Advent 19 | The Saddest Prophecy

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Thus says the LORD: “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more.” Jeremiah 31:15

So Much More

People who really know who Jesus is will respond in one of two ways: anger or adoration. There is no middle ground. We see people try to do this in today’s world but it really isn’t a possibility. I get really frustrated when I hear people say stuff about how Jesus was a “good, moral teacher” because that just isn’t an option. Jesus claimed to be God. Good, moral teachers don’t claim to create and sustain the universe. C.S. Lewis famously said in Mere Christianity:

“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to…”

Now that we are on the same page we can look at this passage. This first comes to us as a prophecy in Jeremiah but then it is quoted in Matthew 1:18, where we are told that it has been fulfilled. But what happened?

The Star

As you know, when Jesus was born a star appeared. It’s crazy because it looks like the only people that recognized it was a group of “wise men” from somewhere in the east. They were so impressed by this star’s appearance that they set out to see the one who was born “king of the Jews”. What’s even crazier is that they weren’t even Jewish. They must have had copies of the Old Testament lying around and put it together that God was going to announce the coming of the king with a star.

Long story short, they show up in Jerusalem asking about the baby. Of course, they would go to Jerusalem, right? This is where the kings are supposed to live. But when they get there Israel’s king, Herod, has no clue what they are talking about, so he gets his own wise men together to figure it out. They come back and say that according to Micah 5:2, the king must be born in Bethlehem. That’s not bad, these guys traveled potentially 400 miles and made it to within 6 miles of Jesus on their first try. Herod then sends them off while trying to trick them. He tells them that they need to come back and tell him all about it so he can go and worship him too. The good news is that God wasn’t tricked. He knew all that was in Herod’s heart, so he later appears to the wise men to tell them not to stop and see Herod but to keep going.

Polarized Responses

These wise men saw the star and came to worship Jesus. They knew that the heavenly signs were pointing to a heavenly baby. They knew that he was so much more than a baby born to be king. That is why they dropped everything to go and worship him. Herod understood this too, but it didn’t lead him to wo

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