Matthew 2:15

CALLED OUT OF EGYPT

‘Out of Egypt have I called My Son.’

Matthew 2:15

At first we are surprised at the use to which the Evangelist puts these words of the prophet. We turn to Hosea 2:1, and it is evident that in their primary intention they do not refer to the child Jesus, but to the children of Israel collectively regarded as God’s dear Son; and the calling out of Egypt is their deliverance by the mighty power of God from their house of bondage there, and from the yoke of their Egyptian taskmasters.

I. Prophecy and Christ.—Yet when Matthew speaks of the infant Christ’s return out of Egypt as the fulfilment of a prophecy, we ought not so to interpret his words as to find in them merely the adaptation or accommodation of a prophecy, and of one spoken originally in quite another sense, and having properly no allusion to Him at all. What then? Words of Scripture being the words of God look many ways, have many aspects, may have one fulfilment, then another, and another, and at last a crowning fulfilment. No doubt the words of Hosea did look back to the calling of the children of Israel; but they were so overruled by the Holy Ghost that, while they thus looked back to one signal mercy of God to His Church, they looked on to a far greater mercy, but one of exactly the same kind.

II. The reason of the call.—Why were the children of Israel called out of Egypt? That they might be bearers of God’s Word, witnesses of God’s truth to the nations, that they might declare His name to the world, that they might be a light to lighten the Gentiles. And why was Christ preserved from Herod’s sword and all the perils of His infancy, sheltered for a while in Egypt, and brought back again to the Holy Land? Why, but for this same reason—that, growing in grace and favour with God and man, He might indeed be that which the natural Israel ought to have been and was not,—the Light of the World, the true and faithful Witness, Who should declare the name and worship of the true God to the ends of the earth. In Christ were gathered up and fulfilled all the purposes of God, all the intentions with which the Jewish people were constituted from the beginning.

III. Yet a further fulfilment.—The words had thus a double fulfilment, the second more glorious than the first. There is yet one fulfilment more. That which was on these two occasions literally fulfilled, “Out of Egypt have I called My Son,” is evermore finding its spiritual fulfilment in the Church of the redeemed. It collectively is God’s Son. Egypt is always represented to us in Scripture as a land of darkness, a land of superstition, of low grovelling idolatry, of slavery and oppression at once for the bodies and the spirits of men. What wonder, then, that when God calls us with a holy calling, from darkness to light, from slavery to freedom, from the worship of the idols of sense to the worship of Himself, it should be styled a calling out of Egypt! Such, indeed, it is. It is a coming out of Egypt; and it is a coming out in obedience to a heavenly calling. We shall never leave our Egypt, if God did not quicken our spirits, did not summon us to a nobler life, to something better than a slavish bondage to our fleshly appetites and grovelling desires. And God calls us as His sons.

—Archbishop Trench.

Illustration

‘We might not unfitly compare that people to the aloe-plant, which is said, and I believe rightly, to flower once during its lifetime, and that after a long lapse of years; and having put forth its single flower once for all, that indeed a flower of exquisite beauty and richness, then, as having lived but for this, to droop and wither and die. Christ, the fairer than the children of men, the One among ten thousand, the Virgin-born, was in some sort the one glorious and perfect flower which the rough and hard aloe-stem of the Jewish Church and nation, barren so long, at length bore; and, having borne thus, having fulfilled the purpose of its existence in that wondrous birth, it also drooped and died. Thus, as gathering up and concentrating all the life, strength, beauty of that stalk and stem in Himself, as the consummation of all that went before, Christ was Israel; He is often so called the Prophets. He, a Jew, at once embodied and represented the Jewish nation before His heavenly Father in their noblest aspect, in their highest fulfilment of that great mission which was theirs, namely, to declare the name of the Lord to the world; and every gracious dealing of God with His people had reference and respect to that one crowning act for which the nation existed, namely, that a child might be born out of the bosom of the people, a son of Abraham, a son of David, in whom all the nations of the world should be blest. With good right, therefore, could Matthew claim all the promises which were made to Israel, as having been made to Him Who by best right was Israel, all past deliverance of the people as typical and prophetical of that mightier deliverance with which God would deliver His elect, in whom His soul delighted, from every danger and from every fear, saying to Him, “Thou art My servant, O Israel, by whom I will be glorified.” ’