Get up & Flee!

Matthew 2:13-18

 

After the scholars were gone, God's angel showed up again in Joseph's dream and commanded, "Get up. Take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt. Stay until further notice. Herod is on the hunt for this child, and wants to kill him."14 Joseph obeyed. He got up, took the child and his mother under cover of darkness. They were out of town and well on their way by daylight. 15 They lived in Egypt until Herod's death. This Egyptian exile fulfilled what Hosea had preached: "I called my son out of Egypt." 16 Herod, when he realized that the scholars had tricked him, flew into a rage. He commanded the murder of every little boy two years old and under who lived in Bethlehem and its surrounding hills. (He determined that age from information he'd gotten from the scholars.) 17 That's when Jeremiah's sermon was fulfilled: 18 A sound was heard in Ramah, weeping and much lament. Rachel weeping for her children, Rachel refusing all solace, Her children gone, dead and buried.

 

Food for thought!

 

Flee to Egypt. Stay until further notice. Herod is on the hunt for this child, and wants to kill him.

 

This statement is a real shock. The Son of God Almighty is on the run, because some human king wants to kill him. We would expect the new born to have the best protection and security around, especially from evil kings like Herod. But he didn’t. Right from his childhood, Jesus is not exempt from problems of and in this life. Jesus has started already to teach us about life and living.

 

Being human is not easy for everybody, including Jesus. Sometimes we wonder and ask such questions as, "Why is this happening to me? If God is a God of love, why all this pain? Why do the innocent suffer? If He is a God of order, why all the chaos? If he is so powerful, why does he seem so incapable?

You pray, but God doesn’t seem to be listening. You trust Him, but He appears to be letting you down. You believe His Word, but His promises are coming up seemingly empty in your life. You seek, but do not find . . . you knock, but no one is answering. If God is doing anything at all in your life . . . you can’t see it.

Jesus told us in John 16: 33, "I have told you all this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world." Again, Jesus told us “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but a human being has no place to lay his head.” (Luke 9:58). In other words, earth is not heaven, and heaven is not earth; life on earth is just plain hard.

 

God's care is not to be seen as rescue from the difficulties of life. One is not to try to escape the limitations of this life, but to embrace reality and live it with faith in God. Christ did not come to deliver us from the difficulties of life but to strengthen us in the midst of our struggles.

 

Jesus is teaching us also that wherever we can, and if we can, we have to run, like he did, not towards but away from our Herods who seek to destroy us. Sometimes we do well to hide, to keep quite, to bold peace until further notice.

"Joseph got up, took the child and his mother under cover of darkness. They were out of town and well on their way by daylight. They lived in Egypt until Herod's death."