When God Doesn’t Make Sense
Note: This sermon was preached by Associate Pastor Jeff Schultz at First Free St. Louis.
Introduction: How are things going for you? Is life working out the way you planned? Maybe things are going well, but you still fear that if you don’t keep it together, things will fall apart? We follow a God who doesn’t always (or often!) do things the way we would – what makes sense to us is often not the way God chooses. As we come back today to the story of Jesus’ birth and infancy, we find that the God who has promised to provide a king and savior has some very strange ideas about how to best fulfill his plans.
But we have a problem in hearing what God wants to say: we’ve heard the stories so many times that they’ve lost their power. We have the benefit of 2,000 years’ perspective, so it makes sense to us. But Mary and Joseph lived this, and in the middle of the story, it seldom makes sense. Almighty God is born as a baby to a poor couple? The savior of the world flees for his own life? The king to sit on David’s throne doesn’t grow up in the palace in Jerusalem, but in a carpenter shop in Galilee?
Pretend with me that you’ve never heard this story before and you don’t know how it’s going to turn out as we read Matthew 2:13-23:
When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”
So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”
When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. 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.”
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 were trying to take the child’s life are dead.”
So he got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus 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, and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets: “He will be called a Nazarene.”
What in the world is God doing? Have you ever asked yourself that question? I sure have. At one point in my marketing career, I realized I wanted to take my skills and education and use them in Christian ministry. God opened an opportunity to work for a Christian relief organization, and I knew this was what God intended for me. We started looking for homes, told people we were going to be leaving, and then one week before I was to start, we got a call saying that the job offer was rescinded. The ministry had been burned in the New Era Philanthropy scandal and lost a lot of money. All hiring was frozen. As quickly as God had opened that door, he slammed it shut. We had no idea what He was doing, and it hurt tremendously. God just doesn’t always make sense. He does the most ridiculous, unexpected things and asks us to trust him. God’s ways are not our ways, and his thoughts are not our thoughts. What seems to make sense to us is often not the way God chooses.
At that point, when things seem to be going all wrong, we are faced with a choice – to trust God and take him at his at his word when it doesn’t seem to make any sense, or to take matters into our own hands to make things turn out the way we want. So here’s the big idea from God’s Word: God is always at his work, so we can trust him in all our circumstances: in comfort and safety, in loss and death, even in the middle of nowhere special.
Now I know what some of you are thinking: “Sure, God was always at work in Jesus’ life because he was the Messiah. But I’m just an ordinary person.” It’s true of course that God had a unique plan for his Son. But what was God’s purpose for Jesus? Paul tells us in Romans chapter 8 that “in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers” (Romans 8:28-29). And Peter assures us: “You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” (1 Peter 2:9).
God’s plan for Jesus is that he would (re)create a new humanity to reflect his glory and declare his praises – which means God does have a plan for me. Of course, God was at work in Jesus’ life in a unique way. But we must understand that God is just as committed to his work in us as to his work in his Son. You and I – the church – we are the completion or fulfillment of God’s work through his Son. You are what God had in mind when he sent Jesus!
Paul assures us that “He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 1:6) and that the very power that God exerted in raising Christ from the dead is at work in us and for us (see Ephesians 1:18-20)! Doesn’t that excite you, encourage you, and motivate you to trust God in all your circumstances?
Of course, it’s easy for us to forget or disbelieve that God is at work all the time. We forget God’s faithfulness and goodness, and Satan comes to whisper in our ear, “You can’t really trust him, you know. Just when you need him, he’s going to abandon you. That’s how he is. Take control of things and make it work out. You know best. You deserve better.”
That’s why these examples from Jesus’ life are helpful. Here we see God at work in the most unlikely circumstances. And if God can be at work for good in what Jesus lived through, then we can trust Him to be at work in our lives, as well. The very first reassurance we have is that …
- God is at work in comfort and safety.
The first sign of God’s work on behalf of Jesus is his protection of his very life. Herod is threatening to kill the Messiah, so God sends his son to Egypt where they are to remain until it’s safe to return. Matthew comments that this is what Hosea was talking about when he said, “Out of Egypt I called my Son.” The book of Hosea is the story of the prophet who acted out in his life a parable of Israel’s unfaithfulness. The quote comes from Hosea 11:1, 2: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. But the more I called Israel, the further they went from me.”
We think of Egypt as the place of slavery and affliction. It certainly was that. But beyond physical bondage, Egypt held a power over God’s people in the desire of their hearts. Remember how in their desert wanderings the people rebelled against God and complained that Egypt was better to them than the Lord himself? In times of trouble, the people turned to Egypt for help instead of looking to God. Egypt represents slavery to sin, but even more the power and pleasure of this world, the pride and glory of humanity in opposition to God. Egypt was a constant snare for the children of God. For Mary and Joseph, Egypt would have been scary at first, but there was also a large Jewish community in Egypt, and nobody in Egypt was trying to kill them. It would have been natural to get comfortable and maybe even start to forget why they were there and what God was up to.
And just like the people in Hosea’s day, we wander away from God. They were more concerned with living the good life than following God, so they turned to idols as a way to make life work on their terms. And yet, in spite of their rejection of God, he still reaches out to them in love, as we see further in Hosea chapter 11:
“How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? ¼ My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused. I will not carry out my fierce anger, nor will I turn and devastate Ephraim. For I am God, and not man– the Holy One among you. I will not come in wrath.” (Hosea 11:8-9)
Egypt is not the promised land and can never be, no matter how good it is. So God has to lead his people out of slavery into the freedom to serve and worship him alone. Jesus fulfills in himself everything that Israel was supposed to be but failed in. He is the perfect Son of God who hears his father’s voice and answers in love and faithfulness. He provides the obedience that we lack. God is at work in the midst of comfort and safety for a greater purpose.
We get to a place of comfort and safety and we want to stay there and just enjoy it. But if God is our greatest good, we have to ask ourselves how we are using what God has entrusted to us for his purposes. Do we really praise God because he is good all the time and his love endures forever, or because we are so blessed and prosperous? It’s not that God doesn’t want us to enjoy life – He doesn’t want us only to enjoy life. We are created to glorify and enjoy Him forever. As C. S. Lewis observed, “Put first things first and second things are thrown in. Put second things first and you lose both first and second things.”
For many of you, life is good. You have strong marriages, good kids, nice careers, big homes, and (relatively) solid retirement accounts. You are intelligent, articulate, attractive and successful. Many of you have positions of authority and influence over others. So where does God fit into all that? We like Egypt because we don’t need to trust God there. If we have a problem, we solve it. If we have a need, we answer it. If we have a desire, we fulfill it – all in our own power and wisdom.
There’s nothing wrong with having a season of comfort, ease and safety. But that is not the goal God has called us to. The danger with safety and comfort is that they dull our edges; they make it easy for us to forget why we’re here in the first place. God has much greater purposes than our personal satisfaction and happiness – namely, his mission to the world, and our growth and maturity. God is at work in the midst of our comfort and safety, God is at work when our comfort and safety lead us astray from him, and God is at work to draw us back to him from idolatry of success, comfort and pleasure. But are we at work with God?
Many of us would choose to live in the midst of comfort and safety, if given the option. Yet God doesn’t always choose that path for us or ask us our preference. We live in a broken world with sinful people, and so we all experience pain and suffering. It was no different in Jesus’ life.
- God is at work in suffering and death.
After Mary and Joseph flee to Egypt, Herod realizes that he had been outwitted by the Magi, and he is furious. He orders the death of all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity about Jesus’ age. Then what was said through the prophet was fulfilled, from Jeremiah 31: “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.’” Jeremiah is writing after Hosea, in the context of God’s wrath poured out on Israel – he sends foreigners to destroy his people and carry them off to captivity. Rachel, the figurative mother of Israel, weeps over her children who are no more in the land.
Here we see the reality of evil and brokenness in the world. Matthew says that this statement was ultimately realized in this brutal event surrounding Jesus’ life. The deaths of a few dozen or even a hundred children in Palestine would hardly warrant notice in a place and age known for cruelty and bloodshed. Fallen human wills are undeniably corrupt, and the human mind is remarkably dexterous in willful ignorance of evil. We have all just lived through the most bloody, murderous century in the history of mankind., and we live in a society where the most dangerous place for a child is in its mother’s womb, yet most of us can’t be bothered to speak up or act out in defense of the weakest member of society.
We live with global nuclear tensions, radical terrorism, political corruption, corporate greed, racism, violence, and more immediately with our own personal pains and losses–broken relationships, absent parents, abusive spouses, divorce, unemployment, cancer, failing health, and the suffering and death of loved ones.
We live in a world that is scarred with the imprint of our brokenness. Is it possible that God could be at work in the midst of pain, loss and death?
“This is what the LORD says: ‘Restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears, for your work will be rewarded,’ declares the LORD. “They will return from the land of the enemy. So there is hope for your future,” declares the LORD.” (Jeremiah 31:15-17).
Israel failed by turning away from God and bringing death on themselves. But Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promise, not just to bring the captives back to Palestine, but more importantly, to set them free once and for all from the power of sin, death and the grave. Listen to these promises that God gives his people in the midst of death, destruction and despair.
“The days are coming,” declares the LORD, “when I will plant the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the offspring of men and of animals. Just as I watched over them to uproot and tear down, and to overthrow, destroy and bring disaster, so I will watch over them to build and to plant,” declares the LORD ¼ “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.” (Jer. 31:27-28, 33).
The death of those children in Bethlehem was not an accident, any more than the deaths of God’s people during Jeremiah’s time, or the death of God’s son on a cross. God, in a sovereign wisdom we cannot fully understand, is able to override evil intent and promises that He is at work to bring good out of sin and death.
Andrew and Lisa lived across the hall from us in seminary. They were like us in many ways – a young couple, working through school, raising a family. But Andrew and Lisa had also lost 2 children to a genetic disorder that made it likely that any further children they conceived would not live. God gave them one boy of their own, but then had closed Lisa’s womb. Yet they took the pain of that disappointment and turned it into something beautiful for God: they became foster parents for an African-American girl, then adopted her. And when her mother became pregnant again, they adopted that child. They continue to provide foster care for underprivileged children and have adopted 3 of the kids as their own. God is at work in painful circumstances in ways we can’t understand.
At times he even uses evil people to accomplish his purposes, like the soldiers in the story. They got the orders to kill all the little boys. Instead of defending and affirming life, like Andrew and Lisa did, they closed their eyes to the pain around them and avoided any responsibility for it. To those men, it was probably just another unpleasant job they had to do. For the women of Bethlehem, all they knew was the immediacy of their grief. They must have cried out to God in confusion, anger and bitterness. Some of you are living there right now. Life doesn’t make sense and you just want the pain to go away. Are you able to trust God in your pain and loss? Especially in what seems to be pointless pain? God promises that even though we don’t always understand, he is at work in our pain and loss.
And yet as bad as pain is, it’s almost worse to feel nothing. Life can seem like little more than boring routine, pleasant meaninglessness. And yet again in Jesus life we see that ¼
- God is at work in the middle of nowhere.
After Mary and Joseph return from Egypt, they go back to their home in Nazareth. Maybe many of us are feeling some of what they experienced. Christmas is over, the angels aren’t singing, the presents are all opened, and we’ve eaten just about all the food we can for the rest of the year. What’s the point of it all? It was nice, but now it’s back to life as usual. Are any of you experiencing post-holiday let-down?
“He will be called a Nazarene” is not a direct quote from the Old Testament. Matthew uses a different construction in the Greek, making it clear this is an indirect statement. Here is what Matthew is getting at: Galilee is not exactly the center of the world, and Nazareth was a despised place, an object of scorn and derision. “Nazarene” was almost a synonym for crude, backwards, unimportant. Matthew is saying that many prophets foretold the Christ would be ridiculed and rejected as a nobody. We might put it this way: “This is just what the prophets meant when they said he would be rejected like a Nazarene!” We see this later when Philip first meets Jesus and runs to tell Nathanael, whose answer drips with scorn: “Philip found Nathanael and told him, ‘We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote – Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.’ ‘Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?’ Nathanael asked.” (John 1:45-46)
The point is that God is at work in what seems to be the middle of nowhere. In the midst of jobs we’re not excited about, daily routines, bills to pay, notes to write, homework to do, soccer practice, dirty diapers – in the midst of everything that we think is unimportant and mundane, God is there at his work.
I struggled with believing this during the past week. I’ve had this message in my mind for a while, but it just wouldn’t come together. At times, I didn’t even want to write this message. It felt like my prayers weren’t being answered and I doubted that God could use this. It’s just been hard. The words haven’t come out the way I wanted. I feel frustrated and tired. So I have had to trust that God has been at work in some way I don’t see. I will have to trust him more than I trust myself and my ability to craft a good sermon. I have had to believe that he has been at work in spite of what it has felt like.
One of the dangers in the way we look at the Christian life is that we expect that when we are where God wants us to be and doing what he wants, then life will be rewarding, fulfilling and energizing. I have at times experienced this, and I imagine you may have too. But we also know it doesn’t necessarily work that way. You see, there is a difference between joy and enthusiasm. One can clean the bed sores of a hospice patient with love and joy and not feel particularly enthused. Sometimes God calls us to do work that we just don’t find interesting or important. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re out of God’s will – it means that God’s highest purpose for us is not our enjoyment of what we do, but our enjoyment of him in the context of what we do.
Are you living in the midst of rejection, frustration, defeat, loneliness, or the fear that after everything is done, it just doesn’t amount to much? God was at work for 30 years of Jesus’ growing up in Nazareth, in the middle of nowhere. And yet all this happened to fulfill God’s plan for his Son. Who we are in Christ and what we do does matter, even if doesn’t feel that way, even if we don’t understand, even if nobody but God will ever see. The attitudes with which we go through the small things that make up our days are what count. Kindness, patience, gentleness, faith, hope, and perseverance are what matters. We live in the middle of the story and have to have faith that God is at work in the middle of nowhere important.
We’ve seen several different characters in this story. One of the interesting traits that we will continue to see in Matthew’s gospel is that he puts us in the middle of the story and often doesn’t finish it for us. He leaves it open-ended because he wants us to identify with the characters and write our own personal conclusion. Matthew’s recurring question for us is, “What are you going to do in response?” What do the people in this story say about God and us?
- Who are you? How do you fit into this story?
Jesus – the perfect Son of God. He is our model, the one we are look to for our example. We aren’t like him yet, but are we becoming more like him by God’s work in us?
Mary and Joseph – unsure, but trusting in God; faithful, obedient, and likely confused; sinful and failing, but still moving forward in faith.
The wailing women of Bethlehem – deeply wounded, confused and angry. You’ve suffered loss and are in danger of letting it define you or embitter you towards God. Something you value highly has been taken away, and now you have to examine what really is most important and whether you can trust God.
The soldiers – just ordinary people doing their jobs. It’s just enough to get through life. You can’t be bothered with considerations of morality, eternal life, justice, truth, mercy.
Herod – the spirit of anti-Christ, who seeks to destroy the Messiah. Maybe some of you are actively and violently resisting God in your lives right now.
Wherever we find ourselves, God is calling out to every single one of us and is working in all the events of our lives to draw us to Him in faith, love and obedience. He is orchestrating everything that happens to us for his own good will and our growth in spiritual maturity and Christlikeness.
Whatever circumstances you are in – comfort, blessing and safety; suffering, pain and loss; routine – we are being shaped and formed into the image of Christ. So the question is, do we really believe that God is at work for us? Is God really trustworthy?
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Sovereignty of God