Hope in the Midst of Suffering and Evil – 12/31/23

Good morning, Church. Happy New Year’s Eve to you. Hope you all had a great Christmas. I also know that for several people Christmas is a really painful time, so I want to remember you guys as well. You were prayed for over Christmas, those who were suffering during this time.

One of the major themes of the Gospel of Matthew, and one that we’re going to see many times over the coming months, is the Kingdom of God, and even more specifically, Jesus as the King of that kingdom. By the time we get to the events of Matthew 1 and 2, which we’ve been looking at for the last few weeks, the birth of Christ, the nation of Israel had been waiting for their forever King to come and set up His forever kingdom, and they’ve been waiting for that for a long, long time. Nations had come and gone, earthly kingdoms. Now the nation of Israel was under the control of the Roman Empire. Their hopeful expectation was that a conquering king, a Messiah, would come and break the bondage of Rome and lead them to victory and prosperity.

As they were waiting, a couple of major questions dominated the minds of many. One of those questions was this: What were people to do in anticipation of that day? How are we to live? A second question that was closely related was, what would hasten the coming of the kingdom? What would bring it on quicker? There were four common answers to these questions, represented by four well-known groups in Israel at that time.

The first one was the Sadducees. We see them mentioned many times in the gospels. They were the religious liberals of the day, and their answer to those questions was accommodation. They believed that compromise with the Roman Empire was absolutely necessary. This is how they kept the little bit of power that they had. And who knows, maybe their power would continue to grow if they just kept the status quo. Let’s just not upset Rome.

The Pharisees were another group. These were the religious conservatives of the day. We see them many times in the gospel stories. Their answer was separation. They believed that radical, cultural, and religious separation would bring in the kingdom. So, they preached and pushed a strict adherence to the law, especially their man-made hedge laws. Once Israel was so distinct from everyone else, maybe then God would bring in the kingdom.

The Essenes went one step further than the Pharisees. We don’t read about the Essenes in the New Testament, but they would have been a well-known group at that time as well. They had no desire to interact with the system of the day, as the Pharisees did. They believed that the corruption in Israel was so deeply rooted that the only remedy to that was complete withdrawal. In their minds, they were the only true Israel. So, they formed these closed communities where only they lived, where they could engage in religious ceremonies and wait in those little closed communities for the King to come.

Then there was another group that would be well known to those who know the Gospels, and those were the Zealots. One of Jesus’ own disciples, Simon, was a Zealot. Their answer to those questions was insurrection. They believed in armed revolt against the Romans. They wanted to take up arms and fight. That’s what they wanted to do. And they were perfectly content to be martyrs for the cause.

The rest of Israel, and really the majority of Israel, just common everyday people who did not belong to any of those groups, they just went through life hoping that one day the kingdom would come. In their book, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story, Bartholomew and Goheen wrote,

“Four different approaches, and yet they are bound by a common loathing for the Gentiles, a deep-seated hatred or at least wariness for all those outside the covenant. And then comes Jesus, who refuses to walk in any of those paths. His way is startlingly different. It’s the way of love and suffering. Love of enemies instead of their destruction, unconditional forgiveness instead of retaliation, readiness to suffer instead of using force, blessing for peacemakers instead of hymns of hate and revenge.”

That’s just a small sampling of the kingdom that Jesus espoused. We’re going to see a lot more of that opened up to us in the future.

The people of Israel were not the only ones who struggled with Jesus’ teaching on the kingdom. How often I find myself struggling with the “already, not yet” tension of the Kingdom of God. My heart desire is, as I think most of us probably are, my heart desire is that evil against others is met with swift justice, and there will come a time when that will be true in the ultimate fulfillment of the kingdom, the “not yet” part. But living in the “right now” of the kingdom means that I am called to strive, to love my enemies, to forgive them, and even to go one step further than that, to seek their well-being. There will come a time in the ultimate fulfillment of the kingdom when we will never again be called upon to suffer but live in comfort forever. We’ll never experience evil done to us, but only peace and safety. But living in the “right now” of the kingdom means that there is suffering and evil that I must endure as I follow Christ in this very broken world. That’s why Peter wrote what he did to suffering Christians in 1 Peter 4:12.

“Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you as though something strange were happening to you.”

Suffering in the “already” of the kingdom is inevitable.

Maybe you’re here today and you’ve experienced such deep suffering that it has changed the whole trajectory of your life. Maybe you’re here and you’re going through that kind of suffering right now. There’s really nothing I can say, probably, to take all the pain away or to make perfect sense of what has happened. But here in our text this morning, we see two truths about the Lord that can fill our hearts with hope, even in the midst of suffering and evil.

The first is this: Jesus is well acquainted with suffering and evil. Think of the suffering even in our passage here when he’s just a little baby. Let’s not miss the drama in this passage. There are no more angels singing, no shepherds proclaiming, no wise men bowing and bringing gifts. Anything idyllic about Jesus’ birth was long gone. Almost from the very outset, Jesus and his family experienced what it was like to suffer. They were running for their lives. They had to travel by foot, probably, all the way down to Egypt and then all the way back up to Nazareth, all trying to escape. Jesus is not a Savior who bypassed the most difficult parts of human existence. He knew what it was like to hunger and thirst. He knew what it was like to have no place to lay his head at night. He knew exhaustion and pain and family rejection. He knew what it was like to be misunderstood, underappreciated, taken for granted, and hated. He knew what the death of loved ones felt like. He knew what it was like to face the full force of temptation to sin. In fact, he experienced a depth of suffering in his life and death that exceeds anything that we could possibly imagine.

It’s no wonder that the writer of Hebrews wrote these encouraging words in Hebrews 4:15-16.

“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are yet without sin. Let us then, with confidence, drawn near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find help in time of need.”

Jesus’ suffering went beyond the normal suffering that many experience in everyday life in a broken world.

He also fully understood what it was like to experience suffering done to him by evil people. Consider the villain in our story here in Matthew 2: Herod was known historically to be a paranoid sociopath. When the Wise Men came, our story from last week, when the wise men came and just described Jesus as the King of the Jews, this little baby just born not long before, Herod snapped once again. And as one author wrote,

“There could be only one ruler in Judea. This was Herod’s passionate commitment. Already, the bones of one wife, several sons, and multiple distant relatives cluttered the family tomb as a result of his conviction that each and every one of them was involved in a conspiracy to kill him.”

was paranoid.

Last week, Ryan led us through Herod’s attempt to locate Jesus through the wise men. Herod pretended he wanted to go and worship along with them. We know that he had every intention of killing this baby Jesus. When that failed, our text reveals he had no problem trying to remove the threat by having all of the male children, two years old and younger, killed in an entire area. He was evil personified, and he was after Jesus. From the very beginning of his earthly life, Jesus experienced evil being done to him. He knew what it was like to be ridiculed, bullied, and falsely accused. He experienced abuse, abandonment, and betrayal by those close to him. He was severely demeaned, beaten, tortured, and killed by evil people. He knew.

Isaiah 53:3 says,

“He was despised and rejected by men. A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief and is one from whom men hide their faces. He was despised and we esteemed him not.”

N.T. Wright wrote,

“The Gospel of Jesus the Messiah was born then in a land and at a time of trouble, tension, violence, and fear. Banish all thoughts of peaceful Christmas scenes. Before the Prince of Peace had learned to walk and talk, he was a homeless refugee with a price on his head. At the same time, in this passage and several others, Matthew insists that we see in Jesus, even when things are at their darkest, the fulfillment of Scripture. This is how Israel’s redeemer was to appear. This is how God would set about liberating his people and bringing justice to the whole world. No point in arriving in comfort when the world is in misery. No point having an easy life when the world suffers violence and injustice. If he is to be Emmanuel, God with us, he must be with us where the pain is.”

That’s what this chapter is about. Jesus is well acquainted with our pain.

But that’s not the only truth about the Godhead that we see in the story that brings hope. The second is this: God is working his plan in the midst of suffering and evil always. He’s always working his plan. We see this in two ways in our text, in this story.

Number one, he’s working proactively. He’s not waiting back and just reacting to everything. He’s working proactively. We see this as God sends three dreams to Joseph. No matter how much power Herod felt like he possessed, he could do nothing to thwart God’s plan. God sent a series of three dreams to Joseph. The first one was to take Jesus and Mary and go all the way down to Egypt to protect him from Herod. A second dream from the Lord, while Joseph and Mary and Jesus were in Egypt, was that Herod had died and now they could go back to the nation of Israel. But as they were going on their way back to Israel, a third dream came to Joseph to let him know that Archelaus was on the throne and he needed to go to Nazareth to keep Jesus safe. Every step of the way here, we see God interjecting and working proactively to fulfill his plans.

He also works purposefully. We see this in the three fulfilled prophecies in our text. On the surface, what Joseph is seeing is God sending him these dreams to keep Jesus safe, and that was a big part of why God was doing that, but there was so much more going on under the surface, and there’s no way that Joseph could have ever seen this, I don’t think. God was working to fulfill the prophecies with these dreams. As he’s working proactively, he’s working to fulfill these prophecies of the Old Testament prophets. This idea of fulfilled prophecies is a really, really important one in the Book of Matthew and in the Gospels, and we’ll get into all of that, I’m sure, in the coming months.

The first fulfilled prophecy in our text had to do with Jesus being taken down to Egypt and then brought out. It was found back in Hosea 11:1.

“Out of Egypt, I have called my son.”

But if we were to go back to Hebrews 11 and read it without this knowledge, I doubt that anybody back then would have read those words looking to the future. They would have read those words looking to something that happened in the far distant past, God bringing his people out of Egypt into the promised land back in the days of Moses. That’s what the context of that passage is about.

It’s the same for the second fulfilled prophecy in the text this morning in Matthew 2,

“A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation. Rachel is weeping for her children. She refuses to be comforted because they are no more.”

That’s from Jeremiah 31:15. Undoubtedly, again, if we go back and read that in its context, our minds would have gone to the Babylonian captivity and not some awful tragedy that was going to happen in the distant future.

The third fulfilled prophecy might be the most difficult actually to discern:

“And he went and lived in a city called Nazareth, so that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene.”

Except we never actually find those words by any Old Testament prophet. There have been a lot of really good solutions presented by many but perhaps the best is that Isaiah especially— remember, Isaiah is the prophet who consistently described the Messiah as the suffering servant. Isaiah especially portrays the coming Messiah as lowly and seemingly insignificant, and Nazareth was the most lowly and insignificant place to live. As one of the disciples would later ask,

“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

The point is that probably nobody would have considered these to be prophecies concerning Jesus or events that took place in his early life, but God did. He knew exactly why he had the prophets write what they wrote. He had a purpose for it all, and that purpose was multilayered, as it often is. He is completely committed to fulfilling his word in his plans, no matter how confusing those methods may be to us, and they most certainly can be. How many times have I read this story and tried to put myself in the drama of this story and thought, would it not have been easier just to take Herod out of the picture? He was going to die a couple of years later. Why not just take him out of the picture then? Why did Joseph and Mary and Jesus have to go through all of what they went through in order to be safe? But as this text shows us, God is doing so much more in a given situation than we can possibly imagine.

John Calvin wrote,

“We are here taught that God has more than one way of preserving his own people. Sometimes he makes astonishing displays of his power, while at other times he employs dark coverings or shadows from which feeble rays of it escape. This wonderful method of preserving the Son of God under the cross teaches us that they act improperly who prescribed to God a fixed plan of action. Let us permit him to advance our salvation by a diversity of methods and let us not refuse to be humbled that he may more abundantly display his glory. Above all, let us never avoid the cross by which the Son of God Himself was trained from his earliest infancy.”

God is always working, even in the midst of suffering and evil, even when we do not see it, and maybe especially when we do not understand that. So how should these truths impact us as we look at this passage?

First of all, it should bring a great deal of comfort. Jesus knows our hurts. He knows our pain and our suffering intimately and experientially. He lived a life of suffering. He understands what it means to groan in this broken world. He experienced evil done to him by evil people. The most comforting thing about all of this is that that is the one who goes to the Father and intercedes on our behalf, the one who knows our pain. We’re not speaking to a Savior who doesn’t know suffering. He knows it. He knows what it feels like to feel the full force of temptation. He knows what all of that is like and he prays for us with perfect words when we do not even know how we should be praying in our suffering, and he invites us to his throne of grace to find help in our time of need. I find that very, very comforting.

But it also fills me with courage. God still supernaturally reigns. He still, in this day, actively subverts evil, and he will ultimately destroy it. He is just as proactive and just as purposeful in every one of our times of suffering as he was in the days of Jesus. That has never ended. Whether we can see it or not. As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4:16-18,

“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light, momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”

I know that doesn’t take away all the pain of our suffering. It may not completely ease the grief and mourning, and it probably will not answer many of the tough questions that we have on the forefront of our minds when we experience suffering or evil done to us. But it is also true, as one author wrote,

“God works in mysterious ways to work out his good purpose, but there is one thing that he wants us to clearly understand: the struggle with evil and suffering in this fallen world is only temporary for God has already won the decisive battle in this war, and his ultimate and complete victory is absolutely certain. If the cross of Jesus Christ shows us that our God shares in our suffering, then the resurrection of Jesus Christ demonstrates that God’s triumph over evil is assured.”

Which leads us to our third point of application: Confidence. God will fulfill all of his promises. Every single one of his plans will be accomplished. God was faithful to make sure that every prophecy of the first coming of Jesus. There are some that are obvious, things that people would look back to in the Old Testament and say that clearly talks about the Messiah who is to come. And then, as we see in our text for this morning, there are some that are really obscure, that people were probably surprised that this was any kind of prophecy about the Messiah. But every single one of those prophecies, the obvious and the obscure, were fulfilled. And as we sit here this morning, the last day of 2023, every single prophecy that was meant to be fulfilled by this point in history has been fulfilled. And we can be filled with absolute confidence that he will be just as committed to his word in the future.

Let’s think for just a moment about what that means for all of us who follow Christ. Jesus, the Forever King, will return. Perfect and complete justice will be served. Satan, sin, evil, and death will be destroyed. Jesus will rule and reign forever, and believers will rule and reign right along with them. All tears and pain and suffering and loss and abuse will be ended. We will only experience wholeness and peace and safety and love and God’s presence and absolute contentment for the rest of eternity. And so, we close this morning by praying the prayer that closes out the Scriptures in Revelation 22. Even so, King Jesus, come soon. And in the meantime, “the grace of the Lord Jesus be with you all. Amen.”