Could the echoes of a tragedy from biblical times still resonate with our ethical dilemmas today? We grapple with this question by revisiting one of the darkest narratives in Scripture—the massacre of the innocents in Bethlehem. The episode delves into the historical, emotional, and moral complexities of these events as recounted in Matthew Chapter 2.
Could the echoes of a tragedy from biblical times still resonate with our ethical dilemmas today? We grapple with this question by revisiting one of the darkest narratives in Scripture—the massacre of the innocents in Bethlehem. The episode delves into the historical, emotional, and moral complexities of these events as recounted in Matthew Chapter 2.
Hi, this is Christa Pochats. We are hoping that you're having a wonderful holiday season. Today, we're going to play one of our previous episodes the Baby Boys of Bethlehem. We hope you enjoyed this episode and we will be back next week with an all-new episode. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. We'll see you back next week On today's episode.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'm going to go back to the two-year-old thing. Just imagine the different emotional feel. So Herod ordered some of the children to be killed. Herod ordered two-year-old boys and younger to be killed. Both hurt. The second hurts a little bit more.
Speaker 1:It does.
Speaker 2:Yeah, as you begin to define it and close it in and do it.
Speaker 3:Welcome to the Life Challenges podcast from Christian Life Resources. People today face many opportunities and struggles when it comes to issues of life and death, marriage and family, health and science. We're here to bring a fresh biblical perspective to these issues and more. Join us now for Life Challenges.
Speaker 1:Hello and welcome back. I am Christa Pochats, and I'm joined by pastors Bob Fleischman and Jeff Samuelson. Today we have a heavy topic. If you are listening to this podcast, on December 28th, it is Holy Innocence Day, and we'll talk a little bit more about what that means. Essentially, though, it is the remembrance day for when Herod had the baby boys of Bethlehem killed, and so this is the day that we remember the baby boys of Bethlehem. We're going to go through the account today and then make some connections to life issues as well. As much as I wish it was the Life Easy Breezy podcast, it's the Life Challenges podcast, and there are very difficult moments of life and difficult moments of Scripture too, and I think we do a disservice if we don't ever talk about them or look at them too. With that being said, we're going to start with you, jeff. You could read the account for us in Scripture of this event.
Speaker 4:Okay, this is all found in Matthew, chapter two. The actual account of the murder of the baby boys is just a few verses, but it's hard to understand without the context. So I'm actually going to read most of chapter two, and this includes basically the epiphany story of the coming of the Magi, and I'm going to be reading from the evangelical heritage version After Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, when Herod was king, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem. They asked where is he, who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.
Speaker 4:When King Herod heard this, he was alarmed, and all Jerusalem with him. He gathered together all the people's chief priests and experts in the law. He asked them where the Christ was to be born. They said to him in Bethlehem of Judea, because this was written through the prophet, you, bethlehem and the land of Judah, are certainly not least among the rulers of Judah, because out of you will come a ruler who will shepherd my people, israel". Then Herod secretly summoned the wise men and found out from them exactly when the star had appeared. He sent them to Bethlehem and said Go and search carefully for the child when you find him, report to me so that I may also go and worship him. After listening to the king, they went on their way. Then the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stood still over the place where the child was.
Speaker 4:When they saw the star, they rejoiced with overwhelming joy. After they went into the house and saw the child with Mary as mother, they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and offered him gifts—gold, frankincense and myrrh. Since they had been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they went back to their own country by another route. After the wise men were gone, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared to Joseph in a dream. He said Get up, take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, because Herod will search for the child in order to kill him.
Speaker 4:Joseph got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt. He stayed there until the death of Herod. This happened to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet out of Egypt. I called my son. When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the wise men, he was furious. He issued orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and in all the surrounding countryside, from two years old and under. This was in keeping with the exact time he had learned from the wise men. Then what was spoken through Jeremiah, the prophet, was fulfilled. A voice was heard in Rama weeping in great mourning, a weeping for her children. She refused to be comforted because they are no more.
Speaker 1:So, jeff, in this account that you read too, you did read a lot of the surrounding events that were going on. Is there anything that we can draw out from the context of these verses?
Speaker 4:Let's say, one of the first things is knowing something about the character of Herod. Part of it we get from history, part of it is right there in the text. But Herod was a bad guy. He was called a king, but he was king of Judea basically because he'd got in good with the Romans. He wasn't even Jewish. He was Idomian, which basically meant he was an Edomite from people related to the Jews. But long, long animosity going back centuries there Because he didn't come to power in any way that was recognized by the people he ruled, because it was kind of forced on them. He was always incredibly nervous about his position.
Speaker 4:When he hears from these wise men that, oh, a king has been born here and it is the king that all these Jews have been talking about as a messiah for all this time, that makes him nervous and that makes the people of Jerusalem nervous, because when Herod is nervous he does bad things. The wise men, of course, they probably don't know much of this, they're foreigners. That's why it takes them being warned in a dream Don't go back to Herod for them to realize oh, he probably doesn't have the good intentions that he said he had when he said he wanted to go and worship the king with us. Joseph apparently knows something about Herod also, because he wastes absolutely no time. When he's warned by an angel in a dream get up and take the child and his mother, he leaves in the middle of the night because it is urgent. And then, of course, what do we see? We see that Herod, because he is so concerned about what's best for him and thinks only of that, he arranges the murder of these boys in Bethlehem and surrounding areas.
Speaker 1:And so what is then the history of Holy Innocence Day?
Speaker 4:Christian Church first observed this festival, the feast of the Holy Innocence, within the early centuries of the church, and it definitely was fixed on a day by, I believe, the fifth century.
Speaker 2:So pretty early on. Well, interestingly enough, contemporary scholarship today likes to quickly dismiss this story as a fable. They'll oftentimes say that it was kind of a replay of the story of Moses when he was born and how his life had to be spared, sending them down the river in a basket. And the argument goes like this that Josephus in his writings who apparently was pretty meticulous at articulating everything that Herod had been doing wrong, his cruelty doesn't make any mention of the slaughter of the children. And of course then the skeptics assume that must mean it didn't really happen. But there is another way and I kind of liked the way I was listening, the way Jeff was describing Herod.
Speaker 2:Herod really was a very not well person, you know mentally and to be honest you know now we have this notion a lot of times. There have been traditions like it was a slaughter of 10,000 children, and remember the old little town of Bethlehem. You are at least the thousands of Judah. We're talking a small community here. Perhaps the more realistic expectation is that it could have been a dozen boys that died that were two years of age or younger, something in that range, and that maybe Josephus was looking at and going.
Speaker 2:Based on all the things that this nutcase Herod had done. This was insignificant. In Herod's world, this didn't matter. Life only mattered to Herod. If it mattered to Herod, he didn't see an intrinsic value to human life. So, historically speaking, they still don't have secular evidence of this or, outside of scripture, proof of it Doesn't rattle me in the least, because I think one of the most important logical things to remember is that if this was a fable, why in the world, with Mary and Joseph, take the baby and leave, to go to Egypt to escape from that? And why also would the wise men go a different route? Because because Herod was capable of all this. And so I would counter and say no evidence doesn't mean it's not real, it just means you don't have any evidence yet.
Speaker 4:And it's a simple principle that if you're the one coming along saying, oh, that's not real, that didn't happen, the burden of proof is on you, because, because you're the one who's making the claim, the burden of proof is not on the one saying no, this is what happened.
Speaker 1:So why is it important to remember this day?
Speaker 2:First of all, we teach that there's an intrinsic value to human life. It's your life is valuable, not because you are pretty or handsome or strong or healthy. You could be weak, you could be ugly, you could be disabled, you could be poor health your life is still valuable, and this foundational principle, that there's an intrinsic value to human life, is like, sometimes in the secular world, the one thing that holds that bay entire mayhem and what you do is in the massacre of the children of Bethlehem. You see that that barrier is dropped, because when we, even though we as strong Christians, believe in this universal, quantitative value to human life, your life is valuable because you're human, you're alive. Even we, though, still have a special place for the most defenseless among us, and that would be children, and you know we had this horrible event occur in Waukesha, with the guy driving the van through and her SUV and killing a number of people who were older, but then the one child died.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I was thinking of that event as well. Just the fact, too, that you mentioned that at first they came out that the five people had died and they were all older, and I mean my heart went out to all of them and their families and thinking about if it had been my parents or in-laws or anybody, and how that would have drastically affected our family. But when it came out that the eight-year-old boy had died because of his injuries, that hit me really hard. I have an eight-year-old boy, so I thought that was part of it. But then I also saw people on the news and everyone who I talked to. There was something about that particular death that made an impact on just about everyone that I talked with, and so it did make me wonder what is it about a death of a child that really impacts our society so much?
Speaker 4:From a completely unreligious, even unphilosophical, I suppose it's getting into the realm of philosophy. Anyway, just potential. When a child dies, you think about he's hardly had a chance to live. What could he have done with his life? Where could he have gone? What could he have done, the people that he could have known, the people would have benefited from knowing him, all those kinds of things. He has his entire life ahead of him and we tend, just kind of from a dispassionate point of view, to not feel quite the same way about somebody who dies at 80 or 90, because it's like, well, they've lived most of their life already, they've done all of those things, not saying that it doesn't hurt or there's no tragedy. But most people would kind of sense that there's a big difference there in terms of what lies ahead and the potential and such, and so I think just about anybody recoils from the death of a child, or perhaps we should say should recoil from that.
Speaker 2:Well, and let me do a little quiz here. In this story, who are the heroes? That would be probably the Wisemen, the angel who warned them in a dream.
Speaker 1:And Mary and Joseph for taking away Jesus.
Speaker 2:Who are the villains? Herod. Herod and the soldiers right, but we're missing the third villain that critics will often point out, and that is God. Some of the most scathing criticism has always been of God. Why did God allow this to happen? Jesus came and, of course, then they like to use the number 10,000. Because this baby was born in Bethlehem, 10,000 children died, and everything what I like to do is I like to turn it around and I'll say, okay, I'm not going to debate with you whether God's at fault. I mean, because that really gets into a deep philosophical discussion about why there is evil and what accountability is there for people for their evil actions. You know why did, and if God is so great, why couldn't God have stopped it? Let's try a different way. Let's talk about the heroes and let's talk about the people who saved, the people who protected, the people who warned.
Speaker 2:Now, in the story of life today, which one are you? Are you the hero? Are you the one who's seeking to protect the child? Are you the one seeking, or are you the one who is the enemy, the bad guy in the story?
Speaker 2:And, a lot of times, people, and it's a polemical device that people use to name. Well, I used to always joke when I give presentations that you know if you always want to do a safe thing, quote a dead person, you know they can't come back to say I never said that or anything. And so a lot of times you know they'll go after God or something They'll go after. But I always tell everybody that when you begin to translate the story and what it means for you today, if all scripture is written for my learning, and so I'm reading this story, what am I learning from that? First of all, I see the depravity of people to be able to have the wherewithal to order the killing of two-year-olds and younger. Personally, you know everyone always talked about the terrible twos, but when my girls were two years old, that's when I loved them the most. I mean that they just were fun. You know they were doing things interactive to get into the little mischief. Maybe I know where that came from.
Speaker 2:I don't know We'll talk about that another day and imagine that being lost. It was painful, it was a heartache, but what am I learning? Okay, I'm learning. I don't want to be, I don't want to be a herit, I don't want to be a soldier. I want to be a Marian at Joseph. I want to protect them and, quite honestly, the story of Marian Joseph in Egypt was very critical component in my personal life to get me involved, because everyone's at a pivot point in life.
Speaker 2:You're at a crossroads and you have to make a decision. Do I remain silent? Do I speak up? Do I do something? Do I do nothing? Do I step in or do I walk away? And Marian Joseph, they get warned and they say we need to protect the child. And it's not just any child, but right now we'll just say it's just the child. And when we're told in Philippians 2 to think more of others than we do of ourselves, then protecting your child is my concern, protecting a child is my concern, and I think that this is oftentimes what we can throw stones at God, we can throw stones at everybody, but in the end we're talking about you. What do I get out of this?
Speaker 4:Yeah, in your language of heroes and villains. I mean just about any story, real or fictional, of you know that has heroes and villains. I mean there are lots of other people in the story who aren't either, and if it's something that we happen to be witnessing, we tend to think well, I'm just a neutral observer, I don't have a place in here. But what you mentioned the Christians' obligation to put others first there's somebody else in this story that very little attention is usually paid to the people of Jerusalem. It says when King Herod heard who is he, who has been born king of the Jews, he was alarmed, and all Jerusalem with him. Now, what should the people of Jerusalem have felt when they heard this news? Hallelujah, the Lord has come. Let's all go find and see this guy, this baby, boy, boy. Let's do no. What were they thinking instead? This is bad. We better hope nothing comes of this, because Herod's going to do something really nasty if this is real.
Speaker 2:They weren't as apathetic as you would think. They literally were part of the problem.
Speaker 4:Yeah, they weren't being neutral. They were actually kind of, I wouldn't say, cheering for the villain, but they weren't on the side of the heroes when I see a pro-abortion marches.
Speaker 2:I find them most annoying. You know some of the clever signs, not just the simplistic and somewhat mindless. You know my body, my choice, but you keep your rosaries off my ovaries. That's one of my favorites, and the but I mean you see, others of these men shouldn't be making our decisions and everything. Quite wrong really. They're just and not about who makes your decisions, but rather we have an obligation to be concerned about everybody else. In fact, think about when they're in an abortion march.
Speaker 2:Supposedly they're standing up for the rights of all women. Now why? What makes that more right than me standing up for the rights of children and unborn children? And one of the things that we make a mistake when we get involved with with debating this issue with people who differ with us is that we kind of allow illogic to stand in that, in the illogic of their position. If you're arguing for women's rights, then am I not right to argue for, for other people's rights as well? And like the unborn child and any, any abortion rights activists worth their salt today already knows that an abortion, a child dies. There's no secret. That's any any abortion rights activists today who says, well, it's not really a life Disappearantly isn't with the program Today. Abortion rights activists will argue personhood. They'll say it's alive, but it's not really a person or doesn't really have rights, and so forth. And again, that's something in their own imagination.
Speaker 1:It doesn't feel pain.
Speaker 2:Doesn't feel pain, which is also not true, but but either way it's in their own imagination. But even if it didn't feel pain, they oftentimes dismiss the point. Because the moment you begin to step in that that terrain, I mean, let's look back again at what Herod ordered All children two years and younger. He wasn't, he wasn't just targeting the Christ child, he needed to target any possibility of the Christ child, and all other life is irrelevant. Now, when you, when C Evercoop spoke at our convention back in the 1980s, he made this nightmare and he goes it's a small leap in logic to go from taking life inside of the womb to taking life outside of the womb. And the moment you begin to say that you know, I'm, I'm going to go, he knew the time of the time for the Magi and so forth but he says we're going to, we're going to swipe out the all the way up to two years old, the males.
Speaker 2:And the same thing with abortion. You know pretty soon it's okay. Not just we want abortion in the womb, but then if you're, like I said, virginia Ironside in Great Britain, she thinks you should be able to terminate a life outside of the womb when they're born. And there have been people who have argued that if a child's born disabled, the child's life should be able to be determined. And then the people say but if you've developed advanced dementia and you can't make a decision for yourself, then we should default to a decision that your life should be terminated. In other words, they take this greater liberty. And it's all because of a Herodian disvalue for human life.
Speaker 4:And as Christians we can't be neutral on that. We can't be apathetic. And there are so many Christians who maintain that they love their Lord, they love his people, they love his word. And yet when it comes to these issues of life, whether it's abortion or euthanasia or assisted suicide or whatever, they would just rather put up with those things than deal with the trouble that might come if somebody fights against it, even if they themselves don't in any way get involved. They're just like just keep it quiet, let's not talk about that, it causes too much trouble. I see that as very similar to the people of Jerusalem in the story. They just rather let's keep this quiet. We don't want things to get any worse than they are right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I want to go back to the two-year-old thing. Just imagine the different emotional feel. So Herod ordered some of the children to be killed. Herod ordered two-year-old boys and younger to be killed. Both hurt. The second hurts a little bit more.
Speaker 1:It does.
Speaker 2:Yeah, as you begin to define it and you close it in and do it. And somebody asked me a few years back why I've been involved so long. I really started getting involved in these issues back in 1976. The reason is because of two-year-olds. I told you how much I loved my girls when they were two and I still love them. Just for the record, I still love them.
Speaker 2:But I loved the children when they were two. But I always try to see. Whenever people talk to me about life in the womb and so forth, I always try to see everyone in my mind as a two-year-old Because when I would I used to get up in the middle of the night to make sure the girls were breathing. When they were babies I was always a little bit worried about SIDS and stuff like that. But it's interesting at two-years-old they can say the cutest things, they can do some really nasty things, they can be quietly asleep, they can be agitated with illness, they could be thrown a tantrum and again they could be very sweet. But in all of them you develop this love for them. And so when they say, well, in the womb they're not aware of their surroundings or anything. Well, I'm not so sure at two-years-old how aware they were of their surroundings when they were sound asleep.
Speaker 2:But I was aware the story of the massacre of the innocents and I don't care if it was 10,000, if it was 12, or it was one it was a horrible thing because it not only was a life created by God and given to a mother and a father, and it was a life for which God says I'm going to offer the ultimate sacrifice for all the evil these people did that took your child's life and I'm going to make it work out for your good. And he did. And sometimes, when I have had to console families who have lost children at a very hard time, you ultimately lean on the one who created them. He said I'm going to do exactly what's right. And you may not understand it, but this is where you trust me and I have to admit I've thought often about the parents of those who lost the children.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I feel too, especially in the season of life I'm in right now. My youngest is a few months shy of two, and so definitely hearing you talk about all those things, and I mean she really in so many ways is the life of the party at our house too, and it does really make me think of these parents too. Just, I know, like a lot of people do go back to how can a loving God allow this to happen? And the just? I mean it's just such a terrible thing, and even if it was just a dozen or less, it's just, it's just really really devastating to think about that.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and this is pure conjecture, and that's just one of those things I've always wondered why is it that in the Gospels we never read anything about Jesus going to Bethlehem? I mean, you would kind of think that this is the place where the shepherds gave testimony to who he was. It seems to me to be a slam dunk kind of thing to help establish who he was. But use a little bit of imagination. I could almost imagine him not going, because there would be people there who remembered what happened because of him.
Speaker 2:We often like to defer blame we get and I guess I'm hesitant to get into the whole. You know, why does God allow you to happen?
Speaker 2:in this episode. I think we should devote one or maybe a chain of episodes to that discussion, because I think there's a lot that we need to understand. But what is clear is all of the evil that seems to go on around us is triggered not by decisions of God, but by decisions of men, whether it's the evil of I'm going to eat of the tree that I shouldn't eat of, or if it's the evil of I'm jealous of my brother so I'm going to kill him. In all of those we could argue that why did God let it happen? How about we be a little bit less godly about it and ask why did the other believing people let that happen? Let's just take it off the shoulders of God for a moment and just simply say what about all the other people that could have stopped it? What about all the people of Jerusalem who, instead of seeing this as a good thing, were alarmed by it?
Speaker 2:And even if you remember, at the death of Lazarus, who was deeply loved by his sisters, jesus says even though you die, you live. He isn't saying you're going to escape death. He just said death has no sting, it's not going to. It's going to look like the worst thing to you. But it isn't the worst thing. But it's funny, because a lot of times when we try to sort out these very, very heartfelt, hard issues, it's almost like we don't want to live by faith, we want to live by sight. So I really, at some point I am going to demand an explanation from God, but then he's not God anymore. He's just somebody on a logical equal who will come down to your level and finally dummy down so that I can understand it. Then he's not God anymore.
Speaker 4:And that's the beautiful thing about the book of Job. Anyway, we can spend a lot more time on that, but 30 chapters or so of the book is first his so-called friends and then Job himself saying okay, God, I've got a bone to pick with you. And God's answer is basically who do you think you are? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And he. It's an answer Job's question. He asked his own question, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, and and plus two, let's not, let's not think overly lightly about packing your bags and heading to Egypt. I mean, there's peril involved in that. There, there's risk, all the time and taken and what you're doing, and and hardship and so forth. And you know, couldn't it have been better? You know, and, of course, what do you? What are we ultimately longing for? We already want heaven, even even in the biblical story of the very earliest moments of Jesus life. We want heaven on earth. We want, we want it to be perfect. We don't. We don't want Herod wanting to kill children. We don't want people being apathetic or or alarmist over over the birth of the Christ child. We don't want peril for Mary and Joseph going to Egypt. We want everything. We want heaven and God says that's.
Speaker 1:That's what I'm working on so here we are, 2000 years after this event. How should we remember the baby boys of Bethlehem today?
Speaker 2:I Would say that that you analyze why it hurts. And it hurts because inside we do recognize there's an intrinsic value to human life, and what we spend our time doing is we try to cloud it over, to justify Doing wrong things, thinking, thinking that it's a disposable life or but instead the story, the story of death of anyone this heartfelt Is troubling.
Speaker 2:The story of a child is even more troubling for a potential child's potential and so forth. But I would say that I think you focus on it because it's it's that built-in Knowledge that God gives you that that there's a value here. It's why I don't kill people, it's why I don't hit people, it's that deep love for God's gift of life well.
Speaker 1:Thank you both very much for your insight with the story today and we look forward to coming back next week in the new year. Happy New Year. We'll see you next time. Bye.
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