Just Your Average Christmas Post . . .

          Every Christian blogger, and most secular bloggers, feel some sense of duty to make a Christmas post around this time of year. This year, I want to put my own twist on the stereotypical Christmas post: I want to talk about the great faith of the wise men from the East. 
          Though the wise men only take up less than one chapter in one book, Matthew 2, their story has become common knowledge even to unbelievers. They came to where Jesus was born and they gave him weird presents like franken-sense and mirrrr. If you know a little bit more of the story, you know they were sent to find the baby Jesus by King Herod, who lied about why he wanted to find Him. King Herod told the wise men that he wanted to worship the baby, who was prophesied to become a King. In reality, King Herod was insecure, jealous, and arrogant; he wanted to find this tiny baby and kill him, because King Herod had no intentions of losing his power as King. (Shout out to my youth group and Jessica George from One80 in Sandusky for that one!) 
          Because it is completely contradictory to my nature to let small details go without correcting them, I have to fix a common misconception. Most people believe that the wise men visited Jesus on the night of his birth. I thought so too, until I read Matthew 2:11 a little more carefully. It says that they visited Jesus in a house rather than in a stable, where Jesus was born. Not critical to our understanding of the Gospel, but still. 
          Now that that's out of the way, let's get into the real meat and potatoes of this story. The wise men had every reason to believe and obey King Herod. These people took Kings verrrrry seriously -- they could be sentenced to death just for sneezing too loudly. So when King Herod told them to return to him when they found the baby, that's exactly what they were going to do. They were going to tell King Herod exactly where the baby was, and King Herod was going to kill Him. Instead, these wise men had a dream that told them not to return to Herod. 
          Let me tell you, if I did everything that my dreams told me to do, they would lock me up and throw me in a psych ward. But this was a different kind of dream. The wise men knew this dream was from God, and they listened to that dream. For that, I would dare to put them right up there with every other person in the Bible who risked their life for the will of God, because they were in very real danger of being killed by King Herod if he found out what they had done. 
          So often Satan whispers into our ear, telling us to sin, and we give in. When God is shouting at us, telling us to do the right thing, we pray about it to make sure it's really God. The story of the wise men is one of intense faith in the God of the universe; they didn't question Him, they just did as they were told. I dare you to let this story bolster your faith; when God is telling you to do something, don't question it! Listen, and obey!