Good From Evil; Great from Small | Matthew 2:13-23

Thank you, be seated.

Patricia, if you're ready, please.

The Bible roadings from Matthew 2, 13 to 23,

and Patricia will be ready from the NIV.

The escape to Egypt.

When they had gone, an angel of the Lord

appeared to Joseph in a dream.

Get up, he said, take the child and his mother

and escape to Egypt.

Stay there until I tell you.

For Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.

So he got up, took the child and his mother

during the night and left for Egypt,

where he stayed until the death of Herod.

And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said

through the prophet.

Out of Egypt, I called my son.

When Herod realized that he had been out

and whitted by the Magi, he was furious

and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem

and its vicinity, who were two years old and under.

In accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.

Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled.

A voice is heard in Roma, weeping and great mourning.

Rachel weeping for her children

and refusing to be comforted because they are no more.

After Herod died, an angel of the Lord

appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said,

get up, take the child and his mother

and go to the land of Israel

for those who were trying to take the child's life are dead.

So he got up, took the child and his mother

and went to the land of Israel.

But when he heard that Arkelaus was reining in Judah

in place of his father Herod,

he was afraid to go there.

Having been warned in a dream,

he withdrew to the district of Galilee

and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth.

So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets

that he would be called a Nazarene?

Let us pray.

Heavenly Father, thank you so much

that we can have your word read,

that we have it in our hands, that we have it in our homes.

Heavenly Father, this morning, as we look more into it,

we pray that you help us to remember what has been read to us,

remember this passage and help it to change us,

that we can be encouraged in our lives

and our service of you and our love of your son Jesus, amen.

Christianity is the world's largest religion.

It has grown from approximately 3,000 people

on the day of Pentecost to 2.18 billion people today.

I want you to just stop and think about how that makes

you feel when you hear that incredible statistic.

Or perhaps if I could reverse that

and ask you to think about what if that wasn't the case.

So just take a little think about how you felt

when Christianity is the greatest religion,

the largest religion.

But how would you feel if it wasn't?

Would you feel at all discouraged?

Would you feel at all uneasy or threatened?

Such an idea isn't so ridiculous.

First of all, because Islam is the world's fastest growing

religion, it's going to overtake Christianity

in size by the second half of this century.

Secondly, perhaps the statistics are a little bit misleading.

Perhaps the 2.18 billion Christians

isn't quite as convincing as what it sounds.

Some of those might be nominal Catholics.

50% are Catholics, some of those may be nominal.

Another 10% are Eastern Orthodox.

Again, perhaps a number are nominal.

Some will be liberal Christians who deny basic truths

like the resurrection.

An increasing number of those people

counted as Christians will believe the prosperity gospel.

In our country, Christianity is declining statistically.

And even the number of people within Christianity

who are willing to stand on biblical truth

is becoming increasingly smaller.

How do you feel when you see ungodly laws passed?

How do you feel when you see our nation turning

its back on the truth?

How would you feel if your church was getting smaller?

How do you feel when evil prospers,

when people hurt the ones that you love and get away with it?

And here's the real question that I'm asking.

This is really what I'm driving at.

Does the Christian faith feel less credible to you

if you can't see things going the way

that you think they should go?

And the answer to that question for some Christians is yes.

They do find it less credible.

They do get discouraged.

They do fall away because of opposition and hardship.

And Jesus warns us about that in this same gospel, chapter 13.

In this passage, things are not going well for the Jesus

story.

In the last passage, in the part that you would have done before,

Jesus is born into the city where the Messiah was to come from.

He's honored by foreign dignitaries.

Not a stunning start for the one who

would be king of the world, but Christmas card worthy nevertheless.

But the story continues, and it isn't pretty.

Can nobody ever put this passage on a Christmas card?

Jesus' family has to flee.

They find themselves refugees in Egypt.

Herod, in his insecurity and greed for power,

murders all the children under two in the area around Bethlehem.

And there's no sense here that he's ever brought to justice.

Joseph and his family are finally able to return to their country,

but they're afraid to live in Judea and choose instead

to live in the backwater of Nazareth,

the least likely place from which to re-establish

the kingdom of God.

Not only is that a less than glamorous start

for the one whom the angel said is God with us,

but evil appears to be prospering.

All right, this is all what's happening

on the surface of the text.

But there are at least two more layers

that we need to consider.

And that's what we're going to be doing today.

Firstly, we're going to look at what Matthew is doing with the text,

what he wants us to understand about these events.

And that relates to Jesus' identity, who Jesus is.

And secondly, after doing that, we're going to look beyond that

at what these things or what Matthew's doing here

reveals about the heart of God.

OK, we're going to kind of, if you like,

pull back the curtains on the passage.

And when we do that, the Holy Spirit gives us a glimpse

into the workings of God.

So firstly, let's look at what Matthew is doing

to reveal about, or what he's revealing,

about Jesus in this passage.

So what I want you to do, so have the Bible out in front of you.

If you don't have one, I noticed that this Bible is

well furnished with, this church has got copies of Bible everywhere.

So grab one of those if that's your thing to read along,

because we're going to be looking pretty closely at the text.

I want you to notice, firstly, that the passage has,

what we've read today, has three sections.

They're kind of divided up a little bit different in the NIV.

But as I want us to think about it, as it was read today,

each of these sections has a different event in it.

So three things happen.

First one is Joseph and his family flee to Egypt.

Second one is Herod has the boys in Bethlehem under two killed.

The third one is that Joseph and his family

return from Egypt and settle in Nazareth.

So three events.

Each of those events starts with a shift in time.

So Matthew's highlighting these as three different things,

sections, events, whatever.

Verse 13 says, when they had gone, so a little time marker there.

Verse 16 says, when Herod realized, I know the little shift there.

And then number three after Herod dies.

So there's three little kind of shifts in that.

And then once we've noticed that, we've got three little sections here,

it's good to notice that each of those sections

has some kind of an Old Testament reference.

Each of these events is in Matthew.

What Matthew is showing us is that they're a fulfillment of prophecy.

So kind of the simplest level, Matthew is showing us

that these things that are taking place are fulfillment of Scripture.

Not only does he show us that they fulfill Scripture,

but he's showing us that Scripture, the Old Testament,

can interpret these events.

So take a look at the first one, which is verses 13 to 15.

And Angel tells Joseph to take his family to Egypt.

And Joseph's actions echo the words of the Angel.

So Matthew goes to trouble to parallel what the Angel says

and what Joseph does.

And that emphasizes Joseph's obedience.

And they stay there until Herod dies, which is probably was about two years,

and possibly living off the money from the gifts that the Magi gave.

Then in verse 15, Matthew says,

And so was fulfilled what the Lord said through the prophet, out of Egypt,

I called my son, which is a kind of odd thing to say.

OK, the quote is from Hosea, chapter 11, verse 1,

Hosea 11:1

where God is looking back on a past event.

So he's talking about how he brought his people out of Egypt.

And I say that's kind of odd because that's not something that needs to be fulfilled, right?

It's not something that hadn't yet happened and so needs to happen in the future.

It is something that did already happen and here it is repeated.

And Jesus repeats this event in a perfect way.

And this tells us something about Old Testament fulfillment.

So one way that Jesus fulfills the Old Testament is he does all the stuff that is promised.

So things are promised and need to get fulfilled.

So for example, God promises a king in the line of David who will rule forever

and then Jesus fulfills that role, he is that king.

But another way that Jesus brings the Old Testament to the full

is that he perfectly fulfills Old Testament roles, Old Testament pictures.

He is the final and perfect prophet.

He is the final and perfect high priest.

He is the final and perfect king.

He fulfills the sacrificial system.

He replaces the temple.

He is our Sunday rest, our Sabbath rest.

And here he is the perfect representative Israel.

He is the perfect representative of God's people.

He is the son whom God brought out of Egypt.

So look back to what you would have done already.

The very first verse, chapter one, verse one.

Matthew says that Jesus is the Messiah.

The son of David, the son of Abraham.

OK, and in chapter one and the start of chapter two, Matthew has been showing us

that Jesus is the son of David by showing that he was born in the city of David in Bethlehem

and that he was honored by foreign nobles just as David's son Solomon was honored

by foreign nobles.

And in this section, Matthew is showing us that Jesus is the son of Abraham.

He is the perfect Israel, God's people.

And he identifies with Israel.

But there's actually more to what Hosea says.

See, although Matthew only quotes verse one, it's kind of like when he quotes that,

it's carrying the weight of all of that passage from Hosea.

When he reads one verse, his audience, who we assume are biblically literate

in the Old Testament, think about the rest of the passage.

And what Hosea goes on to say is that while God lovingly rescued his people out of Egypt,

the people rebelled against him in the wilderness.

And what you guys are going to see as you go kind of into chapter three

in the coming weeks is that Jesus, unlike Israel, didn't rebel against God the Father

when he is tested in the wilderness.

So Jesus is the perfect Israel, the perfect representative.

He's not just the king who can rule us, but he's the perfect representative

who can pay the price for our sins.

So let's have a look at the next one.

That's verses 16 to 19.

So back in verse 12, the Magi were told in a dream not to go back to Herod.

So they didn't tip him off as to the location of the king.

And Herod is furious, he's desperate to hold on to his power,

and he orders the death of all children under two.

And given that Egypt has just been mentioned in the last little section we looked at,

it's not hard to think then of the parallel between Moses being saved from Pharaoh

and Jesus being saved from Herod, both involved the murder of young children.

Jesus doesn't just fulfill the role of a new Israel,

but he is the new and perfect leader of God's people.

But it's easy kind of to be 2,000 years later and looking back at this at these kind

of nice neat parallels that Matthew's kind of laying out for us.

But we also need to remember that the reality of this event would have brought

about immense distress and mourning.

You know, you can just imagine soldiers coming through the town,

hunting down and killing babies.

And then Matthew says that Jeremiah's words from chapter 31 and verse 15 of Jeremiah are fulfilled.

He says, a voice is heard in Ramar, weeping in great mourning.

Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted

because they are no more.

Again, it's kind of a seemingly odd choice.

Again, that fulfills a picture, not something that was predicted and needs fulfillment.

So Jeremiah is picturing Rachel.

So here Rachel is, if you like, the symbolic mother of the nation, of Israel,

and she's crying for the people as they go into exile,

as they're being punished by God.

And so symbolically, as you know, these babies are destroyed in the surroundings of Bethlehem,

the people are still in exile and they need to be brought news of a new Moses

and a new Passover to lead them out of their troubles.

But remember what I said before about Old Testament verses.

We need to kind of think of their context.

So this passage in Jeremiah is actually a passage of hope.

All right, and it's worth turning to.

If you're into flipping to stuff in your Bible, it's actually worth the time.

So Jeremiah chapter 31.

Jeremiah 31 · chapter mention

And the bit the Matthew quotes is verse 15.

So Rachel is pictured weeping, but then the next bit says,

so in verse 16, restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears

for your work will be rewarded, declares the Lord.

They will return from the land of the enemy.

So there is hope for your descendants, declares the Lord.

Your children will return to their own land.

And then jump down.

This is where it really gets exciting.

Jump down to verses 31 or 31 to 33.

And this is kind of, this is one of the most significant passages

for our kind of understanding of the New Testament from the Old Testament.

It says, the days are coming declares, it's verse 31.

The days are coming declares the Lord when I will make a new covenant

with the people of Israel, with the people of Judah.

I will not, it will not be like the old covenant I made with their ancestors

when I took them by their hand and led them out of Egypt

because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them, declares the Lord.

This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel

after that time declares the Lord.

I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.

I will be their God and they will be my people.

No longer will they teach their neighbor.

We'll say to one another, know the Lord.

So Jesus is the new Israel.

He is the one with, that fulfills us, he's the one with the law on his mind and heart,

opening up a new covenant so that we can join him.

All right, let's have a look at the next section.

So this is the final one, verses 19 to 23.

So again, Joseph is shown to be obedient.

He takes Mary back to Israel, as he's told.

But they're unable to settle in Bethlehem where they left from,

because they discovered that Judea has scored the wrong Herod.

All right, so notice he says they kind of go back as King Herod has died,

but then they don't actually go back to where they're planning to

because Arkelaus is there.

So what's happened is that King Herod has had three sons

and when he died, he divided his kingdom into three sections and gave each section

to one of these sons, right?

So Arkelaus is the one of Herod's sons that is most like his father.

So think of the father, the guy who would actually kill young children

to secure his own throne.

That's the one who was King over Judea, so that wasn't a safe place to settle.

Galilee was ended up ruled by Antipas, who was also a Herod,

so he's also a son, but far milder and sainer.

So even this kind of seemingly kind of mundane piece of news,

Matthew realises fulfills the Old Testament.

But of all Matthew's odd fulfillment references, this is the oddest

because the words that you see there in verse 23 aren't actually found

in the Old Testament at all, okay?

He will be called and Nazarene is not there.

But notice that it doesn't say what was spoken by the prophet,

like it does in other places, or as it was said by a particular prophet

like Jeremiah in verse 17.

It says prophets like more than one.

And what Matthew probably means is that the prophets generally said

that this is the kind of person that the Messiah would be,

the kind of person who would come from Nazareth

in the hill country of Galilee, are no one.

Don Bradman came from my hometown, Beryl New South Wales.

Beryl New South Wales isn't famous for anything else.

I tell people that I come from Beryl and they say, oh,

isn't that where Bradman came from?

Point out that I also came from there, but apparently not significant.

And Paul Kelly's song about Bradman calls him just a kid from the sticks.

And that's the point.

And that's what on the surface of it, what Jesus is here.

He's just a kid from the sticks.

He's a no one.

This extraordinary king who's been marked out by stars,

who's been preserved by angels, the one who will lead his people out of exile,

has to flee to Egypt and return to a very ordinary town.

And in doing so, Jesus identifies with us.

He experiences our fear and our pain and our suffering.

He's looked down upon, he's spat on and crucified.

And the fact that he identifies with us means two very important things.

Firstly, it means that he can be a true representative human.

He can die in our place.

He can redeem our body and our soul because he really was one of us.

Secondly, it means that he understands our suffering.

He knows your darkest fears and your deepest insecurities.

And he's not going to let you suffer more than you can bear.

But I said that we're going to kind of peel back another layer of the text.

And that's what we're kind of going to head into now.

So take a look again at the way that Matthew introduces the Old Testament quotations.

So, for a start, look particularly at verse 15 and 23, they say, and so was fulfilled.

Okay?

It's the subtle words that he chooses there.

Matthew's word choice implies that these things have happened in order that these prophecies

have been fulfilled.

All this is orchestrated by God.

God has brought about these hardships so that his purposes are fulfilled.

Verse 17 is shaded ever so slightly differently.

As we find in other places of the Bible, Matthew is careful that he doesn't imply that God

has actively done evil.

Yes, God was in control when the babies were killed, but he allowed evil to take place.

He brought about his purposes through it, but he didn't actively do evil.

When Joseph leads his family out of Egypt, or when he leads them down into Egypt, they're

not like a nice two-year vacation, they're not there to kind of take in the pyramids

and enjoy the local cuisine.

They leave in the night, they become refugees, they get up and go with what they have.

And as I've said in the passage, Joseph is continually shown to be a righteous man.

Okay, bad things happen to good people.

But God has a purpose in and through these bad things.

His purpose has been that his son is protected, number one, he ensures that his Messiah lives

despite opposition.

But God could have done that in a much easier way.

Herod could have just had a heart attack and saved a lot of people, a lot of trouble.

But God has worked in a way that his son has taken on Israel's story and perfectly fulfilled

it and identified with us in a way that made him our perfect Savior.

And God is working in your life too, amongst the evil and the chaos to bring you to salvation.

Now that doesn't make your life easy, because it didn't make the righteous Joseph's life

easy.

And God didn't make his own son's life easy.

He's not working to make your life easy, he's working to bring you to salvation.

But the big difference between your life and your mess and your hardships is that what

we get here is everything laid out nicely in the Bible.

We get Matthew to take us through it.

We can look back and we have that interpreted and we can see the way that God is working,

which is something that we don't get as we're living through our life.

But we live by faith and not by sight.

But you should know that the God who let his own son die to save the lost can bring good

out of your messy life and he promises to do so.

The second thing that we should notice about the way that God works, and this is the last

point that I make, is that God works through the humble and insignificant people of the

world.

Jesus wasn't born in a palace, he didn't go to the best schools, he didn't have everything

that he desired.

His birth went almost unrecognised.

He became an alien in a foreign land and returns to live in the political and cultural backwaters

of the occupied Jewish territory.

In John chapter 1, Philip tells Nathanael that he thinks he's found the Messiah and

John 1 · chapter mention

he comes from Nazareth.

And Nathanael exclaims, Nazareth, can anything good come from there?

And we might well ask, can anything good come from Armadale?

I looked up famous people from Armadale on Wikipedia, and can have a look later, it's

a people of note associated with Armadale or something like this, and there's this

list of, you know, bullet point, the first bullet point on that list tells us that one

of Australia's most notorious bush rangers came from Armadale.

The last point on that list tells us that Ben Cousins faced the Magistrates Court in

Armadale.

So it seems that Armadale is known for criminal activity.

In fairness, it also said that Rod Marsh was from Armadale, but on the whole it didn't

look too flash, but God can do great things with a small church from the sticks.

And that's how God works.

Paul said that God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise.

God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.

And throughout the Bible, God takes no one's and nothing's and uses them for His glorious

purpose.

And at this point, we should circle back to where we started.

Should we feel discouraged if the worldwide church becomes less significant?

Should we feel discouraged if the church generally is small and rejected by society?

Should you be discouraged if the people in your high school or your workplace belittle

your beliefs?

Should we find belief in a good God less credible if we get sick or if we go broke or our

marriage breaks down?

The answer to all these questions is a firm no.

And if we did turn our back on our beliefs because of these hardships, then we had never

understood how God works in the first place.

Life is messy, it can be mundane and insignificant.

But God is a God who is willing to get messy with small people and do His work in their

lives.

Let me pray, Heavenly Father, you are wondrous beyond our understanding and imagination.

The way that you choose to work just shows how great you are.

We thank you that you care about us and can work through insignificant people like us.

We are going to stand and sing together.

We're going to sing a mighty fortress is our God, a song that has encouraged Christians

for many generations.