We have sanitized the Christmas story and made it clean and cute but think for a moment of what the Christmas story includes. The Christmas story is not only the announcement to Mary and Joseph of Jesus’ miraculous conception in Mary’s womb while remaining a virgin, it is not only the pronouncement to lowly shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night, nor is it simply the visit of the magi. The Christmas story is far more than a nativity scene!
Think about Jesus’ resurrection and all the details that surround it. In a culture that did not have much regard for women, it was a woman who first witnessed the resurrection of Jesus. If the gospel writers made up the story of Jesus’ resurrection, they would not have chosen women to be the first to witness the greatest event in history.
In Matthew’s gospel account, to whom Jews were the primary audience, it is the magi who are included at the beginning of his story in connection to proving the point that the infant Jesus was indeed qualified as the rightful heir of King David. The irony in this is that if you are going to tell a story about Jesus and the motive in doing so is to prove to every Jewish reader that He is the Messiah and greater than David, why in the world would you insert magi into your story? Who were the magi you ask? The magi were royal counselors who used astrology for guidance. Do you know what the Old Testament says about astrology? The Bible forbids the practice of astrology (Deut. 4:9) and uses strong language against it (Isa. 47:13-15).
So, why would Matthew include the magi in his story about the life of Jesus? Because God summoned gentile pagans to the Savior of the nations by speaking a language that they could understand.
Do you not find it to be both ironic and encouraging that the story of the pagan magi and a woman with a shady past serve as book ends of the four gospels included in the Bible to show us that Jesus is not just the King of the Jews, but also the Savior of the world. Jesus is God’s “Yes!” to all of His promises of which the one made to Abraham is no exception: “And I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing; and I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed” (Gen. 12:2-3). Through Jesus, a son of Abraham and David, the nations are blessed – the invitation of the magi and Mary Magdalene to witness the two most extraordinary events in human history is testament to Jesus as the hope of the nations.
God Wields Time and Space for His Own Sovereign Designs
We are not told how many magi saw the star and we are not given the exact longitude and latitude from where their journey began. All that we are told is that magi were from the East. Now, as I mentioned last week, there are two principals at work that made the first Christmas possible; those principles are: 1) the incarnational principle, and 2) the grace principle.
The promise, birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus was never plan “B” but always plan “A” in the mind of God, because His intention was always to dwell with His people. The principle of the incarnation is seen in the Garden of Eden before Adam and Eve’s sin, Israel’s experience with God in the wilderness, and in the promise of Isaiah 7:14, “Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and she will name Him Immanuel.” Matthew is quick to point out that “Immanuel” means “God with us.” Connected to the incarnation principle is the principle of God’s unconditional grace in that when it came to the virgin birth, there was nothing anyone could have done to make it happen or to prevent it from happening; Christmas happened all because of God’s unconditional and unmerited grace.
It was the apostle Paul who wrote: “But when the fullness of the time came, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons and daughters” (Gal. 4:4-5). In Matthew and Luke we are provided two separate genealogies that demonstrate this. In Luke 3:23-38 we receive what many scholars believe to be Mary’s genealogy since the point of Luke’s gospel is to show Jesus’ humanity. In Matthew 1:1-17, we are given Joseph’s genealogy showing Jesus’ legal standing as a member of the tribe of Judah as the rightful heir to David’s throne, but before we look at Joseph’s decision to follow through with his marriage to Mary, I want you to see why the magi are so important to Matthew’s gospel. For now, what you need to know is that God moved history, empires, and kings so that Joseph and Mary would meet, fall in love, and get engaged with a plan to start a family together.
Sandwiched in between the time Mary and Joseph’s genealogies represent, is the 70 years much of the tribe of Judah was carried off into exile into Babylon (see Jer. 29:10). Babylon’s method of exile was to ingraft their culture into the culture of the Hebrews. What was threatened by the Babylonian exile was the preservation of the tribe of Judah. One of the Hebrews exiled into Babylon was a young man by the name of Daniel. God had gifted Daniel as a prophet and used him to speak into the life of one of the kings of Babylon known as Nebuchadnezzar. Daniel spent all of his long life as an exile, but for purposes related to this sermon, I want to turn your attention to the time Nebuchadnezzar had a dream of a huge statue made of four distinct types of material with a head of gold, a chest and arms made of silver, a belly and thighs made of bronze, legs of iron, and feet made of both iron and clay.
The Chaldeans were summoned by the king to interpret his dream without being told what dream Nebuchadnezzar had. The Chaldeans were also known as Babylon’s wise men, and because they told the king that to interpret a dream without being told about the dream was impossible, Nebuchadnezzar threatened death upon all the “wise men” who could not interpret his dream (Dan. 2:1-18). Because the God Daniel worshiped is the God who can do the “impossible” he revealed the dream and its meaning to Daniel. Before Daniel interpreted Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, he praised God with these words: “May the name of God be blessed forever and ever, for wisdom and power belong to Him. It is He who changes the times and periods; He removes king and appoints kings; He gives wisdom to wise men, and knowledge to people of understanding” (Dan. 2:20-21).
Daniel told the king what he dreamed and then interpreted it for him. The kingdoms represented in the different materials of the statute included Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome. There was a fifth kingdom represented in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream that was separate from the statute which was in the form of a stone not cut out by human hands that struck the statue’s feet which resulted in the crushing of the entire statue. Here is Daniel’s interpretation of the stone that destroyed the earthly kingdoms: “And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which will never be destroyed, and that kingdom will not be left for another people; it will crush and put an end to all these kingdoms, but it will itself endure forever” (Dan. 2:44). Guess what the king did next after Daniel finished interpreting his dream? He promoted Daniel as ruler over the entire province of Babylon and chief over, “…all the wise men of Babylon” (vv. 46-49).
I don’t think the magi worshiped the same God of Daniel, but I do think they could trace their roots all the way back to Babylon, and I am convinced that their interest in finding the “King of the Jews” was related to the stone that was in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. I think they included in their studies of the stars any sacred document related to Daniel’s people in an effort to find and discover the King of the Kingdom that Daniel’s God would set up that will have no end. If the magi were familiar with Micah 5:2 and its connection they made with Numbers 24:17, which states: “A star shall appear from Jacob, a scepter shall rise from Israel…” (see Matt. 2:1-6), don’t you think they were also familiar with Isaiah 9:6-7? I think that the magi connected the dots in the Old Testament and believed that Micah 5:2; Numbers 24:17, Isaiah 7:14 and 9:6-7 were about the One a powerful pagan Babylonian king dreamed about 500 years before Jesus was born:
For a Child will be born to us, a Son will be given to us; and the government will rest on His shoulders; and His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. There will be no end to the increase of His government or of peace on the throne of David and over his kingdom, To establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness from then on and forevermore. The zeal of the Lord of armies will accomplish this.
The way that God spoke to the magi was through a language they could understand as they looked to the stars the God of Daniel created. We are not told how God did it, but He was able to lead the magi with a star because He is the One, “…who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think” (Eph. 3:20)!
God Shatters the Assumptions of Man Through His Redemptive Plans
Now back to Joseph and Mary’s genealogies and personal lives. Following God’s promise to Abraham that He would bless him by making him a great nation and a blessing to the nations were 430 years of Egyptian slavery, 40 years in the wilderness, and 70 years in exile. There were some good years in-between those hard years of slavery, wilderness wandering, and exilic discipline, but during those seasons, I am pretty sure that it was difficult for the Hebrew people to see any silver lining or hope that God would, or could, turn the ugly around into something beautiful, but what Joseph and Mary’s genealogy shows us is that is exactly what God was doing with the 430 years of Egyptian slavery, 40 years in the wilderness, and 70 years in exile!
God’s plan for Israel and the nations always included a king, but not any old king. The king God intended was a King both human and divine. The plan was never for Israel only to have a human king just like David, nor was His plan of Israel to be only divine. Jesus was always plan “A” and never plan “B.” Let me briefly show what I mean by reminding you what we have looked at in the Bible during this series so far. In Exodus 19:6, God said of Israel after their deliverance from Egypt and as a people large enough to be their own nation: “…and you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” What would set Israel apart from all the other nations, is that Yahweh would be their King. In Isaiah 44:6 we are told what kind of King to Israel Yahweh is: “This is what the Lord says, He who is the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the Lord of armies: I am the first and I am the last, and there is no God besides Me.” In other words, Yahweh is King, Redeemer, the Almighty One, eternal, and unlike any other god of the nations in that He is utterly unique! Just as we see in the first two chapters in Genesis before Adam and Eve’s fall, Yahweh would be King over His people.
Yet, in Genesis 49:10, God spoke through Jacob to Judah long before Israel was ever a nation and promised: “The scepter will not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until Shiloh comes, and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples.” Then when we come to 2 Samuel 7:13, we discover God planned for Israel that not only would the obedience of the nations belong to a human king from the tribe of Judah, but a King who, “…shall build a house for My name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.” Furthermore, we are told in Psalm 2 that this King will rule the nations with a rod of iron but will also be One in Whom all who find refuge in Him will be blessed (vv. 8-12). In Psalm 110, David says of his descendant who will be King over the nations: “Yahweh says to my Lord: ‘Sit at My right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet” (v. 1). So, what kind of human King can be a physical descendant of David, have the obedience of the nations, and not be subject to the limitations of death because His reign will be eternal? The kind of King the magi sought, Mary would carry while a virgin, and Joseph would become the legal but nonbiological father of.
Both Mary and Joseph’s bloodline could be traced back to David, Abraham, and Adam. The problem with sin is that it is passed down from the father to his child, for we are told in the Bible: “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all mankind, because all sinned…. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those who had not sinned in the likeness of the violation committed by Adam…” (Rom. 5:12, 14). Sin is a genetically transmitted curse passed down from a man’s sperm cell to a woman’s embryonic egg. For Jesus to be the rightful and legal heir of David’s throne, he needed to be a legal son of a man who was from the tribe of Judah—Joseph qualified to be that man. For Jesus to be conceived without the curse and plague of sin being passed down to him while remaining a descendant of David, Abraham, and Adam, He had to be conceived and born of woman without biological requirement of a human sperm cell from Joseph. This is why the angel explained to Mary how she could be pregnant: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; for that reason also the holy Child will be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35).
Conclusion
The stakes for Joseph and Mary were very high. If Joseph followed through with ending his relationship with Mary because of a refusal to believe that her pregnancy was a miraculous act of Almighty God through His Holy Spirit, then Jesus would not have been qualified legally to be King of the Jews. Regarding Mary’s pregnancy, there was no turning back; she could not walk away from her pregnancy like Joseph could have. However, both Mary and Joseph chose to trust the God who sovereignly wields time and space for his redemptive plans even though it blew to ashes any assumptions they had for what was impossible or possible. Together, Mary and Joseph would raise the One the magi sought to find, the one read and studied about from the prophet Micah: “But as for you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you One will come forth for Me to be ruler in Israel. His times of coming forth are from long ago, from the days of eternity.”
When the magi found Jesus, they appropriately worshiped Him and brought to Him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh fit for the kind of King Nebuchadnezzar dreamed about 500 years earlier. The treasure for the magi, Joseph, and Mary was Jesus, and having Him in their lives was truly a source of great joy. There are two important lessons from Matthew 1:18-2:12 that I want to briefly mention and think more deeply upon next week:
- In the same way that God wielded time and space to make the virgin birth a reality and the visit of the magi a possibility, God has done, is doing, and will do to accomplish his redemptive purposes in and through your life. Your circumstances and sins are swallowed up by an infinitely greater God who bears the title: Redeemer.
If God is able to move time and space to accomplish His redemptive purposes for mankind… even in the 430 years of Egyptian slavery, 40 years in the wilderness, and 70 years in exile, don’t you think he can do the same in the midst of the circumstances of your life caused by your own sin? Do you really think that your problems are greater than God’s ability to turn your life around?
- In order to experience the great joy that Jesus brought to Mary, Joseph, and the magi… they had to let go of their assumptions, dreams, future, and safety for the purpose of embracing Jesus as the One promised in Isaiah 9:6-7,
For a Child will be born to us, a Son will be given to us; and the government will rest on His shoulders; and His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. There will be no end to the increase of His government or of peace on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness from then on and forevermore. The zeal of the Lord of armies will accomplish this.
In order for you to embrace Jesus as Savior, it will require you to trust Him as Lord over and in your life. To find Jesus the Savior will require that you let go of your idols to experience Him as Redeemer. To say yes to Jesus will mean that you will have to say no to the idols of your heart.
Christmas is about Jesus as the type of King we need!
