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| The three gifts the wise men gave long ago |
“Through mountains and valleys it
led them each night, a star of most radiant light. The wise men rejoiced as
they journeyed afar, to behold such a beautiful star!”
sung by Kathy Mattea
These are the words to a beautiful song called “When They Saw
the Star”. This song talks about the wise men that had visited baby Jesus and
presented him with gifts. But this is where many people get the Nativity Story
wrong: if you were to go out and ask a bunch of people walking down the street
right now and asked what they know about the wise men in the Bible, most, if
not all of them would say that they visited Jesus in Bethlehem as He laid in
the manger. Well, go get your Bible and look in the book of Matthew in the
second chapter. That’s where it talks about the wise men. Does it say they
visited Jesus in the manger? Read it for yourself in verse 11: “And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with
Mary His mother, and fell down and worshipped Him . . .” Does that say
anything about a manger? Noooooo! It clearly says that they visited Jesus when
he was living in a house with His mother (and His dad too). Yet, we see the
wise men visiting Jesus in the manger in television shows, movies, plays,
nativity sets and so forth. However, the wise men really did follow a star to
find the Child. They followed this star until they finally reached the place
where Jesus was. Then they presented Him with three gifts: gold, frankincense
and myrrh. We don’t really know how many wise men there were, but since three
gifts were given, it is assumed by many that there were three. However, after
the gifts are given to Jesus, they mysteriously disappear. As far as we know,
they don’t appear in scripture anywhere. They kind of just floated off into the
unknown . . . right? That’s what everyone thought until one day, that famed
explorer and archaeologist, Indiana James, took a little trip to Vermont to
visit his grandparents. While visiting, he went in a little antique shop and
saw something in the corner of his eye sitting in a box in the very back of the
store (the store was really junky,
the antique dealer just bought antiques and piled them into piles or onto
shelves in the store, so for the most part she really didn’t know what she had
to sell). He took a look at three little “jars” in the box and realized there
was something very peculiar about them . . . they looked strangely familiar. “I
don’t know how on earth these would have looked familiar to me,” says Indiana
James, “considering I really had never seen them before. Maybe it was just pure
providence. Yeah, it probably was.” After taking a few minutes looking at the
beautiful objects, he opened one of them up to reveal some strong smelling
spices. He recognized it as frankincense. He opened another container and
realized it was a bright, shiny object called gold. And the final container was
filled with myrrh. He instantly knew the kind of find he had made and quickly
bought the objects he found. He tried asking the antique store owner how on
earth these three objects got from the Middle East to Vermont, she shrugged. So
it was up to Indiana James to find the origins of these little “jars” to see if
they were in fact the same ones given to Jesus. How would he find out? Well, he
first found out where the antique store owner bought the pieces from. She said
she had bought them from an old lady who lived up by Champlain Lake. This is
what Indiana did with all of the people who had once owned these valuable artifacts.
After doing his research (and eventually flying all the way to the Holy Lands),
he believes he knows how on earth these pieces made it here to the U.S.: the
lady at the antique shop bought the “jars” from an old lady. The old lady got
it from a friend of hers who had had it in her family for at least three
generations. The “three-generation” family kept the artifacts because a man in
their family named Pilot Gorge Kingston, had it in his possessions during his
piloting during World War II. How did he receive the treasures? Well, he bought
it from a merchant in the Middle East who found the treasures in an old shed.
The shed used to belong to a “police” who had confiscated the treasures from
thieves who stole it from an emperor who had received the “jars” from a poor
man. This is where the story is abrupt. “I looked in all the resources I could
find,” says Indiana James, “but nowhere could I find how the treasures got from
Jesus’ family to the poor man. All I know is that this poor man lived in the
area Jesus grew up in. This mystery will have to wait for future generations to
solve it . . . if I don’t discover it before I am dead and gone, that is!” So
as the archaeologist says, this mystery will have to wait to be solved. But
regardless of how it got from Jesus’ family to the antique dealer, we mustn’t
forget that this is not the reason for Christmas in the first place. The real
reason for the season is not the wise men’s gifts, instead, it commemorates the
birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who left His throne in heaven and
humbled Himself. He came to earth for one main reason – to die for our sins. He
took the punishment for our sins so that we don’t have to. Thanks to Jesus,
when we die, we can go to heaven to live with God. Thanks to Jesus, all we have
to do to get admittance in heaven is admit that we have sinned and need Jesus’s
salvation, next we have to believe that Jesus is 100% God (yet he’s also 100%
man), and last but certainly not least, we must confess our faith in Jesus and
chose to live for Him. And that’s what Christmas is all about! Have a merry,
merry Christmas from all of us here at Smiley’s News!
PS: The wise men’s treasures are now safe and sound in the
Riverville Museum of Natural History, thank goodness for that!
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