Gracious heavenly Father, in the midst of all that we have already done in this past week, family, friends, food, all that we may have yet to come, season often filled with lighter schedules, but also with perhaps added stresses and burdens, and then already here this morning singing what are probably for many of us familiar hymns. Now coming to a text that for many of us will be a familiar Christmas story. And yet, Lord, we want more than simply to bask in the nostalgia of the old, old story and the old hymns. We want You to speak to us. So we pray that You might open our ears, You would speak clearly, and You would say to us just what we need to hear, to correct, to rebuke, to train in righteousness. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Our text this morning is Matthew chapter 2, the visit of the wise men. Matthew chapter 2, first book in the New Testament. Chapter 2, verses 1 through 12. Follow along as I read Matthew chapter 2.
“Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is He who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw His star when it rose and have come to worship Him.” When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him; and assembling all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born. They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea, for so it is written by the prophet: “‘And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who will shepherd My people Israel.’””
“Then Herod summoned the wise men secretly and ascertained from them what time the star had appeared. And he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found Him, bring me word, that I too may come and worship Him.” After listening to the king, they went on their way. And behold, the star that they had seen when it rose went before them until it came to rest over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. And going into the house, they saw the child with Mary His mother, and they fell down and worshiped Him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered Him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh. And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed to their own country by another way.”
I think most of you who are regulars here know by now that I was born in Chicago I grew up mostly in Michigan. We moved back and forth a bit and then moved for good to Michigan in 1985 when I was in third grade. So for most of my life I grew up, in fact almost all of my life I have been in a place where everyone else was rooting for a different professional sports team than I was. As I’ve already hinted at, if you think you’ve had a bad sports year, try rooting for the Bears, the Blackhawks, the Bulls, and the White Sox. None of you have had a worse year than I have, professional sports anyway.
So growing up in Michigan and just a little sports nostalgia here. There were many years where the Pistons, if you’re NBA, can recollect the bad boys in the late 80s, early 90s. One back-to-back championship, hated those teams being a Bulls fan. Now, eventually the Bulls got over the hump. They had a fairly decent run with a famous player on their team and we did have six championships in the 90s, but those couple of years, all of my friends rooting for the other team, me just about by myself. Once my team finally did win, I wore many obnoxious t-shirts. How do you like us now? Just sort of pleasantries, just outreach evangelism kind of things. But there were so many times.
My wife doesn’t quite understand this, how you can feel embarrassed when your team loses, especially if you’re among all the people that are rooting for the other team. She’ll say, “But you didn’t have anything to do with them losing?” and she thinks I didn’t have anything to do with them winning. But really, both, both. When they lose, when they win, you feel a sense of shame, you feel a sense of pride. So there were so many times that everyone around me was celebrating this great victory for the Detroit Pistons and I was mourning.
Even here some of you very well-meaning people will sometimes say, because I root for Michigan State, Tom Groelsma roots for Michigan. There have been a few times, very well-meaning I know, when Michigan has beat Michigan State and you come up and you say “Great game” and I have to say, “Actually, the other team. I root for the other team.” So, it’s very confusing.
The same news can land on people in very different ways. The news that to one set of people means great rejoicing can mean to another set of people great fear, annoyance, anger, or even indifference. Same news, different response.
It’s the story of Christmas and it’s the story that we have here in Matthew chapter 2. We have the same news, this star (we’ll say more about this star in just a moment, little later), the star that rose that led the wise men to Judea, to Jerusalem, and then to Bethlehem, that the King of the Jews has been born. Same news, very different response.
There are three characters in this story, verses 1 through 12. They provide to us three very different responses to Christmas. Herod, then the chief priests and the scribes, and then finally the wise men. Three different characters, or three different sets of characters, and they provide for us three very different responses and I wonder if you’re honest that you might have some of each of these responses in your heart.
Let’s look first then at Herod’s response. Herod’s response was jealousy. Who was Herod? This is Herod the Great. His father was an Idumean, his mother was an Arabian. His family some generations previously had embraced Judaism, but this meant that Herod was not himself ethnically Jewish. He was king over Judea, this vassal state as a part of the Roman Empire, king over Judea from 37 B.C. to 4 B.C. We know pretty definitively when he died 4 B.C. and so that means that Jesus was born likely in 5 or 6 B.C.
Now you say, “Shouldn’t He have been in zero? Isn’t that the whole point of ‘before Christ, B.C.,” and ‘anno Domini,’ the year of our Lord?” Well, yes, that was the idea, our current calendar was established by a 6th century monk named Dionysius Exiguus, Dionysius the Humble. I assume he didn’t give himself that name or it wouldn’t really work, but he was later called Dionysius the Humble and he is most famous, he was a very well-respected scholar in his day and most famous for calculating this B.C./A.D. But as best as we can tell, well, one thing he didn’t include a year zero, so we’re off by one, and he missed four years when Caesar Augustus reigned under the name of Octavian. So, he’s off about five years. So Jesus was likely born in around 5 or 6 B.C. We know, you see in verse 19 of chapter 2, that’s when Herod dies, we know that he had to a have been born before Herod died and Herod died in 4 B.C.
Herod is called Herod the Great because in one way he was truly a great king over this vassal state of Judea. He built up Jerusalem. He was by some accounts the only one who could ever really keep peace among this very rambunctious, fractious people. He was called the great because he engineered and oversaw a number of impressive building projects during his reign. A palace for himself, building up the Temple mount, the famous Western Wall that still stands today in Jerusalem, Masada, Caesarea on the coast of the Mediterranean. He built up this and more during his reign.
He also saw to it that the Jews were exempt from military service, also that the Jews had an exemption from emperor worship. They were considered a special class of people in the empire. So, he did many great things. And yet at the same time this Herod the Great was also Herod the Cruel, paranoid, neurotic, bordering on delusional at times, especially during his final years. He feared and hated any possible rival to his power. He executed at one point almost half the Sanhedrin. He killed some 300 court officers. He was so paranoid and jealous for power he executed his own wife and her mother and three of his own sons. This was not a good family man.
In fact, if you look in the text, look at verse 3: “When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled.” Now we understand why Herod would have been troubled. He receives news these wise men have come. They say, “There is One who has been born King of the Jews.” Well, this is what Herod feared most. He was troubled and likely, you say why does the second half say “all of Jerusalem was with him.” Why was the city of Jerusalem troubled? Likely because they knew what Herod was like when he was troubled.
One commentator says when Herod trembled, the whole city shook. They knew, oh, here we go again. If this indeed is the long-awaited Messiah, or if this is just another pretender, or rival to his throne, we know what happens when Herod gets jealous and angry and suspicious.
The wise men had come tracking this star. It was widely believed in the ancient world that stars could herald the birth of some special person and so it made sense that they might go and follow this star all the way to Jerusalem. And why to Jerusalem? Well, if they are looking for One who was born King of the Jews, then of course you would go to the leading city among the Jews. They want to find the King of the Jews. Well, where He would be born? Obviously He must have been born in Jerusalem. Where would you go to seek out this newborn King? Well, you would go to the king himself. Perhaps this was One born in Herod’s house. That would make sense.
So you go to Judea, you go to Jerusalem, you go to Herod himself, but Herod, though he was a king, he wasn’t the real King of the Jews, not the one that had been prophesied. He was a client king of Rome and he wasn’t even ethnically Jewish and he knew that and the people knew that and he knew that the people knew that.
So when the wise men come, they quickly learn what Herod already knows, and that is that this newborn King was not found among Herod’s household. He feels threatened.
Now, most of us thankfully don’t respond as violently as Herod does, but think about it. Most people have this same kind of visceral reaction if something bigger or better is coming along, a better coach, a better pastor, a better boss, a better cook, a better house, a better mom on Instagram. You feel threatened.
So he senses this is a true claimant to the throne, or at least he feared that many of His people might reach that conclusion. He thinks, “My authority could be taken from me.” And what do people do when they feel threatened and jealous? They become manipulative, deceptive. That’s exactly what Herod is doing. He says to them, “Well, you know, when you go and you find this King, why don’t you come back and let me know. I, too, would like to go and worship Him.”
Now the wise men, they don’t know any better. In fact, they would have fallen for Herod’s trap except that they had been warned at the end in a dream to go back by a different route. Now the men attending Herod, you wonder if they’re rolling their eyes, “Oh, boy, they’re going to actually believe this? Herod does not bow to anyone.” They kept their mouths shut and he says, “Go on your way. Find the King. Come back.” Because he has a plan all along. He wants to find some way that this so-called new King will be eliminated.
You see in verse 16, the heading in the ESV. It’s already been read as a part of the liturgy, “Herod kills the children.” It’s called the massacre, or the slaughter, of the innocents. It says, “All the babies in and around Bethlehem 2 years and younger.” Now it doesn’t mean that it took two years for the wise men to get there but however he calculated it with the star that they saw and wanting to very much be on the safe side, this means that the wise men appeared some months later, as much as maybe a year or more after Jesus’ birth, because Herod just to be safe says, “All right. I want to make sure we get all of these kids in this order of execution, 2 years and younger.”
Now other historians don’t tell us about this, and that has led some people to think that it didn’t happen, but there wouldn’t be a reason for other historians to tell us about such a localized incident. This is a terrible, horrific atrocity, at the same time it probably meant the killing of 20 to 30 young boys. This was not a massive city. This was Bethlehem and its surrounding environs. So it was a very localized order. He said this will take care of it, all of the boys 2 years old and under. Every Jew would have seen a parallel to the story of Moses, who also had a jealous king, a Pharaoh, who wanted to order the death of the sons.
Now you may say with this first response, this kind of jealousy, this rage, this suspicion, this anger. You say to yourself, “Well, I’m rather safe with this one because I quite like Christmas.” I mean, who is really like Herod? Well, there are people, sadly we know, who kill babies. That’s another sermon for another time. But just think about this. Before we say to ourselves, “Who responds to Christmas by saying you know what Christmas does in my heart? It makes me want to kill the baby in the manger.” I mean, even the Grinch didn’t go that far.
No normal person thinks that. Even non-religious people like Christmas. You may be here, and perhaps you haven’t been to church in a long time or you don’t even consider yourself a Christian, and chances are you kind of like Christmas. You like the music, you like the movies that are on, you like the presents, you’re even fine with some Christmas carols and the lights and hearing the story and Jesus seems like a pretty good guy. So deep in our hearts, how many of us are really like Herod? We don’t want to kill the baby in the manger.
But think a little more carefully . Some of us can respond to Jesus with a similar kind of suspicion. Maybe some of you are even here this morning. Maybe somebody made you come or you’re just visiting family and so you felt like you had to be here. But in your heart you’re suspicious. You think, “I know what Christians are like. The Church has hurt me before,” or “God has let me down.” Perhaps you have very real pain related to the Church. But is that a reason to live like Herod? With such suspicion, cynicism even? Bitterness perhaps?
Many would respond with the same kind of disdain that Herod expressed, because though we don’t want to rid ourselves with Jesus as a baby in a manger, that feels rather safe. He’s a sweet, precious little baby and we sing songs and we have nativity scenes. Who doesn’t want that child? But note very well this One who was born was born the Son of God to be King and Lord over all the earth, and that means over your life. How many of us, if we are honest, would prefer to have only one king in our life, you, me, ourselves. Not another king. Oh, it’s all fine and good. Lots of sweet songs, peace on earth, light, Jesus in a manger, it’s a wonderful life, and all kind of in that in the Bible somewhere, but as long as you can call the shots for your life, no one gets to tell you want to do, you can take care of yourself. No, if we’re honest, we don’t want a little baby to grow up, be a King, and have the audacity to try to tell us what to do.
You don’t a book to set the priorities for your life. Think of it. How would you react, apart from all of the familiar trappings of Christmas, how would someone react if in one of their Christmas letters to you they said, “Good news.” Your distant cousin had a child this year and they write you and they say, “Good news. We had a baby this year and this baby is the King of the world.” Oh, really? Figures. I know that side of the family. King of the world. Really?
How would you like it if the news spread on your block that someone had a baby this year and that baby was to be your king. How would you like it if this city, or county, or state, or country, had a king and they could tell you want to do, set the priorities in your life. In fact, the word spread that you need this king because you’re such a rebel and you’re so sinful that you can’t be good enough and you can’t do enough good deeds to get into heaven and you need this king to die for you, because without it you are lost.
Well, now we can feel some of Herod’s jealousy perhaps welling up within us. We all tend to react a little like Herod when someone wants to suggest that this story is not actually all about you. We all live our lives this way. I do, too. You just instinctively live your life. You are the lead actor or actress, everyone else supporting actors and actresses. You know when they have the Academy Awards and supporting actor. Well, I mean, that’s nice, but you want to be the lead. We all live our lives as if we are the center of the story and the rest of the world plays a bit part.
This child, born in the manger, is here to announce to the world that it’s His story and we can be a part of His story to bow down and worship. Christmas is among other things about the news that someone has been born who is better than you, smarter than you, holier than you, with more authority than you, more glory than you, and you need Him to forgive your sins and you need to do whatever He tells you to do. Now is that good news or not? Well, that depends on how much of a little Herod you and I have in our hearts.
Herod responds with jealousy, suspicion, envy. Nobody else is going to be king except for me.
Well, there’s another set of characters in this story and we’ll get to the wise men, they’re the most famous, but we need to deal with this other set. It’s easy to overlook the scribes, the chief priests.
Look at verse 3 – when Herod the king heard this he was troubled and all Jerusalem with him and assembling all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them.
Now the scribes and the chief priests. You’ve never got to have your kids dress up as a scribe somewhere in the nativity scene. That doesn’t happen. But they have an important role to play. They tell Herod and the wise men where this Christ, the Messiah, was to be born. These are the scholars, the religious professionals. He calls of the seminary professors.
Now we have all good seminary professors. I can say that because I’m one of them. But he calls, this is like calling the seminary professors, all the Ph.D.s, would you come? All the experts in the Bible, put your heads together. Get out all your Greek and your Hebrew. Where is the Messiah to be born?
They put their heads together and they say, “Well, we know. That’s an easy one, Herod. The wise men need to go Bethlehem.” Conveniently, it’s only about five or six miles south of Jerusalem. The prophet Micah, that’s where this quotation comes from, Micah, and then it’s also related to a word in 2 Samuel. The prophet Micah told us that a shepherd king would be born in the little town of David, the town of Bethlehem. So, if you want to know where the Christ is to be born, you can make it there in a couple of hours. You’ve just got to follow the road down from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. Herod says, “Thanks.” And as far as we can tell, there is no other word about the chief priests and the scribes and they go along their merry way.
Now you might say, “Well, Pastor, they did their job, they answered the question, they knew their Bibles. What’s so wrong with these priests and scribes? They don’t do anything.” Yes, that’s the point. They don’t do anything, at least nothing that we’re told. It seems they have a positive indifference to the news of Christmas. You can’t say their problem was ignorance.
I doubt that’s the problem for many of you here. Now some of you, maybe this is the first time you’ve ever been to church and you’re just learning all this stuff. A whole lot of you, though, you know this story. You know far and away enough information to be saved, to be a Christian, to follow Christ, to be a faithful disciple. The problem is not ignorance. The problem is indifference.
Wouldn’t you think we should read here that when the scribes and the chief priests got together and told Herod and the wise men that the Messiah was to be born in Bethlehem, that they said, “Get out of our way, Magi. Here we come.” And they hightailed it down. “We have been our waiting our whole life to see this.” But we have no record of anything like this. We would think that of all people the religious professionals, the Bible experts, would have been the first ones to fall at His feet and worship Him. But we have no record that they ever made it, or they ever attempted.
The first ones to come, if you don’t count the shepherds who came, first ones to come and fall down in worship were these pagan astrologers from Babylon.
Why didn’t the chief priests and scribes come? Maybe they were incredulous. Maybe they had been around the block too many times, they had seen this song and dance before and they sort of folded their arms and said, “Yeah? Well, we can tell you it’s in Bethlehem,” snicker, snicker, “Yeah, go find the King of the Jews. Hope your star leads right to the baby’s crib” and they all chuckled. “Yep, some Gentile astrologers, they’re going to get there first. I bet that’s how it’s going to happen.”
Maybe they were skeptical. Maybe they had been burned by so-called Messiahs. This isn’t the first time that someone would claim to be a messiah or some group of people would get animated and say, “This is going to be the Christ.” Maybe they thought no, you fooled me before. I am not getting my hopes up for this thing again. However it happened, it seems that they did not really have a genuine longing in their heart. I wonder if this describes some of us.
Intellectually, they get it. Intellectually, yup, Bible says a Messiah is coming. Check. I believe it. Bible says the Messiah is going to be born in the city of David in Bethlehem. Yup. It’s going to happen. I believe it, I got it. But in their heart, it’s cold, indifferent. They weren’t looking.
Maybe they thought to themselves why would we? We have a pretty good gig, priests and scribes. Life is fine. Some of you may feel that way. Life is okay. It’s not too bad. It’s fine if a Messiah wants to be born in some city and some people want to worship Him. I’ve got nothing against that. But don’t upset my life. I don’t need to get worked up because a few magi have wandered in here and they’ve got some crazy story about a star.
The most amazing news in the whole world. This was the most amazing thing that had ever happened to these scribes. And it’s just a bit of Bible trivia to them. They’re just religious professionals. Fine, go find the baby. All right if you believe in that sort of thing, that’s fine.
It’s like if we lived out West and someone said, “Do you want to go and did you hear what the government is hiding in Area 51, out there in Nevada?” Now I’m not getting into what you think is there and what about the drones that take a break over Christmas apparently and what’s happening out there in New Jersey. But it’s like somebody comes to you breathlessly from some other country and they say, “Hey, where does the US government hide all the UFOs? Where do they hide all the aliens? Where’s all the crazy stuff?” Well, there’s Area 51 in Nevada. Everybody knows that and they book it there. But you don’t go. You’re not into the conspiracy theories. Now save the e-mail, “You called it a conspiracy theory.” Okay. So I didn’t rush out to Area 51.
Somebody believes in it. Somebody goes to find something. Good luck. I’m going about my life. That’s how these scribes handled the greatest news they had ever heard. Apathy, indifference. That is for many of us the chief obstacle too authentic Christianity. It’s not persecution. It’s you’re busy and you’ve got life and you’ve got other things you’re doing and a job and you’ve got kids or grandkids or you’re hoping to get married someday. You’re planning a vacation. You’ve got new challenges in your life. You don’t mind if people believe something and you can even sign up to believe it yourself and do a religious exercise once in a while, but I don’t know. The wise men are going a little overboard.
I mean to get up, to leave Babylon, make this month or two long journeys across the desert to come and now they brought the costly gifts and they’re going to bow down before a little baby? I mean, let’s not get carried away. So, Jesus is fine, happy to have Jesus and check the box. Yeah, Savior, Lord, good. God, yeah. But not really an all-consuming reality in your life.
It’s like these priests and the scribes. We’re singing “Jesus, born in Bethlehem,” “Silent night, holy night,” “Round yon virgin, mother and child, the Son of God come to earth as a little baby.” Is there a football game on? Could you pass the chips?
Indifference, ultimately. Let somebody else worship Jesus. I have my life to live.
Well, there’s one other response. It’s the most famous one here. The three wise men. Look in verse 1 – Behold, wise men, you see the ESV has a little footnote. Greek magi. They were wise men. They were very, almost certainly not kings. That song that we sang, “We Three Kings,” Nathan was nice enough, can we sing it? I sang let’s sing it, but I’ll explain why it’s kind of wrong, but it’s good. We three kings. Maybe they were kings. They were some kind of royalty.
But that’s not what the word “magi” means. Magi was a word given to you might call professional astrologers, or astronomers. There’s no reason a Jew or a Christian would ever make up a story like this because both Jews and the early Christians repudiated astrology. Magi is where we get our English word “magic.”
You could call these men magicians, but we’d misunderstand what we mean by magician. But that’s where we get our word “magic.” They’re usually viewed negatively. In fact, it’s the same word, magi, used for the magician named Elymas in Acts 13. So these are not generally people that Jews, or then Christians, would have thought highly of.
They’re not there at the manger at Christmas. We read clearly in verse 1, “after Jesus had been born,” they see this star and even if they hightailed it as soon as they could and got their stuff together and left within a matter of days, it’s probably a six-week journey to get there. We read in verse 11 the family is in a house, “going into the house they saw the child with Mary, His mother.” Interestingly, four times that child, Jesus and His mother, are mentioned in Matthew 2, it always says “child with His mother,” child comes first, where normally you say “mother and child.” But here the point is the child with His mother.
They’re’ in a house. Maybe they’re staying with family. After all, they went there because that’s where Joseph’s lineage was from, so almost certainly they have some family to stay with. Maybe they’re in a different house. Maybe when they came on Christmas they’re in the same house because when it says “there was no room for them in the inn” maybe it meant there was no guestroom in this house or some adjoining piece of property and then they had to lay Him in a manger. There was often a room that was adjacent or maybe a kind of outdoor patio on the house where the animals could come in at night and that’s where they put Jesus. Well, now they’ve brought them inside the house. Wherever they are, here they are, and the magi come.
Herod will make his decree based on the time he ascertained from the wise men, verse 16. So it may have been a matter of months or maybe a year or more, but it is a separate occasion now from the shepherds to the wise men.
In fact, there’s a separate holiday on the Church calendar called Epiphany. If you say someone has an epiphany, you mean something dawns on them, something appears to them. That’s what epiphany means, so Epiphany is on January 6, December 25 to January 6 are the 12 days of Christmas. You get to December 26 and you say, “Ah, it doesn’t feel right that Christmas is over. All of the stations have taken away their Christmas channels. It’s suddenly Valentine’s Day in the grocery store. We need more Christmas. Well, the Church calendar historically has had these 12 days between the celebration of Christmas and the celebration of Epiphany.
We don’t know if there were three wise men. We guess that because there were three gifts, but we can’t be sure. We don’t know the names but a tradition developed centuries, many centuries later, that their names were Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. But there’s no way of knowing, and that doesn’t arise until the 6th century. We don’t know where they came from except verse 1 says “the East.” I think our best estimated guess is that they came from Babylon, which would be today Iraq, though they could have come from Persia, which would be Iran. But we know that in Babylon they had magi and astrologer priests like this.
We can’t be positive what they saw. It says here they saw a star, and that’s a perfectly good translation for the Greek word. Just realize that in the ancient world they referred to many things as stars. A star could be a fixed star, it could be a planet, it could be a comet, it could be a meteor. In a book that came out about 10 years ago called The Great Christ Comet, Crossway published it in 2015, Colin Nicholl, a scholar, he was at Gordon-Conwell and he really set aside teaching there and became an independent researcher, he was a Bible scholar and taught himself about astronomy and comets and this was really his life’s work. If you can find a copy of it, it’s very dense because it has lots of stuff about comets that was unfamiliar to me. But in this dense, 300 or 400-page book, he makes about the most convincing case you can that the star was a comet, or if you’re keeping track at home, a large, long period, nearly isotropic comet. So put that on the bingo card for this morning.
What is a comet? A comet, I had to remind myself, has a nucleus. It’s like a dirty ice ball with dirt and dust and stone in this nucleus and when it gets near the sun, some of that nucleus turns to gas and that forms a tail. It can also be a tail of dust or dust and gas. Nicholl argues that this star was a comet. He says only a comet could appear this long in the sky. Some comets can be visible for a year. The Hale-Bopp comet, if you remember that from a few decades ago, was visible for 10-1/2 months before it rose with the sun.
Then you also have this language in verse 2 – “We say His star when it rose.” That is likely semi-technical language that a comet rises above the eastern horizon in advance of the rising sun. When the sun has enough light to shine on this, you would see this comet rising.
Now, if these were professional astronomers, they knew how to read the stars. They had seen planets before. They knew stars. So whatever happened had to be something they had never seen before in their life. As they would then see with the setting of the sun, you might see this comet then appear in the West and they could follow it to the West, to Judea. And this type of comet, there are a number of illustrations of this throughout history, people doing drawings of these comets that when they reach the end of their life they can almost stand directly vertical with the nucleus facing down, a long tail facing up, and they can come to rest upon a particular place.
This comet, if it was a comet, this star, did more than just lead them to Bethlehem. They didn’t need help getting to Bethlehem. Everyone in Herod’s court could tell them how to go from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. They needed the star to tell them exactly the house where the King was born. So they went. Each night they may have followed with the setting of the sun to see the star guiding them to the West and then finally, in one of the greatest signs Nicholl argues of the accuracy of Old Testament prophecy, this star which had risen, now comes to descend upon the very place where the Savior lays.
The Jews, when they were in captivity in Babylon, could have very easily shared their stories. There would have been a mixing of cultures. It’s not at all implausible to think that these Babylonian holy men would have some awareness of the religions of the world and would have understood that the Jewish people were expecting something like this. After all, Numbers 24:17 says, “I see him but not now; I behold Him, but not near; a star shall come out of Jacob and a scepter shall rise out of Israel; it shall crush the forehead of Moab and break down all the sons of Sheth.”
That prophecy from Numbers 24:17 they took to be a messianic prophecy that a star would come out of Jacob. Now if you know your Bible, you know that who gave that prophecy? It was Balaam. Remember Balaam? The king of Moab Balak hired Balaam and said, “I don’t like these people, Israel. I’m scared of them so I want you to prophesy bad things about them.” But the Lord four times made Balaam give a good prophecy instead of a bad prophecy.
Can you see the connections between Balaam and these wise men? For Balaam was also a Gentile, a kind of holy man who came from the East and had a jealous king who wanted him to be the ruin of God’s people, and yet God prevented him from being the ruin of His people. In the same way we have these holy men come from the East with a jealous king bent on destroying God’s people, but God will not allow it.
With all that we don’t know for certain about this story, we know enough to know that this is absolutely remarkable. These wise men, even if they didn’t show up the same night as the shepherds, they absolutely deserve a place in the nativity story. They may not have complete faith, they may not have understood everything they need to know, likely they went back and continue as pagan astrologers. We don’t know the measure of their faith and whether they were saved, if we put that term on it, but what they demonstrate was truly amazing.
We see here what faith is about. Faith seeks. The scribes and the chief priests, they didn’t seek anything. But here these men, they seek, and not a post-modern kind of seeking where you just seek but you never find. No, they actually found what they were looking for. They weren’t just going on a journey. Well, I’m on a faith journey. Well, I hope your journey gets you somewhere. I hope you arrive at a destination. They were looking for something for someplace and for someone and they found it. Their faith was a seeking faith. Their faith was a costly faith. They had to risk their necks traveling throughout this barren land. They had to risk their reputation. We don’t know what did the rest of their friends in Babylon or Persia say to them. You’re going where? Folding clothes – “Honey, what are you doing again? When will you be back? How long does it take to get there?”
And they came, as we know, with costly gifts. Since at least the 2nd century with the Church father Irenaeus, Christians have speculated, and it’s just speculation, that gold was for royalty, frankincense was a gift for a God, and myrrh was there to prefigure His death and His burial. Whether all of that is to be understood from gold, frankincense, or myrrh we can’t be certain, but what we do know is that these three gifts were absolutely costly. These were gifts that only could be afforded from some kind of royalty and were only given to one who was a king. It was a costly faith and it was a worshiping faith. Not just believing in the miraculous, not just believing in something called faith, but rather their faith had an object. The King of the Jews was first worshiped, not by His own people but by these outsiders.
You see how this is telling us the story? Remember what we saw in Matthew chapter 1? The women in Jesus’ lineage. Even more than their potentially sexually scandalous background, they may have all been Gentiles? All of this is setting up Matthew 28, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Go therefore and make disciples” what? “Of all nations.”
This is a King for all peoples. It’s there in His lineage. It’s there at His manger as the wise men bow down.
Faith worships and faith wonders. This is what separates the wise men from Herod and the priests and the scribes. I hope this is what is in your heart this morning. It’s one of the things I pray for myself and I hope I’ll pray for my kids all their life. Do you pray at Christmas? Lord, help me not to lose a sense of wonder.
When you’re a kind, Christmas has a wonder. Trisha and I went up a few days before Christmas, we went for a wedding of a friend. Flew up to Michigan, came back. We were there for 24 hours and they had snow. We sent back the pictures and the kids said, “Snow, bring back some snow.” Well, you’ll be glad to know we didn’t. Just tornado watches.
That was part of the wonder. But it’s kids going to bed and barely sleeping and waking up to get all those presents and you’ve got to tell them a time when they’re young, but you can’t get out of your room before this time. There’s just such wonder.
Here’s one of my favorite verses in the whole Bible. Do you see it there in verse 10? “When they saw the star,” so the star appears again. It led them to Judea, now it’s there right upon His house. “When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy.” The Greek, megalin, mega joy. You don’t have to know any Greek to translate that. They rejoiced exceedingly with mega joy. One translator translates it, “they were deliriously happy.” I hope some of us were deliriously happy in the last week. Just exuberantly excited.
Do you remember, most of you have seen the movie “Up,” you remember they put the dog, they had the translator on so you can understand what the dogs are thinking. Remember the bird, the bird’s named Kevin because of how ridiculous characters in movie get a “Kevin” name. But you’ve got Doug, the dog, and like a big dog you remember what he says? “I just met you and I love you.”
The wise men are like puppy dogs. Just where, where, where? Where’s the ball? Where’s the stick? And they just come bounding in to the house, shaking off the big golden doodle or something. They just come to the child. I just met you and I love you.
I hope you haven’t stopped feeling that way about Christ. If you’re a Christian, you’ve felt that way some time, some time when you were maybe it happened in college, it does for a lot of people. Maybe it happened when you were just married. Maybe you were converted later. Maybe it came to be real to you when you were 10 years old. But I hope you feel that way sometimes still. Maybe it’s not “I just met you,” maybe it’s “I met you 50 years ago, Jesus, and I still love You.”
These magi didn’t realize who it was exactly they were worshiping. They did not know that the whole world had changed. They had no way of knowing that 2000 years later in a place in a part of the world they had never heard of, outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, 1500 people would be singing about them. They found in Bethlehem more than they could have ever realized. It was the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, Isaiah 60 we’ve already read – the nations shall come to Your light, kings to the brightness of Your rising. That prophecy in Isaiah says that they will bring gold and frankincense. Psalm 72 says the kings of the coastlands will render Him tribute and kings and nations will fall down before Him.
Well, it happened here in Bethlehem, this King who would bring a surprising kingdom, a kingdom where pagan astrologers and dirty shepherds get it but the Jewish kings and the priests and the scholars don’t. Foreign dignitaries bowing before a helpless baby born to some Galilean pilgrims because they knew Herod was not the real king of the Jews. They went right by Herod and went to Jesus.
What a contrast between these two kings. Herod, an insecure king in a stately palace, and here we have the King of kings born in a lowly stall. A king like Herod who lives to kill, and a King like Jesus who was born to die. A king like Herod desperate to hold onto his power, and a King like Christ who willingly set aside, had His glory shrouded. A king like Herod who cannot win no matter how great his successes seem to be because God is against him, and a King like Christ who cannot lose no matter what He suffers because God is for Him, and this King is in fact God with us.
For unto you this day in the city of David a Savior is born, who is Christ the Lord. What is the response in your heart? The only proper response, the saving response, is worship and wonder and to be at the foot of this great King, deliriously happy.
Let’s pray. Our Father in heaven, we thank You for this good news. May it be glad tidings in our hearts. In Jesus’ name. Amen.