Text: Matthew 2:13–23
Preacher: Pastor Brian Sauvé
No Peace With Dragons
Turn with me to Matthew 2, and get your eyes on verse 13, if you would. Thanks to Pastor Dan, for taking us through the first 12 verses of the chapter last week.
We’ll be grabbing onto things right where he left off, right after the magi from the East have come to worship the lowborn King Jesus, Gentiles already streaming to the Lord, bearing the treasures of the nations, right after they are warned in a dream not to go and tell the tyrant-king Herod where the child is.
Continuing straight through that story, look with me at Matthew 2:13–23. This is the Word of the Living God:
“Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, “Out of Egypt I called my son.”
Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah:
“A voice was heard in Ramah,
weeping and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.”But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, “Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child’s life are dead.” And he rose and took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there, and being warned in a dream he withdrew to the district of Galilee. And he went and lived in a city called Nazareth, so that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene.”
-Matthew 2:13–23
Thus ends the reading of God’s Word; may he write it on our hearts by faith. Let’s pray.
As Dan unfolded last week in the first 12 verses of Matthew chapter two, the birth of Jesus was the unsheathing of a great sword in the world: Here was a King—a cosmic King, whose origins, as the prophet Micah proclaimed, were from ancient of days, and as Ezekiel foretold, a Shepherd-King over the people of God.
And the tyrant king, Herod, got what many Christians today do not—that this Christ, this Messiah, was no apolitical spiritual guru come to establish some merely “spiritual” kingdom, with no ramifications for the ways and rulers of this age.
No, here was the Son of Psalm 2, the one whom kings and princes are commanded to kiss, lest God’s wrath be kindled and they perish along the way. This King came to bring a totalizing, all-authority-in-heaven-and-on-earth kind of Kingdom, one which would ultimately topple all earthly rule that did not bend the knee to him.
What we see in the second part of this story is how the tyrant-king Herod responds to this cosmic threat to his own wicked rule, and we see it here in three episodes—verse 13 to 15, verse 16 to 18, and verse 19 to 23—each of which, as Matthew will take great pains to show us, is a fulfillment of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible.
Matthew is weaving his gospel onto the unfinished edge of the Old Testament tapestry; he would have us see that there is no thread in the story of Jesus, that—if you tug on it—won’t twist its way back through the pages and weave of the Hebrew Bible.
Israel Becomes Egypt (13–15)
First, look with me at verses 13–15, and we will see how Jesus relieves the story of Israel and the Exodus.
“Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, “Out of Egypt I called my son.”
-Matthew 2:13–15
Think about what how this passage works. The King of Israel—the one who was born to sit on David’s throne forever, restore the kingdom, and establish peace—is here. And yet, the reigning king of Israel, Herod, sees this not as good news, but as a calamitous threat.
And so God warns Joseph in a dream to flee—where? To Egypt.
This is shocking for two reasons: First, because this passage is so clearly replaying one of the most pivotal story arcs of the nation of Israel, but second, because of how God has reversed one key detail in the story to show how utterly wicked his people, Israel, have become in their idolatry.
The story begins with threads that weave their way back to the Joseph of Genesis. Here in Matthew 2, Joseph, Jesus’ adoptive father, is like the Joseph of the first book of the Bible, Genesis. Both are godly men given divinely appointed dreams to lead them. Both bring their families to Egypt, yet both come back again.
And if you remember Joseph’s story in Genesis, you know that it was through him that the small family of Israel come to dwell in Egypt. But after a few generations, the Egyptians enslaved the Israelites. They grew to a nation in captivity, and the Egyptians became so fearful of their vigor that Pharaoh commanded their male children to be killed—and so God sent Moses to demand freedom for his people, judging Egypt and her gods, and bringing his people out and on their way to the Promised Land, Israel.
That is exactly the context that Hosea 11:1 is referring to initially: God calling his son, Israel, out of Egypt to journey towards the Promised Land. So Jesus is reliving the Exodus, standing in for the entire nation of Israel as the true Son of God.
But see the reversal, because it is a reversal in which God gives Israel under Herod a blistering rebuke: Israel has become like an Egypt. Israel’s king is the pharaoh, the one demanding male children be murdered. Israel has become a denizen of false gods. And the true Israel incarnate, Jesus, has to flee first to Egypt for protection from Israel before God can call his Son out of Egypt and back to the Land.
So in using Hosea in this setting, God rebukes Israel even as he shows us that Jesus has come to save people just like Israel by fulfilling Israel’s covenant—and pursuing the lost sheep of Israel.
However, the next section of the text shows us just how deep into the bleakness of human sin Jesus has descended in order to save us.
Victory Through Lamentation (16–18)
Look again at verses 16,
“Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah:
“A voice was heard in Ramah,
weeping and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.”-Matthew 2:16–18
And so Herod become one more in the long line of humanity’s kings who allied themselves to the Serpent and raged against God and his image bearers, slaughtering dozens of babies and toddlers in order to cling to his crown.
This shows us that Herod, of course, got it. He understood what Jesus’ coming meant—at least in some warped way. He understood that the coming of Israel’s true King meant the end of the line for the dragon’s puppet-kings. And so he did what dragons always do, and he sought to rule by bloody devouring.
Yet God was even using this horror to fulfill his unchanging Word, this time from the prophet Jeremiah.
This quotation comes from Jeremiah 31, which is, surprisingly if all you read is the part of it Matthew quotes, an exultational kind of text. It sits in the context of rejoicing at Israels return from exile, with the prophet again describing the returning Israelites as God’s firstborn son, as a virgin, that this return is God’s salvation.
But Matthew quotes the bleakest couplet in the chapter, which is an allusion to the death of the patriarch Jacob’s beloved Rachel near Bethlehem in Genesis 35 in great sorrow. The context of Jeremiah calls for us to imagine Rachel’s sorrow at watching her children, Israel, go into exile, many of whom would die in captivity in Babylon.
So what is the point of Matthew calling this chapter of Jeremiah 31 to mind? Well, Matthew knows that his Jewish readers will bring the whole chapter to mind—that they will think about how this note of sorrow sits in the celebration of salvation for the exiles in Jeremiah 31.
And so he would have them understand that Jesus’ salvation is going to bring jubilation as well, yet that jubilation will be at the cost of his own blood. It will be the result of a battle fought, with blood shed, with innocents thrown down and defiled.
That Jesus is going to save, but he is going to bring the exile to an end through his own exile. As the innocents are slaughtered by the wicked-king, so Jesus will himself be slaughtered—but he will triumph in his death.
A Holy Branch Buds (19–23)
Finally, Matthew leads us to tug on one more thread in Jesus’ story, drawing us back into the tapestry of the Hebrew Bible. Look with me at verse 19,
“But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, “Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child’s life are dead.” And he rose and took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there, and being warned in a dream he withdrew to the district of Galilee. And he went and lived in a city called Nazareth, so that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene.”
-Matthew 2:19–23
There are a few things that you have to understand in this last episode to see what Matthew is doing. Maybe you noticed this, but there is no corresponding verse to go with Matthew’s claim that Jesus being called a Nazarene is a fulfillment of prophecy.
That’s because their isn’t a verse in the Old Testament that says “He will be called a Nazarene.” So what is Matthew getting at?
First, you need to know something that is going to maybe sound obvious, but that’s important to say out loud: Matthew isn’t mistaken, here. He’s not simply unaware that there is no such sentence in the Old Testament.
If you understand the exquisite, rich depth of Old Testament knowledge on display in Matthew’s gospel, you would never say that. He is a master of the Hebrew Bible. Not to mention that that kind of conclusion would make us functionally deny the inerrancy of Scripture. So what’s going on?
We understand what Matthew is doing by noting a few things:
First, he phrases verse 23 differently than verse 15 and 17. In verses 15 and 17, he says that what Jesus fulfills what a specific prophet had spoken, followed by a quotation from that prophet. But here in verse 23, he says rather that Jesus went to live in Nazareth, “...so that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene.”
Jesus is here being presented not just as the fulfillment of a few scattered prophecies, but of the speech of “the prophets,” clueing us in on Matthew’s purpose here, which is to draw together multiple themes and pictures from the prophets through this Nazarene language.
To get this, you have to see that Matthew is doing some Hebrew wordplay around a few related Hebrew terms. The term brings together both the language of holy warriors and of the righteous branch from the stump of dead Israel.
In Numbers 6 and 16, we have a group called the Nazirites, a related term, that were a kind of set apart, holy warriors. So Jesus relationship to this term shows him to be a set apart, holy warrior. But also, Jesus’ hometown, Nazareth, is almost identical to the Hebrew word for “branch,” which immediately calls to mind the prophecy of Isaiah 11:1, that “...there shall come forth a Rod from the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.”
Both of those Nazarene related ideas—a holy one and a branch—intersect in Isaiah 4:3, a passage that describes the restoration of God’s people after the exile. So what? Well, the prophets anticipate Messiah as a Holy Warrior, a living Branch from the dead stump of Jesse, of David’s line, of rebellious and exiled Israel.
And most shocking of all: These two massively glorious things would come together in a Messiah born in backwater Nazareth! Nazareth was a tiny, insignificant town of mostly laborers and builders, like Joseph and like Jesus most likely as he grew up.
Our God came in glorious humility. He is the living branch of a royal line—but one growing up in humble circumstances, as from a dead and inglorious stump of a once great tree. But this Branch will grow up taller than David ever did—he will be a world-swallowing tree. We are, in fact, all branches from the Branch if we are in Christ. We are all shoots from this new growth.
The Baby-Devouring Dragon
That is the story. What I’d like to do now is to zoom out from this story and show you how these events—this war of the tyrant-king Herod against the Shepherd-King Jesus—is actually the culmination of the only war that has ever been fought in the history of the cosmos.
Every other war, murder, genocide, and atrocity in the history of the cosmos is just a battle in this one war: It is the war of the baby-devouring dragon and the Seed of the Woman. Though Israel has become like an Egypt—though Israel’s ruler is allied with the same baby-devouring dragon that Pharaoh was—God will preserve the Seed of the Woman even as he triumphs over the dragon king.
I keep using the image of a tapestry to illustrate the relationship between the first and second testament, the Old and New Testament—that Matthew is weaving his gospel on to the unfinished edge of the Old Testament.
You might ask, “If the Bible, the two testaments, are one tapestry, what picture is woven onto it? What would I see if I backed up and saw the whole thing?”
One way you could answer that would be to say that the tapestry depicts a holy warrior stamping on the head of a serpentine dragon with a baby in its mouth.
See, there is a baby-devouring dragon lurking on the edges and in the dark corners of the story of the Bible—a baby devouring dragon who hates God and therefore hates everything that reminds him of God. This dragon therefore hates man with special hatred, since man was made in the image of God.
This dragon fell from glory, desiring to be as God himself, lifted up in pride, and this dragon incited our first human parents to sin in the same way: Disobey God and you will be as gods. He was there, lurking in the garden.
And we believed him, and we fell, and we decided that we were gods, and we did whatever we found we desired in our hearts, and we found that our hearts were full of evil. We allied with the dragon, and we became like him.
But God promised that he would crush this dragon’s head, that he would send a Seed, born of the Woman, to crush his head—even at great cost to himself.
And so the story unfolds to the Flood, with God’s image increasingly defaced and degraded, the thoughts and intentions of their hearts were only evil all the time. So God sent death in judgment, and wiped out his defaced image.
Yet, remembering his promise, he preserved the line of the Woman’s Seed, rescuing righteous Noah and his family through the flood, and so the line continues to Abraham. God calls Abraham out of dragon-worshiping Ur of the Chaldees, and he doubles down on his promise—that now we know this Seed will come through Abraham’s line.
But Abraham’s line is enslaved in Egypt, and the dragon rears his head again, showing his particular loathing for babies. Pharaoh, terrified of this God-blessed and vigorous people, demands the murder of the Hebrew baby boys.
Yet God preserves his people, judges the dragon and its worshipers, and sends his people off towards the Promised Land. But the Promised Land is occupied, enemy territory. Many of the nations that sprang from Noah in Genesis 10 have gone into Canaan and worshiped demon gods there. This land is populated with baby-devourers and demon gods.
This is the baby-devouring dragon at work. Nearly every ancient pagan religion has included not only human sacrifice, but particularly the sacrifice of infants. They would lay their infant children in the hands of giant statues of their gods, superheated with fire, to burn their children as offerings to demon gods. In 1 Kings 16, we even hear of a king who sacrificed his firstborn son to please the gods, building his little body into the foundation of his city, and his youngest son’s body as he set the gates of that city.
Demon gods have always demanded babies. Now, I know we’re modernists. And so one of the things we tend to do with stories like that is to say, “Oh, they were so primitive back then. They believed in these false gods.”
But where did that come from? The serpent. The dragon. That's where it came from. It came from the undying war of the devil, the dragon who hates God and therefore hates everything that reminds him of God, especially babies made in the image of God, because God promised that a baby would be born to crush his head.
The Canaanites and Assyrians and the rest, some of them had real, demonic experiences and worship real, bloodthirsty demon gods—just like we do today. What do you think abortion is? Do you think abortion is just a medical decision? No, abortion is sacralized demon worship. That’s what it is.
It’s a demonic inversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ, where Christ said “My life for yours,” we tell our babies, “Your life for mine!” Rather than presenting our bodies as living sacrifices to God in spiritual worship, we present the lives of our babies on the altar of human sacrifice, shedding their blood for ours, their body broken for ours.
That's what it is. It's demonic. It's absolutely vile, sacral, demonic worship—and it came from the baby-devouring dragon.
And God gave the Canaanites 400 years to repent of it as Israel languished in slavery, but they didn’t. So God sends his people, holy warriors, to slay the dragons, burn the green groves, smash up the Asherah poles, but they don’t finish the work.
Rather, they became baby devourers themselves and worshiped the dragon. They broke covenant, broke faith, even some kings practicing sacral, demonic worship. So God sent them to be enslaved by many nations, ultimately a nation called Rome.
And listen: Into that story, that story of this baby-devouring dragon and his enslavement of mankind, God sends a baby. He sends a baby born of a virgin woman. And gentile magi come to worship this child. But the dragon rages all the more, the kind of Israel allies with the dragon and murders the babies.
Yet though Israel had become like an Egypt, though Israel had become like the baby-devouring nations of Canaan, like a wicked Pharaoh, God would preserve the Seed of the Woman. In fact, though Israel had become a dragon, this baby was Israel. A better one. The true Israel.
And this true Israel would do what the old Israel had failed to do, and he would crush the dragon’s head, even though it would cost him his heel. The Word of God incarnate had come to fulfill the Word of God, written, and triumph over the serpent and his baby-devouring, wicked kings. So let me leave you with this, two demands of these things on us:
1. Beware, lest we become, as Israel did, like baby-devouring Egypt.
John actually does this in the book of Revelation, where he portrays Jerusalem as the whore of Babylon, and as wicked Sodom. And he says to his people, “Come out of her!”
We need to hear that today: “Come out of her!” Don’t submit ourselves to be ruled by and captured by and deceived by the gods of this age, in league with the baby-devouring dragon—and so become participants in the baby-devouring dragon worship that our world is drunk with.
Why? Because our Lord came to crush the head of that dragon! And he’s cast him out and he’s bound him and he has invaded his fallen kingdom and he is colonizing it with his own, better, undying Kingdom, of whose increase there will be no end. Because our King came to bind the dragon, the strong man, and to plunder his house.
And number two:
2. We are not merely to come out of her, but to join in the plunder of her house.
That’s what we just saw last week, right? The Gentile wise men bringing treasures before the King. We are called to do the same, to plunder the nations and bring their treasures into the storehouse of God, the Kingdom of God, to lay them at the feet of this King who has slain the dragon.
And that treasure, the nations’ treasure—what does that mean, fundamentally? It’s the people! It’s the people of Ogden. It’s the people of Layton, SLC, Weber County, Utah. We are not of the dragon’s kingdom, we are not to participate in its fallen ways but to come out of them, but we do so even as we live in, colonize, and plunder that fallen Kingdom by way of the preaching of the gospel and the discipleship of the nations. We plunder her house and bring her treasures before God.
And I want you to believe this deeply in your bones. I believe this deeply in my bones: The Seed of the Woman has crushed the head of the baby-devouring dragon. He’s done it. It is finished. Christ is victorious.
Colossians tells us that God has disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to shame by triumphing over them in Christ. He has taken away the sin and guilt that gave the dragon its power over us, nailing our record of debts to the cross of Christ, and killing it.
So if your hands, like mine, have had the blood of sin on them, believe this in your bones: The Seed of the Woman has shed his blood to cleanse the blood of sin from our hands. Christian, you are clean in Christ, robed in white, and filled with the Spirit.
And so may we believe the things so deep down in our bones that we would sing like the saints in Revelation, “We have conquered the dragon by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony, for we loved not our lives, even unto death.”
Believe it. Forsake the dragon. And go plunder his fallen kingdom.