Okay, so here's the truth. I promise that there is going to be no more Herod stuff, but there's a little more Herod stuff to go with a whole lot of Jesus stuff this time around. So here's the deal. We're in Matthew chapter two, we're looking at Jesus and his family getting ready to come back from their time, hiding out in Egypt, where it was probably really easy to blend in with that giant Jewish population, and you're beyond the reach of this murderous Herod jerk, and then Herod the Great dies, and now it's finally time to come home. And picking it up in verse 19, it says, After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who are trying to take the child's life are dead. So all of that happens in a dream. And once again, we know Joseph is very responsive to this kind of thing. This is how God has communicated with him in the past, and it's been right every time. So Joseph, of course, who's very faithful, gets up and does exactly what he's supposed to do. It says, So he got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archolus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee. I should have counted this in advance. I don't know how many dreams that is, but it's got to be like what, five, six at this point? But it's interesting here that Joseph doesn't totally wait for the dream. He's already thinking, uh, I need to make some different plans. And maybe he's wondering, would it technically still be obedient to God and the last dream I had if I went to Galilee? I mean, that's historical Israel, but it's not technically political Israel at this point. How exactly is that going to work? So it's kind of a cool partnering between common sense and the miraculous work of God that we see going on here. But even though I promised we were done with Herod's, there's a little bit more Herod here that we need to talk about. So Herod Archolus, you recall yesterday, was the oldest of the eligible sons to succeed his dad, Herod the Great. And you'll recall that this transition of power wasn't necessarily the smoothest. Did you ever see the video where the girl just comes out in the biggest moment of her life, she's going to sing the national anthem at a professional hockey game, and like one step into this thing, the whole thing goes awry. She slips on the ice and like cracks her head, and you just agonize for her because she's likable and you want her to succeed. Now imagine somebody that you don't like and you don't want to succeed, whose dad murdered a bunch of babies and who wants to have the power to do the same thing. That's Herod Arcolis. And he basically has that exact experience: stepping out onto the ice, his first moments in leadership, and he just botches it horribly. He dresses up in this fancy outfit after his dad dies, and he goes to Jerusalem, and he gets all of the throngs of angry, uncomfortable people all representing different factions together, and he's like, I am gonna make things better. And he makes some political promises and he's like listening to them, and they say, you know, we want a better high priest, and he's not really into that. And he's like, Yeah, okay, fine, just give me a minute on that. And he starts to get kind of irritated with them barking at him about all this stuff, and he's like, uh, this is stupid. Let's just go have a fancy meal. So he goes and he takes all of his leaders and stuff, and they have a fancy meal. And meanwhile, there's just all this disruption and stuff going on over by the temple, and these two buildings would have been basically right next door. And so he sends some officials over there to settle things down. It doesn't really work. He sends some other people to settle things down and they kind of mistreat them as well. And they send some other leaders to do it, and they just end up stoning these messengers, these military messengers, and just going right back to offering sacrifices in the temple. And Archolus is like, I don't think we're starting off like this. So he empties everybody out who looks like a bystander and sends in the soldiers, the goon squad, and they end up killing like 3,000 people on day one of his reign. So this is what Joseph is walking back into. That very famous story. And Arculus, then, as I mentioned the last time around, jumps on a boat and has to go fight in court in Rome to try to get this title for himself. So Joseph, no doubt, got wind of this and is like, hey, nothing has changed. It looks like this guy is still following through on his father's murderous impulses. What am I going to do with my family? And then this miraculous intervention occurs that gives him guidance as to where to go and how to weight this thing out even further in the north. An interesting side note about the Archolis situation: there are two parables of Jesus that look like he might just be hinting at these very well-known stories of Arculus, the failed ruler who ended up being deposed by Rome and replaced by a Roman governor. So nobody would like this guy very much because he couldn't even keep, you know, the uh the authority to rule in any way in-house, and he made Rome even more present with his ineptitude. But these two parables that, I don't know, maybe it's a thin case, but it comes up, would be the one about the ruler who went to the far-off kingdom to try to earn himself a kingdom. And the other one that starts off with uh this is the one with the parable of the vineyard, where the owner sends varying levels of authority figures to go and address the tenants, and eventually they mistreat all of them and even mistreat his highest official. Is it a stretch? Maybe, but it's kind of a fun aside. Okay, so back to the Jesus thing, though. Finally, at the end of chapter two, this tumultuous birth and early childhood narrative of Jesus is going to land somewhere safe and stable, but it's also going to land somewhere that people would have thought of as frankly kind of dumpy. It lands in Nazareth. And we know people weren't crazy about Nazareth because it's used as an insult in another part of the Bible. And at this point, I would do the thing where I'm like, hey, I'm explain how the Bible is to people. And one of the ways I do it is by using contemporary examples. Except if I use any example that's a corollary to this thing with Nazareth, then I'm going to insult a whole bunch of people who live somewhere. And I don't want to do that. And I don't even want to do that with like the remote parts of the world because I looked at that little map of where you all are and who listens to this. And there's some people listening in crazy places. Did you know that this right now is the number five most popular Christian podcast in all of Algeria? Yeah. High five person who listens to this in Algeria. I don't know what would happen if there were two of you. I'd shoot to number one instantly. So this town of Nazareth has this obscure connection with a tradition of people who still believed all of those vague promises in the Old Testament that held out this glimmer of hope for the Messiah. So the people who are really attentive at this moment would have seen beyond the insult and known that isn't there this little clique or this little faction up there that are still messianic and they still think this is all going to work out somehow. So that may have been a hint to a few who would have caught it. But for the most part, I think people would have thought the place was either A, a dump, or B, if they even knew about it. Kind of an interesting little crossroads. It sits up high. I have had the beautiful fortune of getting to go there and take my family and see what it would have looked like for Joseph and Jesus and Mary to wake up in the morning and look around and take in their surroundings. And you get a pretty good look at kind of everything from Nazareth and the easily accessible hill country right around there. And you can see down toward the Sea of Galilee, you can make out the Mediterranean Sea in the other direction. And you can kind of see the, I don't know, the places that all of the armies and everybody else would have had to have traversed to come and gone through that region. So it's kind of a fascinating little spot. It may be there's some obscure geographical overlap to kind of this theme of Jesus taking this family of faith out to a broad area. But yeah, for the second time in this podcast, I would say that's more of a stretch and just a goofy, fun connection that's happening only in my brain. But the last thing that comes up here is that Matthew says, so was fulfilled what was said through the prophets, he will be called a Nazarene. This is such a quirky quote because everything else he's quoted from the Old Testament points directly to an Old Testament verse, but not this. I mean, Nazareth isn't mentioned at all in the Old Testament. If you look at extra-biblical writing, it doesn't really look like there's anything that Matthew would have considered scripture that he was referencing here. So what gives? I mean, Matthew's been so careful to have all of his facts straight and to make these connections and to just shank it at the end of his prologue. That seems weird. There's a couple of theories, and I'll be honest, I'm not totally satisfied with either, and we're just gonna have to live with that tension. But one is that Matthew is using some kind of play on words, referencing back to that Isaiah 11, 1 passage that talks about uh Jesse and the shoot coming up from the well, I'll just read it to you. I have it right stinking here. Uh, a shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse, from his roots, a branch will bear fruit. So the idea is there's this burnt-out stump that represents the line of David that's supposed to have an eternal king sitting on it forever. But you got a problem here, and that is the Israel's gone away, Judah's gone away. But then the later prophets come along, they're like, no, that stump isn't gone. There's still something that's going to grow up out of it, and it's this shoot or this branch. Well, apparently, and I'm not very good at Hebrew, I didn't retain much of that from back in school. The word for branch sounds like a play on words with the word for Nazareth. And so maybe Matthew is saying it's some kind of pun, and in this it's a fulfillment? Uh, I don't know about that. Another theory is that all of the prophecies about the Messiah, about his modesty and humility and where he comes from, triangulate to a place that could only be described as the epitome of humility, which would be Nazareth. Again, it feels like a stretch. So I'm not totally sure what to do with this. Maybe there's some other better theories hanging around out there, but those are the ones that I've heard. Whatever the case, I assume the original audience knew what he was talking about, because again, this thing caught on, and they all would have quit reading if that didn't make any sense to them right there at the end of chapter two. We'll do a big picture look at chapter two next time around, and then we're gonna bounce on to chapter three. Look at this, we're making progress. High five again. We get one of these at the end of every chapter. Wait, no, you don't get it yet. We have to do one more episode of summary. Then the high five. If you high five to yourself or your phone or your listening device, I need you to take that back and save it for next time. All right, I'm Matt is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast. More to come, my friends.