returned to where they were originally from, Nazareth in northern Israel. Another of Herod’s sons named Antipas was in charge there, who apparently was not quite as crazy.

The fact that Jesus did not grow up in Bethlehem where he had been born, but in Nazareth, has implications later in his life. Once at home in Nazareth, he was reared like most other Jewish sons. The oldest of several boys, he grew up in his father Joseph’s workshop, learning beside him the carpentry trade. A very ordinary life until he was about 30 years old. That’s when he suddenly turned to preaching, left Nazareth, and began traveling throughout Galilee, and it was immediately obvious that God’s hand was uniquely upon him. Whether merely listening to him speak or witnessing the astounding things he did, people were always left impressed, if not astounded by Jesus, and many began to say, Could this one be the Messiah?

But disappointing his rapidly growing following, despite their increasingly fevered speculations, Jesus showed no political aspirations at all. He deliberately turned away from them, in fact, and when people tried to lure him into making political statements against the Roman occupiers, he deliberately refused to do that, frustrated and even turned off many of Jesus’ original supporters that he did not seem to think his mission had anything to do with supplanting Herod’s evil sons, much less the Roman occupiers. Are you confused a little bit yet about the Messiah question I mean? It’s okay if you are, because most of the people who lived in Israel in Jesus’ time certainly were. Some things with him seemed to fit perfectly, and some things just didn’t. He was born in Bethlehem, as King David had been a thousand years earlier.

Check. His genealogy was right. He was directly descended from David’s line, as prophets said the Messiah would be. Another check. And if anyone was impertinent enough to ask, those close to Mary knew Jesus’ conception had not been natural. Joseph was not his biological father.

She insisted she was a virgin when she found herself pregnant. So if that was real, wow, that fit the most unlikely of all the prophecies. Then the timing of Jesus’ sudden appearance on the scene, the onset of his public ministry, as we call it, that fit with a very precise prophecy recorded in Daniel chapter 9 about when the Messiah would appear. Another big check. And once his public ministry was underway, it was undeniable that Jesus performed unheard-of healings like opening blind people’s eyes and curing people from leprosy and so on, miraculous things the prophets said would identify the Messiah when he appeared. All of these things very convincing.

But the confusion came in because Jesus did not show any interest in and, in fact, deliberately turned away from other things people expected the Messiah to do. In his contemporaries’ minds, the most important things, namely, the Son of David, as they called the Messiah, was supposed to reclaim the kingdom of Israel and rule from his ancestor David’s throne. Isaiah chapter 9 promised that. And wasn’t the Messiah to bring about an unprecedented era of world peace, as Isaiah 11 and Micah 4 say? And wasn’t he supposed to regather all the exiled Jews back to the promised land, as Ezekiel chapter 20 says? And these things did not happen, we must admit.

In fact, he didn’t even try to make them happen. So maybe you can see how even people who wanted to support him at the time were confused, and why those who didn’t convinced themselves he was a deliberate fraud, probably a magician or worse, a demonically empowered false Messiah. But wait, there are even more pieces to the puzzle of Old Testament prophecy to account for. For example, that prophecy I mentioned in Daniel 9 a moment ago, written 500 years before Jesus’ time, it not only says that Messiah the Prince would appear when Jesus did, but goes on to say that he would be cut off, suggesting a sudden, untimely end, and that afterward Jerusalem would be destroyed. Then again, in another place, in Isaiah chapter 53, that important prophet described in detail the suffering of the Messiah, his rejection, and that he would be punished by God as an offering for sin.

These sound like a completely different scenario playing out. Prophecies, some by the very same prophets that foretold the coming of the Messiah to rule over the nations and bring in a time of universal peace and so on, also said the Messiah would suddenly be cut off, and it was the Lord’s will to crush him, to make his life an offering for sin. Maybe you understand better now why so many people were divided by and confused over Jesus. While we’re talking about messianic prophecies, they did not end with the famous prophets of the Old Testament like Isaiah, Micah, and Daniel. In Matthew chapter 1, we read about another prophecy, not from any of them, but from the angel sent by God to Joseph, Mary’s fiancé.

When Joseph learned that Mary was pregnant, knowing he couldn’t be the father and he was wrestling with what to do, Matthew chapter 1, verses 20 and 21 say that’s when an angel appeared to him in a dream, who assured him that the child growing inside Mary was not another man’s, but was conceived as a result of a miracle of God. And then Joseph was told, You are to name him Jesus. In Hebrew, Yeshua. The name means Yahweh’s salvation. The name combines the unspoken name of God and the word salvation. Name him Jesus, Yahweh’s salvation.

Joseph was told that, and here is the prophecy, because he will save his people from their sins. I listened to a fascinating discussion a while back between Ben Shapiro, a young Orthodox Jewish radio host, popular podcaster, and his guest that day, Pastor John MacArthur, one of the best Bible scholars of my lifetime. And their topic was the exact conundrum I’ve been trying to describe. Shapiro kept making the point that as a religious Jew, he could not accept Jesus as Messiah because Jesus did not end up on David’s throne. He did not bring about a time of peace and prosperity for Israel. All the exiled Jews did not return to the land of Israel in his day.

So how can possibly we say Jesus is the promised Messiah when he didn’t do important things the prophets said Messiah would do? MacArthur wisely asked him to consider, is it possible that in God’s plan, the Messiah would come twice? What if his mission the first time was different from the second time? What if his mission the first time was to become a spiritual savior, to make atonement for the world’s sins, like Isaiah said, as Matthew and the rest of the New Testament writers came to believe? After all, he was named Yeshua, God’s salvation, and he did undeniably fit most of the prophecies, even the ones about the Messiah’s suffering and death. Jesus fulfilled so many of the prophecies.

So what if there is another coming still ahead of us, when he will return to save Israel from her enemies, some glorious coming of the Messiah to rescue his people, to establish peace and justice on earth, to literally rule over the kingdom of God on earth from David’s throne. In other words, to complete all the things Jesus did not do at his first coming that the Messiah was to do. You know what? That’s exactly what Jesus promised his followers would happen. This is not just a theoretical argument between Jews and Christians. Remember that not long after Jesus came, he was cut off, as the prophet Daniel prophesied.

The temple was then shortly afterwards destroyed, and the whole Jewish system of sacrifices stopped, which Daniel said would happen. So, if I was in that discussion with Ben Shapiro, I would have made it personal and asked, How can religious Jews like you, Ben, have your sins forgiven today, since there are no more sacrifices offered for sin, since the temple doesn’t even exist anymore, and the whole Old Testament system of dealing with sin ended long ago?

What Matthew came to believe and the Apostle Paul and all the other Jews who became convinced Jesus was the Messiah came to believe is that it stopped because God had always planned on two comings: the first to provide a once-for-all blood atonement for sins of the world to make salvation possible for all of us who would believe into the Savior he provided, and then to one day at the end of this age return as King to establish his righteous rule over the earth. As the writer of the New Testament book of Hebrews puts it, Christ was offered once for all time as a sacrifice to take away the sins of many people. And he will come again not to deal with sins, but to bring salvation for all who are eagerly awaiting him. Salvation to the Jewish people, who will at his second coming realize he was their Messiah, as well as for all the rest of us who have put our faith in Jesus too.

This is exactly the solution to the questions the earliest Christians came to believe. That’s why Matthew in this Gospel records Jesus saying, on the one hand, this is chapter 20, verse 28, The Son of Man did not come to be served, like a king, for example, but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many. Give his life as a ransom, meaning to make the necessary payment to set us free from sin and death, and the price was his own blood. But then later in Matthew 25, at verse 31, he told the same disciples, When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then he will sit on his throne of glory. So Jesus told his disciples that he had come in their time to fulfill what God required of him to become the Savior from sin the world needs, but that he would come again in the future, not in humility as a servant, but to reign as a king in glory.

So the big idea for today: God’s plan was always for his purposes to be accomplished in two comings of the Messiah, first the suffering, then the glory. Phase one was completed 2,000 years ago when Jesus suffered to ransom us from the power of sin and death. Phase two is still ahead of us. It’s coming when Jesus returns as King to reign forever. Matthew wants to make sure all his readers do not misunderstand this. Jesus is the Messiah, and all the prophecies concerning him, all the prophecies will be kept to fulfill everything God has promised through his prophets.

This is Paul. Thanks for listening. Thanks, Paul. You know, from the very beginning with Adam and Eve, we’ve kept imposing our own interpretation to God’s sovereign plan for us. We can’t simply follow. We need to know why.

We have to know why. We always seem to have a better assessment than God of what to expect, even in the face of being told the truth. Christ told them throughout His time on earth what He was planning to do, and yet, just like the Jews who experienced His presence on earth, 2,000 years later, our task is still to spread the word that the Messiah is coming again. But this time, He’s riding in on a horse. Look, if you’re still sitting on that proverbial fence, listening and waiting, and you think that you know better, when Jesus came 2,000 years ago, He made a way for those who would believe in Him to have their sins forgiven. He’s shown us how much He loves us.

What have you shown Him? You are part of this great commission. What are you waiting for?