Matthew 2:15 “…And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.” 

One of the great marvels of our time is that you can click a button on your computer and have pretty much whatever you want delivered to your front porch in two days. It’s the kind of technological power that the kings of old would have envied. Two-day delivery isn’t a miracle, but to the ancient mind it certainly would have seemed so. 

One of the great (and often overlooked) Advent themes is the theme of deliverance. The Bible returns to the theme over and over again. God takes people out of one place and brings them to a better place. The unfolding story of the Old Testament develops this theme from the very beginning. At creation, God made Adam and placed him (delivered him) into the Garden of Eden. When God visits Abraham, he calls him to leave his homeland and travel to a new place by faith. Of course, many of us know the story of God delivering the Israelites out of the bondage of slavery in Egypt, through the wilderness, and into the land that was promised to them beginning with Abraham. Later, Israel finds itself in exile and needing to be delivered from their own self-inflicted bondage. A remnant was able to return to their homeland, but there were hundreds of years of silence from that point while the faithful waited for the forces aligned against them to be delivered once again.  

This leads us into our verse from Matthew today. Matthew is the first book of the New Testament, and the beginning of the book tells the story of all the generations that led up to the birth of Jesus. Each generation looked forward to the time when God would send a Messiah to deliver them out of darkness and into light. The book of Matthew opens as Israel is subject to the Roman Empire, and the people are longing for deliverance from Roman oppression. 

As we read the story of Jesus’s birth in subsequent passages, it’s easy to see that this deliverance was somewhat unusual and unexpected. Joseph, a humble carpenter, is told that his betrothed will give birth to a son conceived by the Holy Spirit. In other words, the child would not be his but would be from God. The child was to be named Jesus, “for he will save his people from their sins.” Here we have the hints of deliverance the Bible is pointing us toward. Instead of a revolutionary leader who will topple the Roman legions, God is sending his Son to deliver the world from their sins. 

The story becomes more complicated in chapter 2. After Jesus is born, Joseph and Mary are visited by Magi from the east, who have been drawn to them by their study of the stars and their knowledge of ancient texts to find the newly born “King of the Jews. Herod, a cruel leader bent on securing his status as the default leader of Israel, learns about this birth of a “new king” and wants to wipe him out. Terrible bloodshed ensues. An angel appears and tells Joseph and Mary to flee to Egypt to escape Herod’s slaughter of children. God delivers Joseph, Mary, and Jesus to Egypt, ironically putting them exactly where the Israelites escaped from centuries before. It’s a wild story. But what is God doing? 

According to Matthew’s account God is establishing a new picture of deliverance. He has sent his Son into the world as the ultimate deliverer of the human race. The journey to Egypt is a signifier to show that Jesus is now the culmination of all the stories and prophecies that had been foretold. His arrival signals that men and women now have the chance to truly be free. Free not from governmental tyranny, but from their sin. The oppressive nature of sin and unrighteousness is now going to be undone by God’s own son. 

Deliverance is God’s story. He takes people out of the place they don’t want to be and leads them to a new place where they can experience a new spiritual life and freedom. Jesus himself said, “So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” And Jesus is still setting people free today. The story of Christmas is a story of God sending his Son into our reality so that He can deliver us from our brokenness and sin. What does Jesus need to deliver you from? Where will you allow Him to take you? Do you trust Him to lead you into a land He has promised for you, that will ultimately lead to eternal life?