Monday Morning Mail, 30th December 2013

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Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community

Good Morning!

It seems amazing that this is the last Monday Morning Mail of 2013! Doesn't time fly when you're having fun!

Yesterday morning, Philip and Andrew both took us through Matthew 2:13-23 – the notorious picture of Herod and the Slaughter of the Innocents.

In some ways, the central figure in the passage is King Herod – the last political King of the Jews who would do anything to hold onto power. He was only half-Jewish but supported by the Romans and tried to get more Jewish support by rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem. He had married one of the last survivors of the Hasmonean dynasty of kings, who were Jewish but not descended from David, and he set about killing all the other survivors, including his uncle and mother-in-law and eventually even his own (favourite) wife and three of his sons when he saw them as threats. So it is hardly surprising that in the passage he takes to ordering the deaths of children who are potential rivals to his throne.

Jesus is a total contrast to that. Herod has the political power, but not the prophecy or the ancestry to claim it. Jesus has no political power at all – he is a baby and spends much of the passage as an asylum seeker – but he is God's prophesied and predicted king, descendent of David and rightful king of Israel. While Herod will do anything to hold onto his power, Jesus is intent on giving his up – on becoming nothing for the sake of the people whom he loves. But he remains the true king over everything; he is our rightful king and we should follow him.

Like Herod, we all want to be king of our lives. We don't like giving up authority to other people. Of course, not all of us go to the kind of lengths Herod went to, but when we are confronted by the King whose birth we remember at Christmas, we have two responses. Either we try to get rid of him by ignoring him or denying his claim over our lives or we follow him and serve God out of love for him.

That's the response that Joseph takes in the passage. I hadn't noticed before yesterday that when Joseph has his dream where God tells him to leave, he doesn't wait until morning or stay to discuss it. When God tells him to go, he goes – getting up in the middle of the night to move to a different country to protect this boy he knows isn't his – because God tells him to. Joseph is a man who follows and obeys God, who goes out of his way to serve his King. And that is how we know Joseph loves him.

May we have a blessed New Year as we seek to know, love and serve our great King Jesus!


God bless,

John

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