When God Prepared a Way for Foreigners Centuries in Advance
As we all know, this is releasing almost a month after the Christmas festivities, but that’s okay. While God is able to work well ahead of the time He wants things to be finished, I work much later and pretend I’m early for next year. Point in fact, God does work things out for good, but sometimes He starts His good works years earlier than He needs them finished. One of the clearest cases is Joseph, who was sold into slavery and ended up saving God’s people, his own family, by working his way into Pharaoh’s good graces through the blessings of God.
Today, however, we’ll explore a case that is not near so clear. Matthew 2:1-12 tells us the story of the wise men, the magi from the east, who came to present gifts to Jesus, who they knew as king of the Jews (v. 2). When we listen to the Christmas story as often told in churches, we’re presented with this idea that the magi were practically Jewish tangential, as though they were coming to worship Jesus in full awareness that He was the Messiah, so perhaps we’ve never questioned the story. But as I was listening this Christmas season, something struck me: How did the wise men know?
Who Were the Magi and Where Did They Come From?
The wise men, unlike the stories we often hear from church, were not Gentiles who knew who God was. They weren’t coming to worship Jesus because they knew exactly who He was. These wise men most likely followed the ancient Iranian religion of Zoroastrianism, which focuses on mystical, shamanistic aspects of rituals in worship to Zoroaster. So believers they were not. In addition, they practiced astrology and witchcraft, likely in a similar manner to the Egyptian magicians mentioned during the ten plagues in Exodus. In fact, the word used to describe the magi here in the Greek is only used in one other passage in the New Testament, and it’s in Acts 13 when Paul describes a sorcerer.
The Bible describes the wise men as having come from the east. There’s no telling exactly where in the east, but we have some ideas. Church tradition indicates Persia, India, or Arabia and also that there were three, but Scripture does not give us an exact number. Based on the evidence of Scripture, it is my thought that they came from Babylonia or Assyria because what I actually questioned as this Scripture was preached is how they knew the words of the Prophet Micah.
How Did Micah’s Prophecy End up in the East?
In verse 6 of Matthew 2, the wise men say to Herod, “And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah: Because out of you will come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.” This is from Micah 5:2, which reads, “Bethlehem Ephrathah, you are small among the clans of Judah; one will come from you to be ruler over Israel for me. His origin is from antiquity of times.” This question, then, sent me into a furor of searching through the Bible to find out how a scroll of Micah’s words ended up in one of the most pagan places on earth, the heart of enemy territory for a Jewish person.
First, we have to learn of when Micah lived in order to know when he spoke those words. Micah’s ministry work occurred from around 740 to 670 BC. Interestingly, this puts him as alive and working at the same time as another of the most quoted Messianic prophets: Isaiah (739 to 681 BC). But that doesn’t really help much unless we know where Israel was at the time—or who was ruling one of the two kingdoms. For that, we have to go to Jeremiah.
Jeremiah 26:17-18 says, “Some of the elders of the land stood up and said to all the assembled people, ‘Micah the Moreshite prophesied in the days of King Hezekiah of Judah and said to all the people of Judah, “This is what the Lord of Armies says: Zion will be plowed like a field, Jerusalem will become ruins, and the temple’s mountains will be a high thicket.”’” Hezekiah’s reign is documented in 2 Kings 18-20, and while Isaiah is mentioned as speaking to the king, Micah is not. Still, we have established the two were alive and working at the same time.
From here, we can determine how Micah’s words ended up in Babylon from Isaiah’s prophecy to Hezekiah in 2 Kings 20:17-18, “’Look, the days are coming when everything in your palace and all that your predecessors have stored up until today will be carried off to Babylon; nothing will be left,’ says the Lord. ‘Some of your descendants—who come from you, whom you father—will be taken away, and they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.’”
This eventually came to pass in 2 Kings 24:13, “He also carried off from there all the treasures of the king’s palace, and he cut into pieces all the gold articles that King Solomon of Israel had made for the Lord’s sanctuary, just as the Lord had predicted.” It was then completed in 2 Kings 25 when Nebuchadnezzar ransacked Jerusalem and took not only the valuables of the temple that remained but also the chief priest and his second-in-command.
And just in case there’s any doubt that enough time had passed to record Micah’s words and have them stored in the temple or the palace or anywhere else, at minimum, 86 years passed between Isaiah’s prophecy and Jerusalem’s destruction.
Prophecy to Pagans, a Timeline of God’s Hand, Even in Destruction
To bring this back around to the beginning, let’s put together the whole timeline. In 715 BC, Hezekiah became king, and he died in 686 BC. Around the end of his reign, both Micah and Isaiah prophesized about Jesus, and Isaiah prophesized about Babylon’s invasion. Babylon invaded Judah between 597 and 587 BC, around 100 years post-prophecy. And then around 580 years later, Jesus was born, the wise men followed the stars to Bethlehem, and they spoke the words of an Israelite prophet from 700 years earlier.
Now I made the point of the wise men being pagans really strongly early on, and that was for good reason because this entire thing reveals the majesty of God’s hand that he worked a good thing out of a bad thing not just on a small scale but on the scale of more than half a century. In this simple revelation, we can see not only God’s plan to provide for His Son as the child of a carpenter and a yet-to-be-married mother but also His desire to bring Gentiles into His people, as Paul writes about later in Ephesians 2 and 3.
He used not only the prophecies of Micah and Isaiah but also the Babylon’s pagan conquests and the pagan astrology of the wise men to draw them hundreds of miles from their home to tiny Bethlehem and tiny Jesus who would eventually open up the way for them to forgo their pagan ways and come to the Way, the Truth, and the Life. God used Israel’s wickedness and disobedience to make not His people His people (Hosea 2:23) by captivity in Babylon, which not only drew His people back to Him at the time but also opened up the way for even Gentiles to show the love of Christ after the resurrection.
So if you ever doubt, like I have been doing recently, that Romans 8:28 is true, that God is really always doing good things for His people, that destruction and captivity aren’t the end, and things put in place now might have outcomes years, decades, centuries in the future—and even that things centuries, decades, and years in the past are having their outcomes now—then don’t. Look at what God did in this case and remind yourself that He truly does work all things for good, even if they’re painful and destructive. Trust Him.