We Two Kings

Most people never feel secure because they are always worried that they will lose their job, lose the money they already have, lose their spouse, lose their health, and so on.  The only true security in life comes from knowing that every single day you are improving yourself in some way, that you are increasing the caliber of who you are and that you are valuable to your company, your friends, and your family.

Anthony Robbins

Scriptures:  Ph. 2:6-11; Matthew 2:1-16; 2 Samuel 21, 22

Herod the Great

q      An Edomite – natural enmity with Israel.  See 1Sa 21:7; 22:9, 18, 22

q      Appointed King of Judea in B.C. 40 by the Roman Senate at the suggestion of Marc Antony

q      68 years old – Died at 70 years of age

q      In the 35th year of his reign – marked by bloodshed

q      Murdered his wife Mariamne and the two sons that she bore him –

q      Ordered the mass execution of male children in Bethlehem under 2 years of age in an effort to eliminate the Messiah

A Walk Through The Scriptural Account – Matthew 2

1 ¶ After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi {Traditionally Wise Men} from the east came to Jerusalem  2  and asked, "Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east {Or star when it rose} and have come to worship him."  3  When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him.  4  When he had called together all the people's chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Christ {Or Messiah} was to be born.  5  "In Bethlehem in Judea," they replied, "for this is what the prophet has written:  6  "`But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for out of you will come a ruler who will be the shepherd of my people Israel.'" {Micah 5:2}  7  Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared.  8  He sent them to Bethlehem and said, "Go and make a careful search for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him."  9 ¶ After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen in the east {Or seen when it rose} went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was.  10  When they saw the star, they were overjoyed.  11  On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshipped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold and of incense and of myrrh.  12  And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.  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."  14  So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt,  15  where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: "Out of Egypt I called my son." {Hosea 11:1}  16 ¶ When Herod realised 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.

q      Protecting his turf -  When King Herod heard this he was disturbed  He was disturbed because the promise of a Messiah had direct implications for his own life, which he obviously enjoyed to the fullest.  He was threatened by the possibility that the scripturally promised Messiah would upstage him.  After all even the possibility being known would raise hope in the common man.  Although he held a position that was handed to him, a foreigner, by a foreign army, he was never embraced by the people he ruled.  He had done many good things probably in an attempt to win their acceptance and yet he never had.  It was merely his bloodthirsty nature that silenced the dissatisfaction.  There are times in life when people become slaves to the positions that they hold.  They draw their identity and their sense of well being from that position and the possibility of losing it or having it’s parameters infringed upon can make them into formidable enemies.

q      Self-consumed – He realized that this was possibly the fulfillment of prophecy and so asked people who would know better than he.  When he had called together all the people's chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Christ {Or Messiah} was to be born.  All of his responses and actions were about him and his welfare.  This made him blind to the task that He was undertaking.

Spurgeon said:

Success exposes a man to the pressure of people and thus tempts him to hold on to his gains by means of fleshly methods and practices, and to let himself be ruled wholly by the dictatorial demands of incessant expansion.  Success can go to my head, and will unless I remember that it is God who accomplishes the work, that He can continue to do so without my help, and that He will be able to make out with other means whenever He cuts me down to size.

See:  2 Sam 7:18; Prov 16:18-19

I suddenly saw that all the time it was not I who had been seeking God, but God who had been seeking me.  I had made myself the centre of my own existence and had my back turned to God.  All the beauty and truth which I had discovered had come to me as a reflection of his beauty, but I had kept my eyes fixed on the reflection and was always looking at myself.  But God had brought me to the point at which I was compelled to turn away from the reflection, both of myself and of the world which could only mirror my own image.  During that night the mirror had been broken, and I had felt abandoned because I could no longer gaze upon the image of my own reason and the finite world which it knew.  God had brought me to my knees and made me acknowledge my own nothingness, and out of that knowledge I had been reborn.  I was no longer the centre of my life and therefore I could see God in everything.

              ... Bede Griffiths, The Golden String, pp. 107-8

q      Opposing God’s plans – He was actually prepared to eliminate the promised Messiah to protect his own interests.  How many times have their been people in the church who have opposed plans and opportunities that would bring great blessing to a local church family?  Regardless of the circumstance that would provoke someone to stand in this precarious position, it is a dangerous place to be.  God will make a way and his church will not give ground to the gates of hell.  One way or another, it will go forward and how many people have fallen fruitless and barren in the desert of ineffectiveness because they would not trust God to help them face the challenge ahead?

q      Duplicitous Nature – Feigned interest in the Messianic prophecy.  He had a hidden agenda.  His interest was to further his evil plot and ultimately to murder the Messiah.

q      Secrecy – There is great

q      Manipulative nature – He used these seekers to further his own evil ends.

q      Unrestrained morally –

Jesus Christ

q      He was God and entitled to everything in accordance with that position.   He never had to aspire to greatness.  He was innately greater than any other.

He was too great for his disciples.  And in view of what he plainly said, is it any wonder that all who were rich and prosperous felt a horror of strange things, a swimming of their world at his teaching?  Perhaps the priests and the rich men understood him better than his followers.  He was dragging out all the little private reservations they had made from social service into the light of a universal religious life.  He was like some terrible moral huntsman digging mankind out of the snug burrows in which they had lived hitherto.  In the white blaze of this kingdom of his there was to be no property, no privilege, no pride and precedence; no motive indeed and no reward but love.  Is it any wonder that men were dazzled and blinded and cried out against him?  Even his disciples cried out when he would not spare them the light.  Is it any wonder that the priests realized that between this man and themselves there was no choice but that he or priestcraft should perish?  Is it any wonder that the Roman soldiers, confronted and amazed by something soaring over their comprehension and threatening all their disciplines, should take refuge in wild laughter, and crown him with thorns and robe him in purple and make a mock Caesar of him?  For to take him seriously was to enter upon a strange and alarming life, to abandon habits, to control instincts and impulses, to essay an incredible happiness...  Is it any wonder that to this day this Galilean is too much for our small hearts?

      ... H. G. Wells, The Outline of History [1920]

Napoleon (cited by Vernon C. Grounds, The Reason for Our Hope) said: "I know men; and I tell you that Jesus Christ is not a man. Superficial minds see a resemblance between Christ and the founders of empires, and the gods of other religions.  That resemblance does not exist.  There is between Christianity and whatever other religions the distance of infinity.... Everything in Christ astonishes me.  His spirit overawes me, and His will confounds me.  Between him and whoever else in the world, there is no possible term of comparison. He is truly a being by Himself.  His ideas and sentiments, the truth which he announces, His manner of convincing, are not explained either by human organization or by the nature of things.... The nearer I approach, the more carefully I examine, everything is above me -- everything remains grand, of a grandeur which overpowers.  His religion is a revelation from an intelligence which certainly is not that of man.... One can absolutely find nowhere, but in Him alone, the imitation or the example of His life.... I search in vain in history to find the similar to Jesus Christ, or anything which can approach the gospel.  Neither history, nor humanity, nor the ages, nor nature, offer me anything with which I am able to compare it or to explain it. Here everything is extraordinary.

See:  Mark 1:27; John 3:31; Col 1:15-18

q      He was willing to lose everything.  He turned his back and walked away from all of his entitlements.

Love knows no such thing as sacrifice. David Livingstone wrote in his journal on one occasion concerning his "selfless" life:

People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa.  Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paying back a small part of the great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay?  Is that a sacrifice which brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind and a bright hope of glorious destiny hereafter?  Away with the word in such a view and with such a thought!  It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a

privilege.

n       Giving and Living, by Samuel Young, Baker Book House, p.71

He never halted nor wavered but in a heartbeat turned his back completely on all that was due him because he loved us.  How in the world we can reduce faith to some loveless system of rules and regulations in our own personal lives and then hope to propagate that perversion of God’s inestimable love is indeed a great sacrilege.

Without love we are nothing but noise and not even good noise.  All the great things in the world that we might accomplish are nothing apart from that.  And if all the great things are nothing then think of what rubbish the small things become in the absence of love.

q      Made himself of no reputation.   Christ’s Humble Birth  In his best-selling book, *The Jesus I Never Knew*, Philip Yancey contrasts the humility that characterized Jesus’ royal visit to planet earth with the prestigious image associated with world rulers today:  In London, looking toward the auditorium’s royal box where the queen and her family sat, I caught glimpses of the...way rulers stride through the world: with bodyguards, and a trumpet fanfare and a flourish of bright clothes and flashing jewelry.  Queen Elizabeth II had recently visited the United States and reporters delighted in spelling out the logistics involved: her four thousand pounds of luggage included two outfits for every occasion, a        mourning outfit in case someone died, forty pints of plasma, and white kid-leather toilet seat covers. She brought along her own hairdresser, two valets, and a host of other attendants. A brief visit of royalty to a foreign country can easily cost twenty million dollars.  In meek contrast, God’s visit to earth took place in an animal shelter with no attendants present and nowhere to lay the newborn king but a feed trough.  Indeed, the event that divided history, and even our calendars, into two parts may have had more animal than human witnesses. A mule could have stepped on him.  Citation:  Philip Yancey, *The Jesus I Never Knew* (Zondervan, 1995)

q      He became a servant of man.  He did not come to establish an earthly kingdom that would exist to make life better for him.  Servants are not looking for appreciation.  Their nature is to serve without expectation or recognition.  They are fulfilled as they function in this role.  This is the role that Christ assumed and when we are like him we serve in the same manner.  Not looking for return.  Our reward is to serve in itself.

q      He surrendered to a criminal’s death.  He died for something which he did not do.  How quick we are to assign blmae away from us and to do everything that we can do to make ourselves look as good as we might. 

Application

q      We have difficulty at times surrendering our own entitlements.  As parents, achievers, supporters of the church, servants of the church and the kingdom.  The motive of service can never be to make someone else indebted to you.  So many times trouble and strife within the church come when people expect to be treated in a certain manner and fail to realize that.

q      Often this thwarts God’s plan for his people and his church.  Rather than a servant’s posture we want to call in our debts – the things that we believe we are owed.  We have people retiring from service and then hoping to collect in the here and now.

q      In the process of protecting our own interests we become blind to our sinful behavior.  We excuse our attitudes because we feel justified with our outlooks.

q      The good that our life has represented can be easily undone when we do not finish with grace.

The Skin Horse

The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others.  He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces.  He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else.  For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.

   "What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

   "Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse.  "It's a thing that happens to you.  When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become real."

   "Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

   "Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

   "Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

   "It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse.  "You become. It takes a long time.  That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.  Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.  But these things don't matter at all, because once you are real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

   -- Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit 

      New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1958, pp. 16-17

See:  1 Thes 2:8-12; 1 Pet 1:6-7

Many will recognize the flagship of humanism in the words "I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul." They are from a poem entitled "Invictus" (meaning "unconquered"), by William Ernest Henley, an eighteenth century English poet.

   Here is the entire poem:

   Out of the night that covers me,

     Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

   I thank whatever gods may be

     For my unconquerable soul.

   In the fell clutch of circumstance

     I have not winced nor cried aloud.

   Under the bludgeonings of chance

     My head is bloody, but unbowed.

   Beyond this place of wrath and tears

     Looms but the Horror of the shade,

   And yet the menace of the years

     Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

   It matters not how strait the gate,

     How charted with punishments the scroll,

   I am the master of my fate;

     I am the captain of my soul.

   -- William Henley

   Stephen Brown adds, "It is no accident that the life of William Henley ended in suicide."

   -- Stephen Brown, If God Is In Charge...., p. 5859.

See:  Psa 14:1; Prov 16:5; Jude 14-16

Radio personality Paul Harvey tells the story of how an Eskimo kills a wolf. The account is grisly, yet it offers fresh insight into the consuming, self-destructive nature of sin.

   "First the Eskimo coats his knife blade with animal blood and allows it to freeze.  Then he adds another layer of blood, and another, until the blade is completely concealed by frozen blood."

   "Next, the hunter fixes his knife in the ground with the blade up. When a wolf follows his sensitive nose to the source of the scent and discovers the bait he licks it, tasting the fresh, frozen blood.  He begins to lick faster, more and more vigorously, lapping the blade until the keen edge is bare.  Feverishly now, harder and harder the wolf licks the blade in the Arctic night. So great becomes his craving for blood that the wolf doesn't notice the razor sharp sting of the naked blade on his tongue nor does he recognize the instant at which his insatiable thirst is being satisfied by his own warm blood. His carnivorous appetite just craves more -- until the dawn finds him dead in the snow!"

See:  2 Pet 2:10-19; 2 Pet 3:16