Four Ways to Face the Truth

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone, welcome to our worship service. It’s good to see you here with us today.

I don’t have any announcements this morning other than to highlight our services for this coming week before Christmas. Our Longest Night service will be this Thursday at 5:00. If you are dealing with any sort of grief or depression this Christmas season, please join us for a service of comfort and hope.

Our morning worship on Christmas Eve will be at the regular time, but there will be no Sunday school that morning. And our Christmas Eve night service will be at 5:00. That’s earlier than in the past, so please keep that time in mind.

Joanne, do you have an announcement this morning?

Jesyka, do you have anything this morning?

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer Let’s pray: Father how can we not feel joy in this season? How can we not feel joy at the thought of Your Son’s birth, who came into this world for us, who lived for us, who died for us, who rose for us so that we will never truly know death. Yet this time of year is difficult for so many people. We pray for those who are joyful that their joy increases. We pray for those who are grieving that Your joy comes alongside their grief to lessen it, to even sweeten it, and to give them the hope of Christmas – that light can come from even the darkest of places. Be with us now and bless our service in Jesus’s name, Amen.

Lighting of the Advent Candle – Joy On this third Sunday of Advent we light the candle of joy, also known as the Shepherd Candle, which reflects the joy that comes through Christ’s arrival and the eternal salvation he offers us. This candle highlights the joy the shepherds experienced when they were the first to receive the good news of Christ’s birth.

Joy is not the same as happiness. Happiness is what the world gives, and it is fleeting. Joy comes from God alone and cannot be lessened by circumstances.

In John 16:22, Jesus says, “So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and you will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”

(Light candle)

Let’s pray:

Heavenly Father, on this third week of Advent let us remember that the good news of Jesus’ birth has the power to bring us great joy this Christmas season. Our joy isn’t dependent on what is going on in our life, in our world, or the people that we are with. It doesn’t depend on the gifts we give or the gifts we find under the tree. No earthly thing can ever give us complete joy. Our joy comes from you. That joy that flooded the hearts of the shepherds, the angels, the wise men, the hosts of heaven, and Mary and Joseph is the joy that still has the power to overwhelm our hearts with rejoicing. In Jesus’s name, Amen.

Four Ways To Face the Truth

Of all the mysteries surrounding the first few years of Jesus’s life, it’s hard to top the wise men. We don’t know who exactly they were, how many there were, or where they came from. We don’t know what exactly brought them to Bethlehem or even when.

But all of those unknowns just make this story stick with us even more because it teaches a very important lesson. That lesson has to do with Truth – Truth with a capital T – and the fact that sooner or later every single person in this world is going to have to face that Truth.

We’ve talked about Truth a lot this past year, and how most people these days say there isn’t any Truth at all – at least not the sort that’s true for everybody everywhere. The only sort of truth we’ll allow is the kind we get to decide on our own, just for ourselves. And since there’s no real truth to life, there’s no real meaning to life either. But that’s okay too, because that means we get to make our own meaning.

But even if we can decide our own truth and make our own meaning, we still can’t get past the fact that without that Truth with a capital T, our lives don’t have any value. Because sooner or later we’re all going to die, and before long we’re all going to be forgotten, and in time even the earth is going to be swallowed by the sun and everything everyone’s ever done won’t matter at all.

Kind of easy to understand why there are so many depressed and anxious people now, isn’t it? You can’t really have any hope at all if you think like that, and we’ve talked about how hope is the foundation for everything. But the amazing thing is people still believe living without hope is better than believing there really is Truth. Because if they admit there is Truth, they also have to admit they’re going to be held accountable to that Truth, whether they accept it or not.

That’s what people believed for thousands of years. And then around 2,000 years ago, something incredible happened. God showed us that truth wasn’t an idea, truth was a person. Christ is truth. One day every person who’s ever lived will be judged against the truth of Jesus Christ. Believe in him, and you believe in the Truth. Don’t believe in him, and there’s no saving you. It’s as simple as that. But as we’re going to see today, the fact that it’s simple doesn’t make it easy.

Matthew’s account of the wise men’s visit is all about Truth and the ways that people face that Truth. So let’s get started. Turn with me to Matthew chapter 2. We’ll be reading verses 1-12:

2:1 Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem,

2 saying, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.”

3 When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him;

4 and assembling all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born.

5 They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea, for so it is written by the prophet:

6 “ ‘And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,

are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;

for from you shall come a ruler

who will shepherd my people Israel.’ ”

7 Then Herod summoned the wise men secretly and ascertained from them what time the star had appeared.

8 And he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him, bring me word, that I too may come and worship him.”

9 After listening to the king, they went on their way. And behold, the star that they had seen when it rose went before them until it came to rest over the place where the child was.

10 When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy.

11 And going into the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh.

12 And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed to their own country by another way. [1]

And this is the word of the Lord.

“Now after Jesus was born …” – that’s how Matthew begins this account. He doesn’t say how long after Jesus was born that this happened. In fact, Matthew doesn’t give us many details at all. To him, those details don’t matter. What matters is the reason these wise men made their journey, and we know it’s a good reason because of a word almost right in the middle of verse 1 – behold. Whenever you see the word behold in the Bible, it means pay attention to what comes next, because it’s so wonderful that it almost seems impossible, and it’s so important that you don’t dare miss it.

This entire story is built around the word behold. It’s built around Truth with a capital “T”. And it’s built around the only four ways that we can face Truth. We can earnestly seek the truth; we can be afraid of the truth; we can live by the letter but not the spirit of truth; and we can be the guardians of the truth. Let’s take those one at a time.

First, we can earnestly seek the truth, and in this story that is represented by these mysterious wise men. They’re called Magi in the Greek, men of knowledge and learning and wisdom. In many kingdoms of the Middle East, these Magi served as advisors to the king. In the second chapter of Daniel, we find that Daniel himself became the leader of an order of Magi while the Jews were in exile in Babylon, and scholars generally agree these wise men here have come from Babylon.

They were astronomers and biologists, chemists and philosophers. They were students of the secrets of both the natural and supernatural. And by divine grace, a group of these men had been led from the knowledge of nature to the knowledge of the God who created nature.

These people were devoted to the truth. That’s what they lived their lives by. They studied it and searched for it and explored it, and the only way they could do that was if they understood truth really existed. It was out there waiting for them to find it, and they were determined to find that Truth no matter where the search took them, even if it was months and years away from their homes.

That’s what’s happened here. It’s believed these particular wise men were from Babylon. They had studied the skies and knew that a king had been born in the West, and this king was different than any king ever born before. So what do they do? They go looking for him. Why? Well, as we’ll see, they have gifts to give him. Those gifts are very special, and we’ll talk about them. But even more than that, they were looking for the Truth.

Wise as these magi are, though, and as determined as they are to find this king, they still make some mistakes. That’s okay. If your life is devoted to finding the truth of things, you are still going to screw up from time to time. Because you’re just human, and that’s what we humans do – we screw up. But the important thing to remember is God will always honor your search for truth because that search, if it’s done with your whole heart, is only going to lead right where you’re supposed to be. God will use even your mistakes to accomplish His will. We see that happen here too with the mistakes that the wise men make.

Their first is right there in verse 1 – the magi go to Jerusalem instead of Bethlehem. Why do the wise men do that? Well first, that’s the direction where the star pointed them. Second, the wise men don’t know about the Old Testament prophecies about where the Messiah would be born. But there’s another reason too, and it’s one we have to pay attention to – these magi know that Jerusalem is the capital. They know Jerusalem is the center of Jewish culture and learning, so of course this new king will be in Jerusalem, right?

We see this sort of thing played out time and again all through the Bible, and we see it played out in our own lives too. God doesn’t always do what we expect Him to do. God certainly doesn’t always do what we want Him to do. You can see that even here with these men who are so famous for their knowledge and wisdom. They never considered that a great and wonderful king would be found anywhere else but inside the royal palace of a nation’s capitol. Because that just makes sense. But God says, “What you think makes sense is a lot different than what I think, because you don’t know everything, and you can’t see everything, but I do. So don’t trust in what you only have a little of. Instead, trust in what I completely have.”

But these wise men are still doing what we should all be doing every day. They’re seeking the truth in the best way they know, and trusting that they’ll find it in the end. You can see that in verse 2. The wise men are going all around Jerusalem, asking anyone they see, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews?” Notice that the magi aren’t asking, “Where is our king?” They’re asking for “the king of the Jews.” These men aren’t Jewish, they’re Gentiles. But these Gentiles don’t want to just find the king, they want to worship him.

And then they say at the end of verse 2, “For we saw his star when it rose, and have come to worship him.”

Now let’s talk about this star, because for centuries we’ve been trying to figure out what that was. We know that Halley’s comet appeared in 12 B.C., but that’s probably a few years too early for the birth of Christ. It could have been a supernova, or an exploding star. According to ancient Chinese records, one of those appeared in the sky around 4 B.C., so that’s a little closer. The most current theory is that the sun, moon, Jupiter, and Saturn were all aligned in the constellation Aries. That might not make much sense to us, but it did to the Magi. Jupiter and the moon together represented the birth of a ruler with a special destiny. Saturn was the symbol of giving life. And the position of that alignment meant that this king had been born in Palestine.

If you put all of that together, you get a pretty good picture of Jesus. And when you consider that an alignment of planets like that is very rare and won’t happen again for 16,000 years, you can understand why these magi were so excited. But the way Matthew writes about this star also makes us consider the fact that it was something completely different, something only God could do.

Either way, the magi get to Jerusalem and find the exact opposite of what they thought they would. They expected the entire city to be celebrating. Surely everyone in Judea would know this king had been born. They would know what his name was. They would know where he lived. But no one knows anything about it.

The magi say, “What do you mean you don’t know anything about a king? Didn’t you see that star? How could you miss that star?”

But everybody did. All the priests missed it. All the ministers missed it. All the people missed it. That’s because they weren’t expecting the Messiah. The people in Judea are waiting for him to come, because they’re in trouble. Rome rules the land now. But the people are all so busy looking focusing on the little things around them that didn’t matter – their money, their politics, their troubles – that they’ve completely missed what God was shouting from heaven. And that’s how it came to be that the first news to Jerusalem that the Messiah had been born didn’t come from the temple, it came from a bunch of strangers a few hundred miles away.

And these strangers are causing quite a stir. Word spreads about the arrival of these magi, and all the servants and attendants they have, and all the camels, and all their treasure. Eventually that word gets all the way to the palace, and that’s where we find the second way that people handle truth – some people will search for truth wherever it leads, but others are afraid of the truth. And no one represents that more than the next person we meet: Herod, who is also known as Herod the Great.

Verse 3: “When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him.”

What the magi are telling everyone in Jerusalem isn’t just an event, it’s the event. It’s the coming of the Chosen One. It’s the birth of the Messiah of Israel. It’s the answer to countless prayers prayed by countless people for centuries. This is the dawn of a new and better age. But nobody’s excited. Nobody’s celebrating. Instead everybody’s troubled, and it’s all because of Herod.

Herod is a pretty complicated guy. He’s also a very cruel guy. You don’t get to be a king in the Roman empire by being nice. The Roman Senate had given him his title in 41 BC and then told him to go conquer Judea. That’s exactly what Herod did. His main job was to carry out the wishes of Rome, which was to maintain peace in the country. And if peace didn’t work, to kill people. Herod tried to maintain that peace by reducing taxes and building public works, which included making the temple in Jerusalem bigger and better than it had been even under Solomon.

But Herod had a dark side. He actually ordered that on the day he died, the most distinguished citizens of Israel were to be arrested. That way he could guarantee that the whole land would be grieving. He lived in paranoia that someone would challenge him for the throne, even to the point of murdering his own wife and two brothers in-law because he suspected them of treason. And Herod had good reason to be paranoid. He wasn’t a full-blooded Jew. Herod was actually a descendant of Esau, and if you remember, God gave His blessing of the covenant not to Esau, but to his brother Jacob.

So when news of the magi’s visit finally reaches Herod in verse 3, he’s troubled. That word in the Greek is better translated as alarmed. Herod’s not just worried, he’s scared. If the magi’s story is true, then this baby is a danger to his power, maybe even his life. It’s even worse because the news of this new king has come to him not in an ordinary way, but in a supernatural way – a star. A star that shined with such brightness that it convinced these strangers to travel hundreds of miles. Strangers who had arrived in Jerusalem not just to visit this child but to bow down to him, and that was the worst part – they wanted to worship someone other than the great Herod. These magi are saying the King of the Jews had been born, but Herod called himself the King of the Jews.

That’s why all of Jerusalem is troubled. The people aren’t excited, they’re afraid. Because they know what Herod is capable of when he feels threatened.

The wise men are seeking the Truth. Herod is terrified of the Truth, because the Truth means the end of him. The end of all his scheming, all his murdering, all his attempts to get and then hang on to power. And there are a lot of people like that. They’ll do and say and think and believe anything to convince themselves they’re in charge of the truth, or the people they agree with are in charge of the truth, because the only other alternative is that there is a God who is Truth, and that Truth is what they’ll be judged against, not their own, and they know deep down they won’t measure up.

Right now, Herod needs something he’s never admitted to needing at all. He needs help.

There’s only one place he can go – the chief priests and scribes. And those chief priests and scribes represent the third way we can face the truth – we can live by its letter but not its spirit.

The chief priests are the holy ruling class of Judea. The scribes are the interpreters of the law. Put them together, and you have the most religiously educated people in the nation. If anyone can give Herod and answer as to what’s really going on here, it’s them.

You can bet this meeting is tense. Herod had murdered dozens of priests, but now he has no choice but to go to them with a question – Where will the Christ to be born?

They tell him Bethlehem, which is about 8 miles away from Jerusalem, and as proof they tell Herod what’s written in Micah 5:2. What’s interesting, though, is that the priests and scribes don’t quote that verse exactly. They leave the most important part out, the part that describes the Messiah as a ruler that’s a lot different than Herod, a ruler who governs like a shepherd, in faithfulness and tenderness with love and mercy.

Now, why do the priests and scribes leave that out? Because they don’t believe it. They’re not expecting a Messiah who rules with love, they’re expecting one who overthrows the Romans. They know the letter of scripture, but not its spirit. They know what Micah prophesied but they don’t obey it. The Son of God is eight miles down the road, but they didn’t go see him. And in this, these priests and scribes prove themselves to be even worse than Herod. Herod’s afraid of the truth, but at least he’s acting on it. These priests and scribes know the truth but don’t do anything about it.

It doesn’t matter how much scripture you know. It doesn’t matter how often you pray. It doesn’t matter if you carry your Bible everywhere or put a Jesus fish on your car for everyone to see. With truth comes the responsibility to live out that truth. At the end of the age, Christ won’t condemn people who never heard of him. But he will condemn those who heard of him but didn’t accept him, and he’ll also condemn those who knew the truth of him – who even said they believed that truth – but never lived like they did. Like these priests and scribes.

But of course none of that matters to Herod right now, because his plan is working. He’s learned the name of the town where this boy king is living. But there’s one more piece of information Herod needs before sending his soldiers to Bethlehem to take care of things the Roman way, and that’s the boy’s age.

He needs to know how long ago this star first appeared. For this, he uses the wise men themselves. But Herod does it secretly, otherwise the people will find out the Messiah has been born and they’ll start rebelling. In verses 7-9, Herod summons the wise men and finds out the information he needs, then he sends them as messengers. He’s not going to kill this child while the wise men are there. Herod doesn’t want them going back to their home country telling everyone how cruel he is. So he says, “Come back here when you’re done worshipping this king and tell me exactly where he is so I can go worship him too.”

So the wise men leave on the road to Bethlehem just the way that they came into Jerusalem – alone. No one goes with them. Herod won’t go because he doesn’t want this boy’s parents to know their child’s life is in danger. The people don’t go because they’re more terrified of Herod than they are desiring to worship the Messiah. And the religious leaders have their minds so set on the way they think God should do things that they’re not even considering all of this could be true. That’s why the wise men are alone. They’re seeking the Truth. Herod’s afraid of the Truth. Everybody else is ignoring the Truth.

These wise men might be book smart, but they don’t seem to know much about human nature because they believe every word Herod says. It seems by verse 9 that they set out from Jerusalem in the evening, because the star that had guided them all that way now reappeared again. The star had shone on the night Jesus was born in the direction of Jerusalem, which was a city the wise men would know. Then at some point it had disappeared. Now it appeared again, and it’s the star appearing again that leads them to do what verse 10 says – “they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy.”

The star didn’t appear again to show them the way. The way was easy, just a few miles down the road. No, the star appearing again was God’s grace to these wise men. It was God’s assurance that He had been guiding them this entire time. That’s their reason for joy. Truth always brings joy. When you look for Christ, when you search for Truth at all costs, it’s God who is always leading you, and God is always leading you because every search for Truth eventually leads right to His throne.

God will always guide anyone who seeks Jesus. Even if sometimes it feels like the light goes out (like it did for the wise men when the star disappeared for a while), even when we sometimes get lost while seeking him, God will always appear again and lead us right to Himself.

For the magi, their long journey is coming to an end. The star guides them into Bethlehem and settles right over the place where the child was. And in verse 11, we see that the wise men find the last way that people face the truth – they guard it. Read verse 11:

“And going into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshipped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh.”

There’s Mary. We’re going to talk about Mary next week, but here we find Mary doing exactly what a mother and a guardian of the Truth should be doing – caring for her child. Loving her boy. Nourishing him and helping him to grow. When you are in possession of the Truth, which is what you have, your job is to do the same. Love it. Nourish it. Make that Truth grow inside you.

There’s no mention of Joseph here. Joseph always seems to get the short end of the stick in the Gospels, but Mary and Jesus depended on him for so much. Maybe he was out working late, earning money to take care of his family. Or maybe it was part of God’s secret plan that evening to keep Joseph busy elsewhere so that these wise men would find only the King and his mother. Had Joseph been there, the magi might have taken him to be Jesus’s real father.

They had come in search of the Truth. Now these wise men have found it. But the Truth wasn’t what they were expecting. There’s no palace, no crowds, no rejoicing. Just a child in a shack in a little town no one ever thought about. But they still worship. They still give the child gifts, and we all know what those gifts are and what they mean. Gold was treasure fit for a king. Frankincense was treasure fit for worship. Myrrh was treasure fit for the cross.

But let’s look at those treasures in a different way since today we’re talking about Truth. The ultimate Truth. The Truth that is Christ. Because when you seek out that Truth like the wise men did, when you look for that treasure with all your heart and when you find it you hang on to it with all your might, it means you have to lay your own treasures at his feet too.

You have to lay your gold a the feet of the Truth. All those glittering things of this world that promise you what they can never really deliver? All those wants you have that do absolutely nothing for your soul? You have to lay them at the feet of Christ.

You have to lay your frankincense at the feet of the Truth. That’s the worship of yourself instead of God. It’s making you the center of the universe instead of Christ. It’s wanting to do what you want instead of what he wants. It’s obeying your will instead of his. You have to lay that at the feet of Christ too.

And that last gift, the gift of myrrh. That’s your most human gift to give him, because it’s the gift of death. That’s right, death is a gift. It’s dying to yourself, which is the only way you can really receive God’s love and then give that love to others. To love God is to die to yourself so that you can live for Him. That’s what Christ did for you, and he did it twice – first he gave up his eternal power to become a man, and then he gave up his earthly life for your sins. That gift of death is one you have to lay at his feet too.

Herod never got his way. The wise men were warned not to go back to Jerusalem, so they left their gifts and went home another way. They remain a mystery to us, but we can still learn from them. They believed in Christ even though they’d never seen him. They believed in Christ when the priests and scribes didn’t. They believed in Christ when they saw he was just an infant on Mary’s knee, and they worshipped him as king. They didn’t need to see a miracle to convince them. They didn’t need to hear any teaching to persuade them. They saw nothing but a helpless and weak child. But when they saw that child, they believed they saw the Savior of the world.

They went in search of the Truth and found it, just as we will find that truth if we seek it. And what you’ll find will be far better than anything you can ever expect, something that you can truly rejoice over.

If you’re ready to star that search, or if you’re ready to lay your treasures at the feet of Jesus, then I invite you up here as we sing our closing hymn.

Let’s pray:

Father in a world where so many deny the truth of Your Son, live in fear of Your Son, and even try to ignore Your Son, we are so thankful to be called Your people who love and live and hope by Your son. Truly we are guardians of that Truth, tasked with sharing that truth with others in love and joy and compassion. Help us all to do just that, and let us rejoice abundantly in every season of our lives, knowing that in You our victory is already won. For it’s in Christ’s name we pray, Amen.

[1] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Mt 2:1–12.