The Slaughter of the Innocents: I was reading Matthew 2 today and came again to what is commonly called the slaughter of the innocents. Herod, realizing that the wise men had not returned to him, sent men into Bethlehem and the surrounding region and killed all the children two years old and younger. It is one of those passages that does not fit very well upon a Christmas card. Christ had entered the world, but instead of everything becoming peaceful, there was bloodshed, mourning, and a voice heard in Ramah: “Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.”
Matthew records it almost without explanation. Herod sought to destroy Christ. Joseph was warned to flee into Egypt. The prophecy was fulfilled. The narrative then continues. But I found myself stopping there. We are dealing with a God whose purposes reach infinitely beyond our slightest comprehension. We have been given truth – real truth – but we have not been given an explanation for very much at all. Sometimes Scripture opens a small window, allows us to see something terrible and mysterious, and then closes it again. Yet we speak so easily as though everything has been mapped out for us.
Christianity now comes in almost every imaginable form. A person may be raised Baptist, become Presbyterian, embrace Lutheranism, enter Rome, worship only on Saturday, or attach himself to a favorite teacher and spend the rest of his life repeating that teacher’s conclusions. Each group opens the same Bible, claims the guidance of the same Spirit, and is often convinced that everyone outside its boundaries has failed to understand the truth. Christianity can begin to resemble the tower of Babel: everyone speaking, everyone building, and very few understanding one another.
Of course, every group has an explanation for this confusion. The Holy Spirit leads His people into all truth, we are told, and therefore those who do not see the truth as we see it must not have the Spirit. Their disagreement becomes evidence against them. Then they say the same about us. The circle continues without end. Romans 14:4.
We gather the portions of truth we have been given, arrange them into a system, and then begin speaking as though our system were equal to the whole mind of God. We call our framework the gospel, establish the boundaries beyond which no sincere believer may pass, and assume that deviation from our understanding proves the absence of divine teaching. But how much do any of us really see? We are reading of a king attempting to murder the infant Christ, children being slaughtered without mercy simply because they were born in Bethlehem, families mourning, and the promised Messiah being carried into Egypt.
We are standing before events unfolding within a purpose we could never have imagined and cannot fully explain. Yet after closing the chapter, we may return almost immediately to speaking as though God, His ways, His truth, and everyone who belongs to Him fit neatly within the limits of our understanding. That should frighten us.
This does not mean that truth is unknowable or that doctrine does not matter. God has spoken. Error exists, and it should be exposed. But perhaps the first error needing exposure is our assumption that we ourselves have escaped it. Before we pronounce confidently upon everyone who sees differently, perhaps we should remember how little we have understood, how often we have changed our own minds, and how far the living God exceeds every theological arrangement we have constructed around Him.
Truth matters greatly. But has our possession of it made us tremble before God, or merely more secure in our own conclusions? We may condemn error while forgetting that error still clings to us. We may defend the gospel while making our own understanding of it the measure of every soul. We may speak of being taught by the Spirit while treating ourselves as though we have nothing left to learn. And whenever disagreement arises, we resolve the difficulty by deciding that the other person cannot belong to God. That is an easy answer. It may also be a fearful one. Perhaps we should spend less time trying to prove that God is with us and more time asking whether our confidence has outrun what He has actually shown us.
We speak confidently about whom God has received, whom He has rejected, and where His truth may be found. Nearly everyone assumes that God stands within his own circle, while few seem troubled by the possibility that His purpose may reach far beyond the lines we have drawn. The slaughter of the innocents reminds us that we are not dealing with a God who can be reduced to our familiar arrangements. His purposes move through darkness, suffering, kingdoms, human wickedness, fulfilled prophecy, and the flight of Christ into Egypt. We see fragments. He sees the end from the beginning.
So yes, we should speak what we believe to be true. We should expose error and testify plainly of Christ. But we should do so with trembling. We are not distributing light from some inexhaustible source within ourselves. We are poor and limited creatures gathering the few rays God has graciously given us. Perhaps the error we most urgently need exposed is not always theirs. Perhaps it is ours. Psalm 139:23-24. MPJ