Strange Story: The Birth of Jesus Part 17 Take Flight!

That very night the wise men were all given the same dream and “Up” was given his own angelic messenger in his own dream. In each case the message was similar, “Flee!”

The wise men were told to head home by a different route and not return to the king as he had asked them to. The urgency of the message implied that they should start out right away, which they did.

“Up” was told specifically to go to “The Land Bound by Sin.” One would think that God would not want his followers, much less His Son, to go to that evil place but now they were being told to go there for a time. It occurred to “Up” that upon their return from that place, the Scripture would be fulfilled that says, “Out of Egypt I called my son” (Hosea 11:1). For some reason God wanted His son to share with mankind the experience of being surrounded by sin. 

They didn’t.

In teh Biblical narrative, the angel tells Joseph to “flee” meaning to get out of there as fast as he could, only taking what was necessary or easy to carry.

Fleeing as a fugitive was something they knew about from their history; it was common in ancient times.

They couldn’t leave anything with relatives in Bethlehem because none of their relatives wanted anything to do with them.

He couldn’t hide all that stuff in caves; there was no time for that, and the likelihood of it being found was high anyway.

I envision the Wisemen leaving behind the camels they had used to bring the gifts with them, but Joseph did not want to attract attention to himself by having a caravan of loaded camels. Herod knew the Wisemen had come with lots of camels, so his soldiers were told what to look for. Joseph wanted to look like an average family traveling to Egypt; he did not want to stand out. He did not have time to load all those camels anyway. So he probably took as much of the gold as he could realistically load on one camel, the most docile one, on which Mary rode holding Jesus.

They had to abandon most of that stuff and flee for their lives.

As they fled, the wise men to the North and then the East, and the young family to the Southwest, they were unaware of the carnage that “The Self-proclaimed Hero” ordered the next afternoon in the small town that was usually thought of as the place where God provided for their needs. In those days the town was inhabited by about 300 people, so the number of baby boys would not have been great. Nonetheless, the entire town felt the losses heavily because it was not only baby boys who died that day, but also those who tried to protect them. The town was ravaged, the people were enraged and broken, and the king was hated more than ever. Although Herod the Great committed many heinous acts while he was king, the killing of the baby boys in Bethlehem is the primary reason he has been remembered by everyone all mankind, not as the great architect and engineer that he was, not as a powerful king, but as a monster.

To navigate to Part 18 of this story click on The Birth of Jesus Part 18 Measured by Their Names.