Hey, you know who was absolutely adorable as the tiny little baby? Me. Or at least that's what I was told. I remember everybody fawning over me as a little kid, being like, oh, that's so cute. He's so precocious with his little words and stuff. And then I remember my kid's sister came along. She's a couple years younger than me, so she didn't affect much initially. But gradually I kind of moved out of the cute phase and into the puke phase. And then she moved right into the cute phase, and it was getting a little bit nauseating. So we're at this uh, I don't know, fancy dance where people wear outfits, some kind of end-of-year thing or wedding reception. I don't remember. I was very, very young, like maybe maybe five, four years old, something like that. And I was dancing with my sister, and everybody thought it was so cute, right? But they weren't talking about me, they were talking about her. Oh, look at the pigtails or whatever. Look at her cute little dress. Hey, how about a little love for me? I've been adorable twice as long as this kid. And I remember getting really irritated, and so I danced a little more aggressively with my sister. And then I kind of just body slammed her and was like, there, who's cute now? And everyone was so upset. The whole room got quiet. People felt betrayed for thinking it was adorable because I went and ruined the whole moment. But she was a threat. Something had to be done. And I was the only one who was brave enough to do something about it. The point is, even little kids have the potential to get a bit erratic and paranoid and weird when we feel like a position we've had nailed down for a while is suddenly under threat. Yes, I am Herod in this analogy. In Matthew chapter 2, starting in verse 16, we've got a situation where Jesus and Mary and Joseph have been warned in a dream. And Joseph, who is a spectacular husband and father and man in general, does what he's supposed to, and he protects his family, takes them away from Herod. And so we find out in the previous passage that Herod the Great died while the holy family is off in Egypt. But then we jump back in the narrative in verse 16, and it says, When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to, I got a hole in my Bible right here, to, I assume it says kill all the boys. Yeah, it's got to be what it says. To kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under. That's got to be in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. I'll get a new Bible for this page soon. And then it goes on to talk about a prophecy that was fulfilled, and we'll get to that in a minute. So Herod just goes berserk. I mean, this guy's right at the end of his life. He's got to be in his when was he born? He was born in the 70s, right? So he's, yeah, he's somewhere in his 70s at this point, maybe early 70s. But uh the contemporary accounts tell us that he was not physically doing well at this point, and he hadn't been mentally doing well for a really long time. And he's like, well, if the baby's in Bethlehem, how many babies could that possibly be? If we just kill them all, we should get them. And he genuinely thought that seemed like a good idea. Now you might be tempted to say, look, nobody would be that insane and evil. But remember, we've got it on really good authority that this guy planned to round up a bunch of noblemen and just have them slaughtered in an arena upon his death so that people would feel sadder about him dying. Dude was nuts. So when we picture this incident being carried out in Bethlehem and all these little boys getting killed, you know, we might imagine this gigantic purge. The reality is Bethlehem wasn't a super big town. I mean, it's a big town now, but back then we're talking about maybe 10, 20, 30 babies or toddlers that this would have happened to, which is 10, 20, or 30 too much. I'm totally against infanticide. I'm really not trying to minimize it. But one of the pushbacks you'll hear on the credibility of Matthew's account is that we get no external corroboration on this heinous story, which, on its surface, it's a pretty reasonable question. Like if something that terrible happened, and we have a historian, Josephus, once again, who writing a few decades after the fact really has an axe to grind with this Harrod fellow, don't you think he would make some mention of it? There are a couple of possibilities as to why nobody does make a mention of it. One, it was just so par for the course that it didn't really even manage a blip on the radar for people. Two, maybe a lot of people didn't really know. I mean, you'd have some sad moms and peasants and stuff, but maybe this wouldn't have been gigantic news to everyone else because all of his other atrocities so overshadowed it. Or three, I said there were like a couple, there are four. Three, maybe this came so close to the end of his reign that once again people were just so glad to have him gone that it was neither here nor there to go back and deal with this. And so it sort of faded into the background of history. Or four, it was recorded in other historical accounts and just wasn't recorded in the ones that continue on down the line to us. Whatever the case, it would have been really dumb for Matthew to lie about this, whether he's writing at the earliest possible date, supposed by the church fathers, which would be in the 40s A.D., or whether he's writing this closer to the end of his life, maybe close to 70 A.D., or some would even argue even a little bit later. No matter what, you're still within living memory of that incident. And if he just made that up, all you'd have to do is ask the people of Bethlehem if anything that memorable happened. And it would seem somebody would have been able to point it out, even if it was an incident that, as heinous as it sounds to you and me, was rather localized in the cultural memory of the time. Well, whatever the case, the Magi are back on down the road. The holy family has been hanging out in Egypt, which points to this new Moses, new family of faith theme that Matthew wants to draw out. And Herod goes out in the end of his life, behaving as he has for decades prior, like an insane, murderous idiot who will do anything to get rid of anyone he regards as a threat, even public mass infanticide, assuming that no one can or will do anything to stop him. But we get this last little tag at the end of the passage that says, Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled. A voice is heard in Ramah weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted because they are no more. Well, just like we do with all of these things. Let's go over here to Jeremiah. It says it's 31.15 at the bottom of my Bible. I don't have a hole there. What do we got? This is what the Lord says a voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted because her children are no more. Oh, well, that's just the same thing. Okay, so Jeremiah, what's he talking about in this range? Oh, yeah. Jeremiah is the guy who knew that Nebuchadnezzar was going to come and defeat the remaining southern kingdom of Judah and haul all of those people off into captivity. And remember, Jeremiah is kind of the one who does the Liam Nissan and Taken speech where it's like, listen, you're going to be taken. And he kind of warns them that this thing is going to happen, and this is how you need to conduct yourself while you're there in captivity. That's what the famous Jeremiah 29, 11 life verse that everybody gets tattoos of comes in, the one where it says, For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope in a future. And this is all in the context of go and make money and conduct your business well while you're captives in another country. So why even reference that? Hasn't there already been enough from the Old Testament that Matthew's pointed to to be like, okay, we get it. Jesus is the bup bup of history. Why do we need to keep coming back to this kind of thing? I think there's a couple of layers of meaning here, though. Remember, Matthew isn't just pointing out literal fulfillments of predictions. I think the Broncos are going to score 21 points this week. And they scored 22. I was so close. No, no, no. These are completions of theological historical arcs lobbed forward into history and converging on Jesus. In this situation, Nebuchadnezzar, an outsider to the chosen people of God, does great harm to the chosen people of God. And there's mourning and difficulty, but there is also redemption and hope. This is kind of the theme of Jeremiah, even though overwhelmingly Jeremiah is a pretty sad book, there's still this same hint that there's this other good thing coming. So we're dun da dun dun da ing to a historical situation that's very similar, outsider doing great harm to the people of God. We're also dot da-da-da-da-da-da-ing, even further to the larger grand redemptive theme of the Bible, that all of this brokenness and evil and grossness that happens from individuals, from their governments, from the state of existence in a fallen world, that all of this stuff is going to be brought to heal and made right, and that Jesus, Matthew is saying, is the culminating event in that redemptive impulse of God, that all the broken stuff, all the stuff that hurts, is fixed and resolved in him. So pay attention because we keep ticking boxes that point to him as the guy who can do that. All right, next up we've got the return home to Nazareth and a really fascinating controversy that I'm just gonna level with you now. I don't have an answer for. It's not gonna be the last time I don't have an answer for a thing. So we'll get back together next time around and discuss Jesus as a Nazarene and what all of that means. In the meantime, thank you, thank you, thank you to everybody who supports this program at patreon.com/slash the TMBH podcast. I have placed my order for cool little TMBH enamel pins. They look rad. I decided to do like a cool little contour that kind of follows the logo. So it'll be a nifty and unique one. And those should be in any day when they come in. Whoever is a patron here or over at the YouTube channel at that time, at any level, is gonna get one of those pins. I ordered extra in case other people sign up at the last minute. Thank you to everybody who supports the program. Thanks to everybody who's considering supporting the program, and thanks to everybody who's just here and you're not gonna support the program. I love that all of you are a part of this thing, and I appreciate you enormously. And I can't wait to do more of this tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Catch you soon.