Messiah on the Run - Part B

So here it has been fulfilled already, the weeping, the wailing, the mourning, when Israel was taken into captivity. But the second dual part of the fulfillment, the far reaching part, takes us to the birth of Jesus Christ at Bethlehem. The birth of Jesus was cause for great joy for the world.

But as Pastor Skip shares today on Connect with Skip Heitzig, it also brought a time of great weeping and mourning as a prophecy was fulfilled. But first, we want to tell you about a resource that will strengthen your faith with answers to tough questions about Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. Josh McDowell has written books that rank among the bestselling Christian works of all time. Now, with his son, Sean, Josh has released Evidence for Jesus. God gave us our mind and our heart to work in unity.

To what? To glorify him. The Bible, I call it fact, fiction, or fallacy. I want to answer two questions about the Bible.

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Give online securely at connectwithskip.com slash offer or call 800-922-1888. Okay, let's turn to Matthew 2 as we join Skip for today's teaching. Herod killed so many people on so many occasions, including some of his own wives and children, that you'd just be writing that headline every single day.

So some of that is included by ancient historians and some of it, including this one, is not. But there was unimaginable horror in that area as men would travel through the environs of Bethlehem and thrust their swords through the bodies of these little babies or cut off their heads. You can just imagine the weeping, the wailing, the scrambling of mothers to hide their little children, all fulfilling, according to Matthew, a prophecy. Jeremiah wrote about this in Jeremiah chapter 31 verse 15. Now the last thing Herod wanted to do was fulfill prophecy. The only thing he'd want to stop it from happening, you remember Herod said to the scribes and the Jewish leaders, where is the Messiah going to be born?

They said in Bethlehem. And they quote Micah 5, 2. So he doesn't want to fulfill prophecy, he wants to keep prophecy from being fulfilled. And in the process he fulfills even more prophecy. Jeremiah 31, from where this text is taken, is a messianic section of Scripture. You Bible students know that there is a portion of about four chapters around that area, Jeremiah 31, that are highly messianic. It speaks about a new covenant that is coming, a kingdom that is coming, and one who is going to bring that new covenant and bring that kingdom. At the same time, the prophet looks forward from his vantage point, looks forward to a time when the nation of Israel or Judea, the south, will be taken captive by the Babylonians. They'll be brought back, they'll be restored, but they're going to go off to captivity.

And when they do, the mothers are going to be weeping and wailing because their husbands are dead or being captive, their children have been killed. And so there will be weeping. A voice heard in Rama, lamentation, verse 18, weeping, great mourning.

Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted because they are no more. And what does this refer to exactly? Well, there is a village north of Jerusalem called Rama. I know it because I have a friend who lives in Rama. And Rama just means a higher place or an elevated place.

It's usually on a hill, and there are more than one, by the way. So Rama was a place where twice in the history of the Jews, the Jews were taken, it was a staging area to deport them or cart them off to a foreign country. It happened once when the northern kingdom went into captivity, 722 B.C. It happened a second time when Judea, the southern kingdom, taken into captivity, 586 B.C. So twice there was weeping and wailing and mourning because of death and destruction and deportation.

So Rama represents the weeping when the nation was taken captive for their sins. Why Rachel? What does Rachel have to do with it? By the time Jeremiah wrote that Rachel is weeping for her children, Rachel was long dead.

Well, Rachel, it's a metaphor. It's a person who lived in the Old Testament, but she was seen as the mother of Israel. Remember, Rachel was one of the wives of Jacob. And you may remember the day she turned to her husband, her sister was already having a lot of kids and she had no kids, and she turned to her husband Jacob and said, Give me children or I'll die. Not knowing that the children that she would have, the progeny eventually would be killed so that Israel would be weeping because of those children.

Well, she had a couple of children. One was named Joseph. Joseph had two children, Ephraim and Manasseh. And if you are a Bible student, you know that the name Ephraim is sometimes used representing the entire northern kingdom, the northern ten tribes, all summed up by one single name, one tribal name, Ephraim, the northern kingdom. She had another son named Benjamin, and Benjamin becomes a tribe associated with the southern kingdom of Judah.

There are two tribes down south, Judah and Benjamin. So twice would Rachel be weeping for her children, once when the northern kingdom went captive and once when the southern kingdom went captive. Now what we have here in this prophecy is yet another kind of prophecy. First is a direct verbal prophecy. That's the Micah, Be Born in Bethlehem prophecy. The second we discovered is a typical typological, typical predictive prophecy, where one becomes a type of another.

This is a third kind. It is a dual fulfillment prophecy, or a near-far fulfillment, where it's partially fulfilled in the near term, but it will be eventually fulfilled also in a greater manner further on down the road. Now if you know prophecy, you know that this is one of the most common kinds of prophecy in the Bible. Where a prophet makes a prediction, it happens, but it's going to happen again in a bigger stage and a bigger way in the future. There's a lot of that in the Old Testament. One of the biggest examples is called the Abomination of Desolation. Daniel the prophet predicted an abomination of desolation, or a defilement of the Jewish sanctuary, which happened by Antiochus Epiphanes.

Don't need to rehash that history. Just know it was a done deal by the time the New Testament rolls around. And yet, even though it was done and fulfilled, Jesus said, when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet, run. So he spoke of something that was already fulfilled in the past as something that will be fulfilled in the future in a greater manner.

That's dual fulfillment prophecy. So here it has been fulfilled already, the weeping, the wailing, the mourning, when Israel was taken into captivity. But the second dual part of the fulfillment, the far-reaching part, takes us to the birth of Jesus Christ at Bethlehem, at Ramah.

Now I said that there are many places called Ramah. If you go to Bethlehem today, and you may want to just, if you ever take a taxi cab there or ask a tour guide or anybody in the local area, ask, say, where is Rachel's tomb? And they'll point to a place next to Bethlehem called Ramah.

It's not like the one up north where there was a staging going on for captivity. This is down in Bethlehem. It's an elevated place, a Ramah, facing Bethlehem. And that is where Rachel was buried. So even today you have a Rachel in Bethlehem overlooking the town of Bethlehem, so to speak, weeping over her children.

How amazing is that? Once again we have this undercurrent of rejection. Babies being killed because King Herod wants to kill the baby Jesus or the little child Jesus. As I was preparing this study, I kept thinking of that text in Revelation chapter 12. You know, John in the book of Revelation frames the cosmic battle between heaven and hell. And he says, dragon stood before the woman who was ready to give birth to devour her child as soon as it was born. He was the Messiah on the run from the get-go. Satan wanted to destroy the child because it was prophesied this child will be born, grow up and rule the world and ruin Satan's kingdom. So he's a fugitive Messiah.

He's a hunted Messiah, but he's also a despised Messiah. Verse 19. But when Herod was dead, boy, it's great to read those words, isn't it? Sort of like, ding-dong, the witch is dead. Behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt.

This boy gets a lot of dreams. Saying, arise, take the young child and his mother and go to the land of Israel. For those who sought the young child's life are dead. Then he arose, took the young child and his mother and came into the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea, instead of his father Herod, who's one of Herod's sons who took the throne, he was afraid to go there. And being warned by God, in a dream he turned aside into the region of Galilee. And he came and he dwelled in a city called Nazareth, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, he shall be called a Nazarene.

So Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, they're in Egypt. After a while, Herod dies. And it was pretty famous the way he died.

Josephus the historian writes this. He died of ulcerated entrails, putrefied and maggot-filled organs, constant convulsions, foul breath that neither physicians nor warm baths could heal. I don't know, it seems like a fitting death. Because do you know that the last week before he died, while he was on his deathbed, he died in Jericho. He knew he had a few days left to live, and so he also knew that when he died, there'd be a party. Everybody's going to sing Ding Dog the Witch is Dead.

Everybody hated him. Everybody's going to be so happy because he's dead. So he gave an order that all of the noble citizens, the notable citizenry of Judea, be arrested and kept in prison so that when he died, they would be executed. And here was his thinking, I want to make sure there are tears shed when I die.

And if they won't be for me, at least there will be tears. That's how vicious he was. Now Joseph probably wanted to go back to Bethlehem. He had been there, and I think even though he was from Nazareth, I don't think he wanted to go back to Nazareth.

Do you? Mary got pregnant. She was from Nazareth. Joseph was from Nazareth. Tongues were wagging about an illegitimate child. He wanted a fresh start in Bethlehem.

He was probably going to go back there. But the angel said, no, you will go back to Nazareth. And the reason, it says, that it might be fulfilled, which was spoken of by the prophets, he shall be called the Nazarene. Now you know what's wrong with that? You can't find that verse anywhere in the Old Testament. It says the prophets spoke it, he'll be called the Nazarene, but I challenge you, find it in the Old Testament, anywhere.

You won't be able to. It's not there. So what are we to do with this?

How are we to understand this? Well, some see this as a play on words. Because the word Nazareth, the consonants of the word in Hebrew is always right with consonants only. That's how they spell. No vowels, just consonants. The consonants of Nazareth are the same consonants as in Netzer. Netzer sounds like Nazareth.

Netzer means a branch. And Isaiah 11 one says, a branch will come out of the stem or the root of Jesse. And that has always been seen as a messianic prophecy. That Jesse, who is the father of David, David became the king, that out of his lineage would arise this branch, this Netzer. And so they say that is the fulfillment of this prophecy.

Some think that's a little bit sketchy in interpretation. Another possibility is that what he is referring to was a commonly known but unrecorded prophecy. That the prophet, and notice he didn't say prophet singular, but prophets plural. Like there were a lot of prophets that said this. A lot of prophets recorded this because it's put in the plural, not singular. So it could be that it was commonly known but not written down.

Now that is a possibility because it does happen. Sometimes you find a scripture that isn't written in the Old Testament. Example, in the book of Jude, not Hey Jude, the Beatles song, the book of Jude in the Bible next to Revelation, that little book, Jude quotes Enoch in the Old Testament. The problem is you can't find that in the book of Genesis where Enoch said that, but it was common knowledge that he said it, so Jude refers to it.

Here's another example. Paul quotes Jesus in Acts 20. He said, as our own Lord Jesus said, it is more blessed to give than it is to receive.

Remember that? He said, that's what Jesus said. Problem is you can't find that in any of the gospels. He said it, they just didn't write it down. And even John at the end of his book said, Jesus said and did a lot of things which are not written in this book. So it's possible that it was common knowledge, but it was an unrecorded prophecy.

But then there's a third way to look at it, and I lean in this direction. It is a prediction of rejection. Did you know that Nazareth had long been a term of scorn and derision and mockery? You know, every place, every state has its town or towns, and I'm not going to mention any here in this state. But I know as I say that certain towns are coming to your mind, and I'll just let that come to your mind. And it's the towns like, yeah, it's just that little old crazy backwards town. Nothing really great comes out of that town.

That's Podunk Central. Nazareth was Podunk Central. When Philip came to Nathanael and said, we have found the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, Nathanael said, can anything good come out of Nazareth? And what's interesting about that is Jesus said of Nathanael, here's a man in whom there is no guile. So he wasn't given to mockery or put down.

He was a good guy. So for the good guy to say, can anything good come out of Nazareth must mean everybody's saying, can anything good come out of Nazareth? When Jesus hung on the cross, that's the ultimate rejection. Pilate put a sign over Jesus. This is Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews, and he was killed. Many prophets, many prophets predicted Jesus would be scorned, despised, and rejected.

Here's a sampling. Isaiah 53, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected by men. Psalm 22, I am a worm and no man, a reproach of men, and despised by the people. All those who see me ridicule me.

They shoot out the lip and they shake the head. Even Moses in Deuteronomy 18 said, the Lord will raise up a prophet like me from your midst. Do you remember that Moses was rejected the first time he approached the children of Israel to be their deliverer?

It wasn't until the second time that he was accepted. Psalm 69 describes the Messiah with the words reproach, shame, dishonor. Zechariah the prophet says, they will look upon me whom they have pierced. Why did they pierce him? Why did they kill him? Why did they crucify him?

Because they rejected him. So when it says it was spoken of by the prophets, he will be called a Nazarene, that's a way of saying he will be rejected. And all the prophets said that. By the way, quotation marks are not in the original. They're put in the English translation that way. He will be called a Nazarene.

Here's the point. Take your pick of any and all kinds of prophecy. They all point to Jesus Christ. And what the prophecies also show you is that this child was rejected by the world immediately. He was on the run, he was hunted, he came from a nowhere, podunk town that nobody cared about, and so he lived a life of rejection. But he was rejected so you could be accepted. He was forsaken so that you would never have to be forsaken.

You want to know something? Nazareth is never mentioned in the Old Testament. Nobody would have known of it, nobody would care about it unless Jesus grew up there.

Never mentioned once. It's never mentioned in the Apocrypha, it's never mentioned by Flavius Josephus, it's never mentioned in the Jewish Talmud. I'm sure that all the kids that grew up in Nazareth were bored stiff. I'm sure they thought, get me out of this town, I want to go to Jerusalem and have some action.

It's boring here. And yet, the risen Christ spoke of Nazareth from heaven. Did you know that? Paul the Apostle says when he was converted, he saw a light and heard a voice and he said, who are you, Lord? And the voice said, I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting.

You see, what was scorned by men on earth was taken to heaven and glorified by Jesus Christ. I want to close with this thought. There is a principle I call the Nazareth principle. The Nazareth principle is where God, by design, takes out of sorts people from out of the way places and does something awesome with them. This is where we sit up straight and go, oh, really? That could be me.

And that's what I thought. My life verse, 1 Corinthians chapter 1, for God has chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the wise, the weak things of this world to confound the things that are mighty. I'm going to share that with you in the New Living Translation.

I'm going to put it up on the screen so you can follow along with it as I read it. Remember, dear brothers, Paul writes, and sisters, that few of you were wise in the world's eyes or powerful or wealthy when God called you. Instead, God deliberately chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And he chose those who are powerless to shame those who are powerful. God chose things despised by the world, things counted as nothing at all, and used them to bring to nothing what the world considers important so that no one can ever boast in the presence of God. It doesn't matter where you're from.

It does not matter where you live. It matters who you are once Jesus gets a hold of you. That's the Nazareth principle. And Nathaniel said, can anything good come out of Nazareth?

Just salvation, just eternal life, just the best thing ever can come out of Nazareth. And I would just say God keeps doing that today by using you and me. You know, if you put a surgeon in a modern operating suite and the surgeon could pull off an operation, well, you probably wouldn't think much about it. You know, your insurance pays for that kind of stuff, and you expect nothing but the best. That's what doctors do. But take that same doctor, take him to some far-out-of-the-way place like Africa or jungles of South America where there's no operating room, no electricity, no modern tools, and give that doctor a Swiss Army knife.

If that doctor can perform an operation under those conditions, you would say, that's quite a doctor. And you see, that is the point here. The point is the skill of the worker is more noticeable when confined to inferior tools. And so God has chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the wise. That's the Nazareth principle. That concludes today's message from the series Against All Odds. Find the full message, as well as books, booklets, and full teaching series at connectwithskipp.com. Now, here's Skip to share how you can connect you and many others with the truth of God's Word with a gift to keep these messages going out around the world through Connect with Skip Heitzig.

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