Bobby Schuller - The Joy of God
Today we're gonna talk about the scripture that Hannah read on the Magi, and I want to compare, really, two lives, two powerful kingly lives, the lives of the Magi, sometimes we refer to them as the three kings, and the life of Herod the Great, or I should say the so-called Great. Many of us, we have Christmas day memories from when we were a kid, and we remember them being some of the happiest moments of our childhood life or even adult lives. And so, I remember at night on Christmas Eve, going home from the Christmas Eve candlelight service and singing all this music, being so excited about the next day coming.
I remember sometimes at my dad's house you would see actual soot footprints on the carpet going from the fireplace to the Christmas tree, you know, and, you know, wondering what's in the stockings and opening the presents and all the food, was always cinnamon rolls. My mom would make fresh cinnamon rolls from scratch, they were called Pillsbury. And, you know, it was amazing. And they were always so good. It's just you have these memories. Oh, in 1986, now here's some history for you, Japan released the Nintendo Entertainment System, and I was an original patron of that great moment. "Duck Hunt," and "Mario," and I think that was it. It was "Duck Hunt" and "Mario".
Anyway, what an amazing feeling it was to open that present. Maybe you remember when you were a kid and you're like, you know, Ralphie from "The Christmas Story," you know, opening up the BB gun, you know, or whatever it is. You had your heart set on this thing, that feeling you had when you open a present. So, very often when we get around Christmas as full grown adults, we still have this child inside of us that remembers, you know, those great moments with our family of a cool gift or a cool Christmas experience and the magic of it all. I feel like when Christmas comes around, at least for me, and I think many of us feel this way, there's a desire as an adult to recapture that feeling in some way, especially if you have children. Your desire, you want your kids to have that feeling too, and you want to recapture it yourself.
And so, the reason I start with this today is it's a Sunday of joy, the pink candle on the the Advent wreath. We think about joy, think about this is the thing that all of us really want. What a simple question to ask a person. What do you want? What do you really want in life? And when you wake up in the morning and you think about what you want on the surface, what do you really want from that thing or event or emotion? What do you want? What is it that we really crave and desire? And maybe another way that the world might say this, we want to be happy. We want a feeling of happiness. Here's one way to think about it. If you've got kids, and not all of us do, but imagine you've got kids.
I'm always surprised how often we don't take the advice that we give to our children. We only give our children the best advice because we want them to have a good life, and yet we ourselves very often don't want to follow that same advice. What do you want for your kids? And this is still a question that people think they've answered, and you can tell by the decisions they make. "SNL," which has gotten less funny over time, but still has some really good skits from time to time, did one a couple of years ago with Adam Sandler called "Romano Tourists". It is the all time greatest funniest skit of all time. It's just great. And I said all time twice, forgive me.
It's Adam Sandler, and he's doing commercial for trips to Italy, and he's saying, "Come to Italy, and go on a hike, and see the French Riviera," or the Italian Riviera, rather. "Eat some pasta, visit the Colosseum," and it's just this classic commercial, right? And then in the middle he goes, "Now, a disclaimer. Many of you sometimes have left bad comments because you came to Italy and you weren't happy. So, let me say this. If you are sad at home, you'll probably still be sad when you come to Italy". He goes, "Here's what we can do and cannot do. We can take you on a hike. We cannot make you a person who likes hiking. We can take you for some wine tasting. We can't change the reason you drink so much".
You know, he's going on and on, it's this amazing joke. "We can take you to the Italian Riviera. We cannot change the way you feel in a bathing suit". And he goes, I don't know, "If you're not happy at home, you will probably not be happy just because you're in Italy". This is a funny thing. I'm not Adam Sandler, okay, I'm not Adam Sandler, but it's funny. And the reason it's so funny is I think many of us, we have these, we don't really think about it, it's just, like, a feeling, but we have these ideas, like, if I just went somewhere or if I just got this thing or if I just, you know, found love or if I just had kids or if I just got married or if my business would just succeed or even my ministry would take off, very often we associate or the inverse of that.
If only I didn't have this spouse, I would be happy. If only I didn't have this stupid job, I'd be happy. If only I wasn't sick, I'd be happy. There are some valid reasons when those things happen or don't happen that you feel happy or unhappy. But we forget that the rule of the human soul in general is that, Dostoevsky said it the best, "A human being is someone who could get used to anything". That no matter how bad or how good life gets, there's this part of us that always sort of goes back to an emotional normal for us. So, the real question is, how do we move that normal? Is there a way that a person can be really happy even if they don't have any of the things the world says makes them happy?
If the answer to that question were yes, wouldn't it be worth all the money in the world? If I gave a random person a limitless credit card and said, "Go to Vegas and do whatever you want," at first they would be pretty happy. You know, they would be happy. They would be doing whatever they want. But given enough time, if he said you can be there forever, you can do whatever you want for as long as you want, I don't know how long it would take, but eventually you would find one of the most miserable, miserable people on earth. Is there anybody here that disagrees with that? Maybe. In a year, two years, would we find a happy man or woman? I don't think so.
There's something that we can have, even if we're sick, even if we're poor, even if we've been betrayed. Maybe Paul would say, even if you had been tortured in prison, that you can be a joyful person. And what is that thing? It's the Holy Spirit. I gotta get back on track, and here we go. I gotta talk about Herod. I want to introduce you to an ancient way of viewing joy in the right way. I wanna begin with Herod, one of my favorite historic characters located in the Bible, but even outside of the Bible it's an important character. Herod the Great or Herod the First, the great builder, architect, person, Herod was a Roman fanatic, loved Rome, loved Roman ideas, was born to Antipater the Idumaean, so was not born Jewish, and converted to Judaism, and became the client king to Rome as the so called King of the Jews.
And this was really important to Herod. Through politicking and friendships he was great friends with Mark Antony. Unfortunately, was rivals with Cleopatra. Isn't this an amazing time in history? It's amazing how many historic things happen around the birth of Christ. Anyway, Herod is a competitor and rival with Cleopatra, who's the queen of Egypt to the south, the Ptolemaic dynasty, and so she has a lot of glory and clout and a lot of Egypt has, like, is considered this, like, rich, we might call it in America old money kind of state with lots of culture, and it's just this place that the Romans really think is cool, and Egypt really always wants to control the king's road in Israel.
So, there's this competitive thing where Herod, who's also a client state, very pro-Roman, is competing with Caesar over, you know, for favor and glory, and then is also worried about Cleopatra invading, and so he builds this network of amazing palace fortresses in a time when this wasn't very common. If you go to Europe in the Medieval Age you see a lot of this kind of thing, you know, fortress castles that are also palaces, but for Herod it's not completely original, but it's very clever that there are fortresses that can withhold the siege, but they could last, like, ten years, and it still has a swimming pool, you know. And it's like, you know, ten years worth of veal and wine.
And so, he builds some amazing things and gets a lot of validation from it. We all, many of us know that he's the one who really expanded the temple and made it into the great temple, expanded it to the north and did all this marble and many different amazing building projects. But the three you'll see today in Israel that are incredible, the first is famously Masada, which is near the Dead Sea. This would have been the first big impregnable fortress that Egypt would have faced coming north into the Levant. You can't really see much, I should have picked a better picture, but this is what it looks like today. But you can kind of see if you go down the front here, there's, like, a fortress with three palace levels going here, and almost impossible to take.
Of course, the Romans did, it took them years. He built Caesarea Maritima, Maritime, named it after Caesar. This is Herod's palace here. That's his swimming... can you tell it's a swimming pool on the top left there? I think Herod liked swimming. I don't know, he might have been a fun guy to hang out with, probably not. But anyway, gorgeous palace. You can see that today. And then also the most important one for this story, the Herodium, which is Herod's main place he lived, three miles from Bethlehem on a tell. So, just look around. I mean, how far is 3 miles in the distance? Probably that mountain in the distance is more like 10 miles, right?
And so, Bethlehem, and in those days was 3 miles from this place where Herod lived most of the time. And what you would find anywhere you went to these great things, you would find Herod and his family crest, Herod, King of the Jews. Herod, King of the Jews, Herod, King of the Jews, huh? Herod, King of the Jews. This was really important to Herod, because Herod wasn't a Jew. How do you become King of the Jews if you're not even Jewish? Well, he converted, and he married a Maccabean Princess. The Maccabees were the actual kings of the Jews where the Hanukkah story comes from for, like, I forget, it was 150 years or something. But as a Jew convert was ruthless, immoral to the bone, paranoid, always seeking more glory and fame.
When the Sanhedrin was talking about his moral decisions, he had a lot of them wiped out, cleaned out, and replaced. When he placed in an unkosher way a giant golden eagle, which is a symbol of Rome, on top of the temple, and a bunch of Jewish disciples protested, he had them all executed. Killed multiple family members, his brother-in-law, who is becoming a famous rabbi and teacher, and many people were, you know, suspiciously drowned in one of the swimming pools that was only, like, 3 feet deep. So, everybody's like, he drowned. His wife, beautiful amazing wife that the people loved, Princess Miriam was accused falsely of adultery, and so he just strangled her to death.
And then two of his sons, he heard rumors that they were plotting to, you know, upend his kingship, so he had them both executed, and then later when he found out it was his other son that created the rumor, he had that son executed. So, no, he wouldn't have been a good guy to swim with. I was wrong about that, actually. Especially if you have a six pack, because he'd be jealous, and he'd have you strangled. So, you know, Herod really is just not a good guy. And what I see when I see Herod, and we're supposed to do this with biblical characters, whether they're villains or heroes, is we're supposed to see ourselves in them. I'm supposed to ask, how is Herod a magnified version of Bobby Schuller? When do I become like Herod?
And what is it you think that Herod really wants, and why does he want it? Okay, the second character in the story is the famous Magi, not three kings, by the way. I think you all know, you've been going to church here long enough to know there were no three kings. There were three gifts, which kind of traditionally builds into this idea that there were three kings, but it could have been 100 guys, could've been 3 guys, could have been, they all traditionally have names, but none of that stuff's in the Bible, it's all just tradition. And maybe it's true, I don't know. But what we do know is that the Magi obviously came from the East, could have traveled as far as 2,000 miles.
I always think they're Jewish, actually, they're Jewish from Babylonia, and they're leftovers from Daniel's era when they're returning back to Israel, but they might not have been. They could have been Zoroastrians, they could have been some other religion or something. But the way they would have been experienced in those days would have been representatives from the great empire to the east, and they would have been looked at as, like, mad scientists, actually. They were thought of as wizards, they would read the stars, they did have an odd mixture between magic, Harry Potter type weird stuff, and real science.
So, they had, like, this bizarre mixture of both. And so, when they would come to a place like Israel, they're just enshrouded in mystery, they would have been seen as educated, educators, and just holders of mysteries and histories and all that type of thing. And so, when they would travel, it would have been three guys, it would have been like Aladdin coming into Agrabah, a menagerie of animals and wealth and people and some soldiers, and they follow the star, whatever that means, into the great city of Jerusalem.
And so, imagine that, you know, it's just after Hanukkah, and there's still probably a lot of people. Actually, we don't know if it was after Hanukkah, right? Because this happens years after Jesus was born. Anyway, they come in, and Jerusalem, you know, remember, there's no TV back then, there's no internet, there's no electricity, most people before 1930 were bored most of the time. Just ask my grandpa. On that note, when I told my grandma, my grandma Schuller used to joke about living on a farm and how people would say it was great. She's like, it was horrible. Living on a farm is horrible. It's just constant work, and it's so boring.
Okay, so go into that world, and Aladdin comes into Agrabah. You know, it's a big deal, and they come in and everybody, everybody is like, what is going on? Who are these people, these weird clothes and funny animals and Magi and scientists? And they ask this question. You remember the question they ask? "Where is the King of the Jews who has been born this day"? Who's the King of the Jews? I mean, it says it everywhere. It says it on the temple, says it on the Herodian Masada, who's the King of the Jews? Herod, Herod's the King of the Jews, and this giant, amazing, attention soaking parade of mad scientists asked, "Where's the King of the Jews who's been born this day"? And they're like, "Did Herod have a kid? Ask Herod".
So, imagine that. So, Herod, who's already paranoid about somebody trying to take his crown and somebody trying to illegitimize his rule, these people coming, who do they think they are? And so, he gets in this weird way, right? And so, he invites them, probably in the Herodian, they go up, they're 3 miles from Bethlehem now, and he says, "When you find the King of the Jews, tell me so that I may worship him also". You know, it's like, might as well, like, might as well, like, "Tell me, I will..." It's like you can hear it, you know, and they're like, "Okay, great".
So, obviously, they're warned, and they know, and I just want to say this, that when they found Jesus in Bethlehem, which would have been a village of, like, 300, 400 people, very small, one horse town, kinda like those little towns that have a blinking yellow light when you go through, can you imagine the party they had? The celebration? They're bringing gold and frankincense and myrrh, which is, like, incredible wealth, but more than that, there would have been food and celebrating and joy.
And you know who wasn't there? The fake King of the Jews, Herod. He was up in his Herodian. He could probably see the party happening from 3 miles away. He could see the lights, maybe he could even hear it. Probably not, but he wasn't there. He was cloistered up, an isolated shell of a man in old age, living a paranoid, calcified life, keeping people out, trying to control every outcome, joyless. From Rome's eyes, a great achievement. He was given the moniker the Great, What else could you want, that in death people called you Herod the Great? Like Alexander or Peter. It was one of the greatest nicknames you could get as a historic figure. It's nothing great about him. Not in the kingdom of God. He was the least of these in the Kingdom of God. No joy, no kindness, no place in the kingdom except to show what not to do.
So, there's sort of two lives that we look at. One's a successful life, and one is not. One's a joyful life, and one is not. One is a glorified life, one is not. One is a good life, and one is not. And the one that is is the Magi. The ones who seek Christ, who will do anything to find him and worship him, who will travel thousands of miles, and it's it's a message to us that if we really want joy, it's not gonna come from a Nintendo Entertainment System, unfortunately. I mean, it will for a little bit, but, you know, eventually you're gonna need a Super Nintendo, and then a Nintendo 64, and so on we go.
There's never enough of those things, but one of the promises that scripture offers us is that if we reject our Herod-ness, see, I'm like Herod when I become paranoid. I am Herod when I try to control all the outcomes in my life. I am Herod when I take the crown off of Christ's head and put it on my own head. I am Herod when I try to control people. I am Herod when I'm jealous. I'm Herod when I'm competitive, but smiling on the outside. I'm Herod when I go to bed offended and angry all the time, thinking about everybody that did me wrong and hurt me, think about all the ways that I've been treated unfairly and unjustly.
I become Herod when I become violent in my heart, angry, wrathful, bitter. I become the Magi when I let it go, man, when I just let it go. And I take the crown off of my head, and I say, I'm not a king, I'm just a Magi. There's no three kings. We take the crown off our head, and we put it before the Lord, and I say, Lord, I trust my life and death to you. I trust my children to you. I trust my bank account to you. I trust my church, my school, my country, I trust my decisions to you. I'm gonna love my enemies. I'm gonna take it slow. I'm gonna study your Word. I'm gonna seek a spiritual life. I'm gonna seek spiritual rewards.
Those are the kind of rewards that do not have diminished returns. They stay forever, they nourish us, they cause us to endure and to live the kind of life that's worth living. You don't need any of those things, and they're great, if you have them, they're adorning, they're wonderful bonuses, you know, they're great. But if you don't have the main thing, you know, it's like having ornaments without having a Christmas tree, you know? If you don't have the main thing, you don't have anything at all.
So, Father, we ask you in Jesus's name to lead us into your kingdom as faithful disciples. Help us know, God, that the way you taught us to live is the best way. Thank you that you're here now. We believe and we entrust our lives to you, and we thank you. It's in Jesus's name we pray. All God's people said, amen.