SPEAKER_00: We're reading this morning from Matthew chapter two, verses one to twelve.
SPEAKER_00: 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?
SPEAKER_00: For we saw his star when it rose, and have come to worship him.
SPEAKER_00: 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.
SPEAKER_00: They told him, In Bethlehem of Judea, for so it is written by the prophet.
SPEAKER_00: And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judea, are by no in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah.
SPEAKER_00: For from you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.
SPEAKER_00: Then Herod summoned the wise men secretly and ascertained from them what 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.
SPEAKER_00: 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.
SPEAKER_00: 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.
SPEAKER_00: Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh, and being warned in a dream not to return to herod, they departed to their own country by another way.
SPEAKER_00: And so reads God's word.
SPEAKER_02: All right.
SPEAKER_02: Well, good morning.
SPEAKER_02: Welcome to City Church.
SPEAKER_02: Add my welcome to Peters, Marks, and Nicole's, and everybody else that you've seen up here this morning.
SPEAKER_02: My name is Ben, one of the leaders here.
SPEAKER_02: This morning is our third, I believe, final sermon in the Advent series.
SPEAKER_02: So if we can have a better understanding of the scale and scope of the curse, well, maybe that helps us to have a better understanding of the scale and scope of God's love expressed in the advent of Jesus.
SPEAKER_02: How far does the curse go?
SPEAKER_02: It goes pretty far.
SPEAKER_02: But then there's the blessings of Jesus going right along, right over the top of it.
SPEAKER_02: So we've been looking into a few of the particular curses that the coming of Jesus impacts and will ultimately undo.
SPEAKER_02: Not to say that these are the only aspects that there are out there of the curse.
SPEAKER_02: But the first one was at our evening carol service.
SPEAKER_02: Mark talked about the curse of war and oppression.
SPEAKER_02: And the answer to that being the Prince of Peace.
SPEAKER_02: Last week at our family carol service, Peter spoke about the curse of injustice, of inequality, and how Jesus being born to a small family in a small place shows that he's turning the systems of the world upside down.
SPEAKER_02: And this brings us to our third and final curse.
SPEAKER_02: Third and final for this series, right?
SPEAKER_02: There's more curses out there, I'm sure, that we could talk about.
SPEAKER_02: But our third and final curse for this series is death.
SPEAKER_02: So Merry Christmas, everybody.
SPEAKER_02: You know, I saw these lights over here and I may I began to walk towards the No, I'm just kidding.
SPEAKER_02: Um I could tell you all about my experiences growing old, uh, but I'll save that.
SPEAKER_02: If you want to talk about what it is to be this old, come and find me after the service.
SPEAKER_02: But I want to tell you a story.
SPEAKER_02: It was about uh seven years ago.
SPEAKER_02: Uh my uncle passed away.
SPEAKER_02: He was not a particularly old man.
SPEAKER_02: He was 70, he was in decent health, active enough.
SPEAKER_02: No one saw it coming.
SPEAKER_02: He was there one day, and then he wasn't.
SPEAKER_02: And I think our family, our little family, my my wife and children, we felt it probably all the more because just a few days before he passed, he and all of his family, a bunch of his family, had been over at our house for a for a Sunday dinner, and we had a had a lovely time together, and you know, all the loudness and and and great food and and good laughs of a family dinner like that, you know, old and new, old, old and young coming together there.
SPEAKER_02: And then later that week we found out he was gone, and it was just like, what is this?
SPEAKER_02: What is the story here?
SPEAKER_02: Didn't make sense to us.
SPEAKER_02: It was hard to believe, and it was hard to accept.
SPEAKER_02: And that's just for us.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, how much more would it have been so for my aunt, for his wife?
unknown: Right?
SPEAKER_02: How much more for his children, grandchildren?
SPEAKER_02: So grief and mourning stretched out for months and for years.
SPEAKER_02: Now I share that experience not because I think that it's unique.
SPEAKER_02: It's not even unique in my own life, right?
SPEAKER_02: We've all lost people.
SPEAKER_02: But it's we could we could probably go around the room and get dozens of stories of loved ones who've passed on.
SPEAKER_02: You've tell me about the people that you've lost.
SPEAKER_02: We've all known that hurt.
SPEAKER_02: We've all known that mourning.
SPEAKER_02: And this is all known and understood, that this is how life goes.
SPEAKER_02: And yet it still hurts when it happens.
SPEAKER_02: When we lose someone, it still hurts.
SPEAKER_02: And what this suggests to me, what I might say, is that deep down we know that it's not right.
SPEAKER_02: We know that it's not right for us to lose people along the way.
SPEAKER_02: And this scripture backs that up.
SPEAKER_02: Scripture says that death is part of the curse.
SPEAKER_02: And if we want to take it one step further, this is a curse that we all live with.
SPEAKER_02: But it's also a curse that we all live under.
SPEAKER_02: We we may not face the horrors of war, we may not be oppressed particularly, we may not have we may have more or less levels of injustice and inequality that we live with.
SPEAKER_02: This curse, this curse of death, this is universal.
SPEAKER_02: But remember the song lyric, right?
SPEAKER_02: He comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found.
SPEAKER_02: So we've we've just established in a couple of minutes there that this curse is found everywhere.
SPEAKER_02: This curse is in every life, in everyone's experience.
SPEAKER_02: So now let's have a look and see how Jesus coming undoes this curse.
SPEAKER_02: So go ahead and have that passage, the one that Nicole just read, open in front of you there, Matthew 2.
SPEAKER_02: And we'll start with verse 1.
SPEAKER_02: And it says, 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?
SPEAKER_02: And I think this is a fairly familiar story in Scripture.
SPEAKER_02: You know, the source material for a couple of songs back there, We Three Kings of Orientar.
SPEAKER_02: And of course, as Peter alluded to, the text doesn't tell us that there were three kings.
SPEAKER_02: Might have been more, might have been less.
SPEAKER_02: There were at least two because it's plural.
SPEAKER_02: But we just know about three gifts.
SPEAKER_02: You know, and we could we could devote a lot of time and effort going off on tangents and incidental questions this morning, you know, things like, you know, where did these wise men come from?
SPEAKER_02: Where did these where did these magi come from?
SPEAKER_02: Why were they looking for the king of the Jews?
SPEAKER_02: What's the deal with this with this star of Bethlehem?
SPEAKER_02: Does that mean that astrology is a thing?
SPEAKER_02: No, it's not.
SPEAKER_02: But uh, you know, we could answer all of these questions here.
SPEAKER_02: If you want to talk through any of those questions, you can come find me after service.
SPEAKER_02: Or better yet, find Mark after service.
SPEAKER_02: That's even better.
SPEAKER_02: But we're gonna be focusing on the gifts that these three wise men brought.
SPEAKER_02: Before we do that, let's remember that these wise men made the journey to find one born king of the Jews.
SPEAKER_02: So their gifts reflected who and what they expected this king to be.
SPEAKER_02: Notice they didn't go knocking house to house looking for, you know, do you have the king?
SPEAKER_02: Do you have the king?
SPEAKER_02: Have you seen this king?
SPEAKER_02: They went straight to the palace.
SPEAKER_02: They went straight to Jerusalem, the capital city.
SPEAKER_02: They spoke to the king himself, right?
SPEAKER_02: Because surely the king would know that another king was born, and he'd know something about this.
SPEAKER_02: And the people would have expected something like a King David from the Old Testament: an anointed king, God's king, somebody mighty, somebody who would unite the people, someone who would lead them in righteousness, someone who would conquer their enemies before them.
SPEAKER_02: The wise men probably weren't expecting a baby who'd been born in a stable and laid in a manger.
SPEAKER_02: Probably weren't expecting a very ordinary family, very ordinary small city.
SPEAKER_02: They would have been more likely looking for a mighty political leader, someone who would cast off the Roman occupation and make Israel great again.
SPEAKER_02: Even though their idea of who Jesus would be was off in some ways, God seems to have worked in the selection of their gifts to show us something about the advent of Jesus.
SPEAKER_02: Something of who Jesus is, something of what he came to do and how he would accomplish it.
SPEAKER_02: So let's have a look.
SPEAKER_02: And I promise today's service, today's sermon will be brief, right?
SPEAKER_02: Because nobody wants to sit around all afternoon here on Christmas Eve, right?
SPEAKER_02: So let's get right to it here.
SPEAKER_02: The first gift is gold, right?
SPEAKER_02: And gold points to who Jesus is.
SPEAKER_02: He is the king.
SPEAKER_02: And not just any king, right?
SPEAKER_02: This is not just any two-bit tinpot dictator.
SPEAKER_02: This is God's king.
SPEAKER_02: This is the one ordained and predicted, long foretold.
SPEAKER_02: And King Herod seems to get this.
SPEAKER_02: You take a look at verse 3 in our passage, it says, When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled.
SPEAKER_02: A king of this magnitude would have been a threat to him, a threat to his power, a threat to his legacy.
SPEAKER_02: Herod was all about the legacy and the power and the dynasty.
SPEAKER_02: Gold in those days, like it is in our days, was a precious commodity.
SPEAKER_02: It had to be mined and smelted and refined and lots of processes that the geologists would know better, but I don't see Lizzie, so we won't ask.
SPEAKER_02: But this is something that's very valuable.
SPEAKER_02: You would lay this gold before the mightiest, before the most esteemed.
SPEAKER_02: You wouldn't expect to bring it around to a small and unremarkable city like Bethlehem.
SPEAKER_02: You wouldn't hand it off to a family that would, you know, use it to buy nappies and formula down in the Tesco.
SPEAKER_02: Gold shows that this is no ordinary baby.
SPEAKER_02: Gold is for a king.
SPEAKER_02: So question number one that we're answering with gifts here is who is this child who's born?
SPEAKER_02: Well, this child is the king.
SPEAKER_02: Second gift.
SPEAKER_02: Second gift is frankincense.
SPEAKER_02: And this points to what Jesus would do.
SPEAKER_02: Right?
SPEAKER_02: Jesus was was there to bring the people back to God.
SPEAKER_02: And this is an idea that's that's reflected from temple worship, Old Testament temple worship.
SPEAKER_02: It's possible that the wise men had read Leviticus chapter 2, where it was prescribed that grain offerings in the temple be mixed with oil and frankincense and offered as a pleasing aroma before the Lord.
SPEAKER_02: Maybe they'd read Psalm 141 where it says, Let my prayer be counted as incense before you.
SPEAKER_02: The idea of frankincense comes preloaded with the idea of worship, with the idea of fellowship with God, even the idea of reconciliation with God.
SPEAKER_02: If we think about what temple worship was all about, it kind of culminates in this idea of an atoning sacrifice.
SPEAKER_02: The temple was where sinful people like you and me would have gone to have their sins dealt with, to restore that relationship with God.
SPEAKER_02: And that's what Jesus, this king, came to do.
SPEAKER_02: We can see something of this in the New Testament, in the book of 1 Timothy, where Jesus is called the one mediator between God and man.
SPEAKER_02: We can see it in John's Gospel, where Jesus intercedes for the disciples, where he stands between his people and God the Father, and he advocates for them.
SPEAKER_02: Jesus came to open that door of fellowship with the Father.
SPEAKER_02: Greater fellowship and greater access than the temple could ever offer.
SPEAKER_02: So that's what this second gift points to what Jesus came to do.
SPEAKER_02: He came to bring the people to God.
SPEAKER_02: Third gift, however, and we saw something of it in the song there, shows us something of how Jesus would accomplish this.
SPEAKER_02: Right?
SPEAKER_02: We've got a king, he's gonna bring the people to God.
SPEAKER_02: Now what's he gonna do?
SPEAKER_02: Or maybe better question is what's it gonna cost him?
SPEAKER_02: Now the third gift is myrrh, and I want you to be careful because I'm not speaking in a Northern Irish accent and talking about the thing that you look at to see what you look like.
SPEAKER_02: I'm not talking about a mirror, right?
SPEAKER_02: Myrrh.
SPEAKER_02: But to dig deep for a bad pun here, the myrrh here has two faces.
SPEAKER_02: On one hand, myrrh was an expensive perfume.
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
SPEAKER_02: You can see references to it in the Old Testament suggesting abundance, celebration, extravagance.
SPEAKER_02: So, in that respect, it wouldn't have seemed out of place with these other two gifts: gold and frankincense and myrrh, happy days.
SPEAKER_02: But the other side of it is that in the ancient world, myrrh was used for embalming, for preparing a dead body.
SPEAKER_02: We can actually see this in scripture.
SPEAKER_02: We can look to John's gospel, you know, following Jesus' crucifixion.
SPEAKER_02: It says that Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy man, claimed the body of Jesus and said, Let's lay him out in my family's tomb here.
SPEAKER_02: And then another fellow called Nicodemus, who Jesus had met earlier in the story there, he comes up and he shows up with linen strips and aloes and myrrh.
SPEAKER_02: Right?
SPEAKER_02: So he is there to prepare all this stuff so that they could lay out Jesus' body with this myrrh.
SPEAKER_02: So you can see, like I say, two ideas here with the myrrh.
SPEAKER_02: It's not like, you know, the wise men turned up and had gifts of gold, frankincense, and a coffin.
SPEAKER_02: But as we look at it with the hindsight that we have in scripture here, we can see that that's what it was actually pointing to.
SPEAKER_02: So, what does this tell us about how Jesus, this king, brings the people to God?
SPEAKER_02: Well, he does this by his own death.
SPEAKER_02: By taking on the just penalty, we all deserve this was the plan.
SPEAKER_02: This was the design before the world even began.
SPEAKER_02: This was the way, to quote my favorite Christmas carol, that we can have God and sinners reconciled.
SPEAKER_02: It seems almost paradoxical, right?
SPEAKER_02: We have the first curse that we talked about, which was war is undone by the Prince of Peace, right?
SPEAKER_02: War and peace, they're opposites.
SPEAKER_02: We have the second, the second curse that was discussed there, this idea of injustice and inequality.
SPEAKER_02: This is handled by a God who knows and sees and acts for justice.
SPEAKER_02: Justice, injustice, again, opposites.
SPEAKER_02: But death, that's to be undone, that's to be reversed with a death.
SPEAKER_02: By his stripes, we're healed, by his death we get life.
SPEAKER_02: By taking on the punishment that we all deserve, Jesus gets for us the life, the blessing, and the reward that he himself deserves.
SPEAKER_02: And that's the gospel.
SPEAKER_02: That's the good news, friends.
SPEAKER_02: That is what it's all about.
SPEAKER_02: Yes, Jesus came to be a king and he came to conquer, but not in a political or military sense.
SPEAKER_02: He came to defeat sin and to destroy what the apostle Paul calls the last enemy, death.
SPEAKER_02: Yes, Jesus came like frankincense to bring to mind all of the temple ritual, but not to not to make more ritual.
SPEAKER_02: He came so that we would have something better, greater access, greater fellowship.
SPEAKER_02: And yeah, he came with the idea of death and burial, but also with the idea of resurrection and new life, the gift of God.
SPEAKER_02: So I want to make one more connection for us here, one more thing for us to think about as we close here.
SPEAKER_02: This death of Jesus that brings us life.
SPEAKER_02: That's not only talking about death in a physical sense.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we as Christians hold to the hope we have that one day, when this life is over and these bodies are no more, that we will be raised to new life, be given new resurrection bodies in eternity.
SPEAKER_02: And that is certainly a hope that we cling to, especially when you get to be as old as I am.
SPEAKER_02: But Jesus' death also speaks into our spiritual death.
SPEAKER_02: We can see in the second chapter of Ephesians in the New Testament there, it says that apart from Jesus, all of us were dead, right?
SPEAKER_02: Dead in our sins and transgressions.
SPEAKER_02: It says that we were all carrying out the agenda of the devil.
SPEAKER_02: It says that we were all of us deserving of God's wrath.
SPEAKER_02: This was our identity, this was who we were in a spiritual sense, spiritually dead.
SPEAKER_02: But it goes on and says that God, being rich in mercy, made us alive together with Christ.
SPEAKER_02: So we have life not just as something that we look ahead to far down the line in an eternal sense, but we have life in the here and now.
SPEAKER_02: And in both of those cases, in both the present and future sense of our new life in Christ, this is something that was given to us because of the life that Jesus willingly gave up for us.
SPEAKER_02: Not for anything we've done, not for anything that we are.
SPEAKER_02: This is plain and simple grace that we celebrate at Christmas.
SPEAKER_02: So that's our curse, friends.
SPEAKER_02: It goes far and wide.
SPEAKER_02: It touches all of us.
SPEAKER_02: Jesus came to make his blessings flow as far as that curse is found.