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It’s easy to talk about being bold for Jesus until opposition comes—when it’s dangerous, uncomfortable or people may look down on us. In Matthew 2, Joseph and Herod both have choices to make in response to God coming into the world. Do our own responses to God look show bold faith or frantic fear?
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The pastor contrasts Joseph’s obedience (fleeing to Egypt) with what he calls “false boldness” (staying to fight). What are some examples from your own life or community where you’ve seen people confuse boldness with faithfulness to God? How can we tell the difference?
The sermon argues that Jesus fulfilling the pattern of Israel (going to Egypt and coming back) reveals deeper truths about who He is than if He had simply been supernaturally protected from Herod. Why might God choose to work through historical patterns and narratives rather than through obvious miracles? What does this say about how God works in our lives today?
Herod’s response looked “bold” and politically sensible within the Roman system, but the pastor calls it absurd because it opposed God’s kingdom. Are there ways that our culture’s definitions of strength, success, or boldness might actually be working against God’s purposes? How do we recognize this?
The pastor emphasizes that genuine boldness for Jesus must be “drenched in love” and involve actually engaging with people who don’t yet know Jesus, even when it’s uncomfortable. What are the practical challenges to this kind of bold love in your workplace, school, or neighborhood? How can we be both truthful and loving?
The sermon ends with the idea of an “absurdly faithful God” who calls us to faithfulness that appears absurd in the moment. Can you think of a time when obedience to God felt counterintuitive or even foolish, but later proved to be wise? What did that teach you about trust?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Over the last weeks, we’ve been thinking about what it means to live a bold faith. I think that should be something that we’re challenged to do. Something I appreciate about what Cindy said, how she responded to those questions—I just want to affirm how beautiful it is when I asked her those questions about who Jesus is and her relationship to him. She answered with such strength. And that’s boldness. We should be bold in everyday life for that, too, right? We need to testify to Jesus. May we all have that boldness each and every day.
But here’s the challenge I think that we face. It’s really easy to talk about boldness conceptually. It’s easy to talk about, “I’m going to be bold for Jesus,” or even that we can be bold to each other for Jesus. But what’s going to happen when we face opposition? What’s going to happen when things are difficult? When it isn’t nice and smooth and easy to be bold for Jesus, but it’s dangerous to be bold for Jesus? When it’s uncomfortable to be bold for Jesus? When people are going to look down on us if we’re bold for Jesus? Are we willing to get into the uncomfortable spaces—the places that aren’t nice and well-defined and exactly how we want them—for Jesus?
And here’s something that we know. We live in an increasingly secular, increasingly de-churched society. I don’t think that’s necessarily—all this is going to sound counterintuitive at the moment—I don’t think that’s necessarily all bad. Because we had an awful lot of people that used to go to church just because it was the social thing to do. You had to do it but didn’t actually believe, and they could just slip in and out every week and they didn’t have to believe. And I believe in some ways God is purifying the church. He’s calling us to actually have to wrestle with and decide, are we going to believe or not?
But the challenge to that is that, on the other hand, those of us who do believe, those of us who do want to be bold, don’t have that nice, safe space to minister to people that we once had, right? If you were really committed 50 or 100 years ago to Jesus, and someone came into the church every week, but you could tell they were just dialing it in—they thought it was important because they wanted to have connections with the people around their community that they were at church. But they didn’t really buy into much of it. They didn’t really believe in Jesus, they didn’t really think they needed forgiveness for their sins. Well, at least they showed up at church, and you could talk to them. And they would hear the proclamation of the gospel; maybe they’d show up at Sunday school; you could pray for them. There were these things.
Now, what do we find? Well, we encounter an awful lot of people that don’t go to church—in our workplaces—but if we want to keep our jobs, we’re not supposed to talk about our faith. We find an awful lot of people in our schools that don’t know Jesus, but there’s all kinds of restrictions on what we can say and do, and we don’t want to be labeled a bully or somehow get in trouble. We probably know neighbors who don’t go to church. We don’t want them to dislike us.
Here’s what God’s done. On the one hand, I think He’s revealed that we had a false sense of unity in this nation, a false sense of unity in much of the world that has called itself Christian, where it appeared people were on board, but an awful lot of them weren’t on board at all. At the same time, those of us who are on board, He’s also challenging us: now you actually have to go, and you have to be bold like the early church. You have to be willing to go into the public sphere, into the places where it’s not necessarily praised to be a Christian. You have to go into those places, and you have to live a life that testifies to Jesus, and use the opportunities that God presents to share the gospel with people, because people aren’t going to, generally speaking, wander into church just because. Maybe once or twice a year, Easter and Christmas, and I’ll tell you, I’m thankful when people do that. It’s not that I want them to only come at Easter and Christmas, but I’m thankful they come in. Let’s be praying as we get closer to Easter—we see it coming up; it’s not that far away—let’s be praying for those people that might be on the fence and could come in and hear the gospel.
We’re not going to be the church. We’re not going to do what God wants well if we just stop with hoping people come in once or twice a year, and then maybe stay. So what do we do when we’re going to go into the public sphere? We’re going to encounter opposition, and when we encounter opposition, suddenly that boldness that we talk about, that we maybe feel rallied to do when we’re together, suddenly feels a lot harder, because we know things are not necessarily always going to go well for us.
There are a lot of ways that we can try to be bold and not actually be showing the love of Jesus as well. I think those two challenges—are we going to be bold when opposition comes, and are we going to be bold in a godly way?—are the things that we see as we continue our exploration of the story that goes around the wise men, and that’s what we see in Matthew chapter 2.
I was thinking about the challenges of response, and we’re going to see two responses tonight: this challenge for Herod and for Joseph of the situation. The challenge when that opposition comes out of nowhere.
In our country, we have a sense of security, I think, in a lot of ways, maybe too much, but we know we have arguably the most powerful military in the world and the best technology to defend ourselves, and so we feel somewhat like we have everything under control—until something like last week, when rebel groups in the Middle East attacked one of the bases where our men and women in uniform are serving, and three of them died, many were injured.
Opposition rises up, and then the question becomes, how do you respond? Did you notice there was all kinds of confusion: Should we do this? Should we do that? Should we attack all kinds of places? Should we not attack at all? Should we attack Iran? Should we attack the rebel groups? Should we do this? Should we do that? Suddenly it feels very muddled and confusing because there’s all kinds of people coming with all kinds of different answers on how to respond to opposition. It struck me that when bombs are lobbed metaphorically at us in our own lives, we almost feel like we have that same sort of confusion, because when it’s really painful, and the stakes feel suddenly very high, we’re reaching for an answer and asking, God, what is it that I should do?
Now, I don’t think that I can open up a chapter of the Bible and tell our top generals exactly what they should do to respond to that attack. It doesn’t say specifically. And for the opposition that we face, you might say, “Well, I feel like I’m facing opposition in X, Y, and Z,” but X, Y, and Z isn’t mentioned in Scripture. Well, that may be true, but what do we find? We find examples of people who respond faithfully when they face opposition, and God uses that to encourage us, that we would seek faithfulness in the opposition that we face.
Let’s pray that God would help us as we read this, not to just see some interesting story from the past, but we would remember that God was telling us, He was warning us from the very beginning, there’s going to be opposition as we follow Jesus, and that we would see that as a guide to how we face it today. Let’s pray.
Lord, would you help us as we read your word tonight to understand how we should respond to opposition? Lord, it’s hard to know how to respond when things get tough, but we pray that you would help us to see how to do so faithfully, that your church, in times where it isn’t always necessarily seen in the community around us as a good thing to be a Christian, that we would be faithful, that we wouldn’t misunderstand what faithfulness is either, but that we would be genuinely faithful. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Let’s go ahead and take a look, starting at Matthew chapter 2, verse 13:
“Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child to destroy him.’ And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I called my son.’”
This is somewhat of an absurd situation. The Messiah’s coming into the world, and now the Messiah, with his stepfather and his mother, are going to have to flee the very land he came to save. That’s absurd. It’s not how we would write it. It’s probably not how Mary and Joseph imagined it, but here it is. That’s exactly where they are. And so where do they go? They go to Egypt.
You might say, well, why Egypt? It seems like Egypt was a place that wasn’t so good for Israel in the past, and that’s true if we go way back, right? There’s the Exodus, that all-familiar story of the Israelites being enslaved and then making a giant, amazing exodus to go be the people of God outside of Egypt. But in the time after that, Egypt had fulfilled somewhat of a role of a place of refuge, of political asylum for those trying to escape whatever was going on in Israel.
Earlier on, hundreds of years before Jesus, when you had the different empires sweeping through the area that included Judea, you would have people that would see the armies coming, and they’d say, “Well, I don’t want to be here when the army arrives.” And so what would they do? They’d go down to Egypt, because generally speaking, Egypt was well defended enough. They could kind of get out of the way of the army coming at them.
Now, that’s not the situation here. There have been some people who have tried to stretch this story into some kind of parable about how we should handle immigration policy today. And that’s a whole nother topic, and we could talk about that some other time. The Bible does call us to care for the immigrant, for the migrant. But that’s not what this is about, because here’s the thing we need to understand: Egypt and Judea are both in the Roman Empire at this point, so they’re not going into a different country.
So whatever we want to talk about—and we should at some point talk about that—that’s a good thing for Christians to be wrestling with, but that’s not what I’m going to address tonight because it’s not what this text is about. They’re not crossing international lines here, but they are crossing out of one province into another. And that’s what we see.
King Herod is a client or puppet king for the Roman Empire. It’s not a separate kingdom, but he does have broad power over his little territory that the Romans allowed him to govern. And so when Joseph gets told in a dream that he needs to leave and he’s told to go to Egypt, I’m sure Joseph doesn’t say, “Well, why would I go there?” It was obvious, because there had been all those Jews that had gone there back when it was a separate political entity. So there was a community of like-minded, like-believing, like-speaking people there that you could go to, and it was outside of Herod’s control. Not outside of the Roman Empire, but outside of Herod’s control. It didn’t matter that Herod was working for the Romans. He wasn’t going to somehow be able to haul them back. It’d be like if you could cross over into Illinois, and even though you were… In the United States today, if there’s an arrest warrant out for you in Missouri, it’s not necessarily going to go great for you if you go over to Illinois.
In this situation, it goes better for them. That’s what’s going on. There’s a certain logic to it. Like I said, where do you go if you’re a faithful Jew needing to get out of Judea? Well, you go where a bunch of other faithful Jews have gathered, and so they go to Egypt. I think, again, despite the logic, how absurd this is. Joseph is thinking here, God, you told me how all this was going to work: that I should go ahead and take Mary as my wife, and that this baby was from you, and the Holy Spirit’s working in all this, and He’s going to redeem His people. We heard about the angels, the shepherds came, now the wise men have come. Why do I need to go to Egypt? Why don’t I just stay put? I know what I’m going to do, God. I’m going to be bold. I’m going to believe that you will protect your son. I’m going to stay put right here, and I’m going to really enjoy watching as you put up a force field, whatever that is. Those terms haven’t been used yet in my time, but I know it’ll be really cool. I’m going to wait until you put that force field around Jesus, and watch the Roman soldiers at the command of Herod, bumping into it, and wondering what in the world’s going on. And that’s going to be so, so amazing.
I’m going to be bold.
Sometimes that’s the kind of thing that we fall into because in a sense, it feels like that would be really bold. He’s been told there’s going to be danger coming. He’s going to affirm that God—he’s going to affirm with gusto that God is the God of the universe and is in control. But you know what the boldest thing we can do is? We can listen to God. That’s not what He told him to do.
And so often, as we fall into attempts at being bold, we see an awful lot of this. This is something that I believe the church is struggling with here in the United States today. We see a lot of attempts to be bold, to speak boldly for God, to stand up to opposition. But in that, the thing that is ignored, the thing that isn’t weighed properly, is am I being faithful to God as I am bold? Sometimes it feels absurd to be faithful to God. Why not just stand firm? It would have looked a lot more firm to just stay there and wait for Herod to try to take Jesus. Maybe even to say, why don’t I put a sign on the house, “Jesus is here,” and that way, all those other kids—they’re not even in the path of Herod. Come on, bring it, Herod.
That’s not how God chose to do it. It wasn’t the way that the Messiah was going to work. And it wasn’t what He told Joseph to do. And in that, even though it felt absurd in the moment, what was God doing? He was actually going to authenticate the very ministry of Jesus in a much more profound way.
Would He have authenticated it in some way by creating some kind of miracle to stop Jesus from being killed that was physical and visible and everyone would see it? Well, sure. But what did He do instead?
The Father had the Son reenact the very story of Israel. That’s what Matthew says here.
Why does Joseph ultimately go to Egypt with Jesus and Mary? It’s so that Jesus comes out of Egypt just like Israel did. And that’s cueing us in to who the Messiah really is. It’s the first brick in the building that God is going to build during His earthly ministry to say, “Guess what? The Messiah isn’t just the best king. The Messiah is Israel itself. The Messiah is going to do everything God’s people don’t do.”
And how do you show that? Well, He lives the whole experience of Israel. He goes to Egypt. He comes back. He ministers among the people. He lives, He suffers, He dies.
We’re going to be talking more about this, actually, in Sunday school, about the kind of Redeemer that God has brought into this world and why it’s so important that Jesus wasn’t just the full power of God coming onto earth in some kind of energy orb or something. Why did He come as a human being? So important. And this is a part of that—that He’s having the full experience, the human experience of Israel.
And so we start to see what? We start to see that Jesus fulfills everything that we find in Scripture. He fulfills the laws that God has commanded. He fulfills the story that God has brought about. It all happens piece by piece, brick by brick, during the life of Jesus.
The application that Hosea makes here—Matthew’s quoting from Hosea 11—if you go back and look at it, you wouldn’t necessarily think he was talking about Jesus. He’s talking about the people that have been exiled, the people that are feeling abandoned by God and reaffirming that God is going to be faithful to them.
But here’s the thing that God does. He says, you know how I’ve done that? I’ve done it over and over again. Guess what? I’m going to do it even more right now. You’re going to see it fully.
And so we can ask the question, did Hosea understand that someday this would somehow, in some way, point to the life and the ministry of the Messiah? Maybe, maybe not. This wasn’t a clear messianic prophecy like some of the things we read in the Old Testament. That wasn’t the point.
Rather, the point, by drawing the sin, by saying—as Matthew does—take a look at what was said about the Son of God. Matthew’s saying, Son of God—see, He’s Israel. He’s all of us, all of us who’ve been unfaithful. He’s saying that to us today—all of you, all of me, all of us here—who have been unfaithful. He’s like us, but without sin. Jesus is the true Israel.
But in the moment it feels absurd. In the moment it doesn’t feel like a bold faith to flee. We never say, fleeing away from opposition, “Ah, now that’s boldness.” But in this case, it was because Joseph listened to what God said. That’s what we’re called to do.
Imagine if Joseph hadn’t. He would have actually been getting in the way of the message of who Jesus is. He would have been getting in the way of what God was testifying to in the life of Jesus.
So often when we think, “Well, I’m going to be bold. I am going to show boldness beyond what I think God had in mind when He says not to do this or that. I’m going to prove to my culture and my society that I am fearless for God.” What we’re actually doing is looking for an excuse not to do what Jesus has called us to do.
It feels a little absurd. A lot of absurd laws in the world. I was reading about one of them. Did you know in Chico, California, it is forbidden—I’m going to read this; this is really important—you might need to know this in case you travel to California: “No person shall produce, test, maintain, or store within the city nuclear weapons, components of nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons delivery systems, or a component of nuclear weapons delivery systems.”
So if you’re planning to build a home nuclear weapon, don’t go there.
And it’s been speculated, based on the statutory fines that are levied when you violate city ordinances, that if you do that in that city, you will be fined $500. So you might destroy half the state, but you’re going to also have to pay $500.
It’s an absurd law, right? Why would they even pass it? That’s always an interesting question in cases like that.
Well, it turns out they didn’t really think that if someone thought, “I’m going to destroy hundreds of thousands of lives by building some kind of weapon and irradiating people,” that they’re going to be kept from that by being fined $500. That doesn’t make any sense.
Why did they do it? Well, they really just wanted to testify in the 1980s about how much they disliked a world of the threat of nuclear violence. And so they passed this knowing it wasn’t really going to stop anything. It was simply to make a point.
Now, we can debate whether that’s a good idea—to put laws in the books that don’t really do anything useful. They’re just sitting there confusing things. And I think we could say, “Well, it still won’t do any good. No one’s going to say, ‘Well, I wanted to shoot off a nuclear weapon, but because the city council passed this ordinance somewhere in California, I realize that’s a really, really bad thing to do and I don’t want to do it anymore.’”
Looks kind of bold, but then it just looks kind of stupid. And sometimes, when God calls us to genuine faithfulness instead of what we think we should be doing, it looks sort of the same. “God, you want people to know about you, but all I’m doing is passing some city ordinance that’s not going to do any good other than cause people to laugh in the years ahead as it gets passed around and people think, ‘Well, why in the world would a city council pass something like that?’”
But it’s different with God, because here’s the thing: God, unlike that city council, actually has the power to do whatever He wants to do. Imagine if that city council had the ability to pass that and thereby eliminate the ability for any nuclear weapon to be detonated anywhere in the world ever again. It wouldn’t seem so absurd anymore, would it?
In a time that we live in right now where there’s a renewed fear of a nuclear attack—as we see Russia constantly threatening to nuke parts of Western Europe and maybe the United States, and them showing on their state television pictures of how their missiles could hit different parts of the United States and trying to get their citizenry to be excited about that—it feels a little bit more real again.
Imagine if that city council had had the power to do that, and in the 1980s, they’d eliminate that. It was just gone. It doesn’t happen anymore. No one could build a new nuclear weapon. Iran, you know, is threatening to build a nuclear weapon. They couldn’t do it because that city council passed an ordinance prohibiting it. Wouldn’t that suddenly not seem absurd, but instead brilliant? The people of that city council would have won the Nobel Peace Prize. You’d say, “Wow.”
Well, here’s the thing that happens when we actually follow God, even when it feels even more absurd than that ordinance: God has the power to bring about, through what feels absurd, amazing things. That’s exactly what we see here. Does it feel absurd that Joseph flees with the triumphant King of the universe? Yes. Is it absurd? No, because God’s going to use it.
And for all of us today, that should be a reminder as we study His word: may it take us from that false boldness that feels strong. “I’m going to talk tough. I’m going to tell everyone outside the church how bad they are. I’m going to make sure that they know that. I’m not going to show love to them because they need to start respecting God’s law first.” We realize, “Well, wait a second. What does God call us to do? What does Jesus say? Pray for our enemies, love those who hate us, right? We’re called to do what the Messiah did.”
It looks very different. It doesn’t mean that we don’t talk clearly and strongly about the truth of God, but we do it in a way that’s always, always, always drenched in love, even though that feels far more absurd than passing some ordinance that can’t change the global geopolitical rivalries.
I think we like to pick a comfortable boldness. Sometimes that boldness allows us to say, “Well, I’m not going to love people. I’m not going to interact with people that make me uncomfortable. I’m not going to worry about this person and trying to make sure he or she knows the gospel because I’d be very uncomfortable if that person were here with me in the church.”
What is God saying? God is saying, be bold in faith. You can talk the big game—and not at the Super Bowl; I’m not talking at the Super Bowl—you can talk the bigger game of God’s faithful proclamation of the gospel. But if you’re not willing to actually get into the messy absurdity of loving people that don’t yet know Jesus, if you’re not willing to say, “This is going to hurt. This is going to be hard on me. This is not going to make me healthy, wealthy, and wise. This is going to be painful.” If we’re not willing to actually be bold in a way that makes little of us and much of the others around us, makes little of us and ultimately makes much of Jesus, then we’re not really being bold in a way that God calls us to.
We see that in Herod. Herod is the one in this story who looks bold. Let’s go ahead and look at the next part, because here’s what we learn: Herod’s response to his delusional opposition—he thinks he somehow, Jesus is a threat to him, and he’s not really a threat because Jesus’ kingdom is so different than anything Herod can imagine—but Herod’s response to this delusional opposition is bold, but it’s not trusting. And so it’s not the genuine boldness God calls us to.
Matthew 2:16 says, “Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious and he sent and killed all the male children of Bethlehem and all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah: A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children. She refused to be comforted because they are no more.”
You see, Herod responded boldly, and sometimes I think that’s what we want. There’s a threat, the power structure might be changed in our region. Herod, you know, why don’t you just go ahead and respond boldly? Protect your throne. Protect your client state to the Roman Empire. Eliminate the threat. That looks like you’re taking your duty to maintain your power and thus be able to govern seriously. It looks bold.
Sometimes I think that’s really what we want. We want it in our own lives, we want it in the people we look up to, we want them to show decisiveness. We want them to go and charge forward, taking what belongs to them. But that isn’t the way of the kingdom. It’s a false boldness. It’s sort of boldness that thinks that somehow our strength and our wisdom and our cunning and our conniving is somehow going to be what determines whether it works or not, rather than expecting that really where the power is, is in God.
The one who can win victory over sin, in part by telling the stepfather and the mother of the Son of God to flee out into a different land, a land that has negative connotations in the past, somehow can be a part of the plan to completely defeat Satan, sin, and death.
You see, Herod, for all of his seemingly boldness towards absurdity, is actually responding absurdly to the faithfulness of God’s call.
Now, people have said, “Well, Herod couldn’t really have been that much of a monster, could he? And if he had, we’d have all kinds of reports talking about this.”
But here’s the thing we need to understand. If we look at this story—now one thing—I think sometimes we feel like this is probably a very long span of time from when the wise men arrive in Jerusalem that we’ve been looking at this for five weeks now. What we’re probably looking at is a couple of days because Jerusalem is pretty near to Bethlehem. The wise men may have even arrived in the same day at Bethlehem.
So for Herod to realize that he’s been tricked by the wise men, that they’re not coming back, that might have taken a couple of days, maybe a little longer, but not long at all. And so it’s a very contained period of time where all this is happening. Bethlehem is a small, small little town.
So when it says that Herod sends soldiers in and kills all the male children under a certain age—the age of two—this isn’t where he’s massacring thousands. Doesn’t mean it’s any less tragic or he’s any less monstrous for it, but the fact that it doesn’t even become a note in Roman history shouldn’t surprise us.
Because here’s the thing, and this is why Herod’s action looked bold in the moment: the different leaders that Rome appointed to different provinces in their empire did this kind of thing all the time. It wasn’t notable. Pilate, whom we’ll encounter later on, he killed people all the time just to make sure that the people didn’t rise up against him. Over and over and over again, wherever we went in the Roman Empire, Rome ruled with an iron fist.
Historians call it the Pax Romana; it was the peace of Rome. Rome didn’t rule by having just laws and high approval ratings in their society; they ruled by a very simple system: you do what we say or we kill you. And they did that very effectively, and it worked for a very, very long time. And that’s exactly how Herod operates, and that’s how Herod operates here.
And so it looks like common sense. It looks like, well, this is what you do if you’re a king or a leader in the Roman Empire to make sure people don’t cause you trouble.
The problem is God doesn’t care what works well for Rome. God doesn’t care what works well for the United Nations, or the United States, or for Missouri, or for St. Charles. God cares what works for His kingdom, and that’s what we’re called to.
So Herod’s quest at first blush doesn’t feel absurd; it feels smart. It feels like a savvy political operator. But the thing is, the reason it’s absurd is that Herod feels like he’s getting the upper hand, but here’s the thing that we know: Herod’s dead. Herod’s been dead a long time. His children and grandchildren are dead. Someday we’re going to be dead too.
The question is, are we thinking about maintaining or arranging for power in this moment that feels like the smart thing to do, that feels like the bold thing to do, maybe we even couch it and say, “We’re going to promote God,” or are we thinking about the heavenly view? Are we thinking about God’s kingdom and the eternal perspective—God promises eternal life, God promises to be with us and not forget us ever, that we can dwell in His kingdom forever, that the sin that should keep us away He would forgive?
Are we looking at that and saying, “You know, the real absurdity is to act like the world and to live like the world, thinking somehow that’s getting me ahead, and maybe I talk myself into thinking that’s getting God ahead too?” That’s the absurdity.
That quote that Matthew takes from Jeremiah 31, it goes on a little further. It says: “There is hope for your future,” declares the Lord, “and your children shall come back to their own country.” That comes just after it’s saying that Rachel’s weeping for her children.
What’s being described there? Well, Rachel was one of Jacob’s wives; Rachel was the mother of several of the tribes of Israel. And so the picture that Jeremiah describes—this is going into the Babylonian exile, actually—when Babylon conquers the land of Judah, what do they do? They have a staging ground in Ramah where they line up the people to haul them off to Babylon—spoils of war.
And Jeremiah looks at that situation and says, Rachel’s not actually alive at that point, but Rachel is looking at her children, the long down the road descendants of her, and she’s weeping for them as this happens. And that’s where we arrive at this promise: “There is hope for your future,” declares the Lord, “your children shall come back to their own country.”
Yes, it looks absurd to be faithful to God in this moment, because it looks like He’s utterly, utterly abandoned us. We’re being staged to be hauled off. But God doesn’t work just in the moment.
And here’s the thing that we can know: evil doesn’t prevail forever.
When those people were going to be hauled off in the Babylonian exile, God was not going to forget them. He was going to be their God with them in exile.
When the people wept in Bethlehem because instead of joy, their hearts were now filled with sorrow because of what Herod did, it would look like Herod got the upper hand, but it wasn’t going to last.
When it feels like evil and opposition has the upper hand on us today, it feels like it won’t go away. It feels like the enemy has set up a victorious permanent empire on our very souls that we’re just stuck there. But God’s kingdom will prevail.
And in the end, it was Herod’s sin that was absurd. Herod could have gone with the wise men and bowed down to the true King and experienced living in God’s kingdom forever. Instead, he chose the absurdity of what looked wise in the moment.
And so often, that’s our temptation too, even as we say that we’re going to stand up for our God. That’s Jesus challenging you and me to, all of us to take the faithful path even when it feels absurd.
I was struck thinking about this week a year ago. This week a year ago was the first week ever that I hadn’t been here in person. We’d been meeting for a little less than a year. I knew the day would come, something would happen.
And I arrived; Jim was actually preaching that day. Why? Because I had chicken pox for a second time in my life. I don’t really remember having chicken pox as a kid. I remember vividly what it was like last year because let me tell you, it was the most painful thing I have ever experienced in my life.
And as those chicken pox appeared, all I wanted to do was scratch them like crazy and somehow make it stop. And if I couldn’t scratch them, maybe take every painkiller you could find so that at least the pain and the burning would stop.
You know what? A lot of those painkillers actually can cause infection when you have chicken pox, I found out. And if you scratch, you cause infection. It doesn’t make it better; it makes it worse.
But in the moment it feels absurd. I’m going to just sit here in pain wishing someone would drop a brick on my head so at least I didn’t feel it. I’m going to sit here and do that because allegedly in the future it was going to be better.
Yeah, intellectually I knew it would be, but in the moment it didn’t feel that way. And I think all of us have been in places where we know intellectually things will get better, but it doesn’t feel like it in the moment. It feels like evil is triumphing and all we want to do is scratch back at evil. All we want to do is do something to eliminate the pain in the moment. And it feels like it’s absurd not to.
Why am I just going on suffering and suffering and suffering? Why am I taking opposition and just allowing it to cause me to flee to some Egypt of sorts?
God calls us to the absurdity. God calls us to be faithful in what feels like its absurdity because ultimately it’s the opposite of absurdity. And in faithlessness, even when we couch it in faithful languages, it’s the true absurdity.
Friends, we have an absurdly faithful God. That’s why it feels so absurd because who would do what God does? Who would love as God loves? Who would—as we look at God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit—how could the heavenly Father send the Son to come to live, to suffer, to die—utter humiliation, utter pain for a bunch of people that most of the time aren’t even grateful?
We have an absurdly faithful God. He calls us to follow in what appears absurdity and experience His faithfulness. May we pray that He would help us to do that today. Will you pray with me?
Lord, our temptation is to go for what appears strong and defiant, what appears to put down those who oppose us, what appears to provide earthly victory. Help us instead to lay up treasures in heaven.
Lord, you call us not to try to think by our own wits but to trust in You. You call us in Your word to trust that You have things in control. You called us to face what appears to be the absurdity of a moment, that we might show Your love and faithfulness to You, that more would know You and overcome the absurdity of sin in eternity.
Lord, would You help us to do that? Help us to understand that You are offering us something far, far better than what appears to be the rewards of the moment on this earth. And as we turn to You, would You help us to show the same sort of absurd love to others that You showed to us, and in that—to be those who are agents of restoration in this world, ambassadors of Your kingdom. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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