Bridge Church Vancouver

You probably feel somewhat out of place.

In the birth of Jesus, the great God was doing something extraordinary.  He was sending His great Son – the Messiah – the great God was sending his magnificent Son to the world and humanity seemed out of sorts to know what to do.

When you look at the Christmas story you should be able to see that this was no ordinary encounter.  The supernatural is involved, with heavenly angles coming and going, and choirs of them singing in the middle of the night.

Nature is involved with a star that guides wise men to the newborn messiah.

All kinds of humanity is involved from kings to shepards, unknown simple girl to old prophets, Jews and gentiles, and lots of other characters who seem to play important roles yet they themselves seem unaffected, like scribes & court counselors, innkeepers, census workers and crowds of population.

But in it all a great God is greatly involved to demonstrate just how great He is.

In this amazing account provided by Matthew God breaks into humainity , When we encounter God’s Greatness we Realize:

1 – Jesus is the Messiah for all nations
2 – God wields the whole universe to make His Son known and worshiped
3 – Jesus is troubling to people who do not want to worship him
4 – To worship Jesus is to joyfully give him authority and dignity with sacrificial gifts

1. Jesus is the Messiah for all nations in all times 

      Verse 2 tells us what this story is really about:

      “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews?”  a newborn child destined to be the king of the Jews.

But verse 4 makes clear what the magi really mean by "King of the Jews." It says,

“When he (Herod) had called together all the people’s chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Christ (Messiah) was to be born.”

Herod had been called "king of the Jews" by the Senate in Rome for almost 40 years. But no one called him Messiah.

Messiah means the long-awaited, God-anointed Ruler, who would overcome all other rule, and bring in the end of history, and establish the kingdom of God and never die or lose his reign.

We don't know how the wise men got their information that there was such a king coming.

But it is clear that Herod got the message: these fellows are not searching for a mere, ordinary, human successor to me. They are searching for the final King, to end all kings. And, of course, unlike Anna and Simeon in Luke 2, that is the last thing Herod was looking for. He didn't even know the simple Scriptures about where the Messiah was to be born.

So he asks the scribes, and the one text that they focus on is Micah 5:2,6 

Matt. 2:6     “ ‘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.’’”

Now that doesn't sound very extraordinary either. The reason is that the only purpose for which the scribes quoted the text was to answer Herod's question: Where? And the answer is Bethlehem.

But what if Herod had asked them, "Who?" They might have read on in

Micah 5: "(2)
whose origins are from of old,
            from ancient times.’” 
Micah 5:3     Therefore Israel will be abandoned
            until the time when she who is in labor gives birth
      and the rest of his brothers return
            to join the Israelites. 
Mic. 5:4     He will stand and shepherd his flock
            in the strength of the LORD,
            in the majesty of the name of the LORD his God.
 And they will live securely, for then his greatness
            will reach to the ends of the earth.
5   And he will be their peace.

So this king is no ordinary child. "His goings forth are from long ago, from the days of eternity." 

Or, as John's Gospel says,

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1). 

And this king would not be limited in his realm to Israel. 

      “for then his greatness will reach to the ends of the earth”

Jesus is to be Worshiped not just by Jews, but by all the Nations of the World, as Represented by the Wise Men from the East.

Notice that Matthew does not tell us about the shepherds coming to visit Jesus in the stable. His focus is on foreigners coming from the east to worship Jesus.

Matt. 2:1    After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem

So Matthew's Gospel portrays Jesus at the beginning and ending of his Gospel as a universal Messiah for the nations, not just for Jews.

Here the first worshipers are court magicians or astrologers or wise men not from Israel but from the East - perhaps from Babylon. They were gentiles. Unclean. And at the end of Matthew the last words of Jesus are, "All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations."

This not only opened the door for us gentiles to rejoice in the Messiah, it added proof that he was the Messiah. Because one of the repeated prophecies was that the nations and kings would, in fact, come to him as the ruler of the world. 

      Is. 60:3     Nations will come to your light,
                  and kings to the brightness of your dawn.     

2 – God wields the whole universe to make His Son known and worshiped

This is God’s great goal in all things - that His Son be Known and Worshiped.

Nature declares God’s Greatness.  Over and over the Bible baffles our curiosity about just how different things happened. 

How did this "star" get the magi from the east to Jerusalem? It does not say that it led them or went before them. It only says they saw a star in the east (verse 2), and came to Jerusalem. 

And how did that star go before them in the little five-mile walk from Jerusalem to Bethlehem as verse 9 says it did? 

And how did a star stand "over the place where the Child was"? 

The answer is: We do not know. There are numerous efforts to explain it in terms of conjunctions of planets or comets or supernovas or miraculous lights. We just don't know. 

And I want to encourage you not to become preoccupied with developing theories that are only tentative in the end and have very little spiritual significance.

At the risk of a generalization to warn you: people who are preoccupied with such things as how the star worked and how the Red Sea split and how the manna fell and how Jonah survived the fish and how the moon turns to blood are generally people who have what I call a mentality for the marginal. 

You do not see in them a deep desire of the great central things of the gospel - the holiness of God, the ugliness of sin, the helplessness of man, the death of Christ, justification by faith alone, the transforming work of the Spirit, the glory of Christ's return and the final judgment. They always seem to be taking you down a sidetrack with a new article or new tape or book. There is little centered joy in their life.

But what is important concerning the star is that it is doing something that it cannot do on its own: it is guiding magi to the Son of God to worship him. 

There is only ONE that can be behind that intentionality in the stars - God himself.

Social Structures submit to God’s desire

The point is: God is guiding foreigners to Christ to worship him. And he is doing it by exerting global - probably even universal - influence and power to get it done. Luke shows this too -  God influencing the entire Roman Empire so that the census comes at the exact time to get a virgin to Bethlehem to fulfil prophecy with her delivery. Matthew shows God influencing the stars in the sky to get foreign magi to Bethlehem so that they can worship him.

This is God's Great design – He is seeking people to worship His Son. He was doing it then. He is still doing it now.

His aim is that the nations - all the nations (Matthew 24:14) - worship his Son. This is God's will for everybody in your office at work, and in your neighborhood and in your home. 

3 – Jesus is troubling to people who do not want to worship him and brings out opposition to those who do

In this story there are two kinds of people who do not want to worship Jesus, the Messiah.

1. the Pre-Occupied - these are the people who simply do nothing about Jesus. He is a nonentity in their lives. There are other – more important concerns to them.

This group is represented by the chief priests and scribes.

Verse 4: "Gathering together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, [Herod] inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born." Well, they told him, and that was that: back to business as usual. The sheer silence and inactivity of the leaders is overwhelming in view of the magnitude of what was happening. 

And notice, verse 3 says, "When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him." In other words, the rumor was going around that someone thought the Messiah was born. The inactivity on the part of chief priests is staggering - why not go with the Magi? They are not interested. They do not want to worship the true God.

2.  the Threatened - The second kind of people who do not want to worship Jesus is the kind who is deeply threatened by him. That is Herod in this story. He is really afraid. So much so that he schemes and lies and then commits mass murder just to get rid of Jesus.

So today these two kinds of opposition will come against Christ and his worshipers. Indifference and hostility. Are you in one of those groups? 

When God Breaks Into your life – He has a way of shaking things up and if we encounter Him and His Son in their greatness – we are never the same.  

Let this Christmas be the time when you reconsider the Messiah and ponder what it is to worship him.

4 – To worship Jesus is to joyfully give him authority and dignity with sacrificial gifts

There are four pieces to that definition of worship, and all four are grounded in this text.

Authority - The magi defering authority to Christ by calling him "King of the Jews" in verse 2: "Where is He who has been born King of the Jews?"

Dignity - Second, the magi assigning dignity to him by falling down before him in verse 11: "After coming into the house they saw the Child with Mary His mother; and they fell to the ground and worshiped Him." Falling to the ground is what you do to say to someone else: you are high and I am low. You have great dignity and I am lowly by comparison.

Joy - verse 10 "And when they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy."  (NASB)
Now this is a quadruple way of saying they rejoiced. It would have been much to say they rejoiced. More to say they rejoiced with joy. More to say they rejoiced with great joy. And even more to say they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. 

And what was all this joy about? - they were on their way to the Messiah. They were almost there. I cannot avoid the impression then that true worship is not just ascribing authority and dignity to Christ; it is doing this joyfully. It is doing it because you have come to see something about Christ that is so desirable that being near him to ascribe authority and dignity to him personally is overwhelmingly compelling.

Sacrificial Gifts - And the fourth part of the definition of worship here is that we do our ascribing with sacrificial gifts. Worshiping Jesus means joyfully giving authority and dignity to Christ with sacrificial gifts.

When we worship  we should understand that

God is not served by human hands as though he needed anything (Acts 17:25).

So the gifts of the magi are not given by way of assistance or need-meeting. It would dishonor a monarch if foreign visitors came with royal care-packages. Nor are these gifts meant to be bribes. Deuteronomy 10:17 says that God takes no bribe. Well, what then do they mean? How are they worship?

Piper describes the gifts as “intensifiers of desire for Christ himself in much the same way that fasting is.”

When you give a gift to Christ like this, it's a way of saying, "The joy that I pursue (verse 10!) is not the hope of getting rich with things from you. I have not come to you for your things, but for yourself. 

And this desire I now intensify and demonstrate by giving up things, in the hope of enjoying you more, not things. By giving to you what you do not need, and what I might enjoy you more, I am saying more earnestly and more authentically, 'You are my treasure, not these things.'" I think that's what it means to worship God with gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh.

And so may God take the truth of this text and waken in us a desire for Christ himself.

Can you say from your heart, "Lord Jesus you are the Messiah, the King of Israel. All nations will come and bow down before you. God wields the world to see that you are worshiped. Therefore, I joyfully give  authority and dignity to you, and bring my gifts to say that you alone can satisfy my heart, not these."