Matthew 2:1-15

The last time I preached, I started off with a quote from pastor Hayden and it went pretty well, so I’m going to do it again.

“Holy schnikes!” — Hayden Fleming

Hayden said this when we were in a crawlspace Wednesday, and for good reason…

I’d received a call from a gentleman named Bob who was having issues with his floors and was getting quotes to fix it. He described the issues, and they’re issues that I’ve dealt with numerous times. I gave him a ballpark price based on the information he’d given me but told him I’d need to come look in person to give him an accurate quote.

One of Bob’s issues was what we in the biz know as “microbial growth”. I told Bob that I don’t deal with microbial growth, but I have a great friend who would get him taken care of.

Enter Hayden, master of microbial growth remediation and expert in all things fungal and otherwise traumatic to houses.

I told Hayden I was going to look at Bob’s house and asked if he’d come take a look, too, and he graciously agreed.

When I got there, Bob gave us a quick tour of the house, highlighting the issues with bouncy, squeaky, and sagging floors. I thought, “No big deal, this isn’t even the worst I’ve ever seen” and figured it’d be hard work but good money.

But then we got into the crawlspace, which was an entire adventure in and of itself. And we started looking around, and it was pretty standard stuff for a house of this age. A few rotten joists here and there, rusted nails, the usual. Until we got under the living room.

I made it there first, shone my light on the framing members, and just about had a heart attack. I called Hayden over, and his reaction was as quoted on the screen — and it was appropriate.

In my experience, I’ve seen some rotten wood with microbial growth on it and thought, “Eh, that’s not too bad.” But this… this vision will forever be etched into my mind.

And Hayden’s reaction has cemented that for me, because Hayden knew what he was looking at even better than I did. Microbial growth is his specialty. He’s probably seen more of it in the last 6 months than I’ve seen in my 6 years of carpentry.

Now, anybody else who goes in that crawlspace who knows anything about how wood is supposed to look would also know it’s bad. But only people well-trained in the remediation of microbial growth would be able to truly appreciate how bad this was. To give some perspective, between the two of us, fixing it right would probably have cost upwards of $50,000 for the living room alone, let alone the rest of the house. As an aside, I didn’t even bother providing a quote, and I have a strong Hayden will not be getting a check from Bob any time soon.

But the point of this story is that Hayden, being well-trained in his field, was perfectly equipped to see something going on and appreciate just how big of a deal it is. Far better equipped than your average homeowner going in, or any of the other tradespeople who had already worked in the crawlspace, seen the damaged wood, and apparently thought it wasn’t that big of a deal.

Likewise, if we are familiar with the Scriptures, we’ll see that Matthew’s doing something really interesting in Matthew 2, but we might not think it’s that big of a deal.

However, if we’re well-trained in the Scriptures, our minds will be blown by what Matthew is doing as we appreciate just how big of a deal what Matthew’s actually doing is. We’ll actually be able to appreciate precisely how masterfully he’s portraying these events in history through a theological lens, and we’ll be left saying, “Holy schnikes!”

Hayden introduced the idea of Matthew’s ideal audience a few weeks ago, and that concept is really helpful here. Matthew’s ideal audience would be followers of Jesus who know the Old Testament inside and out and have very important questions about his identity, his work, and his teachings — questions that Matthew is very eager to answer.

Here’s our main idea for today: Jesus of Nazareth is the king of the world and the focus of its entire history.

We’ll see this as we watch Matthew present Jesus of Nazareth as God’s true king and the fulfillment of Israel’s history.

Before we get into to the text, though, I have some bad news.

Excursus: Typology

We don’t have time today to spend a lot of time talking about the actual events Matthew describes. And the reason we don’t have time is because as wonderful as the events themselves are, Matthew has an agenda, and the way he goes about that agenda will leave you saying “holy schnikes” if I’m able to do my job well, so we’re starting out this sermon with an excursus.

In our newsletter this week there were two resources concerning something called typology that you may or may not already be familiar with. It’s a way of reading the Bible that sees correspondences between the Old and New Testaments that goes beyond what we as modern Westerners might be comfortable employing as a reading strategy; however, I’m confident it’s what Matthew is doing throughout all of chapter 2.

The best way to explain this is to just go with some examples of non-typological reading, then do some typological reading.

For example, we’re all perfectly at home with what's going on in Matthew 1:22-23

Matthew 1:22–23 CSB

22 Now all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet: 23 See, the virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they will name him Immanuel, which is translated “God is with us.”

and Matthew 2:4-6

Matthew 2:4–6 CSB

4 So he assembled all the chief priests and scribes of the people and asked them where the Messiah would be born. 5 “In Bethlehem of Judea,” they told him, “because this is what was written by the prophet: 6 And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah: Because out of you will come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.”

because these are prophecies that predict the future and they’re fulfilled very exactly in Jesus’s story. He was born of a virgin in Bethlehem, just like the prophets said. Okay, check, got it.

But what about Matthew 2:15?

Matthew 2:15 CSB

15 He stayed there until Herod’s death, so that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet might be fulfilled: Out of Egypt I called my Son.

This is not a prophecy that predicts the future. Quite the opposite. In Hosea 11, God is effectively bringing a lawsuit against his people who refuse to follow him in spite of his never-ending love, and in this lawsuit he’s recounting how he has loved Israel from the time of their infancy hundreds of years before Hosea was even born, when he brought them out of the land of Egypt in the most important event in Israel’s salvation history.

Matthew is asserting that Jesus’s escape TO Egypt and living in safety as a refugee there before eventually returning to the land of Israel completes God’s rescue of Israel from Egypt.

And now we start scratching our heads. Matthew, how can something that already happened in the past be fulfilled? That’s not what fulfillment means, bro. I mean, yes, I agree that God sent Jesus to Egypt and called him back to Israel, but Hosea 11 does not leave us asking, “Okay, when and how is this going to be fulfilled?”

And now we’re starting to think like Matthew’s ideal audience. We want to believe him, but our knowledge of the Old Testament forces us to ask some tough questions rather than just naively accepting Matthew’s assertion at face value and saying, “Yeah, Matthew, I guess you’re right. Jesus is God’s son, and he did go to Egypt and come back when God called him, just like Hosea said he would, although that’s not how I read Hosea so I guess I’m wrong” and then we’d just move on to something we do understand — but if we do that, we’re going to be scratching our heads until we get to chapter 3.

But now those whispers of “Moses” we saw in Matthew 1 become shouts. After all, after Genesis comes Exodus.

Now, what are some things you need if you’re going to have a good biblical Exodus? (ask the audience)

Good answers (probably). Here are the six things that are most prominent in Matthew’s Exodus:

Pharaoh, played by King Herod

Wise men and sorcerers, played by themselves

Wise men and sorcerers, played by the chief priests and scribes

Israel, played by Jesus

Miraculous rescue, played by Joseph’s dream and immediate obedience

Egypt, played by Judea

King Herod makes a perfect Pharaoh. He hears of God’s working in the world and immediately opposes it because he loves power, so he rejects God as king. He’s been oppressing Israel during his entire reign. He’s a murderous tyrant, as we’ll see next week, who goes so far as to carry out the work that the original Pharaoh failed in doing when he massacres the Hebrew baby boys.

The “wise men” make perfect wise men because that’s exactly what they are, except there’s a major difference in this story. These sorcerers, instead of serving Pharaoh through their magic arts and opposing God’s servant, come to worship God’s servant whom he has revealed to them through their pagan ways by writing his message in the stars for them and miraculously guiding them to the place of the birth of the king.

This pagan about-face is critical in Matthew’s Gospel, where we see gentile after gentile recognize Jesus for who he is, while the Jewish recognition is markedly absent — the chief priests and scribes whom Herod summons know all the right answers but fail to act. Eventually, we’ll see that it’s their opposition that leads to the Messiah’s death and they are the most powerful source of opposition to God in this Gospel.

Jesus as Israel is a little bit of a harder case to make. After all, Israel was an entire nation that had existed for centuries before the Exodus, and Jesus was one little boy who had only been born within the last two years at the earliest. For now, we’re going to trust Matthew knows what he’s doing and we’ll explore it more next week — and multiple times in the rest of his Gospel.

The miraculous rescue isn’t quite as astonishing as wiping out an entire army in the Red Sea after parting its waters, but it’s no less supernatural and divinely orchestrated just when things seem their darkest, quite literally. Poor Joseph, whose entire life has been upended by this child that he adopted, is commanded to uproot his entire family and do a reverse Exodus, going back to Egypt for safety at God’s command. If I were Joseph, I think I’d up my caffeine intake and lay off the melatonin. It seems like every time he goes to sleep God turns his life inside out with a command in a dream to do something that makes practically no sense. But his righteous obedience saves the day.

Now, Judea as Egypt is really interesting. Even though Matthew says that God called Jesus out of Egypt, their return in verse 15 is quite secondhand. But I think he’s implying that Judea is, in fact, a place of captivity and oppression for Israel. Think about it. Even though they’re back in the promised land from exile as God had promised, none of the other expectations of that return have been met.

The most concise way to put it is this: Hosea 3:4-5

Hosea 3:4–5 CSB

4 For the Israelites must live many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or sacred pillar, and without ephod or household idols. 5 Afterward, the people of Israel will return and seek the Lord their God and David their king. They will come with awe to the Lord and to his goodness in the last days.

Although Israel has returned, they are being tyrannically ruled over by a non-Jew and shepherded by false shepherds who primarily devour the sheep in the form of the chief priests and scribes, about whose evils we will hear plenty throughout the rest of the gospel. Even though Israel is in the right place, they’re just as enslaved as they ever have been and none of the problems of the Old Testament have been solved.

So Judea is the place of slavery Israel needs to escape from. After all, if their prince’s life is in danger from the very beginning, they will never be able to seek the LORD their God and David their king. So Jesus’s un-Exodus TO Egypt is the start of the true Exodus, because when he comes back, he’s going to finally free Israel from their slavery in the way that the Old Testament indicates still needs to happen.

The way that Matthew portrays this story, he’s not only interested in the events. Rather, he’s telling the events and interpreting them through an incredibly sophisticated theological lens. And this portion of the narrative is SO dense that we could easily spend two more weeks in verses 1-12 alone.

I’m not even going to tell you about how the sorcerers recall Balaam, the gentile sorcerer hired by a pagan king named Balak to destroy Israel, who sees a star rising in Numbers 24 and whom the Greek Old Testament describes as “from the east”, so that Herod is portrayed as this crazy hybrid between Pharaoh and Balak whose plans are thwarted because even the pagans know God at work when they see it. And this makes the chief priests and scribes look even worse, if that’s possible.

I’m also not going to tell you about the other parallels between Jesus and Moses, like the ancient Jewish story that says Pharaoh was warned by an astrologer/sorcerer about the birth of a child who would humble Egypt and exalt Israel, and it’s that prophecy that led to the policy of infanticide for the Hebrew boys. Maybe I can tell you more about that next week as we continue to become more and more like Matthew’s ideal audience.

To bring it full circle, let’s remember that we got on this train at typology station. The way typology works is that we see in the Old Testament shadows that look forward to the real substance. We’re probably already familiar with this in Hebrews 8-10, where the sacrificial system serves as a pattern that describes the actual substance of Jesus’s work.

But Matthew is doing the same thing here, where the Exodus serves as a pattern that describes the reality of Jesus’s life and points forward to an even deeper spiritual reality, in which Jesus leads his new Israel on a new Exodus out of slavery to sin and captivity in the world to return with him to the promised land where he dwells with them forever.

It’s not just that Matthew sees these correspondences and says, “Oh, that’s neat!” but rather, he’s reading the Old Testament looking forward and asking, “How does this point forward to Jesus?” and inviting us to do the same. Sometimes, the forward-pointing is really obvious, like the first two Old Testament citations we’ve seen in this section. Sometimes, that forward-pointing is considerably less obvious, especially when the citation itself is backwards-pointing.

All right. That’s our excursus finished. Holy schnikes. Let’s get into the text, which divides into two sections. In vv. 1-12, Matthew presents Jesus as king, and in vv. 13-15, Matthew presents Jesus as the true Israel.

vv. 1-12: Jesus, King of…

It’s unmistakable in these verses that Matthew wants to prove that Jesus is king of the Jews. The pagan astrologers from the east recognize it in the stars as God miraculously alters space to graciously give them a sign. The chief priests and scribes should have recognized it and investigated it, since they knew exactly where he would be born: Bethlehem of Judea, the town of King David, about 5 miles away from Jerusalem.

They know the Scriptures so well that they not only know the place according to Micah, they know what that ruler will do according to 2 Samuel and slap those Scriptures together — or at least Matthew does, and puts it on their lips, unless he’s portraying them ironically as having misquoted Scripture. But more on Jesus shepherding Israel next week.

The simple fact of Jesus’s birth upends King Herod’s entire life because Herod was merely appointed king over Judea and he wasn’t even a Jew — he was a descendant of the Edomites who ruled over the Jews with an iron fist and probably needed to be locked in an iron cage because of his insanity. One contemporary remarked that it was better to be one of Herod’s pigs than one of his sons because Herod, being a Jewish convert, didn’t eat pork, but he sure did enjoy executing his kids — and their mothers! So it’s no mystery that Jerusalem was disturbed with him.

But whereas King Herod’s desire to “worship” this king was a pretense, the pagans’ is no pretense. They really have come to worship him, and they prove it in verses 9-12, where Matthew presents Jesus as king of the world. And this is where I’m glad I’ve introduced typology, because when I tell you that Matthew presents Jesus as even greater than Solomon, you’re not remotely surprised. You may recall in 1 Kings, after we learn how great Solomon was, that the queen of Sheba came and visited him. 1 Kings 10:10 says it like this.

1 Kings 10:10 CSB

10 Then she gave the king four and a half tons of gold, a great quantity of spices, and precious stones. Never again did such a quantity of spices arrive as those the queen of Sheba gave to King Solomon.

Gold and spices? Sounds familiar. But wait. You know the songs “We Three Kings of Orient Are”, right? How on earth do eastern wise men get confused for kings? I get the number three, since there are three gifts, but kings? Why don’t we let Solomon tell us?

Psalm 72:10–11 CSB

10 May the kings of Tarshish and the coasts and islands bring tribute, the kings of Sheba and Seba offer gifts. 11 Let all kings bow in homage to him, all nations serve him.

Psalm 72:15 CSB

15 May he live long! May gold from Sheba be given to him. May prayer be offered for him continually, and may he be blessed all day long.

And we’ll let Isaiah join the chorus:

Isaiah 60:6 CSB

6 Caravans of camels will cover your land— young camels of Midian and Ephah— all of them will come from Sheba. They will carry gold and frankincense and proclaim the praises of the Lord.

Matthew uses the wise men to present Jesus as the rightful king of all the earth. These gentiles are, in fact, the first to recognize Jesus as king, and they pay the proper homage to him, being filled with overwhelming joy at this wonderful thing. They completely reverse our expectations of pagans.

We would expect the righteous Bible scholars to rejoice at the birth of their king, but they’re cozied up with their fake king Herod, either plotting his demise or enjoying their protection at the expense of their kinsfolk.

Instead, it’s the magicians. The idolaters. The stargazing crazies. The outsiders. God writes the message of his good news in the skies for them to see, and they are the first people to worship Immanuel, God with us, even though they came from distant lands. They even receive God’s direct revelation in their dreams so they return home safely and Jesus’s life is saved.

All the while, the people who will eventually put Immanuel to death are sitting mere miles away, reading the prophets and ignoring the God who inspired them in the first place.

That’s because Jesus is a king like no other, whose arrival into the world signifies a new creation — a new Genesis, and whose work signifies a completely new way of living, with true freedom and the presence of the true God, in a new Exodus.

Yes, he’s king of the Jews, but he’s so much more. He’ll tell his disciples later. Matthew 12:42

Matthew 12:42 CSB

42 The queen of the south will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and look—something greater than Solomon is here.

vv. 13-15: Jesus, the True Israel

In these verses, we Matthew portraying Jesus as the true Israel.

In the Old Testament, Israel was God’s son, his servant who would be a light to the nations as they displayed his wisdom through obedience to his righteous laws. God covenanted with them that he would bless them immeasurably with offspring — recall his promise to Abraham — and peace — recall his promise to David.

Their constant, multi-generational disobedience, however, made that impossible. They experienced the covenantal curses, not the blessings, and instead of displaying God’s wisdom, they displayed God’s righteous fury as they became a mockery, a joke, among the nations.

But God never gave up on them. His promises never fail, but he did have to take things into his own hands if Israel was going to live up to all he planned for them. And that’s exactly what he does. We start seeing that when Matthew tells us that Jesus is Immanuel, and it becomes even clearer when he asserts that Jesus’s sojourning in Egypt and his subsequent return is the fulfillment of Israel’s exodus.

Yet again, Jesus turns things completely upside down. Egypt is his place of safety, underscoring how far short Israel has fallen. Israel should have been the safest place in the world for God to come and dwell with his people, yet from the moment of his birth he’s in danger.

Jesus can say, unlike most of the Israelites in Jerusalem, that he knows what it’s like to be a wanderer in the wilderness. He is a true son of Israel who has escaped certain death at the hands of a crazed king, and his life will only reflect Israel’s history more and more clearly in the coming chapters. After all, we still have Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy to go, and I don’t want to spoil it all.

How many Israelites could lay claim to a divinely-orchestrated exodus of their own like Jesus’s? Certainly not the chief priests and scribes living in their paneled houses in luxury, whose peace and safety come at the expense of their very souls, denying their heritage as sons of Abraham.

If you’re not yet convinced of Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus as the true Israel, perhaps think of the last two week’s texts as you hear Isaiah 49:1-3

Isaiah 49:1–3 CSB

1 Coasts and islands, listen to me; distant peoples, pay attention. The Lord called me before I was born. He named me while I was in my mother’s womb. 2 He made my words like a sharp sword; he hid me in the shadow of his hand. He made me like a sharpened arrow; he hid me in his quiver. 3 He said to me, “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.”

Conclusion

“Holy schnikes." — all of us, for one reason or another

I know that this has been a lot. I know that some of this is very hard to believe if this is the first time you’ve been exposed to this, especially based on one short Old Testament citation that, honestly, doesn’t seem like that big of a deal unless you overthink it. And I’d be lying if I told you I’ve never been accused of overthinking.

But I really do think that Matthew, in crafting this narrative and interpreting it for us, is telling us that he’s doing something far more than just using prooftexts coupled with stories from Jesus’s infancy to prove that Jesus is the Messiah. Jesus of Nazareth isn’t just Israel’s Messiah. He’s God in the flesh, as we saw last week. He’s the king of Israel, in the true Davidic sense, just like God promised. He’s going to reign forever and ever and ever. He’s the king of the world, and God writes his birth announcement in the stars so the nations can stream to Jerusalem to pay tribute to the king.

He’s the true Israel. Their entire history is just a shadow of what Jesus accomplishes in his life, death, and resurrection.

To be clear: I am asking you to believe that God has orchestrated all of human history for the explicit purpose of teaching us about Jesus. It’s not that the world helps us interpret Jesus, and Jesus fits into the story of the world in some way. He is the point of the story of the world, and he tells us how the world and all its happenings are to be interpreted. God shouts in all creation and on every page of his holy Scriptures, “Behold, my servant Jesus, in whom I will be glorified!” Now it’s up to us to behold that servant in every way we can and worship him with our entire lives. Please pray with me.