Friday, December 21, 2012

Fifty Two Weeks / Matthew 2


Timing

Intelligence, strength, talent, beauty… these are all important and useful items but they can all be trumped by timing. All of the strength in the world won’t help you to hit a baseball if your timing is off. You may be the most beautiful but that doesn’t matter if you aren’t the one standing in the waiting room when the director yells, “I need a red head, now!” You can have great intelligence but it really doesn’t take great intelligence to buy low and sell high. That takes timing.

The Magi and the Star

First of all I need to mention that the Magi did not visit the baby Jesus in the manger. It’s OK for artists to take license with this because it is true to the heart of the story; it just isn’t true historically. According to the Scripture they actually came to see the toddler in a house. 

It is also highly unlikely that Jesus was born on December 25th. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is that shepherds don’t keep their flocks out in the fields at night during winter. However, December 25th may not just be a random date and the reason goes far deeper than the claim that it simply displaced the pagan mid winter festivals. I would encourage you to see the movie The Star of Bethlehem or visit the website http://www.bethlehemstar.net/ for more information about this date.

The Magi saw an event in the heavens that convinced them that a great king had been born among the Jews. They set out on a journey that required several months and were led by the star (and the prophet Micah) to where the child actually was. 

Think About This

This is not an attempt to unravel the mystery of the star. (See http://www.bethlehemstar.net/ to do that.) But let’s just take the story at face value and consider what it means.

The universe is like a giant clock. We don’t know all of its mysteries, or likely even more than a tiny fraction of its mysteries, but there are some things we do know. We do know the physical laws which govern the movement of the starts and planets. This is what enables us to send a rocket into space on a journey requiring months or years and still we can manage to calculate exactly where it will need to be in order to arrive at the same point in the vastness of space to intersect a heavenly body moving at great speed. By these laws we can calculate where the heavenly bodies will be in the future and likewise we can determine where they were in the past.

This means that when God send His Son into the world He didn’t just go, “Oh! A star! I need a star to announce this birth. Poof! Star be!” No, actually He would have needed to make preparations a little sooner. According to the latest scientific reasoning He would have needed to plan this over 13,700,000,000 years sooner in order for the heavenly event to occur that caused the Magi to make a long dangerous journey to see the new King. 

The Right Time

Paul says in Romans 5:6, “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.” Of course. God always does things at “just the right time.” 

Furthermore, Jesus uses this idea several times in John’s gospel saying, “The right time foe me has not yet come.” Like Father, Like Son.

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