Matthew: When God Has Other Plans
March 5, 2020
I remember the day when I first realized God was calling me to be a Church Planter. It was August and I was back in the office after three weeks out of the office. The first week I’d been in Seattle with my High School students helping them share their faith as part of a mission trip called SEMP. The next week, I spent three days and nights at Detroit Lake leading our Junior High Water Ski Camp. Now I was back in the office after taking a week off for vacation from all that, and my fall calendar was screaming for my attention. So during this first week back I was totally focused on preparing for the Fall. But then Pastor Gary came into my office and told me to come with him. So I got into his car and he started driving toward my house. I finally asked him, where are we going? “We’re going to go visit the greens.” Now there was no one by the name of Green in our church, so I know what that meant. He was driving me to my house to get my golf clubs so we could go “visit the greens.” (play some golf)
Now you would think that I’d be all for this. But I wasn’t. I was busy. I needed to focus and work. But Gary had other plans. So we went out and played nine holes at the local club. And I didn’t play well, and Gary could tell I was frustrated. So he asked me what was bugging me. I told him that I’d tell him when we got back to the office. So when we there, Gary invited me into his office and asked, “So what’s going on?”
It was then that I told him. “I think God is calling me to be a Church Planter.” His response, “I know that. I was just wondering when you’d come around to knowing it. I’m going to hate to lose you, but I’ll support you one hundred percent.” And he did. He contacted our District Church Planting Director, gave me a glowing review and seemed to get the ball in motion for me. But God had other plans. Little did I know that Becky and I were about to become the legal guardians of my sisters three children. For the next year and a half I had to put that church planting call on hold. But then in the Fall of ’96, I got a call to consider taking a church plant in Langley, BC that had lost their church planting pastor. So in February of 97 we moved to Langley, BC where God had set the stage for me to go to a Country that was not on my radar, to partner with people I didn’t know to lead this floundering Church plant. And for the next eight years, God moved to help us reach the lost and build a church that is still growing and flourishing today. I’ll always remember what God did in calling me to Canada, because I thought God was calling me to plant a Church in the States, but God had other plans.
And that’s just the thing about our God. Proverbs 19:21 says this: Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand. So, if you want to understand what God is up too when your plans don’t work out, then let me encourage you to open your Bible to Matthew 2:13-23 where we’re going to see how God had other plans for Joseph so He could work out His purposes in the life of Jesus. And as we do, we’re going to see why God may change your plans to help you fulfill His purposes in your life. So if you’ve found Matthew 2, let’s look at the first reason why God may have other plans for you:
1.God may change your plans to protect you Look now at God’s change of plans for Joseph When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.” Matthew 2:13
The first question is, “Who are the “they” who had gone?” The Magi had gone. Last week we saw how the Magi had been drawn by God to find Jesus by following a phenomenon of nature, a star; and from what they had learned from God’s Word telling them that the Messiah was to be born in Bethlehem. So they acted on what they heard, went to Bethlehem and found Jesus. And when they found Him, they worshiped him. But shortly after finding Jesus, these Magi were warned by an angel, in a dream, to not return to Herod but go home by another way. This is what they did. They left.
Now upon their leaving, an angel of the Lord appears to Joseph and tells him, he needs to leave immediately and take his family to Egypt. Now by this time Joseph had settled his family into a house. He and Mary had been making a home for their family in Bethlehem. Joseph was a carpenter and so he has set up shop at this house and is busy making a living building chairs and tables right there in Bethlehem. They were a young couple just starting out, making new friends, growing a customer base and raising their child Jesus, who is anywhere from 6 months to two years old. But now God had other plans.
So Matthew tells us what Joseph did: So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. Matthew 2:14-15a Now going to Egypt was not that unusual for the Jews. Egypt had been a place of refuge for Israelites during times of political upheaval, especially during the times of the Kings. And so there many colonies of Jews in several major Egyptian cities. Joseph and Mary would have found one of these colonies and once again found a home, set-up shop, and trusted that God would tell them when it was safe to return.
What we see is that God had other plans for Joseph by getting them to flee Israel. On the surface, we can see that God had acted to protect Jesus. But there’s something more going on here, something that has to do with God’s purpose for Jesus’ life. For then Matthew adds And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.” This is why God had other plans. He had a greater purpose in mind then to just protect Jesus. For on the day Jesus returns to Israel, what was predicted by Hosea will be fulfilled by Jesus. This is what Matthew wants the readers of his Gospel to see.
God used the evil intentions of Herod as part of His purpose to reveal to us that Jesus is the promised deliverer of Israel and the entire world. What Matthew alerts his readers to see is that Israel’s previous Exodus from Egypt foreshadows Jesus’ return from Egypt. With Jesus being called out of Egypt by God, the hearer of this Gospel will make this connection: Just as God saved His people by delivering them from slavery in Egypt in the past, He will now save His people through Jesus by delivering them from slavery to sin in the present. Jesus is the new exodus. Jesus is God’s deliverer. That’s why God changed Joseph’s plans.
How then does this apply to us? I would say it this way: God may change your plans to protect you because He may have a greater purpose in mind for your life. For example: God may change your travel plans to protect you from the Coronavirus, because He has a purpose for you here at the Ranch.
Or God may change your retirement plans to protect you from wasting your time on trivial activities, because He has a purpose for you to be a blessing to others.
I can’t really say because only God knows His purposes for your life. However, God does sometimes allow obstacles to alter our plans because He has a different plan, a better path for us to take. You see, Joseph had no idea that God would turn his life upside down and have him live as a refugee in Egypt. But God used the evil of Herod for good. So the next time something ruins your plans, don’t immediately see it as a bad thing. God may be changing your plans to protect you because He has something better for you. That’s the first thing God wants us to see from this passage today. Here’s the next;
2.God may change your plans teach you When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Matthew 2:16
Now we learned last week Herod was evil. He was paranoid. Whenever there was a threat to his throne, he had that threat eliminated. Here we learn that the Magi had tricked him, deceived him, outwitted him. This is the word you would use if someone made fun of you. So Herod was livid. He was furious. Out of his rage, he orders his soldiers to slaughter these innocent boys in Bethlehem. What a tragedy. Scholars tell us that since Bethlehem was a village of about a thousand residents, Herod was responsible for the death of about twenty innocent children.
But here’s the thing: even the death of one innocent child would have unleashed unimaginable grief. There’s nothing worse than losing a child. But to have yours brutally murdered by Herod – the grief of these mothers would have been inconsolable. And yet Matthew points to their grief as a second fulfillment of Scripture: Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”Matt. 2:17-18
Inconsolable grief. This happened once previously in Israel. This quote is taken from Jeremiah 31:15. The prophet speaks of the time when the people of God were taken into exile. The Babylonians attacked Jerusalem, razing people’s homes and destroying the entire city, and then they took all the people to Ramah, a place north of Jerusalem. At Ramah the people were put into caravans and separated from one another. This was a scene of unimaginable anguish…
Think about how you would feel if you were taken to a place and separated from your family with the prospect that you may never see them again. Imagine your grief, your anguish. This is the scene Matthew points to when he describes the weeping and mourning over children who died in Bethlehem.
Why does he put this quote here? Once again, he’s alerting us to something that God is trying to teach us. He wants us to recall what happened at the time of the exile and specifically, what God promised them. What did God promise? Jeremiah tells us: “Restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears, for your work will be rewarded,” declares the Lord. They will return from the land of the enemy. So there is hope for your descendants,” declares the Lord. “Your children will return to their own land.” Jeremiah 31:16-17 In other words they are to know that God has not forgotten them, and that He has plans for them that will come out of this tragedy.
What were God’s plans? Jeremiah continues: “The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them,” declares the Lord. Jeremiah 31:31-32
“This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time,” declares the Lord. “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,” declares the Lord. “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” Jeremiah 31:33-34
So in the midst of tragedy God wants us to understand that with the birth of Jesus, there is hope in the midst of pain. There is life in the midst of death. Real life and real hope are found in Jesus. You see sometimes God may change your plans to protect you, but sometimes He allows bad things to happen to teach us that there is something better than this life. That’s what we see here today. Sometimes God allows death, suffering or grief to teach us that there is more to life than this life; to teach us hope. We need hope. We need hope that we are not alone in this. We need the hope of forgiveness. We need the hope of knowing God will be with us in our grief. And what this tragedy teaches us: Jesus is our hope. Jesus is the new covenant. He has come to usher in a new kind of life with God.
People respond to tragedy in one of two ways: They either blame God or lean into God. We live in an evil world. Bad things happen. And we need hope in the midst of tragedy, death, suffering and grief. Jesus brings this hope. Do you have this hope?
This may be why you face difficulties in life, because God is trying to get your attention so that you might find your hope in Him. There’s one more reason why God may change your plans. Here it is:
3.God may change your plans to change you After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead.” Matthew 2:19-20
Here’s the last change of plan in Joseph’s story. First, God is true to His Word. Like he promised, God told Joseph Herod has died and it’s now safe to return to Israel. So we read, So he got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. Matthew 2:21-22a
Okay, so God tells Joseph to return to Israel, but somewhere along the way, he hears that Archelaus is now reigning in Israel. This is not good news. Archelaus is just as bad as his father, if not worse. For he began his reign by slaughtering three thousand influential people, and word of that is what put a healthy fear in Joseph’s heart. So once again God comes to Joseph to change his plans and we read: Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. Matthew 2:22b
So Joseph returns to Nazareth, where he and Mary had lived prior to making their journey to Bethlehem. And we read: So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene. Matthew 2:23
If you have trouble tracking down this Old Testament reference, it’s because Matthew is not quoting any particular prophet. In fact, none of the prophet’s ever say precisely, “He will be called a Nazarene.” In fact, the prophets never even talk about Nazareth at all. So why does Matthew say this? We learn throughout the rest of Matthew’s gospel and the other Gospel’s that Nazareth was not a well-respected place. It was at the bottom of the socio-economic scale in Israel. It was a poor town. It was also a town where the Roman garrison was housed. Nazarenes were scorned, derided, and generally despised. It is this idea of scorn that is all over the prophets, maybe most famously recorded for us in Isaiah 53, where Isaiah says of Jesus, He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Isaiah 53:3
This seems to be what Matthew is getting at: Calling someone a Nazarene, was the same as calling them a worthless or despicable person. Calling someone a Nazarene is calling them a derogatory name. “He’s a Nazarene!” It’s like what Nathanael said when he heard Jesus was from Nazareth, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” This is what people will call Jesus. He is the King who is going to be rejected by the world. He will be scorned. He will be despised. But this is actually good news. Why?
Because as we will see, Jesus will identify with the despised. He will identify with outsiders, the unloved, the broken and the rejected. This is why God changed Joseph’s plans to return to Judea. God wanted Jesus to grow up as a second-class citizen. He wanted him to experience life as an outsider to transform Jesus into a man of compassion. He wanted him to learn rejection to transform him into a man of mercy.
And if God changed Joseph’s plans to impact Jesus’ life in this way, what’s to stop God from changing your plans to change you and make you more like Jesus? Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.
Sometimes God changes our plans. And most of the time we don’t like it.
So the next time God changes your plans remember:
He has something better for you
Or He may be trying to teach you something about hope
Or maybe He’s just trying to make you more like Jesus
So the next time when you discover that God has other plans for you, just wait and see what He will do. He’s got you. Trust Him.
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