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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Lewis Walton

Rediscovering Jesus: The Early Years

Our topic this morning is rediscovering Jesus, and we're going to do it in a way seldom attempted from a pulpit or a podium.

We're going to talk about His early years.

There's a chance you may have never heard that tried in public before because There's almost nothing that the Bible seems to say less about.

Once you get past the nativity and the flight to Egypt, you've only got 14 verses in Luke 2 and 3 in Matthew 2 that really mention Jesus' childhood.

We do know he grew up in Nazareth, we know his dad was a carpenter, we know he increased in wisdom and stature, and then it seems as if nothing else is said until he turns 12 and heads for the Passover service at Jerusalem.

But I suggest if we delve into the wonderland of Bible truth, let Scripture comment on Scripture, put it all against the historical stage of known objective facts that we're aware of, and then last and certainly not least, include in our research an indispensable, valuable tool called the spirit of prophecy, we can see the early years of Jesus come to life in full color and 3 dimensions.

I'm going to be reading excerpts for the sake of being a little efficient with our time here.

ÌBehold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, ìArise, take the young child and his mother, flee, flee to Egypt, for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him.îî And we move down to verse 14 in the King James Version and we read, He arose, took the young child and his mother by night, and departed for Egypt.

All right, now let's get the picture of what's happening here.

Moments into his life, the Son of God is already fighting for survival.

And if you do just a little bit of ordinary elaboration on what's happening here, You can see it's happening at night.

You can almost hear Joseph say, no Mary, don't light the lamp.

And a few possessions of a very poor family are tied to the saddle.

There are a couple, maybe 3, elegant containers, certainly 2 of them.

1 contains myrrh, 1 contains expensive frankincense.

There may be a leather pouch full of gold.

This is what will sustain that little family when they're refugees in a foreign land for a couple of years." So if I were Joseph, I own some horses, And if I were Joseph at this point, I would be tying rags, if I had any, to the little animal's hoof so the clip-clop going out of town doesn't wake anybody up.

And long before morning twilight, this little family gropes its way down the mountain road out of Bethlehem.

And soon, moments, just moments behind their still warm footprint, soldiers will come stampeding into town sent there by a monster named Herod whose whole career is rid with murder.

He has decimated the Sanhedrin, ruling council of the Jewish nation he has decimated.

He's ordered the strangulation of his beautiful wife, Miriamne.

He's executed his sons, Alexander, Aristobulus, and Antipater.

He's executed his uncle, Joseph, and his wife's uncle and father, Antigonus, and Alexander.

All of these people die at Herod's command.

He's executed his friends, Dosethius and Gades, and that is just a short list.

Such that from the throne in Rome, Augustus himself says of Herod, it would be safer to be his pig than his son.

And now this vile man turns his sword against the young of Bethlehem.

Let me see if the jury is still awake out there.

Now why would he kill everybody 2 years of age and younger?

Well, the best research we can accomplish is that at that era, it was generally done that youngsters would be nursed for the first 2 years of their life.

Anybody still at the breast could be my rival, kill them all.

So the infant Jesus is taken from a little town called Beth-lechem, which in Hebrew just means house of bread.

He's taken from the house of bread out into a place which in biblical Hebrew is called Mitzrayim.

Now the Greeks called it Aegyptos and from that we've Anglicized it to Egypt.

Taken from a place where people were exposed to truth to a pagan nation where they don't have much of what the Hebrews would consider to be scriptural or revealed truth.

The irony here is that Jesus was at this point in his life safer in his infancy in pagan Egypt than he was among people who had been exposed to a quantum of truth.

The question I pose is, is there a lesson there?

Well he's taken from the house of bread to a place which is a biblical symbol of sin for people in a hurry, and Joseph by this time was obviously in a hurry, you probably could get from Bethlehem to Egypt in 5, 6 days of hard walking with a new mother and a little baby aboard and just a little donkey to carry whatever you were able to transport.

The first place you would come to as you cross the Gaza Strip would be an Egyptian city, the furthest northeast city that we can tell from archeology was even there was called Matareya.

It was sometimes identified with the ancient biblical city of On.

And it is where, as near as we can tell, Joseph's wife Asenath came from.

He apparently married a girl from this town.

It was, It's 1 of the most ancient Egyptian cities.

It was the capital of the 15th gnome or province of Lower Egypt.

Egypt had 42 gnomes, 42 provinces from Upper Egypt way up the Nile all the way down to the Nile Delta.

And this place called Materia or Heliopolis was the 15th gnome of Lower Egypt.

The Egyptians had come to revere the sun, to worship it.

They even had a day a week on which it was worshipped.

That concept made its way east to Persia.

From Persia it made its way west into Christianity.

And I'm gonna say it again this morning, folks, Happy Sabbath.

So in this city where the young Jesus probably lived the first 2 years of his life, priests would leave that huge temple.

It was about the second largest temple in all of Egypt.

It was a great library that held a lot of Egyptian writings, and they would roam the streets extolling sun worship and the day on which it was memorialized.

Our Lord's earliest memories would be of the pungent smell of Nile River silt, and strange pillars erected everywhere because Heliopolis was a city where obelisks were very much in vogue.

The Egyptians had this thing at that time, they loved to erect these obelisks either for the glory of an Egyptian king or for some Egyptian deity and they just dotted the city.

The oldest 1 in existence that we still know of was erected to the glory of Sassastrus the First.

2 others, which we've come to call Cleopatra's Needles, were in that city.

They aren't anymore because guess what happened?

The British stole them when they were in colonial possession of Egypt.

1 of them is on the Thames Embankment in London.

The other 1 is in Central Park in New York City.

But this city where our Lord probably spent His first 2 years was just filled with a forest of these things.

So His earliest memories were of the smell of the Nile River and pagan pillars and that massive temple to the sun god, Ray, from which robed priests came out every day of the week, promoting sun worship.

Scripture doesn't say, but you can, with a little bit of thinking, which we'll come to later, infer that it probably was about 2 years.

The mathematics works out as we see who was ruling Judea at what time.

So probably about 2 years or slightly less, Jesus was down there in his earliest formative years in a pagan land.

Now after the Bethlehem massacre, it was as if divine patience finally just ran out on Herod the Great.

He came down with a dreadful, painful disease, very, very painful.

He was in such agony that 5 days before his death he attempted unsuccessfully to kill himself.

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Rediscovering Jesus: The Early Years

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