By Elliot Ritzema
I grew up in the church. For as long as I can remember anything, I can remember knowing about Jesus. But as many gifts as this life has given me, one byproduct is that I can sometimes have less of a deep, visceral sense of the difference Jesus makes. For that reason, I love hearing and reading about the ways in which Jesus draws people to Himself. My friend Ashley Lande, for example, was delivered from a life of seeking transcendence through psychedelic drugs and wrote a memoir about it called The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever. She had hoped that drugs and New Age spirituality would “make everything okay,” but she found what she was looking for in Jesus.
If you, like me, have always known about the wise men and have memories of seeing them (or being them) in Christmas pageants, it’s hard to get a sense of how disreputable they were from the perspective of God’s people. They practiced astrology, looking to the stars as their guides, which was something Israel was told not to do (see Deuteronomy 4:19; 2Kings 21:3–5; Zephaniah 1:4–6). They also practiced what we would now call magic; the CSB translates the word magos in Matthew 2:1, 7, and 16 as “wise men,” but in Acts 13:6 and 8 it is translated as “sorcerer.” The verb form of this same word means “practiced sorcery” in Acts 8:9, describing the notorious Simon Magus.
Yet God met them where they were. They were looking to the heavens, and He sent a sign in the heavens. They were not looking to the stars as gods that they could manipulate into doing as they pleased (what Simon Magus was guilty of). Rather, they recognized the star of Bethlehem as “his star” (Matthew 2:2), as the star pointed beyond itself. They were so longing to know the One who placed this star that they undertook a long journey far from home. The star that led them to Bethlehem led them to the true God and true King. In revealing Himself this way, God led these men (we don’t know for sure how many, though traditionally there have been three based on their three gifts) to Himself.
If God can draw such unlikely people to Himself using a sign in the sky, how might we think about people who seem far from Him now? Frederick Dale Bruner writes about this passage: “Biblically faithful Israel felt about the Magi roughly the way theological orthodoxy felt in the past about gnosticism and feels in the present about New Age spirituality.…Matthew’s kindness toward the Magi can teach the church today that while rightly critical of New Age thinking she should have a heart for New Age people.”
We should be elated that God invites such people to His party and gladly receives the gifts they offer. May those in the Church never forget that God loves such people and can meet them where they are. Let’s join Him in drawing them to Him.
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