Mothers Grief

Old Testament prophecy fulfilled by Jesus:

Massacre of children in and near Bethlehem.

Young mothers in and around Bethlehem were busy with their children. All through the area, mamas were feeding their babies. They were teaching their toddlers how to walk. They looked down into the faces of their sleeping sons. Life was busy.

Then suddenly, a scream split the air. Then more screams. What could be happening?

Without warning, doors were kicked in. King Herod’s soldiers barged in with swords drawn and looking for male babies and toddlers under two years old. Mothers threw themselves over their children to protect them, only to be yanked up and shoved out of the way. To their horror, they watched as soldiers killed their sons in cold blood.

Screams echoed through the streets as the soldiers methodically killed innocent boys.  

How could this be?

Why?

In their grief, their sorrow, their screams, their weeping, the women of Bethlehem and nearby areas probably didn’t know they were living the words that were prophesied hundreds of years before by Jeremiah.  

The prophet Jeremiah was given words he likely didn’t understand when he recorded what God told him:

“Thus says the LORD, ‘A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping, Rachel is weeping for her children, because they are no more.’” Jeremiah 31:15

Hundreds of years after Jeremiah wrote down the words of the LORD, the “Rachel’s” of Bethlehem would lament and weep over her children who had been killed.  

Those women couldn’t have understood at the time that the one baby boy the soldiers were sent to kill—Jesus—was no longer in Bethlehem.

But how do we know that the words from Jeremiah had anything to do with the birth of Jesus? The apostle Matthew tells us. The gospel writer tells how wise men from the east arrived in Jerusalem and asked King Herod, “Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we saw His star in the East, and have come to worship Him.”

When Herod heard what the wise men said, he was troubled at the idea that anyone else would be considered King of the Jews. He asked the learned leaders of Israel where the Messiah would be born. They answered Bethlehem.

Herod flew into a rage and sent his soldiers to Bethlehem and nearby areas to kill every boy child two years old and under. Then in Matthew 2:16-18, Matthew wrote that this was the fulfillment of the words of Jeremiah 31:15.

Exactly like Jeremiah said it would happen.

Carla Killough McClafferty