The Messiah has to be linked to King David. Has to. He’s got to be born of the royal line of David. The fact that the flag of Israel today is marked by a symbol called the Star of David shows you how important David is to the Jewish people. The Bethlehem we read about in the account of Messiah’s birth and the Bethlehem of now are seem totally different.
on the tours that we we lead in in Israel and those who have gone or will be going. Bethlehem is always an issue. It’s always a challenge. You see, Bethlehem is not under the sovereignty of Israel. It’s under the sovereignty of the Palestinian Authority. In 1950, and some of you were alive, Bethlehem was 86% Christian. And I don’t know they were real Christian or but certainly culturally Christian. By 2016, the number was 12%.
It went from being overwhelmingly Christian to now overwhelmingly Muslim. Why? Christians have fled. On the tour, we have to figure out what to do. You take the whole tour in. There are security posts. There are there are the government of Bethlehem. They don’t allow Israeli Israeli tour guides to go in.
So, you have to stop, switch your bus, switch the guides to guides that they have. They’re never quite the same. and they’ll take you to the Church of Nativity, which is very churchy. You go down to a room filled with icons and religious objects. The last thing you can visualize is the simple manger and the couple and the shepherds that night with a baby because you’re just in this thing.
I remember telling the guide there, “Listen, take us out of here. Just find us a field, a place where that looked like it did them 2,000 years ago.” And he did. We found a field and we worshiped the Lord and sang Christmas carols and worshiped and that was great. But aside from that, people were relieved to get back to Israel proper. If you want the feel of Bethlehem back then, but you want it today, it’s best to do Bethlehem from a distance.
