Jealousy Perverts Justice
“When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.” – Matthew 2:16 It’s strange that the account of a neurotic king like Herod offers so many object lessons to Christians, but in a world that’s obsessed with image and achievement, it behooves us to pay attention to his story. We saw yesterday that he built multiple monuments to himself that now live only in ruins, and today, I want to talk about something else significant we can learn from his life — that jealousy perverts justice. After working hard to earn his title as “King of the Jews,” he was determined to hold onto it. The problem was that it had already been