Matthew 14 - Part 1

 

Read Matthew 14

The chapter begins with a statement by Herod the Tetrarch that requires a little back story.  Herod is not the same ruler that ordered the killing of children through the age of 2 near the time of the birth of Jesus.  Tetrarch means that he governed about one-fourth of the country.  He had some power but was not ruler over the entire region.

The statement of Herod that required a little history is: “This is John the Baptist; he has risen from the dead! That is why miraculous powers are at work in him.”

Herod is speaking of Jesus.  He thinks that John the Baptist has come back as Jesus.

When did John the Baptist die?  That’s what Matthew explains as we begin this chapter. 

John had taken his brother’s wife.  His brother was not dead.  He just wanted his wife.  John the Baptist told Herod that dog don’t hunt.  Herod threw John in prison.

While john was in prison, Herod was enjoying a birthday celebration in his honor.  The daughter of Herodias—the wife he had taken from his brother—danced for Herod.  It was a really good dance.

Herod liked it so much that he promised to give his stepdaughter anything she wanted.  Surely prompted by her mother she asked for the head of John the Baptist delivered to her on a platter at that very time.

Herod was distressed.  It was not that he liked John the Baptist.  He didn’t.  He too wanted him dead but he was afraid of the people for they held him to be a prophet.  But a promise is a promise, and that was a really good dance.

John’s head was brought to the daughter of Herodias and she delivered it to her mother.  And you thought that things were bizarre in Game of Thrones.

John’s disciples came and claimed John’s body.  We don’t get any more of the story about his head. 

What we do know is that some of the people thought the same way that Herod did about Jesus.  Some thought he was John the Baptist resurrected.  We are just a couple chapters away from Jesus asking who people say that he is. 

One of the answers was John the Baptist.  Now you know the story.

Amen.

Matthew 2 - Part 2

 

Read Matthew 2

The wise men visited Jesus after following a star.  This is not a manger scene but one that takes place in a house.  It could have been up to 2 years after his birth in a barn or cave or sheltered part of a livestock area.

What I ask you to think on just for the moment is that these wise men were warned to go back home a different way than they had come.  At the least, they would not be stopping in to give Herod a report on this newborn king.

They were warned in a dream.

Do you remember chapter 1?  Joseph was told to take Mary as his wife in a dream.  What is conceived in her is of God.

An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream.

The wise men did return home via a different route.  Herod never got his report.  He did not want to worship this child whom men from afar knew as the King of the Jews.  He wanted to kill him.  A precise location would have made the job easy.

That didn’t happen so Herod decided to kill every male child two years old and younger.  Compare this to precision bombing and carpet bombing.  If you can’t target precisely, you just kill everyone in a certain area.

This wasn’t a new idea.  Remember at the beginning of Exodus, the Pharaoh who did not remember Joseph ordered all male firstborn killed.  Herod had different motives and increased the target area by two years, but this was simple power politics.

If your replacement is dead before he has a chance to replace you, then you might live a longer life.  It’s like Niccolò Machiavelli and William Shakespeare wrote this part. 

It might have been an effective strategy except that God had warned Joseph in a dream to pack up his family and leave.  Once again, an angel of the Lord had spoken to Joseph in a dream and Joseph had obeyed.

The angel didn’t say go rent a U-Haul tomorrow, have a yard sale to get rid of stuff you don’t need to take, and hold one last gathering with friends.  The angel said, Get em and go.

The angel also told Joseph to stay there until he gave him further instructions.  He did tell Joseph the why part.  Herod wanted to kill. Jesus. 

Herod reigned death upon countless children but eventually he died.  The angel of the Lord once again came to Joseph in a dream and told him to return to Israel. He did.

While the perceived urgency here is not evident, the instructions were to get up and go.

Can you imagine the life of young Jesus?  He gets wonderful gifts then the next thing you know they are leaving town in the middle of the night for Egypt.  Then then a few years later, they get up in the middle of the night and head back to the Promised Land.

When I was stationed in Orlando, Florida there was a drought one year and the housing area that we lived in was evacuated because of wildfires.  It was a get up and go situation in the late afternoon, but the back of my truck was full of photo albums and other things that were considered too valuable to leave behind.

Joseph picked up his family and surely few possessions and just did what he was told.  Get up and go.

When Joseph returned to his home country, he discovered that Herod’s son was on the throne.  Again, an angel of the Lord warned Joseph and told him to go to Galilee instead of Bethlehem or Judea. 

He did.

Much of this was to fulfill scripture but Joseph had to obey the angel of the Lord that came in a dream.  Unlike Luke’s gospel where angels physically appeared, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream again and again.

In a dream!

Occasionally, I have awakened in the middle of the night because of a dream.  All I remember of the dreams now is that they were the best ideas and plot construction and plot twists for the greatest novels the world has ever known.

So, I wrote it all down and went back to bed.  Some of you know that I have perfect penmanship when I am awake. It’s so perfect that I am nearly illiterate without a keyboard.

You should have seen me trying to decipher my notes from my dream.  Those great American novels will remain unwritten.

But even if your dream remains crystal clear to you, how do you know that your mind is not playing tricks on you?  It’s a serious question.  How do you know?

That brings us to John’s gospel, specifically, chapter 10.  Jesus used the example of shepherd and sheep.  The sheep know the voice of the shepherd.  In fact, they will run away from a stranger’s voice.

This is an example of using things known to the people.  The sheep know the voice of the shepherd.  There is an existing and trusted relationship.

While Joseph probably never had an angel visit him in a dream before Mary became pregnant; he had an existing relationship with God.  He trusted God.  He trusted God over his own understanding.

Joseph was predisposed to receive a message from God because he trusted God over his own understanding.  This is where I want to leave the story and venture into our time.

Do we know the voice of our Shepherd?

Do we know what to believe in this age of deception?

Will we stick to the truth when the propaganda of the world sounds enticing?

Will we trust God or our own emotional longings?

The level of deception in this world is at an all-time high.  It is ridiculous what people in this country claim to believe.  It’s not just the Antifa-types that are easy to spot.  It’s the Christians being deceived, leaving the truth for some emotional fix.

It’s those of us who seek the specks in each other’s eyes and ignore the lumberyard in our own so as not to feel the need to love one another or fulfill our commissions.  We put others down so our obligations are fulfilled. 

That’s not how it works.  We were warned against this.

I’m going to label Joseph with an attribute not mentioned—courage.  He did what the angel of the Lord told him to do each and every time.

The first time surely cost him some friends or acquaintances.

The next few times surely cost him a few looks from his wife.

We don’t know much about Joseph after Jesus turned 12 but what we do know is that he was strong and courageous much like God had called Joshua to be.

Joseph did what God required of him without doing a cost-benefit analysis.

Joseph did what God required of him without delay.

Joseph did what God required of him without regret.  Hold on.  It doesn’t say that.

It does.  You just have to look for it.  Time and again, Joseph obeyed the angel of the Lord.  You don’t do that if you regretted a previous decision to follow God’s instructions.

Regret leads you back to your own understanding.

Back to us.  Will we do what God calls us to do without estimating what it costs us?

Will we do what God calls us to do without delay?

Will we do what God calls us to do without regret?

Will we know it’s God who is calling?  Will we know his voice in whatever form he chooses to speak to us?

You will have trouble in the world.  Will we take courage in knowing that our Lord has overcome the world?

Joseph doesn’t get much coverage in the Bible, but what he does get is powerful.  It is a powerful example to us to trust in the Lord and not our own understanding.

When we know the message that we have received is of the Lord, we obey.  We obey courageously without considering the personal cost to us.

Are you ready to be more like Joseph?  Are you ready?

Amen.

Matthew 2 - Part 1

 

Read Matthew 2

The first thing that I want to do is mess up the Nativity Scene.  I’m not really going to mess it up, just clarify that it is representative of what took part over the course of a couple years not just one or two evenings.

Jesus could have been as old as 2 years at the time of the visit of the Maji.  Herod calculated this based upon the report of how long the Maji had been following the star.  We should also note that Joseph, Mary, and Jesus were in a house at the time of the visit.

Is it possible that the star was visible before the birth of the Lord?  In any case, the star led the wise men to this place at this time, which was not while Joseph and his family were in the manger.

Do you know if it was a buyer’s market or a seller’s market for homes at this time?  It was usually a builder’s market.  It’s possible that Joseph had built his family a house.

It may not have taken 2 years to get a house, but they were not in the manger when the Maji came.

But who were the Maji?  There is universal agreement that these men were kings or not.  They were astrologers or not.  They were magicians or not.  The agreement on the subject is that there are many opinions as to whom these men were.

Chances are, they were not kings.  Kings normally travel with processions and sometimes protective details—army detachments if you will.

They were surely wise.  They found Jesus from who knows where they started.  All we know is that it was from the east.  Saudi, Iran, Afghanistan, India, China—who knows exactly where their journey began.  The names of where they began may have also been different than they are today.

Did they travel at night?  If they were crossing desert it would make sense.  It would surely be easier to see the star at night.  If you do the math at 25 miles per day, these Maji may have come from up to 2,000 miles away; but it could have been much closer.

They knew they were looking for the King of the Jews and that was a big thing, wherever they may have come from.

They were more clued in to this event than the local authority.  Herod had to summon the Chief Priests and Teachers of the Law to get answers.  He knew of the Messiah.  He would come someday.  He obviously did not know of a birth in a manger near Bethlehem.

Here is what I ask you to consider.  Jesus came to the lost sheep of Israel.  This was foretold through scripture.  He was the Messiah, the Anointed One promised to God’s Chosen People.  This was a Hebrew thing.

Except, it was a global thing.  Jesus came through the line of Abraham and David but he came to save the world.  The story of the Christ comes through God’s Chosen People, but this was a birth that impacted the entire world.

To which we in America would say Amen, Hallelujah, and Praise the Lord.  We are so glad to be included in his salvation.  We are so blessed to be recipients of his love.

We are glad that salvation is not limited by geography or time.

But how did people from somewhere else know about God?

Go to the end of Genesis 4.  People began to call upon the name of the Lord.  Continue through the flood.  Not every line that came from Noah went through Abraham.  Noah had found favor with God and through his family, the world was populated once again.

Consider how many times the Hebrew people had been scattered about the world by some nation bent on being an empire.  We read of synagogues as Paul and other apostles ventured west into Europe but we don’t have much information about what took place to the east.

There were people in the world other than God’s Chosen People who knew of God—the one true God.  Did the Maji know the one true God?  We don’t know but we do know that the birth of Christ was of global significance.  It wasn’t just a local thing.

These men from afar left gifts.  Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh were noted.  You know gold and most know Frankincense.  It’s used for anointing and blessing.  Myrrh is a resin that historically been used as perfume, incense, or for medicinal purposes.

Some place significance on these as gifts needed to prepare Jesus for burial.   That’s a real begin with the end in mind interpretation.

What I will ask you to consider is that these were all valuable gifts, appropriate for a king.  Before they left home, these men packed expecting to find a king.

What I ask you to think on from this part is that while prophecy came to God’s Chosen People, the birth of Jesus was an event of global importance and known beyond the Promised Land.

These men as indicated by the value of their gifts, truly came in search of a king.  They expected to find a king.

Here’s something to chew on.  Scriptures vary somewhat on the dream that these men had that caused them to leave a different way and avoid Herod and the report that he wanted.

Some say in a dream that was of God or from God and others just say they were warned in a dream.  The dream was obviously fulfilled God’s  purpose and was followed by one to Joseph that enabled him to pick up his family and seek shelter in Egypt, but the question remains unanswered if these wise men also believed in the one true God.

In any case, the birth of Jesus was not a local event and these men truly came seeking a king.

All of creation was waiting for the arrival of a Savior.

One last thing that we find in the beginning of this chapter.  Whether they knew the one true God or not, they said that they followed the star and came to worship this king.

They came to worship!

Did they know they worshiped the King of Kings?   It’s something to chew on.

Amen.