“At that time Herod the tetrarch heard the report about Jesus. ‘This is John the Baptist,’ he told his servants. “He has been raised from the dead, and that’s why miraculous powers are at work in him.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Have you ever read something in the Scriptures and wondered how on earth the author could have come to know that particular detail? We don’t encounter this much in the Old Testament, but the Gospel authors all have places where there are details reported they were present to have observed or experienced for themselves. Sometimes they report the conversations that happened in gatherings of priests that included none of Jesus’s followers when they happened. Matthew reports a private conversation between Pilate and his wife. Here he reports what was apparently a private conversation between Herod and his servants. How did they come by this knowledge? Let’s explore that briefly this morning through the lens of an interesting little connection that’s easy to miss.

One of the best ways to gain an understanding of a particular part of the Scriptures is to let it be informed by other places in the Scriptures that provide context or similar thematic elements. The fact is, the Scriptures are far more internally and intentionally connected than you might imagine. Authors of chronologically later entries were typically pretty well-versed in the documents that were written before them. New Testament authors in particular knew what we refer to as the Old Testament really, really well. They included references to it all over their writings. I have an entire commentary in my office that is dedicated to nothing but exploring how the New Testament authors used the Old Testament in their work. Sometimes these references are clear and obvious; other times they are much more subtle. Either way, they are numerous.

Well, when I was studying for a sermon series through Luke’s historical record of the origin and growth of the early church that we call Acts, something caught my eye that I hadn’t really paid attention to before. In Acts 13, we find Paul and Barnabas serving the church in Antioch together. The church in Antioch had started small and unexpectedly when the mostly Gentile population there began converting to Christianity and droves as they heard and accepted the testimony that this Jesus character had risen from the dead. In fact, it was in Antioch that mocking locals first called us “Christians.” Rather than rejecting what was intended to be an insult, they proudly claimed the label, and it stuck. The church had actually grown to overtake the original church in Jerusalem in terms of its prominence in the world and its Gospel impact on its surrounding territory.

As Acts 13 opens, Paul and Barnabas and a group of three other leaders in the church were praying together. As they prayed, the Holy Spirit moved among them and called Paul and Barnabas to go and plant churches across Asia (what we know of as Turkey today). This calling sparked Paul’s first missionary journey and preceded the church’s arrival in Europe and westward spread. The world has never been the same since. Had Paul been called to go east history would have probably looked very different than it turned out.

Paul’s call in and of itself is important for all sorts of reasons, but as I was studying for this particular sermon, something else caught my eye. Luke gives us a list of the other guys who were in this prayer group with Paul and Barnabas. There was Simeon who was called Niger (probably because he was black), Lucius from Cyrene which is in modern day Libya near the Mediterranean coast, and a guy named Manaen. We don’t know where Manaen was from as Luke doesn’t give us that particular information. What he does tell us, though, as far as identifying who this was for the sake of his audience (and we have to keep in mind that he would have likely included identifying information like this because it meant something to his audience) is that he was “a close friend of Herod the tetrarch.”

It’s easy to read over something like this without giving it much attention. But we dare not do that here. Our story here in Matthew’s Gospel reminds us of why. As you already read, Matthew tells us here that when Herod heard about Jesus and everything He was doing, his first thought was that Jesus was simply John the Baptist raised from the dead and imbued with magical powers. More specifically, Herod was probably expressing great fear that this was the case because he was the one who had sentenced John to a death he knew was unjust. This was the gods’ way of getting revenge on him for his crimes.

But again: how could Matthew have come by this knowledge? If someone like Herod expressed a fear like this, he wasn’t going to do it where just anybody could hear him. He was going to do it with people he trusted to keep their mouths shut. It wouldn’t do for it to get out that Herod was afraid of this famous Jewish rabbi and miracle worker.

Yet what if one of the people Herod would possibly have told about his concerns later became a follower of Jesus? Would perhaps a “close friend” have fit the bill of someone with whom Herod might have shared his personal thoughts about the identity of Jesus? That certainly doesn’t seem like too far of a stretch of the imagination. What if this close friend also happened to be around when Herod had conversations with John the Baptist while holding him in prison? And what if these conversations resulted in Gospel seeds being planted in his heart and mind that eventually blossomed into faith when he heard the reports the Jesus had been raised from the dead? It could be that he was in Antioch because he had to flee Jerusalem when the purge of believers began after Stephen’s martyrdom. That exodus resulted in his getting connected with the church there and rising through the ranks to become a leader; a leader who would eventually be in the room when the Holy Spirit called Paul and Barnabas to their world-changing work.

I don’t know that there’s a terribly strong applicational point to all of this except for its being a pretty interesting point of connection between two parts of the text that otherwise don’t seem to have anything to do with each other. It is a reminder, though, that our God is big enough that He can work in ways we can’t even see until much later. The first Jurassic Park movie famously introduced the world to a pop culture version of Chaos Theory and its understanding of the vast interconnectedness of everything in the world. The oft-quoted line is that if a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon, this could change the weather on the other side of the world. What if the world really was that connected, but it was God who managed all the connections. Stories like this one are subtle pointers to the idea that this last part just may be truer than we imagine.

God is bigger than we think. He knows and sees far more than we can imagine. His ability to accomplish His plans through people He puts in place at specific times goes way beyond what we could even begin to fathom. We try to think 2-3 steps ahead of the people around us. He’s a trillion steps beyond that. If we will trust Him and pursue His path of life, He will never fail to guide us to just where He wants us to be. If we’ll continue to trust Him in those places, even when they are hard, He will guide us through even those to an abundance of life on the other side that we never conceived could be a possibility for us to experience. Today is a perfect day to give it a try.