Micah 5:2 “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.

”Sometimes God does his best work with some of the humblest and smallest things. Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem is a comfort for people like you and me.

What constitutes a small town isn’t the same for everyone. My family moved to Norman, OK from Dallas, TX, which has over a million people. Norman’s population around 120,000 seems small by comparison. But it is surrounded by smaller towns less than one tenth the size. If you are coming from one of them, Norman may feel more like the big city.

Today, Bethlehem, Israel, isn’t so much the “Little Town of Bethlehem” we sing about in the Christmas carol. It’s a thriving bedroom community for Jerusalem with about 30,000 people. As recently as the late 1960’s, however, it was half that size. In Jesus’ day there were at most 2000 people who lived there. When Micah wrote, the population may have been in the hundreds.

There sat this little town. In over a thousand years of history, it had produced one famous person: King David. And, of course, David didn’t hang around Bethlehem once he reached his late teens. It was off to the capital city where big things happened. The town he left behind remained a quiet place whose chief industry seemed to be sheep.

This is where The Lord chose to make his grand entry when he came to earth. This was the unlikely birthplace of our unlikely King. Of course, it had those ancient connections to King David, but then, so did Jerusalem, the city David made his capital. Bethlehem had little more going for it than the fact that it was a geographical location on planet earth, in Israel, and that’s where our King came to live and serve.

“Where are you from?” is one of the first questions we ask a person when getting to know them. It is one of the first phrases you learn when you are learning another language. “De donde esta?” “Var kommer du ifran?” “Wo kommst du her?” As a matter of information there is nothing wrong with this.

But we are tempted to put entirely too much stock in a person’s origin. You know that some who live in the big cities on the East and West Coasts refer to the middle of the country as “flyover territory.” It is not a compliment. It implies that there is nothing and no one of value or importance where people like me live.

We do the same thing. We try to build our sense of personal worth by finding something unique and noteworthy about the place we come from, and by finding some other place to ridicule. It is a strange thing, isn’t it, to feed our pride and give ourselves value based on something for which we had no choice in the process: the place in which we were born? I was born and raised in Rochester, Minnesota, the home of the world-famous Mayo Clinic. But there is nothing about that place or institution for which I can take any credit.

The Lord isn’t impressed with this, or any of the other factoids I might be tempted to put on my spiritual resume: the family tree into which I was born, where I went to school, what my GPA was, how many degrees I have earned, what I do for a living, titles I have held at work or in the community. The only thing that concerns him is how I have loved him and treated my neighbor. And this is just the problem, if we are honest. That part of our resumes associates us far too closely with that place where it is far too hot and miserable all the time. Hell may not be the place where we were born, but it could easily become the place to which we retire.

Our Lord did not come to save anyone because they were famous, or smart, or had good family connections, or came from a city you could be proud of. He came to save ordinary sinners, including people practically no one else knows exist, from places you may never have heard of and might find difficult to pronounce. Our King was born in Nowheresville, Israel, because he didn’t need to impress anyone with shallow credentials like a prestigious address. His love and his sacrifice would be impressive enough to save us all. He comes out of the little town of Bethlehem, the unlikely birthplace of our King.

Zephaniah 3:15 “Sing, O Daughter of Zion; shout aloud, O Israel! Be glad and rejoice with all your heart, O Daughter of Jerusalem! The Lord has taken away your punishment, he has turned back your enemy.”

Zephaniah proclaims God’s judgment on five nations neighboring Judah in his prophecy. You won’t find them on a modern map. They don’t exist anymore. Philistia was once a formidable rival of Israel along the southeastern coast of the Mediterranean. That’s the nation the giant Goliath came from. Today there is no race or people known by that name. Moab and Ammon suffered a similar fate. They were once located where we find the modern nation of Jordan. Cush was a powerful country where we now find Ethiopia. Assyria was one of the great empires of ancient times. After they fell to the Babylonians they never really existed as their own country again.

All these nations managed to anger God with their arrogance and their opposition to his plans for Israel. In the Old Testament, that was essentially the same as opposing God’s plan of salvation. One by one the Lord simply got rid of them. You can’t openly and persistently defy God and expect to live to tell about it.

The Jews themselves hadn’t lived a remarkably better life than their neighbors in the ancient Middle East. Their institutions were corrupt, Zephaniah says. The politicians used their power to enrich themselves and prey on the people. The prophets and priests had no integrity. They corrupted the religion to make themselves popular and preserve the high standard of living their positions gave them.

Nor were the ordinary people without fault. Many if not most dabbled in the highly sexualized and violent religions of their non-Jewish neighbors. They, too, were getting in the way of God’s saving plans by the lifestyle and values they were adopting, maybe even more than the pagan nations just across their borders. You can’t openly and persistently defy God and expect to live to tell about it.

Take a moment to compare Zephaniah’s concerns to our own times, and our own lives. Nations set themselves up against God’s saving work. Think communist and Muslim countries today. Politics for personal gain, religion twisted and manipulated so that clergy can remain popular and prosperous, everyday people sucked more and more into a culture of sex and violence. How should we expect God to react to the world we have created for ourselves?

Certainly not with the promises Zephaniah gave God’s people! “The Lord has taken away your punishment.” Do you know what it feels like to escape the just consequences of your behavior? I have always said that if you want to get somewhere fast and travel over the speed limit, you should let my wife drive. Seven times in her life she has been pulled over and given a warning instead of a ticket. Seven times! You know the dread you feel when you see the patrol car pull out of the median or off the shoulder and start following you. You look at your speedometer and know you have been going way too fast. Then the red and blue lights start flashing. You pull over. The officer approaches your car. Your heart races. Your stomach turns. How much is this going to cost? You hand the officer your license and your insurance and you wait. But he doesn’t return with a citation for you to sign with a date at the courthouse. He hands you back your documentation. “I’m letting you go with a warning. Please slow down and drive carefully. Have a nice day.”

You have just been given a gift worth hundreds of dollars: no fine to pay, no increase on your insurance rates, no hassle with the court, no time in a defensive driving course. All that, though you were as guilty as sin. As nervous and anxious as you were a few minutes earlier, you are filled with relief, even joy, to be let go. Maybe you feel a little song coming on, even your happy dance. But don’t do that. You are still in the car and don’t want to get pulled over again for reckless driving.

Now, compare that relatively minor escape from a relatively insignificant punishment, to the release God has given us from the mountain of sins we pile up day after day and the hell that they deserve! For Jesus’ sake we don’t have to pay the price for our repeat offenses, or any others for that matter. He paid the price for them all. The Lord has turned back our enemy, the devil. He has lost all claim on our souls. He cannot drag us away to the flames, the maggots, the darkness, the endless grief and misery. The Lord has taken away your punishment, and that’s reason for our hearts to be so full of joy they sing.

Malachi 3:5-6 “So I will come near to you for judgment. I will be quick to testify against sorcerers, adulterers and perjurers, against those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive aliens of justice, but do not fear me,” says the Lord Almighty. ‘I the Lord do not change. So you, O descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed.’”

Jesus was a real person, fully human and fully God, son of Mary and Son of God. He is not a myth, as some people claim. But the Jesus who was only sweet, only mild, only gentle; who overlooked bad behavior and didn’t care how people lived their lives–that Jesus is a myth. Malachi says that he was coming near for judgment. It was not the main mission of his earthly ministry. But you hear it in the Sermon on the Mount as he confronts the rather loose interpretation of God’s law popular in his day. You hear it in the seven woes he pronounces on the Pharisees.

You hear it four hundred years earlier in the words of Malachi. He has no tolerance for sorcery, dabbling in the occult. It is flirting with the enemy. It is evidence of a divided heart, unwilling to accept and embrace the measure of health or prosperity our loving Father has carefully decided serves us best.

He is quick to testify against the adulterers. There may be no area of life in which the human race has been in more of a hurry to throw off God’s plan for our well-being than in his plan for love and marriage. Even in his day Jesus had to confront easy divorce; lustful, leering, dirty-minded men; and the apparent failure of his people to grasp why God made two genders in the first place.

Look closely at the other sins listed in the prophet: “those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive aliens of justice.” In 1879 American Church Father C.F.W. Walther delivered a series of lectures to his congregation explaining why the Lutheran Church opposed Communism and Socialism: mostly because those movements were atheistic, defended violence, and did not recognize the right to private property.

But he went on to say, “When the rich…look upon (the poor) as existing simply for their profit…if they will not give the laborer proper wages…if they will not support the laborer and his family in case of sickness, if they can live in luxury and be unconcerned when the laborer is suffering: then we are not their friends, but, from principle, their enemies! O my brethren, what terms of reproach might not be justly applied to us, if we sided with the human vampires and not with the oppressed!” (Communism and Socialism, p. 36).

All of this flows from one great sin, the Lord points out: “(They) do not fear me.” Even the most faithful Christian may stumble into any of these sins in a moment of weakness, even multiple times. That God forgives. But when there is no fear of God, and the sin is embraced, and no repentance follows, then the Lord comes for judgment.

So our God and Savior is just. But he is more than just. He comes to spare his people. “I the Lord do not change. So you, O descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed.”

God does not change. Since the opening chapters of the Bible story, the Lord has shown himself to be the God who comes looking for people who aren’t looking for him. He wants to repair the relationship he did not destroy. He wants to find people who don’t know they are lost. He intends to rescue people who aren’t aware they are in danger. He gives life back to people who don’t realize they are dead.

So the descendants of Jacob, the Jews to whom Malachi wrote, were not destroyed. They were spared, time after time. The Lord kept coming to them through leaders and prophets. Finally Jesus came to them himself. He called them back. He died for their sins.

He still seeks our return. More than that, he offers to carry us all the way home. He gave us his word, and baptized us into his family, and feeds us with his Supper, not so that he can judge us, but so that he can spare us. Don’t dismiss his judgment. Don’t forget his grace.

Malachi 3:1-3 “See, I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,” says the Lord Almighty. But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold. Then the Lord will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness.

God’s promises to send two people: the messenger who would prepare his way. That is John the Baptist. Then “the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple.” That was Jesus. The Lord they were looking for was going to come, just as they asked.

But it can be a dangerous thing to ask for God to come. Refining and laundering are both pictures of cleansing. This isn’t a relaxing shower or a soothing bath. This is burning away the impurities in a blast furnace. This is soaking the pants in lye and rubbing them over a washboard and maybe beating them over a rock until the stain comes out. This is the painful process of leading people to surrender to God and repent of their sin.

There is a scene in the C.S. Lewis book The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in which one of the characters, Eustace Scrubb, has discovered a dragon’s treasure on an enchanted island. It fills him with all kinds of greed, and he plots how to take it all for himself without anyone else finding out. As he plans and plots, he falls asleep, and when he awakes, he has become a dragon himself. It is all a picture of how our sin and selfishness make us like THE Dragon. They spoil our hearts. They ruin us as human beings, turning us into creatures of an entirely different sort than God made us to be.

Eustace is desperate to become a little boy again. It occurs to him that scaly dragons are snake like. Perhaps he can shed his skin and become the boy he once was. Three times he scrapes the scales off his body, only to find that he hasn’t changed underneath. He is still the dragon. That should come as no real surprise, because that’s what happens when a snake sheds its skin, too, isn’t it. It remains a snake. It can’t really change itself.

Then Aslan the Lion, the Jesus character in the book, appears. He tells Eustace, “You will have to let me undress you.” And Eustace is afraid of his claws. He knows it will hurt, but he lets him do it. So Aslan goes to work pulling the dragon skin off. It hurts worse than anything Eustace has ever felt, but it is the only way to escape the dragon body he has become. In the end Aslan has stripped Eustace of his dragon body, and washes him up, and gives him new clothes to wear.

When John the Baptist and Jesus came to God’s people, the people had been looking for them. They wanted the Messenger and their Lord to come. But this is what God wanted to do to his people through them: burn and scrub away their sin and selfishness, tear away their dragon scales, turn them back into his children. For some the process was too scary, too painful. They didn’t go through with it–the Pharisees, the Priests, Judas.

For us, the Lord wants the same thing. He doesn’t want us to peel off our own scales, softly and gently, when we make the easy choices and give up the vices we never really liked anyway. That is a limp and weak repentance, no real repentance at all. He wants to get his claws deep into our souls. He tears through our favorite sins and underneath them. He gets to the heart that is the root of the problem. Tearing the old creature away is necessary for us to become people of God.

Then he can wash us in Jesus’ blood. Then he can dress us in Jesus’ righteousness and love. “Then the Lord will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord, as in days gone by, as in former years.” So cleansed can we live and love and give as the Lord wants us to do.

Malachi 2:17 “You have wearied the Lord with your words. ‘How have we wearied him, you ask?’ By saying, ‘All who do evil are good in the eyes of the Lord, and he is pleased with them,’ or ‘Where is the God of justice?’”

            People are confused about the kind of God they want. Sometimes they want a “just” God. Then they complain that he isn’t “just” enough. People have told me they can’t believe in a God who lets innocent children be abused or go hungry. At the very least he should see that the perpetrators are punished. One person who took my Bible information class balked at the idea that God could forgive a murderer and let him go to heaven. I heard comedian Bill Maher take exception to certain Christians who thought that the assassination of terrorist Osama bin Laden was the wrong way to serve him justice. Certainly, he thought, a just god should find this acceptable.

            On the other hand, when the Lord does display his justice, many get upset about that, too. They accuse God of atrocities and war crimes for the way he dealt with the Canaanites in the Old Testament–urging their annihilation. They don’t consider that violence and sexual perversion had infected almost every feature of their culture. For most of them, their worship involved prostitution. For others, they burned their own children alive in the fiery arms of the false god Molech. This was considered an acceptable, normal part of their daily life.

And the Lord was patient with these peoples and cultures for half a millennium or more. But people criticize him when, after hundreds of years, his patience ran out and he served justice on the whole society. What do they think a just God is going to do when Judgment Day comes?

Four hundred years before Christ, Israel had the same confused ideas about God that many people have today. Through Malachi the Lord addressed some of their specific complaints. “All who do evil are good in the eyes of the Lord.” It seemed to them that God somehow favored the people with the worst behavior. They wanted the Lord to bring down justice on their less than holy neighbors. Justice on their own lives? Not so much.

            So, with many people, the Lord can’t win. They are against him when he is gracious and patient, and they are against him when he is just and firm. Here is the irony: a God who is both gracious and just is the kind of God we need. Deep down inside, he is also the kind of God we want. Where is he? In the words of prophets and apostles, and the preachers who preach their message today.

Jeremiah 33:16 “In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. This is the name by which it will be called: The Lord our Righteousness.”

When we think of being saved, we think especially of the cross. We think especially of the blood of Jesus’ paying for our sins. We think of God’s grace forgiving every fault and sparing us of the hell we deserved as a gift of his love, and rightly so. This is what Jesus came to do for us.

But when Jeremiah wrote, those were not details the Lord had shared with his people yet. They had hints and pictures of it in the prophecies and in the sacrifices of their temple worship, but the details of Jesus saving us would still wait hundreds of years to be seen.

So Jeremiah pictures God’s saving work another way. You may remember that he is writing at a time when the Babylonians had taken over the land of Judah and surrounded the city of Jerusalem. God’s people were under attack. It was not a safe time to be a Jewish citizen.

This future King from David’s line, however, would make God’s people safe again. The Hebrew word for “saved” pictures a person being delivered to a wide a spacious place, where you are free to move and roam. There are no threats, no enemies to be seen anywhere around. The Hebrew word for “safety” describes a person so free from any danger that they have this absolute sense of confidence and trust. That is just about the opposite of the experience of the Jewish people to whom Jeremiah wrote, surrounded by their enemies.

Since that time, neither Judah nor Jerusalem have literally been so “saved” or “safe.” After the Persians let them go back home, Alexander the Great and the Greeks swept through and subjugated them. At the time of Jesus, it was the Romans. To this day the literal land of Israel is surrounded by enemies who would like nothing more than to squeeze them out of existence.

But if this is a picture of the work of King Jesus, then we aren’t talking about a national, political safety anyway. This is a spiritual picture of the results of Jesus’ work. Under Jesus we are safe from the enemies of our faith, safe from sin, safe from death. That’s why the people of God will be called “The Lord our Righteousness.” We are righteous and safe from sin and hell because Jesus has taken it all away. And ultimately, this is the safety all God’s people will have on the day that is coming, when Jesus returns to take his people home to the New Jerusalem in heaven.

Jeremiah 33:15 “In those days and at that time I will make a righteous Branch sprout from David’s line; he will do what is just and right in the land.”

Do you ever get depressed about our current crop of leaders? Politicians make all kinds of promises to get elected. Then it seems their main concern becomes getting re-elected. Sometimes it seems as if they would sell their souls to stay in office. They aren’t concerned with doing what is right for the country. Personal morals and decency don’t concern many of them at all. Between 2010 and 2020 more than 105 members of our congress came under investigation or had to resign due to issues ranging from bribery to sexual harassment to ethics violations.

Ancient Israel had its own leadership problems. King David, the good king, the model king, committed adultery and murder while in office. It went downhill from there. As Jeremiah wrote, King Zedekiah was the spineless puppet of special interest groups in Judah fighting an unwinnable war and driving the nation toward catastrophe. I have to think that a faithful Jew in 600 B.C. complained as much about the state of their government as we do, maybe more.

That being said, the Lord tends to give a nation the kind of leaders it deserves. It’s not as though the typical Jewish citizen was a model of godly behavior in Jeremiah’s day. They were materialistic. They took advantage of the poor. They were sexually promiscuous, considering themselves “liberated” from God’s standards. They had stopped attending temple or abandoned the Bible faith for other strange religions. Sound like the citizens of any country you know?

Against that backdrop, the Lord’s promise is that much more striking. “I will make a righteous Branch sprout from David’s line. He will do what is just and right in the land.” To be “righteous” in Bible terms means that one’s life and actions conform to God’s standards. The Lord was promising a leader who was guided, not by what was popular or trendy. It would not be his goal to please people or conform to the culture. His only guide would be the law of God, the morals laid out in the 10 commandments, that standard of right and wrong recorded in the Holy Scriptures. His life would be consistent with that standard with no exceptions made for anyone, ever.

That description fits Jesus to a “T,” who was “tempted in every way just as we are, yet was without sin. When he laid down the challenge to his enemies to convict him of some sort of sin, they had no reply, because they had nothing with which to accuse him. Even when they tried to pay false witnesses to accuse him, they couldn’t get their accusations to line up. He was the righteous Branch from David’s line.

He was the kind of King we need. You can trust that a leader like that “will do what is just and right in the land.” Earthly, material, political kingdoms don’t work like that, not in this world. There is little tolerance for consistent justice and integrity. Scandal and power seem to go hand in hand.

Jesus did not aspire to set up a material, political kingdom anyway. As it was, his righteous life got him crucified by those in authority. But he was and is a King nonetheless. He set up his kingdom in human hearts. He still does. He rules by faith. He turns enemies into subjects by winning them with his love. He does not pander to his constituents. He does forgive them when they stumble. As he changes hearts from defiant rebels to willing followers, he leads them toward the same kind selfless, serving, righteous, loving behavior that marked his own life. When we look at the day that was coming for Jeremiah and his people, the one that has come with Jesus, a righteous Branch has appeared. “He does what is just and right in the land.”

Jeremiah 33:14 “The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will fulfill the gracious promise I made to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah.”

Ever wondered about God’s promises? Our experience with his short-term promises may leave us in doubt about the long-term ones. “Don’t worry about food or clothes or necessities of life,” Jesus says. “Your Father in heaven will take care of all that.” But we know Christian people who have faced eviction, bankruptcy, or hunger. Maybe the person you know is yourself.

“If you make the Most High your dwelling–even the Lord, who is my refuge–then no harm will befall you, no disaster will come near your tent. For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways…” Psalm 91 promises. There is no asterisk in the text, no small print stating, “Offer excludes Oklahoma tornadoes, Alaskan earthquakes, California wildfires, various car accidents, and other unspecified or man-made catastrophes.”

As a pastor I depend daily on God’s promise in Isaiah 55, “My word will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.” I have shared that word with thousands of people during my ministry. Sometimes it feels like that word is coming back empty.

How do we reconcile these promises with our experience? None of these promises intends to disprove or contradict other things God tells us in his word, like “In this world you will have much trouble,” or “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.” Having the necessities to live is not the same thing as never experiencing hunger, poverty, or pain. And God never promises we will live in this world forever. He has to use something to end our lives here and take us home. As for his word, while he wants everyone to be saved, his purpose in any individual case when his word is heard may not necessarily be some person’s conversion.

 For our doubts, we still have the big, world-changing promises like the ones he gives here. The Lord promised to send his people a Deliverer, a Savior, the Messiah. A hundred years before Jeremiah he gave the promise to Isaiah. Three hundred years before Isaiah he had given the promise to King David. In other forms the promise had existed for thousands of years before that.

Then Jesus came. It may have been hundreds, even thousands of years later for some of these men, but he came. The Lord fulfilled “the gracious promise I made to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah,” just as he said. The details of Jesus’ coming fulfill at least 300 prophecies about the circumstances. In 1952 Peter Stoner, Professor of mathematics and astronomy at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, worked out the statistical probabilities of one man fulfilling just eight of those prophecies, and the chances are one out of 10 to the seventeenth, or one out of 100 quadrillion. For the believer, of course, the fulfillment of all 300 plus has always been a given, because God keeps his word.

That reassures us as we wait for the next big prophecy, when Jesus comes again. The passing of thousands of years did not prevent the fulfillment of his first coming. We can be confident the Lord will fulfill his promise when we look at the day that is coming, because God keeps his word.