OUR FATHER WHO GAVE HIS ONLY BEGOTTEN SON Part 3

In Mathew chapter 2 verses 13 - 18,  we continue on in the story from where the magi from the east had returned home without informing king Herod of the identity of the child who they had come to worship.

Their evasive maneuver as they left Judah heading east had gained the little family some time but the threat against the young Jesus was still present and an angelic intervention was now needed to get the child away from king Herod's cross-hairs.

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.”

Joseph, who only a few months before had been plying his carpentry trade, (correction: Matthew mentions Joseph's vocation in chapter 13 verse 55  “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?" but the place where he originally practiced carpentry is not Nazareth because Mathew indicates that the family settled in Nazareth after they returned from Egypt and so I have scratched out the phrase in the tiny village of Nazareth, ) was now fully immersed in a high-stakes political and spiritual struggle. 

Already, he had saved the unborn child's life when he heeded an angelic dream that instructed him to abandoned his plan to divorce Mary because, had he cut her loose and left her in the wind, she was likely to have lost her life and the life of her child.

Here again, an angelic dream stirred Joseph in his sleep but this time with an urgent warning to get out of town and escape to Egypt to avoid the death squad that king Herod was going to send into Bethlehem.

16 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. 

17 Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

18 “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.”

In a shockingly brutal action, king Herod, being unable to identify the specific child who was potentially his replacement, decided to sweep the entire town of Bethlehem and surrounding areas to find all the boys under two years old and kill them so as to eliminate the threat against himself.

This massacre of young boys was so traumatic that it registered in the prophetic scrolls of Jeremiah where it was foretold that a cry would be heard rising out of Ramah and Rachel would weep for her children and be inconsolable because a generation of her children had been wiped out. Ramah is a small town adjacent to Bethlehem when Rachel, the wife of the patriarch Jacob, was buried centuries before.

It was because of the proximity to the deadly event that the prophet Jeremiah associated the event with Rachel.

Meanwhile, having spirited his family out of Bethlehem under the cover of darkness to avoid giving anyone an idea  of the direction they were heading, Joseph and his young family travelled to Egypt where they lived until Herod died and it was safe to return home.

This fulfilled the words of the prophet Hosea in chapter  11 verse 1 which says;

“When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.

This oblique reference to the events in the Messiah's early life was deliberately made extremely obscure and tucked away towards the end of Hosea's scroll.

Whereas the birthplace of the Messiah was easily known from the prophetic scriptures so that the priests and scolars quickly identified Bethlehem to Herod, the escape route had to be less accessible so that no scolar would have been able to pinpoint Egypt as the land to which the Messiah would escape to as a child.

One can imagine that armed with that information, Herod, while having his soldiers killing the boys in Bethlehem,  could have sent a detachment to put a checkpoint on the road to Egypt.

To conceal this exit route in the scriptures, the Messiah as a child is identified by prophet Hosea by the name Israel and only the return from Egypt is actually mentioned in the scriptures.

Amen.

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