There's a passage in my (ESV) Bible in Matthew chapter 2 that's simply headlined, "Herod Kills the Children." This is one of those headlines in the Bible that you look at and think, "How did something like this end up in this book, and how could a book about a loving God contain a such a morbid story? Because, after all, a 'loving God' wouldn't really let things like this happen, much less happen in His book.
The story behind this headline is a part of the Biblical Christmas narrative of the Christ being born. Essentially, in a Cliff Note's summary of what happened, when Herod, the ruler of Judea at the time Jesus was born, found of that another 'King' had been born in his land, he set out to find this King and kill Him, so the other 'King' (Jesus) wouldn't be a threat to him; however, Herod was tricked and unable to discover the exact location and identity of the newborn King, so he had all the male children in Bethlehem and in the surrounded region who where two years old or younger killed. All of them. Hundreds of children dead to erase any threat to Herod's throne and kingdom. Hundreds of kids dead, all for the life of one child that lived.
This small portion of the Christmas story is a portion that I had never really noticed before, and frankly, it's a portion that really bothered me when I read it. After all, why would God let all these innocent, young kids die by the sword at the hands of an evil king while Jesus escaped to Egypt safe and sound? I mean, why is it necessary that this is part of the story? Couldn't God do skip the killing hundreds or thousands of kids part and go straight from Jesus in a manger to Jesus picking the disciples? It seems pretty unnecessary, especially when one considers God's all-powerful, loving nature.
Maybe it wasn't necessary, but it is telling.
After I sat there fuming for a few minutes and asking lots of hard questions, a thought occurred to me: That headline, 'Herod Kills the Children', is the way the story should go. That's the way the story should end- without grace. That headline is almost a picture of what we deserve without the salvation of the Christ. We die. He lives.
But that's not the way the story ends; that's more of a telling depiction of what could have been.
In reality, Christ is the only perfect One to have every lived. He's the only one that is really deserving of Life and eternity; we are not. In a world with no grace, Christ is safe in Egypt, and we're slain in our sin. In a world in which Christ does not die for us, we die the death we deserve, yet grace does exist, and we get to live. Because of Christ, we are not dead. Because of God's grace, we get to live. Consider us not children caught in a death trap, but instead, children in the pursuit of freedom because of the gift of grace.
-Cliff
Cliff's Note: "The beauty of grace is that it makes life not fair."