THE SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS

THE SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS Matthew 2:13-23 With grateful acknowledgement of these sources of direction and inspiration: the Holy Spirit; the Word of God; David Alsobrook, Abortion; Breakpoint with Charles Colson (several postings); Charles Colson, Against the Night; Peter Kreeft, Three Approaches to Abortion; Swindoll, The Sanctity of Life; World Magazine, 1/18/03 and 1/10/04. January 18, 2004 Given by: Pastor Rich Bersett [Index of Past Messages] Show 7-minute film clip on the Sanctity of Human Life from Focus on the Family… Today is Sanctity of Human Life Sunday, when we appropriately honor that which God honored when He created it. He exercised awesome and incomprehensible power when He created all things. And He exercised unimaginable grace when He paused on the sixth day to say to Himselves, "Let us make man in our image." (Genesis 1:26) Then he anointed His human creation with added esteem when He said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply and increase in number fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and over every living creature that moves on the ground." (Genesis 1:28-29) We also use this day, among people of faith, to honor the very brief lives of the estimated 55 million human beings who have been legally murdered through abortion procedures in the United States since the heinous ruling by our Supreme Court on January 22, 1973. Worldwide, that many babies are aborted every year. I would like for us to consider the travesty of that ongoing genocide against the backdrop of our text in Matthew today. Following the Magi's visit at the home of Joseph and Mary in Bethlehem, where the baby Jesus was now probably near one year of age, the eastern mystics were warned in a dream not to go back to the scheming Herod in Jerusalem. Matthew 2:12 tells us they returned to their country by another route. Turn to Matthew 2 as we read beginning at verse 13. "When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. "Get up," he said, "take the child and his mother and escape  to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for  the child to kill him." (Matthew 2:13) These dreams and visitations certainly were keeping the angels busy! One thing is for sure, though: when the angels get busy, something is going on that is of real importance to God's plans. It was a natural choice-Egypt. At Alexandria there was a Jewish sanctuary established by none other than Alexander the Great. "So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord has said through the prophet: "Out of Egypt I called my son." (Matthew 2:14-15) This prophecy is from Hosea 11:1, who probably had no clue that what he spoke at the time was anything other than a reference to the great deliverance of Israel from Egyptian bondage under Moses. It certainly was that, but more. As we often see, there is a double (and sometimes a triple) fulfillment of the prophet's words. "When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: "A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more." (Matthew 2:16-18) What do malicious, maniacal, murderous monarchs do when provoked to anger? More of the same thing they always do. Lash out with violence and vengeance. Figuring Jesus to be perhaps one year old, but not much more, he decided to act quickly and put to death all the boys in the area of Bethlehem, the town the chief priests and Magi had identified as being the birthplace of this "king". Like Pharaoh in the earlier history of Israel, who had all the boys under two drowned (Exodus 1:22), Herod once again slaughtered the defenseless. It's the trademark of the arrogant to be ruthless. It is the pattern of the powerful to abuse the weak. And it is the goal of wickedness to destroy the innocent. I want to say more about this theme in a moment. But let's read the rest of this chapter first. "After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, "Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child's life are dead." [webmasters note Matthew 2:19-20] There is our busy angel again, messing with Joseph's sleep. He tells Joseph the danger is past and, for reasons only God knew at the time, He wanted the family back in Israel. Notice, Joseph was not told to go back to Bethlehem, specifically. In fact the directions were fairly unspecific, a little bit like our being told to leave a home in another state and return to Illinois. Where in Illinois? Your choice! Sometimes God wants us to use the common sense He gave us-in fact, most of the time. Will Rogers once quipped, "Common sense isn't as common as it used to be." Sometimes, when the Lord is not leading in a specific way, He's letting us choose what we want. It is the dreams and visions that are uncommon. The Lord put a brain in our crania and reasoning power in our minds for a purpose. There is nothing particularly holy about expecting a "sign" for every decision in your life. I have an unusual itch on my left elbow-it must mean I am to turn left here. I've had two men tell me they felt it was God's will that they divorce their wives because they didn't feel they loved them anymore. I woke up with a feeling of dread-I don't think I'm not supposed to go to work today. A couple more of those signs and you'll be waking up with a feeling of unemployment! "So he got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets:  "He will be called a Nazarene." [webmasters note: Matthew 2:21-23] Joseph was told in no uncertain terms to return to Israel, but he was told in only the most general terms. What did he do? He opted for Galilee. Why? Three very simple reasons: 1) God warned him against Judea, 2) even though the murderer Herod was dead, his son (in many ways the spitting image of his father) was on the throne in Judea (where Bethlehem was), and 3) Nazareth, in Galilee, was their home town (Luke 2:4-5). It seemed like a good choice. By the way, in the matter of following God's leading, don't worry about wrong choices. If you're walking in the Spirit, doing your best to please the Lord, even if you make a bad choice, He will bring a course correction to you in a way you won't miss (see Philippians 3:15). Some people superstitiously think God is trying to "trip them up" or has set up a riddle for them to make it hard to find their way in His will. Nonsense. It is His desire that you succeed in His purposes and He helps you find His will. He doesn't hide it from you and dare you to find it. "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will direct your paths." (Proverbs 3:5) There was another reason they ended up in Nazareth, as it turns out. There was a popular prophetic saying (not recorded in our Bible) that was believed to apply to the Messiah, that He would be called a Nazarene. You almost get the picture here that God was laying back, hoping Joseph would pick up on the clues and end up in Nazareth, without His having to actually tell him outright by sending that angel again. You can almost hear the angels cheering Joseph from the grandstand of heaven, "Some on, Joe, not there; no, not there; that's right, Nazareth! Good job!" Nazareth was, for a number of reasons, considered a crude area populated by the lower classes. What cities do you know of that, people snicker when they hear you're from there! Maybe, Gary, IN or Hahira, GA? Nazarene was a term of derision. It is no wonder that when Philip told Nathanael that he'd met the Messiah-Jesus of Nazareth-Nathanael responded, "Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?" (John 1:46) In those days, to be known as a Nazarene meant you were low class, crude, even violent. Why did God allow, and apparently arrange for, Jesus to be from Nazareth? Simple: it was a further means for Him to identify with sinful man. I'd like for us to return to verses 17-18 for a moment. "Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: "A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more." (Matthew 2:17-18) This reference is from Jeremiah 31:15. Rachel is the wife of Jacob and the mother of Joseph. She had once cried out, "Give me children or I'll die!" (Genesis 30:1). God had answered that cry and by the time of her old age, she had many children and grandchildren. Jeremiah was prophesying about the great sorrow that the nation would experience soon when most of Israel's people would be carried off into Babylonian captivity. Families would be split apart and mothers would weep. Rachel was symbolic of all the mothers lamenting Israel's great tragedy, and the mothers mourning the loss of their murdered children in Bethlehem. The Old Testament reference is brought in here by Matthew under the direction of the Holy Spirit, to illustrate and emphasize the deep pain of loss being experienced by the mothers of the children murdered in and around Bethlehem. Bethlehem was not a large town, as we discovered in last week's teaching, and the number of families who lost a son younger than age two probably came to less than twenty. You might think that, in the big scheme of things, twenty is not so bad. But a death in the family, especially the death of an infant, is never experienced "in the big scheme of things." I remember the morning of October 14, 1958, like it was yesterday. I was sick and I was taking an early-morning nap on my parents' bed. Baby Randy's crib was also in their room. My mother came in to bring me an aspirin and a glass of water. Then she turned to check on Randy. I vividly remember she dropped the glass and sucked in a gasp of air that was so audible I can still hear it this morning. She picked up the lifeless body of her sixth child who had suffered a crib death in the night. She held him in his little blanket up against her chest and ran to the phone, saying over and over again, "O my God! My baby! O my God! My baby!" The ambulance came. The neighbor came over to baby-sit. An hour or so later, my mother came home. She looked so sad, so spent. I had never seen my strong mother like that. I'll never forget-like Rachel, weeping for her child. Let it be clearly understood, it was a dark day in Egypt when those baby boys were taken from their homes and thrown into the Nile. It was a dismal, mournful day in Bethlehem that day when those infant sons were ripped from their mother's arms and killed in the streets. It's a dark season in our world and our nation today. In the past thirty years nearly 2 billion children have been ripped from their mothers (in many cases, quite literally) and their lives snuffed out through the medical manslaughter we euphemistically call abortion. Although the very verb abort carries the message to cause to cease. What ceases is life. A human being created by God by a miracle is terminated. In any other circumstances, that's called murder. You know, it just won't do to argue that We don't actually know when life begins. Well, I guess life begins when the sperm and egg unite and cell multiplication begins! Then someone arbitrarily says At the beginning of the sixth month-that's when it's a real baby! Then someone else says When the baby is born and starts breathing on it's own-then it is a viable human being. And then, Until the cord is cut and the fetus is completely separated from it's mother, it is not yet a person. Today, in the classrooms and soon in the courts, it is being suggested that infanticide is a very real option that should be considered. That is, that parents should have the right to decide if they really want to be parents up to three months after the birth of the child. Would you consider abortion in the following four situations? 1. There's a preacher and wife who are very, very, poor. They already have 14 kids. Now she finds out she's pregnant with number 15. They're living in tremendous poverty. Considering their poverty and the excessive world population, would you consider recommending she get an abortion? 2. The father is sick with syphilis, the mother has TB. They have four children. The first is blind, the second is dead, the third is deaf, and the fourth has TB. She finds she's pregnant again. Given the extreme situation, would you consider recommending abortion? 3. A white man raped a 13-year-old black girl, and she got pregnant. If you were her parents, would you considering recommending abortion? 4. A teenage girl is pregnant. She's not married. Her fianc?is not the father of the baby, and he's very upset. Would you consider recommending abortion? In the first case, you have just killed John Wesley, one of the great evangelists in the 19th century. In the second case, you have killed Beethoven. In the third case, you have killed Ethel Waters, the great black gospel singer. If you said yes to the fourth case, you have just declared the murder of Jesus Christ!! The question is basically, who will decide when a person will die? The Bible says that God has that sole right and responsibility. This gives some fits. But God is God and that's it. The choice of when we were born was not up to us. It was God's decision, working in concert with your parents. And ultimately it is His decision when you will die. One question that surfaces when we consider God's power to decided these things is, Why did all those children have to die in Bethlehem? Or even in Egypt in the time of Moses. Couldn't God have interfered and stopped that? I don't suppose any of us is comfortable with all the choices of God, precisely because we're not working with the knowledge and wisdom He has. Ravi Zacharias wrote: …on every campus where I debated the issue of God's existence, some individual challenged God's goodness by pointing out all the evil in this world, especially the gratuitous evil that seems purely the result of a whim. "A plan crashes, and thirty die while twenty live . . . what sort of God is that? If God is good, why does He arbitrarily allow some to live and destine others to die?" The implication was, of course, that since God is so arbitrary in His actions He must be evil. "My question to you, madam, is this-When you arrogate the right to yourself to choose who may live in your womb and who may die, you call it your moral right. But when God exercises the same right, you call Him evil. Can you explain that contradiction to me?" We apply our beliefs selectively and judge by different standards. This is the sad result of living with flagrant contradiction that exacts a heavy toll, ultimately breeding justification of even the most irrational opinions and actions. Think, for example, of the rationale behind the defense of abortion. The comment is often made that we do not know when life begins and therefore may abort at will. How irrational can that argument get? If my two-year-old son were missing on a friend's farm, would I go plunging a pitchfork into haystacks looking for him, because I do not know whether he is lost in a haystack. The death of reason has resulted in such loss of the sanctity of life because pluralism has bred irrationality . . . It is the equivalent of plunging the pitchfork into the womb because we do not know if life is there. Billy Graham's daughter was being interviewed on the Early Show and Jane Clayson asked her "How could God let something like this happen?" And Anne Graham gave an extremely profound and insightful response. She said "I believe that God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years we've been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives. And being the gentleman that He is, I believe that He has calmly backed out. How can we expect God to give us His blessing and His protection if we demand that He leave us alone?" Dear God: Why didn't you save the school children in Littleton, Colorado? Sincerely, Concerned Student Dear Concerned Student: I am not allowed in schools. Sincerely, God But, on another plane, the real issue behind abortion is much simpler. We just don't want to be inconvenienced by babies. Why are children aborted? The Alan Guttmacher Institute (the research arm of Planned Parenthood) states: * 1% are victims of incest or rape * 1% had fetal abnormalities * 4% had a doctor who said their health would worsen if they continued the pregnancy * 50% said they didn't want to be a single parent or they had problems in current relationships * 66% stated they could not afford a child *75% said the child would interfere with their lives. Dr. C. Everett Koop, formerly the Surgeon General, said that during his 35+ years of practicing medicine, "Never once did a case come across my practice where abortion was necessary to save a mother's life." It's all a matter of convenience. What does all of this have to do with Matthew 2 and the killing of the Bethlehemite children? Herod wanted to eliminate all threats to his throne. He didn't like the idea that anyone else but he would rule. We don't either. And eventually irrational voices got it through the Supreme Court in 1973. As a nation we are no different from Herod-killing for convenience. Slaughter the Innocents in order to keep the rule of our own lives in place. There is good news. While still insufferably high the numbers of abortions in the United States are decreasing by a couple of percentage points, and the trend is making a tediously slow reversal. Debate is beginning again, even in the courts, about the legalization of abortion in America. And rational voices are being heard. The other good news is the love of God. What about those poor, innocent infant boys in Bethlehem? What about the two billion pre-born infants who have been murdered world-wide in the past three and a half decades? What of them? We trust the merciful and loving Lord has received them to Himself. It was Jesus who said, "Let the children come to me…for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." (Matthew 19:14) Of even greater concern to us must be the Rachel's around us who are weeping. The statistics are telling us that post-abortion syndrome is a huge problem for women who have given in to the god of convenience. The church is called to minister to their needs. To be available with an understanding heart, arms to hold them and comfort them and the gospel message to assure them that in Christ there is forgiveness of sins-all sins. Let's be faithful in praying down the slaughter of the innocents. Pray that our court system will recognize the irrational and unconscionable position we are in. Pray for divine wisdom and mercy toward the children. I want to encourage you to be generous in giving to the New Beginnings Crisis Pregnancy Center. It is a Christian-run ministry to women with crisis pregnancies right here in Fairview Heights. It is one of the churches' attempts at doing more than just decrying abortion, but being available with real help for real hurting women. Fill up a baby bottle with change or green stuff. You don't even need a bottle. The collection will terminate next Sunday.   [Back to Top]