Faithbase

Hello and welcome to this edition of Thinking About the Bible. I want to talk a little bit about someone we usually don't talk about around the Christmas season and that is King Herod, Herod the Great, and it's just another example, I think, of how God orchestrates events to bring about his desired end. Because when we think of Herod, Herod the Great, we think of a horrible king, who he was, a very bloodthirsty and violent man. But what we don't think about is that at that time in the world, on the world scene, there were two great powers, Rome and the kingdom of Parthenia. And the truth is that Herod could have gone either way, in fact he had courted both sides. Make a long story short, he eventually became known as the third man in the empire of Rome, the Roman Empire, and became a very important figure in the Roman Empire. He was ruthless, he was bloodthirsty, he was paranoid, he was just an evil man all around. But God used him to keep, I guess you'd say, the region of Judea and Galilee, Israel, in the Roman Empire, and to keep order there, and to prepare the way for the king, the true king, Jesus the Christ. So as bad as Herod was, even the horrible things that he did, just who he was, God used that for his desired ends. Does that make what Herod did right? Not at all, not by any means. But it is just another example of how God orchestrated events, kept, you might say, the land of Palestine, Israel, and the whole of that region, under the sway of the empire of Rome, rather than the Parthenian Empire, and it made a huge difference as the gospel went forth from Jerusalem into the civilized world of the Roman Empire, and has a very large impact on the way that Christianity unfolded in the generations after the time of Christ. So, Merry Christmas, and keep in mind, be thinking about the Bible, and thinking about how everything that happens in this life, God is in control, and he will use it for his desired ends.