Back from Egypt

Another night. Another dream. And this time the angel brings the news Joseph has been waiting for. The danger is over. It is time to go home.

We do not know exactly where in Egypt the family lived, or for how long. It may have been months. It may have been a year or two. Long enough for a baby to learn to walk and talk, perhaps, in a land where the great river Nile rose and fell each year, and where the speech in the market was foreign. Joseph had been told to stay until God told him otherwise. So he worked, and he waited. He did not make his own plans to slip back early. He had been given a word, and he was waiting for the next one.

Back in Judea, the old king was dying. Herod, who had built palaces and fortresses and a magnificent temple, who had ruled for more than thirty years and killed anyone he feared, could not hold on to his own life. He grew very sick, and then he died. The man who had tried to destroy the child was gone. Matthew tells it in just a few words: when Herod was dead. No drama. The powerful pass away, and God's purposes go on.

Then, once again, an angel of the Lord appears to Joseph in a dream in Egypt. And the words echo the first message almost exactly. Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and go into the land of Israel: for they are dead which sought the young child's life. The same God who said go now says come back. The same careful words, the young child and his mother. Joseph is not told to take his own things first. He is reminded what matters most: the child, and the child's mother.

And Joseph does what Joseph always does. Matthew says he arose, and took the young child and his mother, and came into the land of Israel. Imagine the journey back. A little boy now, perhaps riding on his father's shoulders. A mother who has been far from her family, about to see familiar hills again. Many centuries before, God's people had come out of Egypt after long years of slavery. Now one small family comes out of Egypt too, walking toward home, carrying the one who would lead God's people out of a much deeper slavery.

The historian Josephus describes Herod's final illness in painful detail. He tells us Herod died at Jericho, his winter palace near the Jordan, and that his body was carried in a great procession to be buried at the Herodium, the fortress-palace he had built on a hilltop a few miles from Bethlehem. Most historians place his death around 4 BC, which is why Jesus' birth is usually dated a little before that.

Back from Egypt. You'll find it in Matthew chapter two, verses nineteen to twenty-one. Joseph waited for God's word, and when it came, he moved. So here is a question to carry with you. Is there something you are waiting for, and can you trust God's timing while you wait?