After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem – Matthew 2:1

Today’s Scripture Reading (August 3, 2014): Matthew 2

Just after the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, there was a Holy Man on the rise in Persia. Zoroaster was born most likely (although the issue is far from settled) somewhere around 660 B.C.E. in what is now Modern Day Iran. He was an author and the founder of the Zoroastrian faith. Zoroaster himself taught that the human condition was summed up by the mental struggle between truth (asa) and lie (druj). The purpose for all of creation is to simply maintain truth. For the human race, that meant actively participating in life with constructive thoughts, words and deeds. If we think and do good things, then Zoroaster believed that we will be instrumental in maintaining the truth.

One of the beliefs of Zoroaster was that in the final day God will send the Saoshyant, the Savior, to save the world and bring it into eternal truth. And according to the prophecies of Zoroaster, the Saoshyant would be born of a virgin and he will have the ability to raise the dead. And these prophecies of this Eastern Holy man were written only a few decades after Isaiah wrote “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14).

I am convinced that sometimes, if we will just let the Bible speak, it will say amazing things. If we try to approach it without too much knowledge, without expectation of what the words will say, the words that it whispers back to us will be almost unbelievable. But before it can speak to us, we have to realize that Bible was intended not just for some small segment of the population of the earth. If God is to be God at all, than he must be God over all.

So Matthew talks about the coming of the Magi from the East. At the time of Jesus, Magi came in two different shapes. The false Magi were masters at Illusion, they were continually looking into the stars with the belief that they could tell the future. They were shysters from which we get the word Magician. But these were not the real Magi. Since the sixth century B.C.E., the word Magi really indicated simply a follower of Zoroaster.

So it would seem that God indeed sent a sign which was detected, not by the followers of Jehovah, but by the followers of the prophet Zoroaster who were looking for their Savior, a child born of a virgin who would one day raise the dead. And God brought these Zoroastrian believers to the little town of Bethlehem, to a house where a man named Joseph and a woman named Mary were living with their infant son Jesus – oh yeah, and Mary was a virgin when Jesus was born. And Jesus would grow up and come to epitomize for the world the idea of truth, and he would do many miraculous things – including the raising of the dead – fulfilling not just the prophecies of the Jewish Isaiah, but a Persian Holy Man whose followers would come from the East to find the Savior of the World.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: John 1