Opposition - Matthew 2:13

Matthew 2:13 (ESV)

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.”

I am conflicted as I read these last two paragraphs of Matthew 2. God protected his son, yet the sons of many died. The violence of Herod’s response to a new king is over the top. Here in the U.S. we live in a world where if someone says something I don’t like I have a right to feel oppressed and persecuted. We have no idea the pain of those mothers who lost their sons.

[18] “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.”

We claim oppression if someone uses the wrong pronoun. We have no idea what real oppression is. As believers in Jesus Christ, we can be assured of three things. 1. God will care for us. Even if it is through the Valley of the Shadow of Death we are under his protection. 2. We have an Enemy who is vilely and violently opposed to anything God would do in and through us. 3. Inconvenience, pain, and loss are an inevitable part of living in a fallen, broken world.

I realize that this is not a real upbeat, positive message for the start of a new year. Maybe it is simply a call for believers to be less like the world and more like Christ; a call to be less thin skinned and, to mix metaphors, to let the jibes of the world roll off our backs. After all, it is just broken people being broken. The real enemy is unseen. Most of what we have called oppression and persecution has not been all that violent yet. In the face of real opposition sometimes we stand and sometimes we flee, but we never give in and we never stop believing. God is with us.