Matthew 2:13-15 ~ Out of Egypt I called my son

View of Israel from Mount Nebo. Where Moses stayed instead of entering the Promised Land. Here 2 Maccabees 2:4-9 records Jeremiah hiding the Ark of the Covenant before the Babylonian invasions.


Matthew 2:13-15

David Cochran, English Standard Version


13 Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” 14 And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt 15 and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, “Out of Egypt I called my son.”


God' s plan can unfold quickly like an earthquake, tsunami or gently. Rarely does God give us experiences, like where we live as we grow up, that doesn't teach us to be the people He wants us to strive to be.

Having spent 4 years of my childhood in Nice, France, I appreciate the outdoors because our house was dark in France, but the living room wall of windows facing the Mediterranean was a constant changing display of light and color. Outdoors was much more pleasant and I was out there every day. So many vivid colors and foods. We lived in the Pennsylvania mountains, at the end of the Appalachian mountains, for 4 years in steel mill country where Lake Erie left snow for sometimes 9 months on the ground, waist high. This is where people matter to each other, because cabin fever will get you.

God's child could have grown up regretting leaving prosperous Egypt and feeling like a sulky Goth teenager. This could have been brutal to Mary and Joseph. It's up to us to feel gratitude for a change in circumstance, good or bad. Jesus knew what it was to be a foreigner in a foreign land. There might have been Jews to help Joseph find work. Or Joseph was left, with God's help, to manage for his family and find work with skill and patience. Mary might have had women to visit with to raise her family. Or she might have spent time with Jesus. Would the little Egyptian children have enjoyed Jesus. We know they did.

Luke 2:52
And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.

Jesus became a Jew, a man, who went to the Samaritans and wasn't very concerned with borders or ethnic backgrounds. Jesus declared himself by the 4th chapter of John's gospel.

John 4: 4-26
Now he had to go through Samaria. ⁵ So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. ⁶ Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.

⁷ When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” ⁸ (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)

⁹ The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)

¹⁰ Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

¹¹ “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? ¹² Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”

¹³ Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, ¹⁴ but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

¹⁵ The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

¹⁶ He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”

¹⁷ “I have no husband,” she replied.

Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. ¹⁸ The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”

¹⁹ “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. ²⁰ Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”

²¹ “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. ²² You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. ²³ Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. ²⁴ God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”

²⁵ The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”

²⁶ Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”

Jesus doing the work of God. Not jumping into the fray with all the other Salmon, just swimming up stream. Jesus finding the path of peace, ways of mercy. Inclusion. Purity. Love, joy, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Isaiah 58:6
"Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter--when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?


Psalm 146:9
The LORD watches over the foreigner and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked.


Luke 17:5-19
5 One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. ¹⁶ He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him—and he was a Samaritan.

¹⁷ Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? ¹⁸ Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?” ¹⁹ Then he said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.”

Ephesians 2:19
So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God


As a fellow citizen, with the members of the household of God - a Child of God - how have the good and bad circumstances of your growing years been gifts to use for your life?

1 Thessalonians 5:18
give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you



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