Wisemen Judge by God’s Standards
We at Cities Church love to celebrate the full, twelve days of Christmas. And even beyond the 12th day of Christmas is January 6, the feast of Epiphany. Since Epiphany was this last Monday, I will focus on the visit of the Magi, or wisemen, to Bethlehem.
Notice the words Matthew uses to describe their entrance in Matthew 2:11,
“And going into the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him…”
There were two physical actions: they fell down and “worshiped.” The term proskuneo almost always denotes bowing or prostrating oneself. I suppose we have the wise men kneeling in a Christmas pageant, but this is the ancient world and I would wager that they made a full prostration, like the Muslim prayer motion. They did not just speak to Mary and Joseph and politely ask how labor and delivery went. But they bowed down before a child.
What confidence and faith would be required for you to take this position in relation to an infant or small child?
Here is the miracle of Epiphany, the Messiah appears/reveals himself for the Gentiles. In a moment of clarity, the wise men saw through the veil of human outward appearances and apprehended that in this child was the hope of the nations.
They see just as Samuel said about David, “For the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart” (1 Sam. 16:7). They catch a glimpse of what the Apostle calls “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6).
In that moment, the wise men are not philosophers who have attained a knowledge of the ultimate, they are not magicians who manipulate the universe for their own use, they are not power brokers who know how to use people to meet their ends, they are not particularly wealthy so that they can purchase what they think they need.
No, dear friends, they are one thing—Jesus worshippers. They leave all of those other claims behind in order to not stand, but to bow, to prostrate themselves before a child. They judge not as a man sees, but as God sees…by God’s standards, not the standards of this world.
As an exhortation for us, I ask you, Cities Church, by what standards are you judging yourself, and others this morning? Are there areas of your life in which the cloudiness of the world’s standards is limiting your ability to see clearly the glory of Jesus and the counter-cultural value system of God’s kingdom? The Magi catch a glimpse of true glory. How does that look for you today?
The example of the wise men gives us ample reason to reflect, and calls us to confess our sins…