Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - The Messy Side of Christmas | Advent | Matthew 2:13-23

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

What if Christmas doesn't feel like the most wonderful time of the year? What if you don't feel the peace on earth? What if Christmas just doesn't feel like Christmas? In today's episode, Keith shares the messiness of the very first Christmas and how it brings hope to your Christmas. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter@TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Matthew 2:13-23 Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year. It's gifts, lights, trees, and parties, and carols like joy to the world. Or is it? I mean, what if you have an empty chair at your Christmas dinner because of a ruptured relationship? What if this is the first Christmas since someone you loved died?

What if this marks another Christmas unable to have children? What if another Christmas party means she will come home drunk again? What if you have to divide the kids on Christmas so they spend their holidays schlepping between parents' houses? Is Christmas really the most wonderful time of the year? Maybe we have sentimentalized Christmas and robbed it of its power in our life. If you think Christianity is too pie in the sky, if you think it paints too rosy of a picture of life, if it's too simplistic for a complex world,

if you think Christianity fails to wrestle with the hardest questions we are confronted with. That's a good sign you don't know much about the Bible. The Bible is unflinchingly honest about the brokenness of us and the world. We see the brokenness in the story the event surrounding Christmas. It's far from idyllic. After the Magi had left worshiping Jesus, an angel of the Lord appears to Joseph in a dream. And he says, get up, 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. God sends an angel to warn Joseph and Mary that murderous King Herod is determined to kill Jesus before he can become a real threat to his power. You don't see this story on many

Christmas cards or reenacted in Christmas plays. This is the messy side of Christmas. And that's comforting, because my life is messy too. Back to Matthew 2. So he got up, took the child in a 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. Jesus goes down to Egypt as a refugee on the run from corrupt authorities. Put yourself in the position of his mom or dad. This isn't the life you wanted for your child. You're scared. You're on the run. You're exhausted. Things are out of control. You're wondering, where's God? Now, God isn't surprised by what's going on in your life. He's not surprised by the doctor's diagnosis or the unfair decision your boss made.

Matthew is telling us, look, we've been here before. Matthew says, this fulfilled what the prophet said, Out of Egypt I called my son. That's a reference to the book of Hosea. And when you go back and look it up, what you find is that it's not pointing toward Jesus. When it says out of Egypt, I called my son, it's talking about Israel. Israel was in captivity in Egypt for 400, years, 400 years of mystery, 400 years of slavery, 400 years of injustice, 400 years of disappointment. But then God moved. When everything seemed lost, God raised up a deliverer and against all odds brought them out of Egypt through the sea and eventually into the promised land. There's a divine pattern that God is drawing our attention to. This is the way God works in the world and in our life. He intervenes

in dark places. He overcomes impossible odds. He's present when it feels like he's absent. He's His grace overcome sin. The light shined into the darkness and the darkness could not overcome it. The story of the Exodus is being fulfilled in Jesus. Just like God raised up Moses to deliver Israel from slavery in Egypt, God is raising up Jesus to deliver us from slavery to sin. Just as God delivered Israel from the oppression of the Pharaoh, just as God delivered Joseph and Mary and Jesus from the oppression of Herod,

God can deliver you from whatever oppresses you in your life. If you have an unplanned pregnancy, if you have unwanted desires, if you're at an undesirable place in life, the Christmas story tells you that God hasn't abandoned you. If you're feeling anxious because you don't think you measure up, if you don't see any hope on the horizon, if sin and evil seem to be winning, Matthew wants you to know that God is in control and that his purposes cannot be thwarted. Matthew 216. When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he

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. Now this is pure evil. Herod wanted to rid the world of a rival king, so he had all the boys two years old and under killed. Can you imagine the shock, the trauma, the pain, the screaming, the grief that night, those boys were killed? Bethlehem had a population of about 1 to 2,000 people, so based on population estimates, they were probably between 25 and 50 children killed by Herod's death squads.

If God had warned Joseph in a dream to take his family away to avoid being killed, why hadn't God warned all the families? What is God doing while children are massacred? Verse 17. Then what was said to 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. Now here's another Old Testament quotation.

This one is from the Prophet Jeremiah written 600 years before Jesus's birth. Babylon, the world's greatest superpower, had attacked Jerusalem, killing some of the people, taking others back to Babylon and destroying the temple. The Prophet Jeremiah writes poetry, lamenting all the death and destruction caused by Babylon. He pictures this mom, Rachel, weeping for her children. You see, even hundreds of years before Babylon, so going back further into history, Rachel, Jacob's wife, was right outside of Bethlehem about to give birth to her son. She realized she was going to die after giving birth. Jeremiah is using Rachel weeping over her child as an image of her weeping over the children of Israel

who had been taken captive in Babylon. And Jeremiah is using Rachel symbolically. after all Rachel has been dead for hundreds of years. It would have been like a poet mourning the deaths on 9-11, saying George and Martha Washington were weeping over those who died. And now Matthew is telling us that it's all happening again. Rachel wept over the children of Israel killed by Babylon and the children killed by Herod.

This is far from idyllic. What happened to peace on earth and goodwill to men? But here's what we really want to know. What is God doing when these children in Bethlehem are dying at the hands of an oppressive empire led by King Herod? Where is God in our moments of terror? He weeps over sin and the damage and pain it causes. God sees what you are going through and he weeps. Your heartache and your disappointment bring tears to his eyes.

Your pain doesn't go unnoticed. You're not alone. Emmanuel means God with us, even in the mess, especially in the mess. verse 19 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 are trying to take the child's life are dead Herod dies And so in a sense we catch a break With the corrupt king dead An angel tells Joseph and Mary to leave Egypt And go back to Israel It's a 300-mile trek

They're probably heading to Bethlehem Because that's where Joseph was from And where Jesus was born verse 21 so he got up took the child and his mother and went to the land of israel but when he heard that archelaus was reigning in judea 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 joseph discovers that while herod is dead his son rules in bethlehem so he's not going to go there so at the last minute he yells Omaha, Omaha. Just kidding. That's a reference to Peyton Manning in his famous audibles at the line of scrimmage. Essentially what's happening is that Joseph is saying it's time to change plans. So he tells Mary, you're going to have to stay on that donkey another 80 miles. We're going to go up to Nazareth and that's where Jesus grows up. Now notice that Nazareth was not their first choice.

Remember that people said nothing good comes from Nazareth. And yet, this is all a part of God's plan. No one thought that the Messiah would come from Nazareth. Everything about Jesus, including the town he comes from, epitomizes who he is and what he came to do. So where is God when your life is disappointing? Where is God when your life isn't turning out the way you wanted it to? Where is God when your life is painful and hard? Matthew says that God is with you and experiences those disappointments with you. Jesus's whole life is a disappointment. First he's on the run for his life from an oppressive king. Next, he grows up in Nazareth.

That's not what he wanted. The Christmas story is far from idyllic. Jesus doesn't solve your problems. He experiences them with you. He's born with corrupt authorities trying to kill him, and eventually they catch up and he dies on the cross. Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year. Is that a cruel joke?

Well, not if you focus on the true story. story instead of this sentimental substitute. Christmas is the story of a teenage girl, pregnant with a child that is not her husband's. It's the story of a family of refugees who had to flee their homeland so that their child would not be killed. It's the story of a savior coming to his people only to be rejected by them. God comes to the meek and lowly. He came to live in the hearts of the poor and spirit. He shined his light in a dark world. He gave sight to the blind, made the lame walk and set the prisoners free. Blessed are those who mourn, for God wipes away their tears.

Christmas is the story of Emmanuel, God with us. God comes to be with us in the mess, to comfort us, to forgive us, to restore us, to grant us peace, to be raised for us, to store our tears in his bottle, to offer us eternal life. Amen. Hey, thanks for listening. If you want to go deeper, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talk newsletter. You'll get a short email once a week. It'll challenge you to grow in your faith, give you interesting background on today's passage,

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