December 8, Bethlehem's supernatural star.

Where is he who has been born King of the Jews?

For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him, Matthew 2-2.

After and over the Bible baffles our curiosity about just how certain things happened.

How did this star get the magi from the east to Jerusalem?

It does not say that it led them or went before them on the way to Jerusalem.

It only says they saw a star in the east and came to Jerusalem, Matthew 2-2.

And how did that star go before them in the little five-mile walk from Jerusalem to Bethlehem,

as Matthew 2-9 says it did?

And how did a star rest over the place where the child was?

The answer is we do not know.

There are numerous efforts to explain it in terms of conjunctions of planets or comets

or supernovas or miraculous lights we just don't know.

And I want to exhort you not to become preoccupied, not to become fixated on theories

that are only tentative in the end and have very little spiritual significance.

I risk a generalization to warn you, people who are exercised and preoccupied with such things

as how the star worked and how the red sea split and how the manna fell and how Jonah survived

in the fish and how the moon turns to blood are generally people who have what I call a mentality

for the marginal.

You do not see in them a deep cherishing of the great central things of the gospel,

the holiness of God, the ugliness of sin, the helplessness of man, the death of Christ,

justification by faith alone, the sanctifying work of the Spirit, the glory of Christ's return,

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