On the Eleventh Week of Christmas the One, True God Gave To Us . . .
. . . a Foolish King Named Herod
This concept requires some explanation, I suppose. We don’t usually think about Herod in any kind of positive way when we tell the Christmas story. The role he played was simple. When the Wise Men arrived they went to his court to inquire about where the Messiah was to be born, Herod sent for the chief priests and scribes. They correctly informed the king and the Wise men that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem of Judea. It is interesting that they exhibited a marked lack of curiosity about the situation. They did not even ask why Herod and the Wise Men wanted to know about the Messiah. Of course, they would soon find out more than they wanted to know about the Child born in Bethlehem, but that is another story for another day.
Herod was not about to allow any competition to his own power exist. He had killed his wife, a couple of his own sons, and various other threats to his power, so killing this peasant Child would be as natural to him as sitting down to lunch. Matthew tells us that because Herod could not determine exactly which child was the be King of the Jews, he simply had all children two years old and younger killed. To protect the Child, Joseph and Mary took the young Messiah to Egypt for a couple of years and returned to Nazareth only after the death of Herod. Exactly why God worked things out this way we are not told, but there is certainly a great deal of correlation to God’s redemptive work in Moses’ day.
Given the situation, why should be be thankful God gave us King Herod. Simply because it is a great example of how God takes what appears to be tragedy and turns it to the victory of his redemptive work. God’s entire redemptive work is one example after another of God’s victories over defeats. Herod had no idea he was a part of God’s redemptive work, but he was. Just as God used King Artaxerxes to restore his people to Jerusalem after the exile, God used Herod to work out the details of his redemptive plan in Christ. What a tremendous example of the sovereign power of our Father. God brought all these events together to defeat sin and death. Only a God who has power over all the universe, the godly and the ungodly, has the ability and desire to do just that. Some thirty years later God would again use the ungodly–specifically Pontius Pilate, another King Herod, and the hypocritical Jewish leadership–to send the Christ child to the cross, thus providing the ultimate sacrifice for the sinfulness of mankind.
In this Christmas season, remember that God can and will use the ungodly to accomplish his redemptive work. Does he use the unruly shoppers and others who represent the seedier side of our Christmas celebrations? Maybe; who can know. The one thing I do know, however, is that God so loves his people that he will do what is necessary to redeem him people, including sending his own Son as a child who would eventually died on the Cross. For that reason the angel proclaimed, “‘Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.’ (Luke 2:10)”
