Day 2 - The Twelve Days of Christmas

Today's blog is an abridged version of what is being sent out to subscribers for the 12 Days of Christmas Devotional Series.  If you would like to receive the rest of the series just enter your e-mail above.

Get over it . . .

 Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared.  He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.”  Matthew 2:1-8

So we talked about how the wise men came from the East yesterday.  It is fascinating to think that floating around somewhere out there is God’s influence outside the scriptures to invite some astrologers to witness His Son’s birth.

Okay - imagine a small caravan of people winding their way through the streets of Jerusalem - it was just polite to check in with the ruler of a place to show you came in peace.

Well none of this sat well with King Herod.

To be fair, I am sure you would be a bit suspect.  In today’s terms - imagine you started a company from scratch and three human resources executives from your competition come to your office one day telling you their Onstar GPS led them to your office in search of the next CEO of your company.

It might make you feel a bit nervous about your future . . .

So Herod is a bit antsy.  But that is nothing new for Herod, he seems to have suffered all his life from paranoia.  He killed three of his sons.  Three.  Not one, not two – three.   The joke in Greek was that it was safer to be Herod’s pig [hus] than his son [huios].   Oh – and he murdered his second wife.  And not to be outdone, near to his death he gathered up dozens of influential people around Jerusalem and had them imprisoned.  He then gave orders to have them killed when he died ‘so that there will be weeping’ on the day of his death.

Wow . . . and you thought you had issues . . .

So what’s the point?

Why does God bother with people like this?  I mean, it can’t be a surprise to Him – right?  Why can’t God just wipe Herod out and move on?

Apparently that is not the way that God works.

Even for His own Son – it seems that God prefers to work through the junk, not removed from the junk.  I don’t get it, but it seems like the repeated pattern in scripture is to use people that are broken and then put them in situations that break them some more (Abraham waited 25 years to have a son, Moses got exiled, Joseph was accused of rape and thrown in prison, David was hunted by his son – the list goes on and on).  God works through the junk of life.

So if you have junk you are tired of – maybe it is really God working through it all . . .

Think of it this way:

If God didn’t make everything easy for a teenage girl who blindly trusts Him with completely changing her life forever then He isn’t going to make everything easy for you either.

Or to put it another way:

Some of the best work that God does is in the midst of pain and confusion and if you have some of that right now you might just be halfway through the kind of story that you will tell strangers ten years from now.  And the moral of your story will be “only God could have done that!”

So get over it – junk is the raw material that God uses to make our lives beautiful.