Luke 2:1 Commentary and Bible Study

(Synoptics: Luke 2:1-7)The decisions and decrees of the great ones of this world play an important part in the providences of God, but one which they are completely unaware of. Of course Cesar Augustus knew nothing of the events that were about to take place in Bethlehem. He understood nothing about how his decree would affect the birth of the Messiah, and yet God ordained that it should be so. Luke however weaves this into his narrative, for he sees under inspiration that this was the very means that God ordained to bring about the fulfilment of the prophecies surrounding Christ’s birth. We may see, after the event, what God was doing, when no one could see it at the time, and the Lord is happy that it should be so. This is not because he always wants to cover his tracks – he reveals it here in his word – but because he is content that his workings are a mystery to those who disregard him. While the world goes about its business, the Lord is laying the foundations of his city. He is building it up all around them when they are only conscious of what they are building. It is as if kings and their princes are turned into servants of God who are told to go and lay the table for God’s children to come and sit down to eat. Cesar’s decree went out to bring in taxes, but long after those taxes were spent and forgotten, the real effect of this decree would remain recorded in Scripture. Man has one motive; God has another. Even when the human motive is evil, the Lord’s use of that act is good. ‘We can’, says the apostle Paul, ‘do nothing against the truth, but for the truth.’It is explained that this census or enrolment – the KJV uses the word ‘taxing’, but literally it is ‘writing from’ – became a regular practice in all regions of the Roman Empire (it was normally done every fourteen years), and that this was the first such census. It was done on a house-by-house basis, and required each family to return to the city where their branch came from because family lines were to be proven and established as part of the record. What a massive upheaval bureaucracy required!