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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Jonathan Zirkle

Christmas and the Wise Men

Dear Lord, I ask that you would be with us here today, Lord.

Lord, I ask especially that you would be with me to preach your word and not my own, Lord.

Lord, we thank you so much for the gift you gave us on this Christmas day.

Lord, I just pray that we would glorify you.

I'd like to say thank you for singing that hymn, Way Through Kings.

You know, when I was a kid, I'd hear that hymn, and I'd think, it always evoked a lot of imagination in me.

Because first off, I thought, well, these kings of Orient, what does that mean?

And it took me a long time to understand what that really meant.

A little piece of trivia, Orient just means east.

And Occident, the antonym for that means west.

That's why we have Occidental College here in Los Angeles.

But anyway, today I'd like to talk and start by focusing upon the 3 kings.

And so if I could get you to open your Bibles to Matthew 2 in verse 1.

We'll start with, read verses 1 through 12 in verse 16.

Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise man from the east to Jerusalem, saying, where is he that is born King of the Jews?

For we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.

When Herod the king had heard these things, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him.

And when he had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he demanded of them where Christ should be born.

And they said unto him, In Bethlehem of Judea, for thus it is written by the prophet, And thou, Bethlehem, in the land of Judea, are not the least among the princess of Judah.

For out of thee shall come a governor that shall rule my people Israel.

Then Herod, when he had privileged called the wise men, inquired of them diligently what time the star appeared.

And he sent them to Bethlehem and said, go and search diligently for the young child.

And when ye have found him, bring me word again that I may come and worship him also.

When they had heard the king, they departed.

And lo, the star which they saw in the east went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was.

When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.

And when they were coming to the house, they saw the young child with Mary, his mother, and fell down and worshipped him.

And when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh.

And being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way.

And to kind of finish off the story, let's look at verse 16.

Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceedingly wroth and sent forth and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem and all the coast thereof, from 2 years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men." It's an amazing story.

You know, we don't really know that much about where they came from.

The concept of a wise man was a common 1 throughout the biblical times.

The thought that comes to mind first, probably to most of us, is the story of Daniel.

Because Daniel was there in Babylon, and in Daniel 2, we see that Daniel was 1 of the wise men.

And when it's talking about the wise men, it's talking about magicians, astrologers, Chaldeans, and Daniel and his fellow men.

But we see other wise men in the Bible as well.

In Persia, in the story of Esther, the king there also had wise men.

We see that both in earlier parts of Genesis and at the Exodus story.

Reading in Exodus and Deuteronomy, we also see that the Israelites had wise men as well.

And reading the Desire of Ages, we see that Balaam is also counted as a wise man.

So just because they're called wise men, we can't immediately just go to Daniel and see that nice little analogy there and think that these wise men are from Persia.

There's really probably 2 theories as to where they're from.

The most common theory is the Persian 1, and that's the 1 that I probably most likely believe.

But there's also a second opinion on that, and that's that they came from Arabia.

Both of these places would have had the gifts that the wise men brought.

The reason why the people look for Arabia is that there was a tradition among the Jews that in Arabia, the Midianites and some of their brothers were prophets.

And these would have been descended from Keturah, Abraham's second wife.

But Anyway, so we don't know where they're from, but we know that they came to Jerusalem.

Well, if you look at this story very carefully, they must have come sometime afterwards, because it said Herod diligently inquired of them of when the star was seen.

And then Herod kills the babies 2 years and younger, when he finds out he'd been maybe tricked by the wise men.

And so we know that they came sometime afterwards.

So why did they come to Jerusalem and not to Bethlehem?

If these are wise men, why go to the wrong place?

Well, I believe that they came because they were looking for a king and they believed that Israel would recognize that their king was coming.

If they were coming from Persia, this was 1 of the major powers outside of Rome.

Rome was constantly having to send armies in to quell Persia and to pacify it.

And so they would have come to Jerusalem as a state visit, and they would have gone to the king because this is a state visit, and that's exactly what they did.

He may have been considered Herod the great, but he did a lot of wicked things.

His first wife and his first son he put to death 5 days before his own death.

And so that there was this saying about Herod that it's better to be Herod's hog than his son.

The reason why they said that is because being Jewish, you wouldn't have killed the hog.

He killed a number of his sons and just a number of family members.

It's interesting, the wise men come and they meet with the chief priests.

Think back to the whole story of the nativity, among the chief priests was Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist.

And when we think back to that story, Zacharias, you know, he goes into the temple and He gets a vision that he's going to be the father of John the Baptist, and he's struck dumb.

And after he comes out of that temple, he's struck dumb for a while, and then John is born.

And when John is born, he makes a prophecy.

If I could get you to turn to Luke chapter 1.

I'm going to do this just a little bit out of order, because I think it makes better sense for our purposes here.

Luke 1 verse 76, and this is Zacharias here prophesying about his son John.

And he's saying, And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the highest, for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways.

So Zacharias now is giving a prophecy of his son John, and that he's going to go forward before the Messiah.

And look here in what it says in verse 65.

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