Matthew 2:16-18 Weeping in Ramah

Perhaps you have heard of the infamous eighteenth-century French philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778) of the so-called Enlightenment era. Though not exactly an atheist, Voltaire spent much of his life ridiculing the Bible and the Christian faith. In a 1767 letter to Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, he wrote: “Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and bloody religion that has ever infected the world… My one regret in dying is that I cannot aid you in this noble enterprise of extirpating the world of this infamous superstition.” Further, after his death, an early biographer quoted him writing a letter to a friend, stating, “It is impossible that Christianism survives.” He seemed to think that Christianity would not survive another generation; the faith was in its twilight years.

He even published a large two-volume work called "The Bible Fully Explained," basically a commentary with the purpose of quoting: "to make the whole building (of Christianity) crumble." Voltaire died with a clenched fist to the heavens, metaphorically speaking. But God is not mocked. With a cruel sense of irony, as is now well documented, Voltaire's former residence in Geneva, Switzerland, from where he wrote condemning the Bible, was later, after his passing, purchased by Christians and used as a Bible storehouse for a Bible society.

Furthermore, the very printing press he once employed in Ferney, France, for his publications was later used to print Bibles. Curiously enough, one author noted that Voltaire printed Bibles on paper specifically designed for a superior edition of his works. The Voltaire project was unsuccessful; this led to the purchase and dedication of the paper to this superior purpose.

I am reminded of the Psalmist: “The kings of the earth take their stand, and the rulers take counsel together against the LORD and against His Anointed, saying, ‘Let us tear their fetters apart and cast away their cords from us!’... He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord scoffs at them.” (Psalm 2:2–4).

The lesson from this story of Voltaire is much the same as what we find in our section in Matthew 2 this morning. Man is incapable of limiting God's ability to perform what He wills. Men like Voltaire, men like Herod pass, and God's work continues; He continues to magnify His own name in the redemption of man.

So Matthew, though having already introduced us to King Herod earlier in his account, will now highlight one of his final murderous atrocities. Herod instructed the Magi; remember, you will recall, he said, “When you find the born king that you seek, tell me so that I too can come and worship him.” But in his heart was the devising of the evil one, Satan. In a rage, Herod's henchmen are sent to slaughter the infant males of Bethlehem and the vicinity around in order that the child Christ might be killed.

As a dying man, Herod is counselling against the Lord God. As all tyrants do, he thinks of himself as benevolent, believing it within his grasp to frustrate and upset God's prophetic programme and will attempt to destroy Jesus. But as Proverbs 21:30 says, there is no wisdom and no understanding and no counsel against the Lord.

The big idea of this passage, Matthew 2:16–18, is about God's fulfilment of His promises in the Messiah. Specifically, we want to see how Matthew interprets Herod's slaughter of the infants at Bethlehem as a further example of how the life of the Messiah occurred as a recapitulation, a retelling of the story of the nation of Israel.

Last week, we considered how Jesus entering into Egypt and escaping from Herod, thereby coming out of Egypt, repeated the story of Israel's exodus. In that link, we observed how Matthew reduced Israel to a single man in Jesus. He represents the true Israelite, the faithful son, and is contrasted against the unfaithful nation of Israel. It is in this man, Jesus, that we find one who truly fulfils the nation's mould and their mission.

As we shall see, Matthew will again reach into the Old Testament. As he hears the weeping of Bethlehem and the cries of the mothers mourning for the loss of their sons, Matthew hears this as comparable to the voice of sorrow, weeping from Rama in times past as the Babylonians besieged Judah and led the people of God into exile.

Matthew's purpose for this connection is another New Exodus type link. In the context of the passage from which he cites as fulfilled, Jeremiah holds out hope of the coming in-breaking of God. He holds out hope of a new and everlasting covenant with Israel, present now in the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah.

Herod's Rage

So let us turn to the biblical text. We have simply two headings to consider. The first is verse 16: Herod's rage. Herod's rage. The Lord frustrated Herod's plan to locate and destroy Jesus. Herod had tricked the Magi into believing that he too wished to worship Jesus, which cannot fool God. Herod managed to present himself in a winsome manner to the Magi; perhaps they genuinely thought that he really did want to worship along with them.

It was the Lord who had to warn the Magi of Herod's true motives. We saw this earlier; if you look back at verse 12 of chapter two, having been warned by God in a dream not to return to Herod, the Magi left for their own country by another way. Here we see what was stated earlier in the story of Voltaire: God is not mocked. We cannot deceive God or stand in His way.

When man stands in the way of the Lord's true motives, of the Lord's truth, in between what man wishes to accomplish versus what God wishes to accomplish, we stand no chance. He is sovereign. Psalm 33:10 says the Lord nullifies the counsel of nations; He frustrates the plans of the peoples. But there will always be those who oppose the truth, remember.

In Herod's rage, threatened by the infant king who would take his power, he sends soldiers to Bethlehem. He has the male children under two years old in the town murdered in an attempt to kill the Lord Jesus. The total number of boys in Bethlehem at this time would probably be no more than twenty to forty, historians estimate. A low number makes the crime no less atrocious. Herod was a man of ruthless cruelty. It is possible that even this event did not make much of a ripple in the history of the day, given his reputation.

Rachel's Weeping

So we have Herod's rage. The next heading, where we will spend most of our time, is Rachel's weeping. Rachel's weeping. Here we come across another of Matthew's fulfilment formulas. You will notice there in verse seventeen that Matthew says, “Then what had been spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled.” It is one of those fulfilment formulas in Matthew, and it is the first where Matthew specifically tells us the prophet from whom he is quoting: he says, Jeremiah.

Perhaps to communicate the importance of what he is about to establish in this connection, he forms an Old Testament link concerning the nation of Israel and tells us that in its reappearance in the life of Jesus, the story finds its fulfilment of that Old Testament account. Matthew takes us deeper into the theme of the Old Testament scripture as anticipating and fulfilled in Christ's appearance.

I do not want to leave you all bamboozled in the many layers of rich theology here. This passage is almost like an onion that you can continually peel layers off, and it continues to give and give. We do not want to confuse ourselves; we want to try to stick close to the central thrust of the text and keep things simple.

For clarity on this passage, we need to first understand a few of the terms that are being used here in this quotation. I will begin by reading the passage, which is found in Jeremiah 31:15: “Thus says the Lord: A voice is heard in Rama, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children because they are no more.”

Jeremiah is ministering for God in a time when the Southern Kingdom of Judah—remember, Israel was split into the Northern Kingdom and the Southern Kingdom—is set to follow her northern sister, Israel, into exile. Babylon will come and carry them away. That is the context of Jeremiah. We read in Jeremiah 21:10, “For I have set my face against the city for harm and not for good, declares the Lord. It will be given into the hand of the King of Babylon, and he will burn it with fire.”

The nation of Israel and even the Southern Kingdom of Judah had been like an unfaithful wife to the Lord. By forsaking God, by sinning against the Lord without repentance, they forsook their rights to the land. They forsook the covenantal blessings of peace in the land. Ezekiel put it this way: “You adulterous wife who takes strangers instead of her husband” (Ezekiel 16:32). They fell into idolatry, you see.

Rama is a town name, and it is an important geographical symbol of the coming exile. Rama was located right at the centre between the Northern Kingdom and the Southern Kingdom. If you imagine Woodlands as Rama, the Northern Kingdom would be Wyndham or Edendale; the Southern Kingdom could be Invercargill if you just imagine that picture as you drive from there. That is Rama; it is located right in the centre. So it is a representative town.

As a voice rises up from Rama, it is as if the nation as a whole is mourning what is taking place. It is a crying out; it is a corporate grief of the nation who are enduring the Lord's discipline for sin, for their breaking of the covenant and not seeking His face. Jeremiah is saying that there is weeping coming from Rama, symbolic of the fact that when the defeated multitudes would be exiled away to a faraway land, Rama was the location where all the defeated hostages would be collected, and from there they would be ushered off, walked out, marched out into Babylon.

The crying of Rama is the grief of the nation. That is what Jeremiah is saying is coming in his context. We find the same type of figurative language in Jeremiah's reference to Rachel. Rachel was the cherished wife of Jacob, renamed Israel. The mourning of Rachel represents the matriarchs of Israel. As she mourns, as her children are carried away and the nation is besieged, the focal point of the grief is due to the fact that there is a worldly foreign power over the people of God.

Rachel's mourning is symbolic of the fact that the children of Israel are being carried away by a foreign power. The mourning in the context of Jeremiah would be a reference to the mourning of the families during the murder of the children during the invasion of Judea, the southern kingdom; weeping for their sons who were led into exile.

And perhaps part of Matthew's reason why he chooses this quote to link to the death of the children in Bethlehem is because Rachel was actually buried in Bethlehem herself, Genesis 35. So we have Rama; we have Rachel; we understand now how Jeremiah is using these names to symbolically represent the grief of the nation being led into exile.

And then comes the theology; follow me closely. Herod's murderous act serves in Matthew's mind to retell and remind the nation of Israel of the woeful reality that, though they were no longer in Babylon in Jesus' day, they were still truly in exile spiritually. The exile never really ended; they are still under foreign oppression. Without the peace and glory of former times, they are awaiting God to move. Foreign powers dominate Israel.

And Herod's slaughter at Bethlehem serves as a horrific reminder that all is not well in the land. The faithful eagerly awaited a second exodus: the return of God to redeem, restore, and bless the nations through them as foretold in the Abrahamic covenant. So when Rachel weeps and Rama raises her voice, it signifies that the nation's agony continues even in the time that Jesus is born.

And there are further parallels that establish the fact of Israel's exile. Think of Pharaoh down in Egypt; the nation was down there. What did Pharaoh do? Well, he ordered the murder of the young Hebrew boys as well, did he not? So we have a direct parallel. At the time of Moses, Moses' life was under threat. It is like Herod is the new Pharaoh in Matthew two, and Jesus, you see, is the new Moses. That is what Matthew wants us to see.

God has sovereignly protected Moses, and so he will here sovereignly protect the new Moses, the Lord Jesus. Here is the one who is going to lead the new and final exodus for the people of God. That is where we find our story: in the exodus that Jesus leads.

Matthew's reference to this passage in Jeremiah is not simply to highlight the grief of Israel or the atrocity of Herod's act, but he calls readers to lean into the anticipated hope that God promised the exiles in Jeremiah's day. Matthew knows exactly what he is doing; he is wrapping his arms around the context of Jeremiah.

Jeremiah 31, from which he quotes, is perhaps one of the most significant Old Testament chapters in all the Hebrew Bible. In fact, if you are not familiar with Jeremiah 31, I encourage you to go home tonight and read through those chapters, particularly chapters 31 to 33: Jeremiah 31.

So it pays for us to look at that chapter again. If you want to open your Bibles there, you are most welcome. Matthew quotes from Jeremiah 31:15, but in the very next verse, Rachel is called to stop weeping, to grieve no more. That is important. Jeremiah says, "Behold, a day is coming when exile shall be over. God will come and he will fulfil his promises despite her previous covenantal unfaithfulness."

Despite Babylon, despite Rome in Jesus' day, despite Herod, the text says, Jeremiah 31:16, "Thus says the Lord: 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." At the brink of exile, Jeremiah says God is not finished and the exile will end.

The central hope that God holds out through Jeremiah is a new and everlasting covenant. Almost all of Jeremiah 31, from where Matthew reaches, is about the days of God's new covenant that is coming with his people. If you are in Jeremiah 31, you can look down at verse 31: Jeremiah 31:31. "Behold, days are coming," declares the Lord, "when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers on the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them," declares the Lord.

"But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days," declares the Lord. "I will put my law within them, and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. They will not teach again each man his neighbour and each man his brother, saying, 'Know the Lord,' for they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest of them," declares the Lord, "for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more."

Jeremiah foresaw by divine revelation that a new covenant was coming, of such a nature that God's law would be written on the hearts of his people. While the covenant made with Israel at Mount Sinai through Moses was an external covenant, with its law written on tablets of stone and its sign being the sign of circumcision of the flesh, external; this time the Lord will form a covenant with his people which will be internal. He will instil his law upon their hearts so that they would follow, obey, know, and love the Lord from the depths of their heart.

Ezekiel, as the other prophets, foresaw this coming reality too: Ezekiel 36:25, "Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean. I will cleanse you from all filthiness, from all your idols. Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes, and you will be careful to observe my ordinances."

Application

So how do these things apply? Matthew wants us to recognise the context of Jeremiah 31, which he is drawing from. As we hear the mourning of Bethlehem, as Herod sends his henchmen to do his work, that mourning comes to our ears, just as it came to the original audience of Matthew. We would immediately recognise that the time of hope promised by God is now here in Christ. He has come, the new Moses, the new deliverer for God. He is here for his people, and he will cut this new covenant that Jeremiah promised in Jeremiah 31, the covenant not by the letter but by the spirit.

Moreover, God has included Gentiles in this covenant so that the nations might be gathered to him. Friends, have you ever considered the cost of this covenant that God has formed between God and his believing people? A perfect life, the life of Jesus; an atoning death, the death of Jesus; a conquering over the grave, the resurrection of Jesus; a mediator forever, the ascension of Jesus. What a God we worship, and what a saviour is Jesus.

If Jeremiah 31 is a chapter you should probably go home and read, Hebrews eight is another one. In Hebrews eight, the author of Hebrews quotes extensively from Jeremiah 31, recognising the fulfilment of this covenantal promise in the arrival of Jesus Christ, this new covenant. Then, in Hebrews ten, again referring to the work of the Holy Spirit, the author quotes Jeremiah 31 again and says this: "For by a single offering, that is Christ, he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified."

"The Holy Spirit also bears witness to us after saying," and then quotes from Jeremiah 31, "This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days," declares the Lord. "I will put my laws on their hearts and write them on their minds. I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more." That is our inheritance, friends.

Although Jeremiah 31 references a covenant with the house of Israel and Judah, the New Testament authors clearly state that the fulfilment belongs to all God's people, Jew and Gentile, though it is enacted upon a covenant with the nation. When the nations hear Christ preached and believe, they enter into the blessings of the new covenant in Christ. God will remember their iniquities no more.

This is why Paul in Ephesians 2 speaks of Christ as forming one new man: he takes Jew and Gentile and brings them together. Paul says, establishing peace, reconciling them both in one body to God through the cross of Christ. That is why Jesus in Matthew 22, in that wedding feast parable, said that the banquet is ready; that is, the kingdom of God is prepared. The way and access to God is now open, but those who are invited, that is, the nation of the Jews with whom the covenant was formed, were not worthy; they were unwilling to receive Christ, and they cried out, "We have no king but Caesar," and crucified the Lord Jesus.

Jesus says therefore in his parable, "Go therefore into the main roads and invite to the wedding feast as many as you find." Those servants went out into the roads and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad. So the wedding hall was filled with guests; that is, the nations are invited to come and participate in what God has formed in the new covenant. He says, "Gather the nations; proclaim this gospel to the ends of the earth."

That is why Paul says in Romans 2:29 that "he is a Jew who is one inwardly, and the circumcision is that which is of the heart, by the spirit, not by the letter. And his praise is not from men but from God." We remember the new covenant of which we partake in Christ and the Lord's supper. What we just celebrated was the new covenant that is in Christ. The scripture says in Luke 22:20, "In the same way he took the cup after they had eaten, saying, 'The cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.'"

So to Paul and his ministry to the Gentiles, he calls himself a minister of the new covenant: 2 Corinthians 3:6, "Who also made us adequate as servants of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the spirit." This is what Matthew is doing as he sees this atrocity in Bethlehem compared to the mourning of the nation as a whole, especially as the southern kingdom of Judah went off to exile.

But he says, "Look, there's more. So the new deliverer is here; the time of exile is over; the new covenant is being formed. God's arms welcome all those who will come, repent of their sins, and believe upon Christ." So I conclude with this: the Anglican minister J.C. Ryle wrote these words: "Remember that the triumphant thing of the wicked is but short. What has become of the pharaohs and Nero's and the Elocitans, who at one time fiercely persecuted the people of God? Where is the enmity of Charles the Ninth of France and Bloody Mary of England?

They did their utmost to cast the truth down to the ground, but the truth rose again from the earth and still lives. They are dead and moldering in the grave. Let not the heart of any believer fail. Death is a mighty leveler and can take any mountain out of the way of Christ's church. The Lord lives forever; his enemies are only men. The truth shall always prevail."

Conclusion

We have seen this morning that God's word and his truth endure in spite of the scheming and devices of men who oppose him, and in spite of unworthy people like us who deserve his judgement, not his mercy; his justice, not his forgiveness. Matthew this morning drew us to Jeremiah 31 and the story of the nation retold in the mourning of Bethlehem for her children. But all is not lost, for the Messiah is here: the deliverer to lead the spiritual exodus and write God's law upon the hearts of his people through the forgiveness of sins that is ours in Christ Jesus.

I hope you have been enriched by a deeper appreciation of all that is contained in the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.