The Magoi

 

6 January 2010: The above image is an artistic rendering of thethree Magoi (Magi). In fact, there had to have been quite an entourage who accompanied the Magoi, primarily because of the basic fact that no one makes a 1,000+ mile round trip journey across the desert between Mesopotamia and Israel on foot without a supply and life sustaining caravan and significant numbers of mounted cavalry for protection. The actual number of gentile visitors from the east was probably closer to 300 than just 3. It's a minor miracle that the illegitimate Roman puppet King Herod did not think the appearance of this caravan was the advance guard of a Parthian Empire invasion force.
The importance of the whole story about the Magoi is quite likely unknown by most Christians. That's because we've not spent much time learning about it, even though it is Scripture, Old Testament prophetic Scripture at that.
Oh, we all know and have visualized one way or another the "We Three Kings" Christmas carol, and have seen Nativity scene imagery like the above for the sum of our lives, but that's not the half of it. There's more... so much more to the story.
The more I think about it, the more I am astounded by the fact that the GENTILE Magoi who came out of the Parthian Empire and made this tremendous journey did so after fervently holding to the prophet Daniel's detailed prophecy (9:24-27) concerning the coming of the Hebrew Messiah for over 600 years, and waited generation after generation for a very specific sign, and all the while knowing the precise number of days until the Messiah's birth.
And then once that sign appeared and the number of days had elapsed they rounded up the multiple parts of a large caravan and the water and provisions for the entire group's survival, plus the gifts for the object of their 500+ year devotion for what had to be a round trip of something well in excess of 1,100 miles across barren desert.... I stand here in awe thinking about it.
The caravan was quite probably a round trip from Seleucia to Jerusalem and back, on foot and by beast of burden, of GENTILE believers coming from the Magoi's descendents of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylonian Empire, the Persian Empire and Alexander's and the Seleucid Empires to the Parthain Empire of the Roman Era.
That these GENTILES, these Magoi, had clung to and fervently believed in the exquisitely detailed God-breathed prophecy of Daniel concerning the coming birth of the Messiah for hundreds and hundreds of years, through all of the events, wars, and tumults that had occurred in this crossroads region of the known world, is without question the greatest account of the prophetic Word of God causing belief in the God of Israel among gentiles in history.
Having been in those same Middle Eastern deserts, such a specifically purposeful journey undertaken 2,000 years ago is mindboggling to me. These gentiles from the regions and lands of Israel's captivity knew the details of, believed in and all the while eagerly awaited the birth of the Messiah. And the Jews, for the most part, due to their disobediance and the spiritual blindness and deafness placed upon them by the Covenant of Moab, besides the Covenant of Horeb, (Deuteronomy 29) knew nothing of His coming.
And here we are, knowing in detail that the days of time which are left until the advent of Daniel's 70th Week are all but palpable... just stand in awe and in praise of God brothers and sisters, just stand in awe and praise to be a living part of all this.

http://eschatologytoday.blogspot.com/2011/01/magoi.html