This is what the Lord says: ‘A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.’ This is what the Lord says: ‘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. So there is hope for your descendants,’ declares the Lord. ‘Your children will return to their own land.
Jeremiah 31:15-17 NIVUK
When Herod realised that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: ‘A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.’
Matthew 2:16-18 NIVUK
There are some events that are so awful, so utterly terrible, that they stay with us for a long time.
Here in the UK, we have seen the sentencing to life imprisonment without parole of a maternity nurse, Lucy Letby, who was found guilty of slaying seven babies and attempting to kill a further six.
Such news is nothing short of awful. It breaks our hearts, tears our souls into pieces and makes us wonder how it could be possible for things like that happen.
This prophecy comes from the darkest day in Old Testament history. It comes from a time when the Babylonians were inflicting horrific, mindless violence against the Jews. Its full nature is relayed to us in the chilling words of the book of Lamentations. There are also hints of it in the Psalms:
By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the poplars we hung our harps, for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy; they said, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land? If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill. May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not consider Jerusalem my highest joy. Remember, Lord, what the Edomites did on the day Jerusalem fell. ‘Tear it down,’ they cried, ‘tear it down to its foundations!’ Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us. Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.
Psalms 137:1-9 NIVUK
Yet this was not the last time that an act of heartless, unspeakable violence was meted out against the Jews.
Right towards the end of the Christmas story, in verses that destroy our picture postcard perfect vision of the event, we see this narrative:
When Herod realised that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.
Matthew 2:16 NIVUK
This was likely not a lot of infants – commentators believe it was around ten or twelve – but even one infant is too many. The despot Herod is so mad keen to preserve his throne that he is not above committing a singularly despicable act to do so.
Whichever way you look at it, this is a heinous crime that inflicted an enormous amount of pain and suffering.
Yet we have to ask ourselves why? Why does God permit this to happen? And why is such a tragic and violent story part of the Christmas narrative?
Where is God in the midst of such horror?
Interestingly, and this is very important, the Bible only lets us know why bad things happen some of the time – and usually it’s to punish or discipline evil or to help us realise who we are and who God is. The rest of the time, it does not.
This case is one of them. It is blatantly obvious that Herod’s attack on these blameless infants is utterly wrong and borne out of a capricious desire to remain in charge. But other than that, we are given no reason why these infants have died.
However, the quote from Jeremiah does give us an indication of where God is and what He is doing in the midst of the suffering.
The first is that God is listening. He is aware of the suffering. He hears. He knows.
As it says elsewhere in the Bible:
You, Lord, hear the desire of the afflicted; you encourage them, and you listen to their cry, defending the fatherless and the oppressed, so that mere earthly mortals will never again strike terror.
Psalms 10:17-18 NIVUK
Record my misery; list my tears on your scroll – are they not in your record? Then my enemies will turn back when I call for help. By this I will know that God is for me.
Psalms 56:8-9 NIVUK
And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off?
Luke 18:7 NIVUK
If you have been a victim of a heinous evil today; if you carry around the deep pain and the scars that others have inflicted on you; if you wonder if the hurt will ever go away, then I want you to know that the Lord hears your cries. The Lord knows you are hurting. He is not blind to it. He is not deaf to it.
And He is absolutely not indifferent to it.
This verse in Revelation is wonderful:
When he opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.
Revelation 8:1 NIVUK
Imagine: the noise of worship and acclamation in Heaven falls silent!
But why?
For a most wonderful reason:
Another angel, who had a golden censer, came and stood at the altar. He was given much incense to offer, with the prayers of all God’s people, on the golden altar in front of the throne. The smoke of the incense, together with the prayers of God’s people, went up before God from the angel’s hand. Then the angel took the censer, filled it with fire from the altar, and hurled it on the earth; and there came peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning and an earthquake.
Revelation 8:3-5 NIVUK
Heaven falls silent so that our prayers can be heard!
That is why we see these commands in the Bible:
And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people.
Ephesians 6:18 NIVUK
Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.
1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 NIVUK
We pray, not because it induces a nice meditative state that is good for our mental health.
No, we pray because God hears.
And that is what is different about Christian prayer compared to any other types of prayer. It is not the words or the posture or the place. It’s that our God hears.
Secondly, we see that God does not only just hear. No, God speaks.
When you are a child, there were times when simply hearing your parents’ voice was enough to calm your fears, ease your pain and calm your weeping.
As an adult, however, simply hearing someone else is not enough. They have to say something – something meaningful – that will make your suffering seem worthwhile.
However, the painful reality is that very few people have the knowledge or the insight to say words that have this effect. More often than not, words spoken by other people are at best trite or superficial, at worst unnecessary or even hurtful.
But we need to remember who is speaking here. Genesis 1 presents the picture of a God who created the entire universe simply by speaking and commanding it into being. Psalm 139:13-16 presents a God who knows us intimately from the moment we are conceived. John 1:14 and Hebrews 4:15 present a God who walked our footsteps and knows how it feels to be us. Hebrews 2:10 presents a God whose human experience was perfected because of His suffering on earth.
In every walk of life, there are people we should listen to and people we should not. In our country, we had a Christian, Jason Leitch, in the role of National Clinical Director, who spoke simply and directly to our nation during the Covid Pandemic and was widely respected. Men like him deserve to be listened to because they have moral and intellectual authority, and are also affected by their own advice.
There is no higher authority on human suffering that God Himself. None. No-one else.
So when He speaks, we ought to listen.
It is a wonderful thing that God listens to our cries. It is a more wonderful thing that, like a loving parent, He is not silent and speaks His Word into our situation.
However, we need to be aware that we don’t always listen or want to hear what He says.
Let me give you an example. Every day, we live and breathe around electromagnetic radiation. It does us no harm at all. But that radiation contains the signals of thousands of radio and TV channels, of Bluetooth and mobile phone transmissions, of freelance radio broadcasts, of broadband internet... Yet we are completely oblivious of all these things unless we are tuned into them.
Often, when we suffer, the problem is not that God isn’t speaking (although this can be the case, as it was for the Israelites for four hundred years between the Old and New Testaments – see Amos 8:11-12), it could be that we are not tuned in to listen to it. It could be that our suffering and pain is creating so much noise and static that the Word of God cannot get through to us.
Those are the days when we need to recognise the problem, shut out the noise and seek Him all the more. After all, listening to Him is like a pilot listening to Air Traffic Control. When times are hard, we need His guidance and His perspective more than ever.
But sometimes, all we need is His Presence to guide us through the storm.
We all have friends, I am sure, who can hear our problems and speak words of comfort to us.
However, only God can do something about it. Only God acts.
Now, here is where we hit a bit of a misunderstanding. In Jeremiah, we see these words, not quoted by Matthew because they are not appropriate to the situation in Bethlehem after the massacre of the innocents:
This is what the Lord says: ‘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. So there is hope for your descendants,’ declares the Lord. ‘Your children will return to their own land.
Jeremiah 31:16-17 NIVUK
Many times I have heard this verse quoted by those whose children have gone astray from the Lord. They use it to cling onto in the hope that God will bring their children back to Him again. I believe He can. I believe He is able.
But I don’t believe that the original meaning of this verse was that God would bring the actual children of these parents back from Babylon.
How could it? Jeremiah himself prophesied that the Exile to Babylon would last seventy years (Jeremiah 25:11, 29:10; 2 Chronicles 36:21; Daniel 9:2). The painful reality is that many of these children would die before the Jews would be allowed to return home. The painful truth is that many of their parents would die before their children would return home.
So no, I don’t think this was a direct promise to every parent that their children would return home from the Exile. Instead, I believe that this is a promise that the Jews would return: that a remnant would survive of an otherwise lost generation and that they would rebuild the Jewish nation (see Isaiah 10:21-22; Jeremiah 23:3; Zephaniah 2:7).
In other words, their suffering, shame and disgrace would end.
And that is the promise every Christian can cling on to. Because that is what the Bible teaches:
And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Look! God’s dwelling-place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death” or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.’
Revelation 21:3-4 NIVUK
We must understand this truth: only Biblical Christianity can make this claim.
Islam can’t. How can we be sure that our suffering will end if we are always uncertain on whether we have done enough to get into heaven?
Hinduism and Buddhism can’t either. How can we know that one day we will be good enough to escape the cycle of reincarnation and make it into Nirvana?
Atheism certainly can’t. The nearest we get in that belief system to our suffering ending is death, and becoming worm food.
No, the only belief system there is that replaces the grief of our suffering with deepest joy is Christianity.
And this matters. It really matters. Because only this truth can give us the strength to make it through the suffering. As Paul wrote:
I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.
Romans 8:18 NIVUK
Maybe you still have doubts. After all, what comfort would this be to mothers and fathers whose infants were wrenched from their arms and mercilessly slaughtered by a ruthless and heartless dictator? How would it be any comfort to them?
My answer? It would mean everything to them.
Because, although their suffering would be way deeper than anything most of us would ever know, they would believe that one day that suffering would end, one day healing would come, one day the pain would be over. And when you hurt that deeply, the hope this truth brings is what gets you through the darkness.
This is a very difficult event. That’s why most people don’t include it in the Christmas narrative. It doesn’t seem to fit. It seems thoroughly inappropriate.
And yet it as much a part or the Christmas story as the shepherds, the angels and the wise men.
Why?
Because this event shows one man’s cruel, selfish, despotic attempts to extinguish hope for those who are already suffering.
Yet he fails.
He fails completely and utterly.
Because although he brings unspeakable suffering to the poor families of these infants, the one infant he needed to kill to end their hope is not there. God had moved Him to safety.
And that, you see, is the message of these verses. Hope in God, and in His plan to send Jesus Christ to this earth to save us, is inextinguishable. It is imperishable. It cannot ever be stopped:
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.
1 Peter 1:3-5 NIVUK
And the triumph of good over evil, light over darkness, hope over despair, is the very essence of the Christmas – and the Christian – story.
I am sure there are many who are reading these lines whose suffering is deep and seems to be endless. But the wonderful truth of the Gospel is that there is always hope. There is always an end to it. There is always a way out.
And that hope, end and way out is Jesus.
And no-one else.
Prayer
Lord Jesus, thank You that You are brighter than the darkest darkness. Thank You that you are deeper than the deepest suffering. Thank You that You are the beginning, but also the end. Help me to hope in You even when all is lost. Amen.
Questions
1. What did Herod hope to achieve in this heinous act? What did he actually achieve?
2. What three things does God do when we suffer?
3. How do these verses give us hope in hard times?
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