Flickering Hope
Text: Matthew 2:13–23 ESV
INTRODUCTION
This Advent season we have been looking at Matthew chapters one and two, and we have titled our series “Wrought in Wisdom and Wonder.”
We say wrought because we are not just talking about the effort put into work, nor are we just talking about the outcome and results of work, but rather we are wanting to remind ourselves of the amazing process, the many years, centuries and millennia that God wrought days and nights and seasons and lives to get us to the moment where God himself stepped down off his throne and took on human flesh forever, that we might know him.
We say wisdom because this is not the plan you or I would have put together. Even from the opening lines of Matthew 1:1, we are thrust into God’s plan, the plan he had from before time began, and we see a wisdom that is not like ours. God uses people we would never choose to pick for our team if it was up to us. God uses moments that we would have thought for sure were unredeemable and turns them for his glory. This is a deep wisdom that God is revealing to us that we might begin to glimpse his glory.
And we say wonder because we should be moved to affection for God and Jesus Christ through this all. Wonder at his wisdom, wonder at his plan wrought right before our eyes, wonder at his mercy and grace.
Every Advent we light the candles, and every tradition has different ways to think about the candles. Some have set meanings for each week and each candle year after year, some have variable meanings, some simply see the lighting of the candles as an increasing of the light as the light of the world is about to come to us.
I would suggest that so far at Table Rock we have had variable meanings for the candles. Each Advent we have picked phrases from the passage we are working through at Christmas time. Last year as we went through the gospel of Luke, we had five Sundays of Advent, and we picked the phrases Hope & Promise, Preparation & Waiting, Joy & Peace, Love, and Adoration. Each week as we lit the candles, we were meant to remember the previous weeks’ topics.
This year, as we pair the candle meanings under this heading of Wrought in Wisdom and Wonder, we have already looked at two main aspects of how God wrought in wisdom and wonder. The first week, as we looked at the genealogies listed in Matthew 1 and we saw how God wrought Christmas in wisdom and wonder in a plan that was long promised and firmly held. Or, said in one word, faithfulness. We saw through that list of names in Matthew 1:1–16 the names that demonstrated God’s faithfulness to keep his promises: his promises to Adam and Eve, his promises to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, and many others in Israel’s history. We saw how God held onto that promise firmly through sin, unexpected means and unexpected people. That is what we are supposed to remember each week when we look up here and see this first candle lit—the faithfulness of God in how he wrought this amazing moment.
Last week you may have noticed that we didn’t continue in order through Matthew. We skipped the actual birth story of Jesus, saving that for our Christmas service next week. We are circling around that story and seeing the other amazing aspects of God that Matthew shows us. Last week, Don looked at the story of the wise men and Herod and the pharisees, and we saw how God wrought Christmas in wisdom and wonder through sacrifice not selfishness. In one word, God showed us real Love. The wise men were a pointer, an echo of the sacrificial love that we see in our God and our savior Jesus Christ—who left heaven and forever became the God-man, that we might be saved. It is the pharisees knowing the prophecies, sitting comfortably in their homes about six miles away, and Herod worrying about his legacy and his status and rule over Judea, that demonstrate selfishness. That is what we are to remember when we see this second candle this Advent—the amazing selfless Love of God in Christ that we see in this Christmas story.
As we come to Matthew 2:13–23, which we are going to look at this morning, we will see how God wrought in wisdom and wonder even when hope flickers, and even through flickering hope.
You may have noticed the first week of Advent that the candle went out. That is always the worry of a church staff—you plan for a great image and then it fails. We pre-lit the candles like any good church staff knows to do, but we didn’t do it long enough to account for the air flow and movement in this building. I think we have many moments where we worry that God’s faithfulness, God’s love, will flicker and fade away like that candle did the first morning. That he won’t hold us through the winds and storms of life, and we worry, “can we truly trust him?” That is what we are talking about this morning—hope. The hope we have in this God who is faithful and who has loved us with a love so far beyond what we could ever imagine and hope for. Hope that may flicker in our eyes, but in reality, there is a hope God holds secure that is still for you and me today. A God who is operating even when hope seems to flicker, and he is even operating through the flickering hope.
This morning as we look at this section of Matthew—where Jesus and his family flee to Egypt and then return to Nazareth, and when Herod kills the children of Bethlehem—we are going to see first the two kinds of flickering hope that you and I are very familiar with: the flickering hope of missed personal desires and expectations, and the flickering hope from forces outside of us that cause death, destruction, and discouragement. Then, we are going to see how Matthew is ordering this section and using the language of promises and fulfillment to point us to a bigger hope behind all of this—the hope of our Messiah and his new covenant that will never flicker, fade, or fail.
Matthew 2:13–15; 19–23 — The Flickering Hope of Personal Desires
Let’s go first to Matthew 2:13–15:
“Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod.” (Matthew 2:13–15 ESV)
“When they had departed” is the wise men. They had found Jesus where they expected him and visited him and his parents and brought gifts to them. They likely turned around and left that same night or within the next several days. So here are Mary, Joseph, and young Jesus—somewhere between six months and two years old. Think about what that must have been like for them. They are sitting there with the Christ-child. The very Son of God, in the flesh. For Mary, her miraculous pregnancy had come to fruition and a boy had been born just as the angel had promised. Both Mary and Joseph could look back on the trek they had taken from Nazareth to Bethlehem and could see how that had allowed these wise men from the east to find them—them of all people—and bring them gifts and praise the young Christ. They could look back and remember that they had been visited by the shepherds the night of Jesus’s birth, who told Mary and Joseph about the angels proclaiming the glories of God all around them in the heavens.
By all accounts, if you were Mary and Joseph, from the small back-water town of Nazareth, you might be thinking, “Things are looking good.” Being the parents of the Christ child may not be a bad gig! It might be how the parents of Stevie Wonder felt as he—despite being blind—prolifically cranked out music throughout his childhood and then began recording professionally at age 12 and was so good he was eventually inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Or maybe how the parents of young Amadeus Mozart felt, who at 14 went to the Vatican with his father and heard them sing the Miserere, a choral piece based on Psalm 50 that was so popular the Vatican forbade anyone from ever copying the music. Unable to sleep that night, Mozart wrote the entire choral piece down, from memory, and it is now one of only a handful of copies we have of that great work.
How much more must the parents of the Christ-child, the Messiah, have thought this may actually end up very well for us. There is already recognition and notoriety, there has been financial reward for taking on this role. Maybe this won’t be so bad. An odd start to say the least, but a hopeful trajectory.
That is how hope often starts for all of us. We get hints of a better future. Sometimes it is when we imagine what things will be like when we finish our degree and can get that first, good paying job. Sometimes it is a new house with new roommates and the imagined amazing late-night conversations and games we will play together—how we will become best friends forever and ever. I am sure it doesn’t take much for you to stop and think about a moment that was full of so much hope and desire, and then it didn’t come to pass. Sadly, we remember those moments more readily than we do the moments where it actually panned out.
I can remember the first moment like this for me and Katie. We were literally newly married, just returned from our honeymoon. Our plan was that Katie would finish up her credits at BSU and graduate and then I would apply and go finish my master’s degree at divinity school. It didn’t take long for God’s plans to crash into that hope. Literally upon returning from our honeymoon we had multiple messages asking if I would help be a teacher at a local school here. That small turn in our hoped for plan began a 13-year detour before God would let us go to seminary. There were many times, if we were honest, that hope flickered. Something we thought we had really wanted just didn’t happen—definitely not the way we had envisioned it. And we found that would happen again and again to us. We lived in a 1000 sq ft house with all five of our kids and only one bathroom for the first eleven years of our marriage, and the first six years of their childhoods we really wanted something more and different. We had job disappointments, personal and family struggles. Hope seemed to flicker at many different times.
Here we have Mary and Joseph, right on the cusp of feeling like things are going well. They go to sleep that night, and an angel comes to Joseph in a dream. Head to Egypt, they are told, because Herod is seeking to kill Jesus. So immediately they pack up and leave—so far the angels have been right and have been helpful, and saving the life of the Messiah, the Christ-child, probably sounds like the right thing to do. The gifts from the wise men likely become the financial means for this poor family to get them from Israel to Egypt and help to provide for them as they are there.
Egypt wasn’t a scary place for them to go. It had a large Jewish community at this point, and as part of the Roman empire it was easy for them to travel there. In this way, Jesus and his family would be able to relate to those who are displaced, immigrants who need a place of refuge when times at home are difficult. But hope undoubtedly was flickering. This wasn’t the plan. Is this really how this should go?
In fact, we don’t see just how far hope likely flickered for Mary and Joseph at the beginning of Jesus’s life until their story is picked back up in Matthew 2:19:
“But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, “Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child’s life are dead.” And he rose and took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there, and being warned in a dream he withdrew to the district of Galilee. And he went and lived in a city called Nazareth,” (Matthew 2:19–23 ESV)
Finally—good news! They could come home. Joseph, Mary, and Jesus were likely in Egypt somewhere between a couple of months to at most two years. During that time, Herod had died. So, they head back to Israel and are excited to resettle and move forward in life. It might be easy to miss how hope flickered for them even more. Look what it says here:
“And he [Joseph] rose and took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there, and being warned in a dream he withdrew to the district of Galilee.” (Matthew 2:21–22 ESV)
Their original plan was to go back to Bethlehem, or another suburb of Jerusalem, somewhere in Judea proper. Joseph probably assumed that when Herod died that his son, Herod Antipas, was now in charge of all of Israel. Herod Antipas was much kinder than his father and much more friendly to Jews. But Herod had split his kingdom into three, and his son Archelaus, who was as brutal if not more brutal than his father, was ruling over the central region of Israel—this included Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and in fact, most of Israel.
We don’t know for sure where Joseph and Mary were hoping to settle, but Matthew’s narrative here is meant to help us see where they weren’t planning—Nazareth. One of the few towns they could go to and be safe and out of reach from Archelaus was back home. In fact, looking at a map of the time, it is odd how Nazareth and just a few other small towns were their only real options. They had left the small town they were from and seemed to have no plans on going back. Some of you who are from small towns may relate to that. At the very least, we can all relate to the moment we got out of our parents’ house and never had plans to go back there! For Mary and Joseph this might actually have felt worse than moving back into your parents’ basement.
Nazareth was a despised place—we see this in John 7:42. Even other people in the same region thought very little of the town of Nazareth (John 1:46). My Dad grew up in the town of Albany, Oregon. If you are from that part of Oregon, you have a thought about Albany if you have passed by—it has a paper mill and it really stinks. All, the, time. That was always my memory of visiting there—even our hotel rooms stunk. For me, growing up in Boise, as a young kid we lived close to the Eddy’s Bakery—and most mornings we woke to the smell of fresh baked bread throughout the entire neighborhood. However, whenever we traveled to Nampa all I remembered was the smell of the sugar-beet factory. I didn’t have a high thought of Nampa, like many people don’t have a high thought of Albany. The same was true of Nazareth, except even worse. The people of Jesus’s day couldn’t believe anything good could come from Galilee and Nazareth. When Christians began to form congregations and churches in Acts, they are called the “Nazarene Sect” (Acts 24:5) and that is not meant to be a kind comment—it is meant to be a slur and a derision.
So here are Joseph and Mary, their amazing trajectory full of hope seems to flicker and almost fade as they find themselves back in the town of Nazareth for the remainder of Joseph’s life, and until Jesus begins his public ministry about thirty years later. If they believed—as was true—that they were chosen by God for something special, you wouldn’t imagine this is how it would all happen. Wouldn’t God want his son to be raised in comfort, ease, and security? Why would he do all of this—send them to Bethlehem, send angels, shepherds, wisemen with gifts, send them to Egypt just to bring them back to their small, backwater, despised and derided town?
Identification
The flickering hope of missed personal desires and expectations. You and I see the hand of God in our life in a moment, and we have great hope, but it doesn’t quite go the way we would want or expect. COVID has been almost one long year of flickering hope. Couples engaged only to have their wedding plans thrown into disarray and changed because of venue closings. College seniors and freshmen not getting that special year they hoped for. Plans delayed, trips cancelled. Kids schooled at home—every day—for people who never planned to homeschool. Family not even seen for months. I think everyone here can identify with how Mary and Joseph might have felt.
Matthew wants us to identify with these feelings and even more.
Matthew 2:16 — The Flickering Hope of Forces Outside
Look at Matthew 2:16, the section we skipped over:
“Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men.”(Matthew 2:16 ESV)
This tragedy isn’t recorded in history anywhere outside of Scripture that we know of, but it likely wouldn’t have been. Compared to how brutal this period of time was in general, and how brutal Herod was in particular, the killing of a few children in a small town would not have stood out. Bethlehem was small and this was probably a dozen or two dozen kids at most that would have been targeted for being two or under and male at this stage. But that isn’t nothing. Imagine your entire third grade class if you can (or fourth or fifth). And now imagine a class full of just girls—the rest of the boys your age gone. If you grew up in Bethlehem, there would have been an odd gap of boys in the town. For the shepherds, they knew that Jesus had been born there and likely put 2-and-2 together and realized he was the one Herod was after. That can’t have made the slaughter any easier. This likely happened within a day or two of the wise men and Jesus and his family leaving, so perhaps Mary and Joseph heard about it on their journey, as the wise men may have as well.
Identification
Hope can also flicker when we see the forces outside of us at work in this world. With tragedies both big and small, we can feel like we have little control over what is happening and can feel hopeless to make changes. Whether it is political, the movement of global changes and challenges, or even the neighbors acting inappropriately and bullying others. We hear stories of the downtrodden, the abused, the hurt, and we can find our hope flickering.
We can identify with this aspect of the story again—how the shepherds and people of Bethlehem felt, how Mary and Joseph likely felt when they heard about the death of these precious children, all peers of Jesus and people they likely met in such a small town while they lived there those previous months to a year or two. How hope would flicker and be challenged in the face of the slaughter of innocent lives.
A Search for Hope
When hope flickers, our natural instinct is to always look for the reason, the purpose behind the struggle or difficulty that we might again hope in the future. I think Matthew knows that instinct well and is organizing this section that we will come to the answer he wants us to see.
At first, we might look at the story of Jesus’s flight to Egypt and then his return, and note that in both instances it is an angel, an agent of God, who gives direction and instruction. This obviously means that God is not surprised at what is going on. It could lead us to believe that this section is mostly about God protecting and providing for Jesus. That is obviously true—God protects Jesus until it is time for him to die. In Luke 4:30 we see him walk right through a crowd that is intent on killing him because it was not yet time for him to die. This is an important point, but subpoint in Matthew’s account.
We might similarly remember that God is a God who uses suffering to grow us. We have passages like Romans 5:2–5 that say:
“Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” (Romans 5:2–5 ESV)
We might conclude that God is building hope for Mary and Joseph, and the people of Bethlehem, through suffering here. As Paul says, suffering produces endurance, which produces character, which produces hope. That is also undoubtedly happening here. This is even true for those in Bethlehem who have lost their children—God can use even that kind of loss to build hope, not cause it to fail.
However, it is the language of promises and fulfillment that Matthew uses when he quotes the Old Testament as well as the way he organizes these accounts that is meant to point us to much deeper and more enduring hope—one rooted in God’s great plan we are seeing unfold in the Christmas story.
Promise and Fulfillment: The Hope of the Messiah
All the gospels use the language of promise and fulfillment: God has made statements and prophecies in Scripture, and we are finally seeing them come to fruition in Jesus Christ’s birth and life. Matthew is particularly concerned about this promise and fulfillment process. In fact, he makes at least 23 statements about how Jesus “fulfills” Old Testament Scripture. We have already seen a couple of these:
“Behold the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel.” (Matthew 1:23 ESV, quoting Isaiah 7:4)
“And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.” (Matthew 2:6 ESV, quoting Micah 5:2)
These are both obvious, direct fulfillments of a prophecy. Jesus was indeed born of a virgin, and he was birthed in Bethlehem. There is nothing very complicated about these, and they point to how God can be trusted to directly fulfill what he has promised us. Yet, when we turn to the way Matthew uses the Old Testament in these three small stories stitched together here, it is very different.
Starting in Matthew 2:15 we see this:
“This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, “Out of Egypt I called my son.” (Matthew 2:15 ESV, quoting Hosea 11:1)
At first glance we might quickly say this is a direct fulfillment of prophecy like the other examples we have so far. But it isn’t. If we go back to Hosea 11:1, Hosea is not talking about the Messiah. He is remembering how God called Israel/Ephraim and all the people of Israel out of Egypt. Throughout this chapter we see a reminder of how Israel/Ephraim is disobedient and wayward, but because God is not a man (11:9) he will have compassion, and he will roar like a lion and his children will return to him again from all over the world—including Egypt and Assyria (11:10–11). This quote was never a promise that God would send the Messiah to Egypt and bring him back, but rather recalling the story of Israel and their exodus from Egypt to Israel, out of exile, and back when God calls them.
We see what may seem like another odd use of promise and fulfillment when we look at the second half of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus’s journey out of Egypt. Matthew 2:23 says:
“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.” (Matthew 2:23 ESV)
What is striking here is that Matthew doesn’t reference any specific verse, but rather the prophets in general. Unlike Bethlehem, Nazareth isn’t named anywhere in the Old Testament. Matthew is likely alluding to prophecies from places like Psalms 22:6–8, 13; 69:8, 20-21; Isaiah 11:1; 49:7; 53:2–3, 8; Daniel 9:26 that say the Messiah would be despised. Matthew picks up that same type of language (Jesus being despised) again later in his gospel in Matthew 8:20; 11:16–9; and 15:7–8. As we already mentioned, being from Nazareth would have meant exactly that, he was despised. Matthew may also be picking up on the prophecies like Isaiah 11:1 where David’s son is said to come from obscurity—he is the small branch coming out of the stump of a once great nation.
So, what is Matthew trying to get us to see? How is all this pointing us to greater hope in God through Jesus? We have one passage from Hosea 11:1 that is most easily about Israel and their past, not their future. Jesus being despised or obscure can be found in other passages, but Matthew doesn’t give us just one, but rather points us to multiple “prophets” and seems to be asking us to look at the broader context of the Messiah in the Old Testament. Why connect Mary and Joseph’s journeys to these passages that aren’t direct fulfillment?
The gospel writers—Luke, John, Mark, and Matthew—all use a writing device called intercalation at times. That is such an awful word that even scholars don’t use it, they just use the shorthand “sandwiches.” That may sound odd, but Mark does this so much that “Markan Sandwiches” is a phrase you will read often in biblical commentaries. It is where a writer pairs three sections of stories together in a pattern. Usually, it is one story (the bread) split by a second story in the middle (the meat, or peanut butter and honey if you will). Mark does this all the time—much of the middle of his gospel is sandwich after sandwich, which once you see it, helps you understand so many of the odd parables listed there.
Here, Matthew has done the same thing by splitting up the story of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus going to Egypt and returning by making a statement about Herod in the middle and connecting it with the promise-fulfillment motif in Scripture. When authors do this, the idea is that the stories help explain one another. Sometimes the story that is split can help explain the story in the middle. Sometimes the story in the middle can help explain the purpose behind the story that is split. Sometimes it is only when taken together that you can understand what God’s main goal is. Sometimes it is a mix, but seeing that there is a pattern like that can help you realize there is a goal nonetheless.
When we come to the middle story about the death of the children in Bethlehem, we see one of the oddest quotations of Scripture for promise and fulfillment of these three pieces. Matthew 2:17–18 says:
“Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.”” (Matthew 2:17–18 ESV, quoting Jeremiah 31:15)
This time Matthew is quoting Jeremiah 31:15. This quotation originally refers to the time Israel was deported. It is hard to know if Jeremiah is talking about the deportation of the northern tribes to Assyria in 722–721 BC, or if he is talking about the final deportation of Judah and Benjamin in 587–586 BC. It is likely the latter, Judah and Benjamin. Either way, Rachel (who is long dead at this point) is being used as the image of the ideal mother of Israel, who is weeping as her children are taken away and she no longer sees them because they are in exile. This is odd because the children are not talked about being killed, they are exiled. And this prophecy was immediately fulfilled in the people of Israel being taken into captivity.
It is not a problem that Matthew isn’t using direct fulfillment (like Jesus born in Bethlehem or to a virgin) when he uses the language of promise and fulfillment. There is another purpose often found in promise and fulfillment: typology. Scripture is often setting a trajectory where the greater story is pointing to, and often preparing us for, something bigger. And the largest of those themes is the image of the Messiah. We saw that in many of the stories in the genealogies of Jesus, and we see it here again in the prophecies that Matthew is using. In Hosea 11:1, Israel is failing God, but Jesus, as the Messiah, will do what Israel was never able to do. He will be the true Israel. And the story is looking forward to the moment in Hosea 11:10–11 when God himself comes and does what Israel can’t and gathers all his people to himself as the good roaring lion.
In every prophecy about the Messiah being despised, rejected, and obscure, it points to the fact that Jesus—the boy from Nazareth—truly was the Messiah, the very Son of God and Son of David, the forever reigning king.
Here in Jeremiah, we have the clearest help. Jeremiah 31 is moving toward the end of the chapter, where even if God’s children are in exile, there is a New Covenant and promise coming. The tears of the mothers in Bethlehem are meant to bring us back to the tears of Israel in their exile. Israel and all people, at the moment of Christ’s birth, are still in exile and need hope. Here in Jeremiah, we see the hope of God that will change all that. Here is what it says at the end of Jeremiah 31:31–34:
““Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”” (Jeremiah 31:31–34 ESV)
The way Matthew uses these quotes is meant to point out to us that Jesus is truly the Messiah, and that is where our true hope lies. He is the greater Israel, who was brought out of Egypt, in whom we all find our identity, not as an ethnic race or people, but as sons and daughters through faith. He is the Messiah, raised in obscurity and despised, that we might be raised as beloved ones and saved through his love and sacrifice. And he is the Messiah, who brings with him a New Covenant in his blood, that we might be different. This is very good news. Since our hope is always fickle, always quickly lost, look at what God says about his promise of a New Covenant with his people, the believers of Israel and you and me in Jesus Christ in Jeremiah 31:35–37:
“Thus says the LORD, who gives the sun for light by day and the fixed order of the moon and the stars for light by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar— the LORD of hosts is his name: “If this fixed order departs from before me, declares the LORD, then shall the offspring of Israel cease from being a nation before me forever.” Thus says the LORD: “If the heavens above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth below can be explored, then I will cast off all the offspring of Israel for all that they have done, declares the LORD.”” (Jeremiah 31:35–37 ESV)
Only if someone can stop the sun and moon and stars, slow the oceans, and explore every square inch of this earth above and below, will God’s plans ever possibly be thwarted. In short—it is impossible. God will accomplish what he has set out to accomplish in Jesus Christ! Both for the salvation of his people, and for their daily hope in a future with him forevermore.
This is such good news to you and me. The hope of our Messiah never flickers, fades, or fails. Undoubtedly, Jesus was protected by God until the right moment of his death. You and I, we have much to grow in through our suffering to know that our hope is found in God alone. And this passage is pushing us further into that truth. We may never know, when hope flickers in our personal disappointments, what God’s plans were—we likely won’t have an angel come and reveal that story for us in a dream. Similarly, when our hope flickers in light of the dangers and difficulties that lie outside in this world, we know there is hope beyond seeing the immediate purposes. If COVID is gone tomorrow and we learn nothing from it, behind it all lies a deep truth. You and I, as God’s sons and daughters, have an enduring hope—as sure as the sun rose this morning—in Jesus Christ our Messiah. As sure as God brought about that plan through millennia, he will work in our short life that we might know and love him and treasure him, even through each flicker of hope.
Our hope is built in nothing less than Jesus Christ and his righteousness—our Lord, our Savior, our Messiah. It is this hope that the entire New Testament speaks to again and again.
Conclusion and Benediction
It is this hope we stand on as we look backward and as we look forward to that future day with God. It was the same hope that Jesus was prepared for when he left the throne of God to come and save me and you. Come to God this morning and realize he is your true hope when hope is flickering—the promise of Jesus is the foundation of our hope.
“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.” (Romans 15:3 ESV)