Two weeks after Christmas, the trees are curbside trash and the sentimental baby Jesus is boxed away—but what if the real fury boiling in hearts (and statehouses) isn’t over a harmless doll, but a King who demands every throne? Herod smiled, said “that I too may worship,” then plotted massacre to silence the threat.
Today, Herod Lamont, Herod Murphy, Herod DeLauro, Herod Tong, and Herod Mamdani hear the same gospel and conspire just as subtly. This Sunday, uncover the biblical opposite of worship—insincere lips hiding murderous intent—and the one explosive doctrine that flips their conspiracy into your unbreakable hope. You can’t unhear this.
Christmas 2
Psalm 84; Jeremiah 31:7-14; Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a; Matthew 2:1-12
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I.
The problem I wish to examine in today’s readings is this: Why did Herod conspire to destroy the Christ Child?
It was a great problem then, back when these events took place, and perhaps the best answer is this: Herod was no friend of Christ, and neither were the people of Jerusalem.
Matthew tells us, “When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him” (Matthew 2:3).
What tremendous foreshadowing there is in that sentence: “he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him.”
Here we are, only two weeks after Christmas, and already the great events of Holy Week loom on the horizon.
It remains a great problem today. Many are troubled by the news that the child of Bethlehem is, in fact, the newborn king. A baby in a manger — harmless, sentimental, a doll in a crèche — that the unbelieving world will tolerate for a season.
But a king who intends to wage war, to wage war on every sin, on every vice, a king who will lay claim to all domains, public and private, school and family, church and state, this king will cause trouble for many.
It was also a subtle problem for the wise men. It was not immediately obvious to them that Herod was no friend of Christ. They had to be warned in a dream not to return to Herod.
It is still a subtle problem today. It is not immediately obvious to those of us who love Him, who call Him Lord, who sometimes pay a great price to bear the name Christian, why so many of our family, friends, and neighbors should hate Him.
Yet hate Him — sometimes with the same murderous fury of Herod — they often do.
II.
We have occasion once again this morning to examine the great doctrines of Predestination and Election as set forth by St. Paul in Ephesians 1.
These doctrines are placed for us by the lectionary in the context of the visit of the wise men. First they travel to see King Herod, then on to see the Christ Child. It begins as a story of human conspiracy and betrayal, and ends as one of divine choice.
Paul writes this morning about the choice made by God, “before the foundation of the world” to choose the Ephesian church in love “to be his sons through Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 1:4-5).
Paul’s hope is that the Ephesian church can begin to understand the implications of God’s choice, of this divine election that was decided in their favor.
Paul writes that he prays that God:
“May give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him…
“That you may know what is the hope to which he has called you…”
And specifically to know: “the immeasurable greatness of his power in us who believe.”
I preached last week on the power that Christians have — a power given to them by God — to govern creation.
Here Paul is speaking once again of the “immeasurable greatness” of that power, a power that is reserved for those “who believe.”
The wise men clearly believed, and their journey to meet the Christ Child was a journey guided by the “spirit of wisdom.”
That is clear from the symbolism of the star in the East, a special revelation of knowledge about Christ, and the first of two special revelations in this story.
We will examine the second one shortly.
But first we must remark on Herod’s attempt to co-opt that spirit of wisdom — to make it serve his own purpose.
After consulting his own “wise men,” the “chief priests and scribes of the people,” Herod sends the visitors from the East on their way with this ominous admonition:
“Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him bring me word, that I too may come and worship him.”
No one who hears this story, either when it was first told, or now, believes Herod is being sincere.
He would no more desire to worship Christ than he would desire to give up his own throne to this supposed newborn “king of the Jews.”
However, the wise men get what they came for. They get the answer to their question: “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews?”
Note that it is Herod himself — not the star — that sends them on to Bethlehem.
The wise men did not know the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. The star did not lead them to Bethlehem.
In fact, at this point in the story, the star hasn’t led them anywhere.
They saw it once in the East. That was enough to set them on the road to Jerusalem. Then it vanished.
Neither did Herod have any idea how to answer the visitors’ question when they got there. Nor, apparently, did the people of Jerusalem. They and their king were troubled by their ignorance.
Only after Herod assembled and consulted with “all the chief priests and scribes of the people” was the old, long-forgotten prophecy of Micah dusted off and trotted out:
“And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who will govern my people Israel.”
In other words, Herod, the chief priests, the scribes, the people of Jerusalem, and the Gentile visitors all had to go to the book, to the Scriptures, to find the Christ, which is where He’s always been.
“In the beginning was the Word…” (John 1:1).
“If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me” (John 5:46).
It is no different for us today. To find the Christ there is only one place for us to look: in the pages of Holy Writ, in the books of the Bible.
The Bible contains what Paul calls “revelation in the knowledge of him.” It grieves the Spirit when we deny this or put the word of God up on a shelf — or even on our nightstand — where we so easily forget it.
“Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him bring me word, that I too may come and worship him.”
These insincere words spoken by Herod nevertheless contain a charge every Christian ought to obey:
Go and search diligently the pages of Scripture, and when you have found Jesus in them, bring word to the rulers of the earth, so that they too may come and worship Him.
III.
Herod says words of worship, but conspires to do the very opposite of worship. He plans to murder.
A few verses later, in Matthew 2:16-18, Herod orders the death of all the male children in Bethlehem under the age of two. His aim was always to murder Jesus, he just hoped to do it quietly and efficiently.
In what has to be one of the worst abuses of scripture, Herod uses the prophetic words of Micah to locate the Christ — only to plot His death — rather than offer Him worship.
But it has been this way since almost the beginning, since Cain murdered his brother Abel, because Abel’s worship was acceptable to God, whereas Cain’s was not.
No reason is given other than God “had regard for Abel and his offering” but not for Cain’s (Genesis 4:4-5).
Neither are we meant to understand this. We are not meant to understand God’s choices.
This is why the doctrines of predestination and election are called great.
They are called great because they are beyond us and our comprehension.
Why God chooses some and not others, Jacob but not Esau, Israel but not Egypt, is not for us to know.
For this reason some of us cannot find Christ, even when — like Herod — we are told exactly where to look.
This doctrine enrages many. Like Herod, they fly into a murderous fury: Unitarians, Arminians, liberals, modernists, free-thinkers, and progressives spent the balance of two centuries cutting down all wisdom and destroying every doctrine to get at this one, the one they hate.
After all, how does one live with the knowledge that he has not been chosen by God?
But that is not Paul’s point at all. Paul’s point is that the Church should begin to understand the implications of God’s choice — His choice to choose the Church.
“He destined us in love,” Paul writes, “to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will.”
The truth is that not one of us can live, other than by a predestined, divine choice in our favor that we should live.
The other choice, the choice to die, was made for us long ago, by our sinful first parents:
“You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”
We live under predestination and election whether we like it or not, whether we want to or not. Both choices — life and death — have already been made for us, either by Adam or Christ.
The only question that remains is: whose sons and daughters are we destined to be? Sons of Adam and daughters of Eve? Or children of God the Father Almighty, through Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord?
IV.
Jesus escapes Herod the Great’s murderous intent — for now. He increased in knowledge and in years and found favor with God and men, until the time came for Him to trouble Jerusalem again, now ruled by Herod’s son, Herod Antipas.
There, on a cross outside the city wall, a miscarriage of justice, a judicial murder reveals God’s choice in Him for us: a divine decision made “before the foundation of the world.”
How you respond to this choice — God’s choice — to offer His Son for your salvation will reveal whose son or daughter you are destined to be. Are you a son of Adam or a son of God? Will you inherit eternal life or everlasting damnation?
I will not say: “The choice is yours.”
I will say: “How you respond to the cross of Christ reveals the choice that was made before the foundation of the world on your behalf.”
You are either in Adam or you are in Christ. One of these men has taken your place. Who? Which one is it? Both of them go to the grave, only one emerges triumphant. Who has died in your place? How will you know?
If you can say with Paul, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him,” then indeed it is Christ who took your place on the cross.
But if you conspire with Herod and the wise men of this world to render false worship — which is to say, to murder the truth — then you remain dead in your trespasses and sin. You will go to your grave, never to come out.
Clearly, these doctrines of Predestination and Election must be called great.
Great, because the one is greater than anything we can determine.
Great, because the other is greater than any decision man can make.
V.
Fortunately, Christ has removed these two great burdens from us. It only remains for us to go and search diligently whether or not we are His.
At what point did the wise men discover they were Christ’s, bought and purchased by His yet-to-be-shed blood? I said there was a special revelation we would come back to. Here it is.
The first was the special revelation of the guiding star, a star that led them not to Christ, but to Herod and his troubled city.
Only after they had consulted the scriptures did the star reappear — to their great joy — this time to go before them until it came to rest over the house where Jesus lived with Mary, His mother.
The second was the special revelation in a dream not to return to Herod, but to return to their own country another way.
Have you ever wondered why Paul found such success preaching Christ among the Gentiles?
Perhaps it was because the wise men were obedient to this second revelation. Returning to their own country, they did not keep quiet about what they had seen, but prepared the way of the Lord.
A few weeks ago, I preached a sermon admonishing you not to blackpill. Several of you came up to me after to ask what a “blackpill” was and what it meant to “blackpill.”
The origin of the term goes back to the 1999 Hollywood film, The Matrix. Blackpilling refers to a fatalistic and deeply pessimistic belief that all outcomes are predetermined. Escaping the death-trap of the computer-generated simulation of reality called the matrix was the theme of the film.
The film makes the case for human autonomy — represented in the story by the red pill — and argues against the predestination of the machine.
This is why the movie fails. The red pill — even when it reveals the machine’s lie — cannot set free, because it is not the truth. Only the truth can set you free.
This is why the generation raised since the film’s release is, perhaps, the most blackpilled to ever live.
They have been told that the opposite of a world in which all reality is predetermined is human autonomy.
But that means trading the predestination of the machine for the predestination of man.
As we have seen, that is something greater than our nature can handle, a choice we were never meant to make, while the one man who tried, fell — and all creation with him.
The opposite of the predestination of the machine is the biblical doctrine of Predestination and Election.
Or, as Paul put it: “[God] destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will.”
This generation — particularly this generation of men — desperately needs to be told this.
They already know the machine well enough to know it has lied to them.
They have been raised on Darwinian evolution, the unproven theory taught in every school that nature is nothing more than a machine, optimized by chance.
But they also know themselves well enough to know they can’t beat the machine at its own deterministic game.
This is why so many of you are blackpilling about politics and the prospects for saving something of this country that we love.
But this is why the gospel of Jesus Christ is good news for you and for every generation of men.
It is, as Paul tells us, the “immeasurable greatness of his power in us who believe, according to the working of his great might.”
It is, as Paul continues in the verses we did not read this morning, everything God:
“accomplished in Christ when he raised him from the dead and made him sit at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come” (Ephesians 1:20-21).
There is no corner of America, and no corner of Connecticut that does not already belong to Jesus Christ, the title to which He purchased with His blood.
This land has been conquered, not by Satan, but by the Lord Jesus Christ. It is up to us in our obedience to press the crown rights of our king.
The wise men were warned in a dream not to return to Herod, but no such special revelation applies to us.
It is now our great commission to go to Herod Lamont, Herod Murphy, Herod DeLauro, Herod Tong, and Herod Mamdani — to name only a few — and to bring them word about the Christ who was born in Bethlehem, so that they too may come and worship Him.
It is striking to me that Governor Lamont, as part of his efforts to “Keep Connecticut Affordable,” has authorized over $10 million in emergency funding for Planned Parenthood.
The governor asks us to accept that affordability must be predicated on murder. Truly, like Jerusalem of old, we have become a death-cult.
If these modern-day “Herods” will not repent and offer true worship to Christ the King, then we have all the evidence we need to know how the great doctrines of Predestination and Election have been applied to them.
But if they do — if God grants them repentance — we will see even governors and senators bow before the Child who troubled Jerusalem, and who still troubles the capitals of every state and nation to this day.
Preached on January 4, 2026, at the First Congregational Church, Woodbury, Connecticut (https://www.firstchurchwoodbury.org).
