“When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son” (Hosea 11:1, NIV).
“Out of Egypt?” But wasn’t Jesus a Jew? Wasn’t He born in Bethlehem? Wasn’t He a Nazarene? Yes to all of these.
According to the passage we’ve already looked at in Micah: “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for Me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times” (Micah 5:2).
How does all this mesh? Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Let’s look at Luke 2:1-7a: “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to his own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son.”
Mary and Joseph were from Nazareth: “God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary” (Luke 1:26-27).
How’d Jesus come “out of Egypt?” In Matthew 2:1 we read: “After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, ‘Where is the one who has been born King of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him’” (Matthew 2:1-2).
The idea of royal strangers coming from another land to worship a baby king terrified Herod! After the “wise men” failed to return and report to him the whereabouts of the infant king, Herod consulted with his astrologers to determine the time when the Christ Child was born and then “gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under” (Matthew 2:16).
But God sent an angel to warn Joseph: “‘Get up,’ [the angel] said, ‘Take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you’” (Matthew 2:13).
So Joseph took Mary and little Jesus and fled to Egypt. “After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt” (Matthew 2:19) and told him it was safe to take the family back to Israel. Apparently Joseph’s first plan was to go back to Judea, the region in which Bethlehem was situated. “But when [Joseph] heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there” (Matthew 2:22). So instead, Joseph took his family to “the district of Galilee, and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth” (Matthew 2:22b-23).
No other child could have fulfilled even these few prophecies. Jesus IS the Son of God! Celebrate Him. Share Him. Thank Him.
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