and if the rest of us please could turn in our Bibles to Matthew chapter 2 and even if you've not followed the other readings I would encourage you to follow this reading because We will be referring to the reading during the course of my talk. So it's on page 960, if you wish to follow. 960 of the Church Bibles. Matthew chapter 2 and reading from verse 1. Now, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him. When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him. And assembling all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born. They told him, in Bethlehem of Judea, for so it is written by the prophets. And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah. For out of you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.' Then Herod summoned the wise men secretly and ascertained from them the time the star had appeared. And he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him, bring me word that I too may come and worship him.' After listening to the king, they went on their way, and behold, the star that they had seen when it rose went before them until it came to rest over the place where the child was. And when they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. And going into the house, they saw the child with Mary, his mother, and they fell down and worshipped him. Then they opened their treasures, Then opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed to their own country by another way." Well, keep your Bible open because we will now think about this passage. So let's pray now. Almighty God, we thank you for your precious and holy word. We thank you that your word is true and your word is life-giving. And we pray that as we consider your word now, you will speak to us and you will draw us to yourself. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Now this story that we read is a most remarkable story because it tells us that among the first people, and indeed almost the only people to worship Jesus, were people who were not Jews. And not only that, not only were they not Jews, but they also, up to that time, it would seem, had been practitioners of occult powers, completely opposed to the worship of the true God of the Bible. And yet we also see, by contrast, that the vast majority of those whom you would have expected to welcome Jesus, the Jews, did not believe in or welcome their own Messiah at all. And the king of the Jews wanted to kill him. So this story teaches us that God will frequently draw to himself and move to trust in Jesus people who have almost no knowledge of God whatsoever, and who are far from him, and who've been living lives of gross sin. And yet at the same time, there may be those who have got a lot of knowledge of Christianity, whose hearts remain cold and hard, and who go away from the Lord Jesus Christ. And it illustrates something that Jesus said during his earthly ministry. Some of you might know this saying, where Jesus said, the first shall be last, and the last shall be first. people you would have expected to be right close. In fact, they land up far away. But people who were far away land up very close. So here is something which I hope will be of great encouragement for any who Maybe here this morning, or maybe you might listen in to this sermon on a future occasion, who may be far away from God. Maybe they have very little knowledge of God. Maybe you hardly ever go to church. You think, well, Christianity isn't really for me. Well, here's great good news for you. God can draw you to himself. And he calls you to himself. And he's ready to welcome you. to wash away your sins and to bring you into relationship with himself. But there's also a warning here for some who might call themselves religious, might call themselves Christian in some way, shape or form, that there's a warning. You can have a hard heart that actually turns away from the true and living God. Well, what I want to do is to go through the story bit by bit and just think about different parts of the story and draw out lessons for us. And so the first thing I'd like us to think about is who were these visitors who turned up in Jerusalem saying, where is this king who's been born? Who were they? What were they? Well, our translation says, calls them wise men. But the word that's actually used in the original Greek is a word which is magos, from which we get our English word magician. And it usually means somebody who practices magic or occult powers, and fortune-telling, astrology, and the like. The only other place where that word occurs in the New Testament is in Acts chapter 13, where it occurs twice. referring to an occult practitioner who was called Bar-Jesus, and also Eli-Mas. And this man opposed Paul, the preacher. And he tried to interfere with the preaching of the gospel, and tried to stop the person who was listening to Paul from hearing what Paul was saying. And Paul eventually directly addressed this man with these words. He says to this man, you son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, full of all deceit and villainy, will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the Lord? It's not exactly a commendation of godliness or virtue, is it, the way that Paul addressed him? And then Paul said that as a judgment from God, he was going to be struck down with blindness for a while. Now, when we go back to the Old Testament, we are helped by the fact that the ancient Jews made a translation of their Bible, which was written of course in Hebrew, into Greek. And that is called the Septuagint translation. And in the Septuagint translation, there are eight occurrences of this word magos, which all occur in the book of Daniel, to refer to the occult advisors of the king. I'll give you one example. Daniel chapter 2 verse 2 we read, then the king commanded that the magicians, the enchanters, the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans be summoned to tell the king his dreams. So they came and stood before the king. And the king summoned these practitioners of occult powers to say to them, and he said to them that they had to tell him not only the dream, the interpretation of the dream that they had, but they had to tell him what the dream was in the first place. And of course they couldn't. Because they didn't have any real power at all. But the point is this, that they were, these were occult practitioners. And so I think we have no reason to think that these People who came and visited Jerusalem were anything other than the same, as the word is used in other parts of the Bible. Does this mean that God approves of such occult practices? Absolutely not! I can remember as a boy going to my church that I grew up in and somebody said to me with great excitement, oh, of course, horoscopes is in the Bible. And he was very pleased to have seen these major, oh, yeah, you see, it's quite all right to read your horoscope and all this astrology. No, not at all, absolutely not. Deuteronomy 18. We have these verses. When you come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable, that means hateful, disgusting practices of those nations. There shall be not found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, a sorcerer or a charmer, a medium, a necromancer, or who inquires for the dead. For whoever does these things is an abomination, something God hates, to the Lord. And because of these abominations, the Lord your God is driving them out before you. No, God does not approve of witchcraft or fortune-telling, going to medium, going to spiritists, reading horoscopes, not at all. And if any of you do these things, let me say to you that these things are absolutely forbidden in the Bible, very dangerous, very harmful, and you expose yourself to the power of evil spirits if you do these things. And yet, it would appear that God, in his great kindness, appeared to men who'd been engaged in these most vile of practices, and revealed to them that a king had been born to the Jews. And not just any old king, a king who is divine, who is God. Now, there's a lesson for us here. God draws all types of people to himself, even those who are far away from him. Maybe there are some here who you'd say, well, I very rarely will darken the door of a church. I can't remember when I last went to church. Maybe you've been practicing horoscopes and other things like that. You can, God can draw you to himself. And indeed, he's calling you. He's inviting you to come. He's summoning you to come to Jesus and to trust in him. Now, so there's the first, the major. Now, what's the next thing to think about is the star. What was this star that they saw? Now, some have suggested that there was, like an alignment of the planets that caused a bright star to shine in the sky. That doesn't seem to make sense to me because there would have been alignments of planets before, no doubt, and there would have been alignments of planets afterwards. But that didn't lead people to start going to Jerusalem, asking about a king that's been born. But the other reason why I don't think it was an alignment of planets, or some comet or something like that, is because it says in verse 10, that the star went before them. In fact, it seems from the context as well, it seems, it says that before that, it says, Behold the star that they had seen when it rose went before them. So it seems as though the star had sort of like got them as far as Jerusalem and then it went before them again as far as this house and then stopped over a house. It says, until it came to rest over the place where the child was, and it says then, verse 10, and when they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly. So it seems like the star came for a while, took them to Jerusalem, then it stopped, and then it reappeared, and then it went in front of them as far as the house, and then stopped. So that doesn't sound to me like it's a natural phenomenon. And I would like to suggest to you that in fact, it may well be that God sent an angel to be that star, to be that bright star shining in the sky to direct them to draw attention to the fact that this son had been born. And it may be that God in his great kindness stooped, as it were, to speak to them in the medium with which they had been accustomed to deal. Maybe they were indeed stargazers and God gave them this amazing apparition that they'd never seen anything like before. Now we can learn from this as well, can't we? God will sometimes use very extraordinary things to draw attention to himself. Sometimes it might be an amazing deliverance from an accident. You think, why am I still alive? I shouldn't be here. Or maybe it was a family crisis. An illness. People say sometimes, don't they, they say, it was a wake-up call for me. Maybe you've said that yourself sometimes. It was a wake-up call. It stirred me up. It shook my life up. It made me think. And God does that sometimes, doesn't he with us? He gives us these things, these events, which shake us up and make us think. about him where perhaps we wouldn't be giving him a second thought the rest of the time. So that's the second thing, the start. Now the third thing, this journey to Jerusalem. Now we don't know exactly where they came from. It says they saw his star in the east. One can't help thinking that probably it was somewhere like Babylon. few hundred miles, maybe a few thousand, maybe a thousand miles or so away, a long way away. And then they made this journey for hundreds of miles, maybe thousands of miles, probably on foot, if not on foot, On camels, they wouldn't have had, there's no motorized transport, of course, in those days, certainly no airplane, but not even, of course, a vehicle that you can drive in. It's just animals on foot. It would have been very expensive for them. It would have been very dangerous, lots of bandits around, and extremely time consuming. But they thought it's worth it. We've heard of this king. We must go and find this king. We must go and meet this king. And so they made this journey. Now why did they do this? Well it says there that when they came to Jerusalem they said, we've come to worship him. And it says in verse 9 that when they got there, no, sorry, verse 11, when they got there they fell down and they worshipped him. They had come to understand that this one who had been born was God become man. And they had this idea that through this God become man, they were going to find something more valuable than anything else in this world. And so it was worth it. It's going to cost X numbers of months, X hundreds of thousands of pounds of modern day money, maybe millions of pounds of modern day money. I don't care. It's worth it. because we've understood that there's somebody very, very valuable that we have the opportunity to meet and to know. How do they know that? We don't know. Maybe we know that they had an angel appear to them, tell them not to go back to So maybe at the same time the star appeared, maybe an angel actually spoke to them. We don't know, but they knew this one was really, really valuable. And so they said, right, don't care what it takes, we're gonna find him. Now isn't there a lesson for us there? Finding Jesus is actually hard work. It involves coming to meetings of the church. A few people will just have this amazing experience, but for most people, finding Jesus, it's a period of time. You come to meetings of the church, you read the Bible, you pray, you do some research on the internet, you listen to sermons, you read books, you talk to people, and it takes time, it takes effort. And the question for you and for me is, are you prepared to put in that effort to say, right, I'm going to make a priority of this because I've learned that there's somebody very important, Jesus, God become man, who can take away my sins, who can save me from going to hell. I'm going to find out about this, even if it takes time, even if it takes effort. That's what we need, we need that attitude whereby we will seek the Lord with all we've got. The Bible says, seek the Lord while he may be found. Or another place it says, God says, you shall seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. That's what these people did. Okay, let's go on, next thing. I want now to consider the reaction of Herod. So these magi turn up in Jerusalem, and they say, where is the king of the Jews? Where is he? This one has been born to be the king of the Jews. We saw his son at Star when it rose, and we've come to worship him. He's a king. who's also God, and we've gone to worship him. How does Herod react to that? How do the Jewish people react to that? Now, what you would have expected is that they'd have said, wow, fantastic! The Messiah! We've been waiting for all these years! Wonderful! Did they do that? No, no. It was the exact opposite. Oh no. Look what it says there. When Herod heard this, he was troubled and all Jerusalem with him. They were in a panic. Oh no. He's come. That really is very extraordinary, isn't it? Because these people knew their Bibles. They knew the prophecies. We read one of them this morning. And there's loads of them in the Old Testament. They're all along the same lines. Joy, peace, forgiveness of sins, knowledge of God, deliverance from enemies, a place in heaven. And they said, no. Well, of course, from a human point of view, you could say, well, Herod just lost his power. And he saw another king as a threat. But surely it's something much more than that. Because after all, the scribes and the Chief priests, they weren't in danger of losing their kingdom, but they weren't rushing down to Bethlehem to see Jesus either. They didn't want to go and worship him either. They could quite accurately quote the scriptures to say where the Christ was to be born, and interestingly, Herod himself said, He inquired where the Christ, the special Messiah, was to be born. So Herod clicked immediately. Ah, this is the Christ. This is the Messiah. And the chief priest, the scribes, the teachers, They'd all clicked. And they correctly went to the very scripture, immediately went to it, the very scripture in the Old Testament, which predicts the exact place where Jesus would be born, where the Son of God, the Messiah, would be born, Bethlehem. They, straight there. But did they say, great, wonderful? No. There's only a very few people who said wonderful. when they heard about Jesus. You've got the shepherds. We know about the shepherds in the field, don't we? We all know their story, how they went down and they worshipped Jesus. And then you've got the two elderly saints who were in the temple, Simeon and Anna, who'd been praying and praying and praying for the Messiah to come. And oh, he's here. Oh, the joy they had when they saw the Lord. Two people. Out of all the thousands and thousands and thousands of Jews, two people plus the shepherds, and then these pagan occultists turn up, and they see what these people can't see. It's incredible, isn't it? You think, what on earth is going on? Now, of course, it's very easy for us to say, oh, that man, Herod, he was a horrible man. Look at what he went on to do. Slaughter all those babies in Bethlehem out of anger because of this king who'd come because he was so full of envy and hatred. Oh, what a wicked man. He was a wicked man, terribly wicked man. But actually, Herod, is a picture of how you and I are in our natural state. Because in the natural state, none of us has any love for God. None of us has any desire for God. If you and I had the chance, without our hearts being, if you and I had the chance, we would have done the same. Because it's a picture of the hostility of man against God. And this is why Jesus got strung up on the cross later on. Because man hates God. And when man has got a chance to kill God, he takes it. That's the way we are. And we can't say, oh, those terrible Jews, how awful they are, which is, of course, the foundation of a lot of antisemitism in the Middle Ages, which is appalling. No, because the Jews did with the Romans what man wants to do to God, which is to kill him. And the irony is that the very people who so hated the Messiah when he was born were the people who most knew the Bible. They knew the prophecies. They knew the scriptures. And they said, no, we don't want him. We don't love him at all. So here's a warning for us. If you've been brought up in a Christian home, it doesn't exempt you from the danger of hatred of God. There'll be some people, many people who, sadly, who will be in hell. who won many prizes for learning verses of the Bible off by heart in Sunday school. But the hatred of God never went away from them. And so as a warning for us all, we must repent of that hatred of God which is built into all of us. Okay, so there's the the reaction of Herod. Now let's go back to the Magi now. So they leave Herod, they go off and the star rises again and it comes and leads them to Bethlehem and it stops over the house and then they go in and they see Jesus and they fall down before him and they worship him. And then they bring out these gifts. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Now, as I'm sure many of you will know, these have often been talked about, and quite rightly so, because these are very symbolic. Gold, what does that symbolize? Royalty. Jesus, the king, not the king in some human sphere, but the king in the kingdom of heaven. Incense, what does that speak of? Incense is what's used in worship. He's God become man to be worshipped. And myrrh, what about myrrh? What's the significance of myrrh? was frequently used at the time of burial. Speaks of death. Now we don't know whether the angel told them to take these three gifts, we don't know whether they just knew, we don't know. But it's very interesting you've got these three gifts, gold, incense, and myrrh. Speaking of him as king, as God, and as one who would suffer on the cross for sinners. And it's because Jesus then went on to suffer and die on that cross that any one of us can know God because he was punished for our sins including the sin of the hatred of God. And all those other sins, sexual immorality, we've mentioned occultism, Lying, cheating, being rude to parents, being unkind to people. All those sins, worshipping false gods, all those sins were placed upon Jesus for all those who trust in him, not for everybody. But for those who trust in him, their sins are completely paid for through that death on the cross. Well, finally, we need to think, well, what happened to the Major after this? Well, we know what happened in the very short term, that they didn't go back to Herod. They were warned in a dream not to go back to Herod. But they went home by a different way. Do you think that they carried on with their witchcraft and their horoscopes and All the other things they'd been up to before? I don't think so. They'd met the Lord Jesus Christ, they'd encountered him, their lives were transformed. Have you trusted in Christ? Well, leave your life of sin, live a new life by the power of the Holy Spirit. So, overall, what lessons can we learn from this? Well, the great lesson, of course, is that Jesus is God. That's the point from this story. He is God. And what should we do? If Jesus is God, what should we do? How should that affect us? Let me mention three things. First of all, believe him. There's a time in his life when Jesus went up a mountain and his clothing became brilliant white, he became dazzling white, and the voice said from him, of course it's the voice of God, this is my beloved son. Listen to him, believe in him. Secondly, trust him. Trust Him to save you from your sins. And thirdly, we should do what the Magi did. We should worship him and serve him and follow him all our lives. Well, may God have mercy upon us and speak to us through his word. We're going to sing now our final hymn, which is carol, which is number 359, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, 359.