Matthew 2:11 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Matthew 2:11

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This was like a prophecy and a great token to Mary and Joseph. These celebrated astronomers and scholar priests from another religion and a distant place come in with great treasures and they pay homage to the babe. Mary and Joseph understand that their babe is the Lord of glory, the Messiah. God has brought this about to teach something. First of all, they would have realised all learning bows to Jesus Christ. The scholars of such remote and famous places, who studied the heavens; they came and fell prostrate on the ground, and they lay before him. They could not humble themselves any more than they did. They bought their homage to honour him, and worshipped him as the God man. He is the author of the Bible. John’s gospel says it: ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ He is the member of the eternal godhead, equal God with the Father, who communicates the mind of God to mankind. He is the author of the divine manual of human nature that tells us about ourselves, bringing us to understand how he can save us and what are his plans for all eternity. Theology, the study of the Bible, used to be called the queen of the sciences, and so it is. Secondly, all religion bows to Jesus Christ. What is the meaning of the wise men, men of knowledge, men from another religion, from another place, coming to worship Christ? These men came from a mistaken religion. It had some crazy ideas. But all man-made religion, all mistaken religion bows to him, and for a number of reasons. There is no grace in any religion except the true religion of Jesus Christ. Because man wants to rule himself and at the same time think that he is in touch with God, he invents umpteen religions which suit him, which let him do as he likes, and at the same time, let him imagine that he knows about God. But no man-made religion has grace. Grace means undeserved, unmerited salvation. In all man-made religions you have got to deserve whatever you are after; you have got earn it, and only Christ comes and says, ‘You cannot deserve it; you cannot earn it; you can never be sufficiently righteous to gain heaven and to please God. I come to die on Calvary’s cross, to ask my Father to put your punishment upon me, so that I can pay the price for you, I can suffer your eternal weight of punishment, and pay the price of sin for you. I will give you freely, if you come to me, salvation and heaven.’ The wise men were in effect saying, ‘We are priests of an eastern religion, and we have come to see that it is vain, and we bow to the Saviour and we worship him.’ All religions must bow to Jesus Christ or else stay in error and in confusion. Mary and Joseph would have understood why God had arranged that a star would guide these priests and scholars from afar to bow the knee before their child: because distant lands will be led to him. Just as Isaiah the prophet said (49:23; 60:16), just as Jeremiah said (16:19), just as other prophets said (Psalm 72:11), all nations or people from all nations will worship him and adore him and find him to be their Saviour. There was an early Christian teacher who wrote just a little more than 200 years after these events, and he made some very simple and very profound observations about the gold, frankincense and myrrh. In bringing gold, he said, the wise men were paying homage to a king. In olden times, if you were a defeated nation, you paid homage by bringing gold to your superior king, and the wise men consciously paid homage to a king. Frankincense was used by all religions in temples. In the true religion the Old Testament temple was forever full of incense, and the smoke and the aroma symbolised the presence of God. But all religions tried the same thing, and they all burned incense, and frankincense was the most costly version of incense, so it symbolised that Christ was God. Myrrh was a very expensive perfume that beautified the person, but it was also used by everyone in funerals, because it was used to anoint the body to cover the smell of decomposition. Myrrh was associated most of all with funerals, with mortality. So the early Christian writer said, the lesson of the gold, frankincense, and myrrh is that the wise men paid homage to a king; they paid homage to God; and they paid homage to a mortal man. They realised he was king over all, and he was God, and he was man also.

Application

You may be very learned. You may be decorated with PhDs and have great honours for your prowess in your chosen field or subject, but this is the pinnacle of knowledge. This is higher than any earthly knowledge. All earthly knowledge bows to this: Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Consider: why are we here? Why was the world ever brought into being? Why does it go on? This is surely the highest knowledge: because Christ was the Creator. He was the member of the triune Godhead equal with the Father, the Bible tells us, through whom all things were made. All things were made for him, so that ultimately all things would eternally exist in a most glorified condition. People would throng heaven, people who knew him and loved him and would bow the knee to him. Everything was created so that there would be an eternal glorified earth, peopled with those who loved the Lord. But mankind fell right at the very beginning, by rebelling against God, and so successive generations are alienated from God, and we do not know him and feel him and walk with him. So why does the world go on? Why did God not destroy it all, and end the human race centuries ago? This is the highest knowledge: because Christ has not yet gathered out of the world all the people who he has determined to have in eternal glory. He is still gathering out his people, bringing them to repentance and faith in himself, bringing them to walk with him. That is the purpose of everything. You can study any amount of biology and physics and particle physics, try to understand as much as you can about the material world, and you may have the capacity of brain to understand great things, but you cannot answer the question: ‘Yes, but why? Why is the world made? Why does it go on?’ All knowledge is subordinate to Christ. He is the greatest knowledge, and the most important knowledge.

In the non-Christian religions, there is no Saviour who takes your place and dies in your place, and can give you salvation and hope freely. There is no life changing power in any other religion. It is all down to you. Your life is not changed; you are not given a new nature. In any other religion, you are not given real communion with God; you have to imagine it. There are religious faiths where you are taught various techniques in which, by your willpower and your engineering of your thoughts and your meditations, you can imagine or hope that you are in touch somehow with deity. But it is only the Christian faith that actually gives you communion with God so that you pray, and you walk with him, and you know he is yours. There is no holiness in other religions. It is only Christ who can make you a better man and a better woman, and give you a pure heart and a pure mind, and enable you to live according to his standards. Christ had to be God. He was the eternal Son equal with the Father, and he had also to be man, because he had to be our representative and feel the punishment of our sin as we deserve to feel it. At the same time he had to be God or he could never have sustained the horror of making an atonement for us and for our sin.

Gold also means that Christ is the possessor of power. The wise men knew they were paying homage to one with supreme power. They see a babe; they see poor people, Mary and Joseph, and yet those wise men were given such faith by God, it didn’t put them off. They didn’t enter the house and say, ‘What are we doing in this poor house with poor people, with a poor mother and a poor father, and an ill clad child? This cannot be the King of the Jews, the Saviour of the world.’ They were given faith to understand that this was the one, this child. So they paid their homage. Gold: he is the one who possesses all power, the Creator of the world, the one who can save souls and give eternal life. He is the one – gold – who exists for ever. Think of the imperishability, the durability of gold. It represents the Ancient of Days, the one who will live for ever. It represents status: he is the Son of God. Frankincense represents spiritual presence and influence. ‘He is the source of spiritual life’, they said. And myrrh: he must suffer death for his people. He will be a perfect man; there will be no sin him. There will be every beauty of character and refinement and perfection. He will alone be qualified to be a Saviour for me. A sinner could not bear my sin away; he would have to be punished for his own sin, but he is the perfect man, and the fragrance represents his perfection and his holiness and his attributes.

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Matthew 2:11 Commentary and Bible Study