The Sign of His Birthplace

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And if I didn’t make it clear this morning, I want to make it clear now that what we’re looking at is how we can know for a fact that Jesus Christ is that promised Messiah of God based on the prophecies of the Old Testament. There are people that doubt today that Jesus was who He said He was. There are people who doubt that Jesus is who God said He was.

But as I said this morning, when you look at the Old Testament prophecies about who the Messiah would be, it fits Jesus perfectly. And that’s what I want to look at today, these next few weeks, so that we can have the utmost confidence in the Savior that we believe in, the Savior who died for us, and maybe so we can take that confidence and that hope to other people. Turn with me to Micah chapter 5.

Micah chapter 5, I’m excited about the message tonight. I’m also a little bit nervous because as I was looking over my notes and things again this afternoon, Really, just the last few minutes looking over them again, I noticed some things that I’ve never noticed before, and it kind of connected some dots, and I saw this in a new way, and now I have questions that I didn’t have before, but I also have answers that I didn’t have before. And so I’m not going to preach to you tonight on the things I have questions about.

I’ll have to study those out and answer them, and then come back and give you answers maybe. But the things that I’m sure about, we’re going to talk about tonight. with the signs of His coming.

We’re going to talk about the sign of His birthplace. As the Messiah wasn’t just to be born anywhere, God had said hundreds of years before how and where and everything that was going to happen. It even says, if we’re looking, the Bible even tells us when the Messiah was going to come.

I didn’t realize that until just a few months ago. The Bible told when the Messiah was going to come. It told where He was going to come.

It told how He was going to come. It told all these things. So we’re going to talk tonight about the sign of His birthplace.

It mattered immensely that Jesus was born in Bethlehem because it had been prophesied that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. And it wasn’t just a happy accident of history. It was something God planned ahead of time.

Now, I want to look at Micah chapter 5, verses 1 through 4. And again, my amazement this afternoon came, again, from looking at it in context where I hadn’t always done that in the past. Look there for the prophecies. Then you start reading the things around them and things start coming together.

But Micah chapter 5, just to give you a little background, Micah wrote roughly around the same time that Isaiah did. And so he was a contemporary of Isaiah, wrote around the same time as what we read this morning, and he prophesied things that were about 200 years down the road. And then as far as Christ, he prophesied things that were to come about 700 years down the road.

And so these, again, these are not things that were made up later and put in there by Christians because we know they were in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible as early as about 200 or 300 years before Christ was born. But he said in Micah chapter 5, Now gather thyself in troops, gather in troops for yourself, O daughter of troops. He hath laid siege against us.

They shall smite the judge of Israel with a rod upon the cheek. And this is the verse that people talk about. This is what they focus on when we talk about Old Testament prophecy of Christ. Verse 2, But thou, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of these shall he come forth unto me, that is, to be ruler in Israel, whose going forths have been from old, from everlasting.

And therefore will he give them up until the time that she which travaileth hath brought forth. Then the remnant of his brethren shall return unto the children of Israel, And he shall stand and feed in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God. And they shall abide, for now shall he be great unto the ends of the earth.

I looked at that in the context today, even this week when I was studying it out, I really just looked at verses 1 and 2. And verse 1, people think, really is supposed to go with chapter 4. The chapter and verse divisions, by the way, are not inspired.

The chapter and verse divisions did not come in until about the 16th century. Up until then, they just wrote in paragraphs. If they even divided at the words in the original Greek, they didn’t even have punctuation.

I think for the most part, they wrote straight lines. In the Hebrew, certainly, they wrote in straight lines, and you just had to decipher where the word ended. It was about the 16th century that they began dividing it into chapters and then into verses.

and so some people think that this verse 1 should have gone with the end of chapter 4. So I looked at chapter 4, just kind of glanced through it this afternoon, and this is where things started to come alive for me because I thought, who is this judge that they’re going to smite on the cheek with a rod, and what does this have to do with Bethlehem, Ephratah, and this siege? What does all of this have to do to come together?

And I began to look at it in the context of chapter 4, and I’m not going to go and read all of chapter 4 to you, but it talks about, according to the headings in here, it talks about a golden age, it talks about Armageddon, but one of the things it talks about is the Babylonian captivity that we’ve talked about so many times with the time of Daniel. It talks about the fact that one of these days, and at this point it was about 200 years in the future from Micah’s time, in about 200 years in the future, God was going to have enough with Israel, with Judah, the southern kingdom we talked about this morning, and he was going to say, he was going to, one last big attempt to get their attention. And he was going to let the Babylonians come in and take over for about 70 years.

And Micah foretells that in chapter 4. He says, and thou shalt go even to Babylon, and there thou shalt be delivered. There the Lord shall redeem thee from the hand of thine enemies.

It talks about the fact that they would be taken off to Babylon. It talks about the fact that they would be redeemed and brought back. Well, when you look at all of these things together, it becomes apparent that he’s talking about things that are just in the future.

I thought, who is Micah writing about in chapter 5, verse 1, that’s going to come in and smite this judge? What was going on? Because this was about the time he’s writing, is when the northern kingdom was about to be carried away by the Assyrians.

Who’s he writing to in Judah that’s about to be smitten? Who’s he writing to? But you realize that he’s talking to them about what God’s going to do in the future.

And so most people, I’d never noticed that before, most people think that who he’s writing about here, this judge, is King Zedekiah, who was the last legitimate king to sit on the throne of Israel, and the throne of Judah, to sit on David’s throne. And it was under Zedekiah that the Babylonians came in later and overthrew Israel, overthrew Judah. I’m sorry, I use those interchangeably sometimes.

Judah was part of Israel, the big kingdom, and then they split off and there was Israel, the northern kingdom, Judah, the southern kingdom. He was the last one to sit on the throne of David in Jerusalem. And he talks at the beginning of chapter 5 about somebody coming in and gathering up troops, and they will smite the judge of Israel with a rod upon the cheek.

And he talks about judgment that’s going to come on Judah and their strong man. And he talks about the siege that will take place. And then he says in verse 2, But thou Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, Yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me, that is to be ruler in Israel, whose going forths have been from old, from everlasting.

And what it indicates, when you look at the whole thing, when you look at the fact that he’s talking about somebody’s going to come in and they’re going to smite Judah, and there’s going to be a siege, and there’s going to be a time when God gives them up for a time, and there will be a remnant, and there will come one out of Bethlehem who was to be a ruler, really looks to the fact that Zedekiah was the last king of Judah. He was the last one to sit on David’s throne until this person that he talks about in verse 2. That from Zedekiah on to this person in verse 2, this ruler, who we can tell is the Messiah, until the Messiah comes, there would not be another king to sit on the throne of David.

And so it’s very important to look at who this person is because the person he talks about in Micah chapter 2 is not just somebody that’s going to be born in Bethlehem and is going to be a ruler of God’s people. He’s somebody who’s going to sit on the throne of David. He is going to be the king.

He’s going to be the God-ordained king of Israel. And it’s important that he comes from Bethlehem. And it seems when you read the gospel accounts, it almost seems like an accident that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.

Jesus was from Nazareth. His hometown, his area that he was from, that was Nazareth. He didn’t grow up in Bethlehem.

But he was born there according to the gospel accounts. And if you’ll remember the story, once we talked about the virgin birth this morning, and Joseph had reason to doubt that Mary was telling the truth until the angel of the Lord came and told him that the child really had been conceived by the Holy Spirit, that Mary was telling the truth that this was a work of God. And Joseph changed his mind and decided not to divorce Mary, but decided that he would marry her.

And when there came forth the decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world was to be taxed or counted, and different people read that Greek word there for different things, they say some of the most accurate government records are the tax records. So if they wanted to count people, they’d probably tax them while they were there because they were going to get what they were owed. And so everybody was to go back to their ancestral home city, And Joseph, being a descendant of David, had to go back to Bethlehem, and they were there to be taxed.

And it just, everything just kind of coincided, if you believe in coincidence, that they would end up in Bethlehem about the time she was to be delivered. But it wasn’t just an accident so we could, years later, centuries later, sing, O Little Town of Bethlehem, which has a catchier ring to it than O Little Town of Nazareth. It wasn’t just so we could sing that.

it wasn’t just an accident that Jesus was born there. This was foretold 700 years before the fact that He would be born in Bethlehem. And it’s amazing that the Jews were looking for their Messiah for all these hundreds and thousands of years.

They were looking for this Messiah who was going to deliver them, and Bethlehem was not the logical choice for that Messiah to come out of. I mean, on the one sense, that’s where David, the great king, had come from. That’s where he’d been born.

But as far as what the situation then was, it didn’t seem likely that the Messiah, the great king, would be born in Bethlehem. But that’s exactly what Micah says, in spite of the fact that they were little, that they were weak, that they were not prominent. Or maybe, better said because of that, God chose Bethlehem as the birthplace of the Messiah.

We’re going to look at that tonight. And what that tells us about what Jesus’ mission was, what He was here to do, and the fact that He was born in Bethlehem is important because of what it says about the Messiah who would come from Bethlehem. Verse 2 says, Though thou be little among the thousands of Judah.

Bethlehem Ephratah was a small town in comparison, in contrast to some of the other cities of Judah, especially in contrast to Jerusalem, the capital of the kingdom, of the empire. Bethlehem was just an outlying community, what we would probably call today flyover country. It wasn’t really significant.

It had historical significance as the birthplace of David, as the place where Rachel was buried, but as far as what was to them the modern day, it really wasn’t a significant place. See, if you were waiting for a great religious or political reformer to come in and kick out the pagan countries, later on to kick out the Romans, to kick out whoever was vexing the Jews at the time, you would expect they would come from Jerusalem. I mean, that was the center of power.

And yet God here through Micah says He’ll come from Bethlehem Ephratah, even though you’re little, you’re small among the thousands of Judah. And thousands from the best I can tell is just a word for a political division, maybe like a county or a township or something. Among the communities of Judah, it says Bethlehem Ephratah was just a small, small place.

It seems reasonable, as I said, to expect that if the Messiah were to come as an earthly king or as a priest, that he would come from Jerusalem. That’s where the temple was. That’s where the palace was.

That’s where anything that happened, the movers and shakers in Judah, they were in Jerusalem. And it would seem reasonable to expect that the next leader, the great king, would come out of there. Just as it seems many people in our country think that, you know, somebody shouldn’t be president unless they’ve been in Washington a long time.

That’s worked out well for us so far. Let’s keep going with that. But it seems inconceivable to say somebody that’s been the mayor of Podunkville, USA, could be the next great leader, could be the next president.

Although sometimes I think that’s what we need. It’s the same thing here. They’re looking for a great leader, just as we are.

We tend to look at Washington and who they can give us. Well, they would be looking to Jerusalem. Who’s this Messiah, this king going to be that’s going to redeem us, that’s going to kick out all the foreign pagan people and make us independent and make us a great power again?

they’re looking to Jerusalem, like we would look to Washington, when they should have been looking out in this small town in the Judean wilderness. Bethlehem was far away from the power. So it’s important to note that Jesus, first thing that’s important about this, it’s important to note that Jesus was born away from the seat of power and prestige.

The Messiah, and let’s take the New Testament out of it for just a second and say we’re talking about the Messiah in Micah chapter 5. because, as I said, there are some people who doubt it’s Jesus, although I really believe it was. Everything fits.

The Messiah that they were expecting was to be a different kind of king. And the reason some people doubt that Jesus was the Messiah was because they’re expecting this earthly king, this conqueror. They’re expecting this Napoleon or this Alexander the Great.

But the fact he was born, it says, in this place that was little among the thousands of Judah, tells us the Messiah was to be a different kind of king. And so it’s important to note that Jesus was born far away from the seed of power and prestige and privilege. He didn’t come to be an earthly king.

He didn’t come to be a great reformer within the religious system that they had going on there. He didn’t come for political power, for military power. He didn’t come for any of these things.

And that’s why so many people missed him, because they had their ideas of what he was to be. Even though Micah had told them the Messiah is going to come from Bethlehem, they were still looking for a Jerusalem power broker. But Jesus, Jesus the Messiah, was born far away from the seat and the center of power and prestige because he came to be a different kind of king.

He came to be a different kind of ruler. So the second thing that we need to know tonight is that Jesus was born in the house of bread. Where did I get that?

The word Bethlehem in the Hebrew language, the nearest I can tell, means house of bread. Jesus wasn’t born in the city. He was born out in this farming community out in the middle of nowhere.

By our standards, not too far from Jerusalem, but certainly a good little journey out from it. He was born out in the country in a city called the House of Bread. Why is that significant?

Because he told people that he was the bread of life. And so it’s only, I think it’s, wow, it’s incredible to have seen that the other day, that here he said he was the bread of life, and Micah prophesied that this Messiah would come from the House of Bread. He didn’t come from the house of political power.

He didn’t come from the house of military power. He came from the house of bread. He came to be something different than what the world was looking for.

Folks, even today, even in His churches, we seem sometimes to have this misguided idea that Jesus came to be a political power or to build up a religious empire, to build any of these things, and it’s not true. Jesus is not a means to political power. Now, I’m not against Christians getting out and voting, being involved, certainly not.

I think we have a responsibility to be salt and light wherever we go. But I hear some preachers who all they ever preach on is politics. And I hear some preachers that to hear them talk, Jesus’ point in being here was for us to build up an earthly kingdom, that Jesus came to fix Washington, that Jesus came to fix this, Jesus came to fix that.

I remember a man running for one of the county commissioners where we used to live a few years ago, And he said he was going to bring Christian values to government, which I think is important. But he was in a job that the job description was to fix the roads. Jesus’ job was not to come and tell him how to fix the roads.

I understand what he was trying to say. It’s important to have Christian values and ethics and take them with us wherever we go and whatever job we’re in. But to use it as a campaign slogan, Jesus didn’t come to tell us how to fix the roads.

Jesus didn’t come to tell us how to fix Washington. And I think if we follow his principles, we’ll be better off as a country, as a state, as a community. But Jesus didn’t come to show us the way to political power.

And that’s my problem with some of the preachers and politicians we see today. That’s my problem with myself five years ago. Jesus is not a means toward political power.

Jesus is not a means toward reforming things. Jesus is a means toward restoring, towards completely transforming things. See, Jesus’ kingdom was a spiritual thing.

He was not the earthly king. He was the bread of life. He came for a spiritual purpose.

That other stuff, the fixing the world around us, that’s important. But even more vital, even more important is the spiritual purpose that Jesus came to fulfill. That He came to be God’s provision for us.

We understand that. He came to be God’s provision for us. He called Himself the bread of life.

He came from this house of bread, Bethel, Bethlehem, Ephratah. He came from this house of bread and said He was the bread of life, and we gloss over that and we think, okay, that’s nice. That’s a nice metaphor he used.

See, we live in a different world, and our diet and our culture and all this has changed. We don’t always understand the importance of the metaphors and the symbols that are used in the Bible. Bread was the very essence of life to people in this day.

See, we have meat and we have all these things in such an abundance. Our food is so much more varied that, you know, if we didn’t eat bread for a few weeks, we could live. As a matter of fact, never mind.

I’m not going to get on my soapbox about chemicals in the food. My wife calls me a conspiracy nut. You know, my wife, for example, doesn’t eat a lot of bread.

She’ll buy herself a loaf of bread. She won’t eat the wheat bread I buy with the 27 kinds of grain in it. She wants the bleached white bread that, you know, the critters won’t even go near because it’s not even real food.

She wants that, and so she’ll buy a loaf of that white bread. I didn’t say that again. I won’t get on to the food thing.

That’s not why I brought it up. But she’ll buy that loaf of white bread, and it will sit there on the counter for months and have a piece, maybe two, taken out of it. She just doesn’t eat that much bread.

And you know what? She survives, and she’s healthy because we’ve got other things to eat. But in the day they lived in, if you didn’t eat bread, you were dead.

I saw something on one of these documentaries just a few days ago. And they actually sometimes have truth in documentaries. Said that around the time mankind started being involved in agriculture, which I take exception to that, because if you believe the biblical account of creation, we’ve always been involved in agriculture.

But at the time man started being involved in agriculture, we went to a point where 90% of our calories came from two crops. And in the Middle East, that was wheat and barley. And so some weeks they wouldn’t have anything to eat if they didn’t have bread.

Why is he going on about bread up here? because we need to understand what it means that Jesus said, I came to be, that He was the bread of life. He was the absolute provision.

He is absolutely necessary. And He came to fulfill this need in us that is absolutely necessary that cannot be fulfilled anywhere else. Hear me on that.

What we need from Christ, we cannot get anywhere else. We could get a military ruler someplace else. We could get a political leader.

We could get a religious reformer anyplace else. But this bread of life that He came to be, coming out of the house of bread, and I don’t believe God does things by accident, but coming out of Bethlehem, He came to be our supply of our needs that we could not find anyplace else, and being our supply for our spiritual needs. And the final thing tonight in verses 2 and 3, it says, But thou, Bethlehem, Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of these shall he come forth unto me, that is to be the ruler of Israel.

Not only shall he come out of Bethlehem, small in the thousands of Judah, But he shall come forth unto me, that is, to be the ruler in Israel. He’s talking here. God is very clearly speaking about the Messiah, the ruler.

Even though he didn’t come to be an earthly king, he came to be the ruler. And it says, whose going forths, and this is easy to miss too, whose going forths have been from of old, from everlasting. Whose work, whose existence has been eternal. How many kings do we know?

How many rulers do we know that live forever? None so far, except Jesus. life is 100% fatal. And yet Jesus, the Bible says, the passage I talked about this morning, John chapter 1, the Word was in the beginning with God.

He’s been there from the very beginning. He’s been there before the beginning. As a part of the Godhead, He’s existed from eternity past and will exist to eternity future.

We can’t even wrap our minds around how. . .

Well, maybe you can, maybe you’re smarter than me, but I can’t wrap my mind around God’s eternity. that He existed back to the earliest times we can think of, and then He’s older than that, and then He’s older than that. It’s incredible.

So this Messiah, this ruler He’s talking about, is not just a human king, is not just a human ruler, but He’s come to be a ruler whose going forths have been from old, from everlasting. The only thing that is everlasting is God. So He’s very clearly talking about God coming and being a ruler.

Therefore will He give them up, talking about the people of Judah, Until that time that she which travaileth hath brought forth, then the remnant of his brethren shall return unto the children of Israel. Jesus, the third thing tonight, is that Jesus, he didn’t come just to be a king, he didn’t come just to be a supply, but he came to be the eternal ruler of God’s remnant. He came to be the eternal ruler of God’s remnant.

We can see from this passage that it says that his people would reject him. Therefore will he give them up until the time that she which travaileth hath brought forth. Then the remnant of his brethren shall return unto the children of Israel.

This remnant returns, which means that they’ve all gone somewhere. They’ve wandered away from God. So this Messiah that was sent, God even told them, God even warned them 700 years in advance.

You’re looking for the Messiah. This is where he’s going to come from, and you’re going to miss him. And they’re going to miss him because they weren’t heeding the other words in here.

They were looking for the earthly king we talked about when he came as a spiritual ruler, when he came as this Messiah who was to be everything that we could not be for ourselves. And they would wander away from God. And you know, that’s exactly what happened with the people in Jesus’ day.

Especially the most religious among Israel. They were the ones that wandered farthest away from God. And everybody disbelieved, or for the most part, people disbelieved.

Jesus was able to draw huge crowds. And we could say, well, then Jesus had a lot of followers. But when things were good, when he was teaching what they thought was revolution, when he was feeding them, when he was doing miracles, he could draw a huge crowd.

But when he started talking about things like sacrifice, when he started talking about his sacrifice, when he started talking about my kingdom is not of this world, most people abandoned him. And in the earliest days of Christianity, there were only a couple hundred people. There were 12 disciples.

There were three of the inner circle. And even they walked away for a while. Even Peter said, I don’t know him.

So it’s told in here that Israel was going to wander away from Him, but in the fact that Israel rejected the Messiah, in the fact that Israel to this day rejects the Messiah, and most even of the Gentiles reject the Messiah. And we’re going to talk in a few weeks about the fact that the Messiah was to bring salvation to the whole world, that that was foretold by Isaiah. But even most Gentiles have rejected Jesus as the Messiah, but God is clear there’s always a believing remnant that will be restored.

And this is one of those areas where I’m not clear. It may be talking about back then. It may be talking in the future.

My goodness, it could be talking about both. Let’s not limit God. But there would be a remnant who would turn to Christ. Now, he may be talking about since the resurrection, that even though the world as a whole has rejected him, even though Israel as a whole has rejected him, there’s still a remnant of Jews today who accept Christ as their Messiah.

There’s still a remnant in the world today of Gentiles that accept Christ as the Messiah. You don’t believe that statement, look around you. We’re part of that remnant of the Gentiles.

It could just as easily be referring to, in the future, the book of Revelation talks about the 144,000 Jews who will turn back to Him. It could be talking about that. But the Bible is clear in other places that there will always be a remnant.

There will always be people who will trust Christ as their Messiah. We are proof of that. that even 2,000 years later, even though the world throws everything they can to try to discredit Christ, to try to discredit the gospel, there are still people who believe.

There’s still a remnant, and He’s to be our ruler eternally. He’s our ruler today. He doesn’t have to set up an earthly kingdom here to be our ruler, because His kingdom is not of this world.

And though people reject Him, there’s always a remnant who will turn to Christ. We’re part of that remnant. And today, Jesus was born as this Messiah that’s described here in Micah. Jesus was born to be the eternal ruler of God’s remnant, and so He is today.

So He was 2,000 years ago to those who trusted Him and submitted to Him, and so He’ll be for the rest of eternity. Because if we’ve trusted Christ and we’ve submitted to Him, He’s our King already. Brother Phil and I were talking again on Tuesday about some things I said last week.

And it’s always good to hear somebody repeat to you the things you’ve said in the message. You know they’re paying attention. Sometimes people will say good message and say, I loved when you said da-da-da, and I think I didn’t say that.

But the Holy Spirit must have been telling you, and I really wish I’d gotten to hear what he had to say instead of what I had to say. But Brother Phil and I were talking Tuesday at the hospital about some of the things that I said last Sunday night. And he brought this up again that I said last week.

There’s a lot about the end times I don’t understand, but I do know without a shadow of a doubt that Christ is coming back. The Bible is very clear on that. Now, there’s room for discussion, and I’m willing to admit I could be wrong, and as I read the Bible, I read it with an open mind and let God show me.

But insofar as what I understand now, I hold to a premillennial position of the second coming. I hold to a pre-tribulation rapture insofar as I understand it. And so I believe there will come a day when Christ will set up a kingdom, a millennial kingdom.

But folks, He doesn’t have to set up that millennial kingdom to be our ruler. He’s our ruler now. He’s our Lord now.

If we’re part of those who have trusted in Him, He’s already the ruler. He’s already the Messiah to us. Regardless of what the condition of the world is, regardless of whether or not He’s the earthly king, He’s already the king here.

He’s already the king in this place. And we can say that because political power doesn’t matter what the world’s religious system, and it seems to be getting worse, the system of things that the world believes in. It doesn’t matter what any of those things are, because he’s already the eternal ruler of those for whom he’s the Messiah.

He came to be a different kind of king. He came to be a different kind of king. And so why does it matter where he was born?

It matters that he was born in Bethlehem, because the way the Bible describes the one, the Messiah, who would be born in Bethlehem. And if Jesus had been born in Nazareth, if Jesus had been born in Jerusalem, if Jesus had been born somewhere in Galilee, He wouldn’t have fulfilled this prophecy of who the Messiah is. And we’d be left to say, well, that’s talking about the Messiah.

That can’t possibly be Jesus Christ. But God