Looking back through the years, one can see that there are certain seasons in life when one spiritually grew significantly as a person. There is a commonality to all such seasons. They are always times when one realizes the huge delta between knowing what one believes and actually acting according to said belief. Times when we restructure our habits and/or lifestyle and/or finances to match what we say we stand for.
Unfortunately, those times are rare, not normative. It is the human condition to say one thing and do another, to believe one thing and act different to said belief. It has been so since Adam fell, and it remains so even today. Unrealized hypocrisy is common to every fallen human being. It is not a surprise then to know that it was also common to the learned men of God’s Word in Herod’s day. For though they knew exactly where Messiah was to be born, they were not looking for him, or for signs of his coming.
“When he [Herod] had called together all the people’s chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Christ was to be born. “In Bethlehem in Judea,” they replied, “for this is what the prophet has written: “ ‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for out of you will come a ruler who will be the shepherd of my people Israel.’”
The chief priests and teachers of the law evidently had something that the Magi did not – they had access to the book of Micah. Micah had prophesied that Bethlehem – and not the Bethlehem in the north (Zebulun) but the Bethlehem of Judah, the city of David’s line – would be the birthplace of Messiah. Just how common was that knowledge at the time in Israel is unknown, but it had been seven hundred years since Micah was written, so one expects that most every worshipping Jew had heard it, even if such news had not reached the far east where the Magi originated.
The fact is that the spiritual authorities knew this and yet evidently had neither understood the prophesy of the star as a sign of His appearing (Numbers 24:17), nor looked up during the night sky (things that the Magi must have done, even though they were Gentiles). That tells us that they were not looking for Messiah at all – let alone searching for His coming in Bethlehem! Truly, it is a sad state of affairs when spiritual leaders are not putting their faith into practice, and when those who do not have access to the whole of Scripture sacrifice more time and energy into searching out God and His Kingdom than the people of God do!
It is all a stunning indictment of their spiritual negligence, and it makes Jesus’ later condemnation of Israels’ spiritual leadership all the more striking. For here at His birth is God’s indictment, but His judgment is put off for at thirty years until Jesus starts ministering in the flesh. That meant that Israel’s spiritual leadership had three full decades to realize how they missed the greatest event in all of human history. They had literally all of their careers to repent.
They did not.
It is no wonder Jesus would be so harsh with them.
The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind, to reward a man according to his conduct, according to what his deeds deserve.
Jeremiah 17:9-10
APPLICATION: Intentionality
Have you been putting off something the Lord been speaking to you about?
Do so no longer.