Herod sent them to Bethlehem and said, "Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him." (Matthew 2:8).
Note the great ones of this world are not averse to using a cloak of piety to hide evil intentions. Herod The Great once said, "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful." Christians, of course, know that's bunk and that wise men seek Him still.
When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and all the region who were two years old or younger. When the Eastern Orthodox celebrate the Feast of the Holy Innocents, their tradition insists that he slew 14,000 infants. But the Jewish historian Josephus who catalogs any number of Herod's atrocities fails to mention this one.
The answer the modern scholars tend to give is a good one; there probably weren't all that many children thus murdered and it kind of pales killing other folks' kids when you executed your own favorite wife, her mother, and your kids. What is for sure, the information given by Josephus fits the action of Herod here and makes it totally unsurprising. He was cold and calculating and jealous of his thrown.
But even if it's only 10 or 5, would it not be an awful and evil thing in its own right? As the mothers and fathers held their butchered babies in their arms, you better believe the only question that arose in their broken and shattered hearts was why- why God? It's cold comfort to try to theologically parse the distinction between God's permissive will and His active will. It was the cruelty of Herod himself, a very broken man from a very broken race of men who are shown it wasn't God who affected those deaths. A spotlight on what's gone wrong in us all.
-Pr. Will Weedon
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