{"id":16089,"date":"2026-03-28T18:03:14","date_gmt":"2026-03-28T23:03:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/?p=16089"},"modified":"2026-03-28T18:03:14","modified_gmt":"2026-03-28T23:03:14","slug":"question-matthew-32","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/16089\/question-matthew-32\/","title":{"rendered":"Question: Matthew 3:2"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Good morning Pastor John,<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 I am not sure if I understand the full meaning of Matthew 2:3: &#8220;But having heard of this, King Herod was troubled, and all of Jerusalem with him.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Was Jerusalem troubled because a king was born and the leaders were afraid to lose their positions, or was it that Herod troubled them with his actions?\u00a0 I can see either or both.\u00a0 I would hope, anyway, if I was there and heard a prophesied king was born, I would rejoice and not be troubled.\u00a0 Not sure why this struck me today.\u00a0 But I think it may have been the beginning of Jesus&#8217; troubles with the Jewish leaders.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Mark\u00a0W.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">PS\u00a0Sorry\u00a0this is\u00a0so brief but I am listening to this while doing maintenance on infusion pumps and did not want to forget my question again.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">=========<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em>Hi Mark.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 I am glad you are getting those infusion pumps fixed!\u00a0 Ha.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 As for Matthew 2:3, we know why Herod was upset.\u00a0 He was an extremely, murderously paranoid king.\u00a0 Jerusalem was &#8220;troubled&#8221; only in the sense of being excited and mystified; a visit from foreigners wanting to find the king who had been born would have been an amazing event.\u00a0 Herod had not yet done anything concerning the birth of a king that would have troubled the Jews; his killing of the innocents around Bethlehem came later.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 As for your comment about wondering how you would have done in that ancient situation, my father said there is a way you can tell:\u00a0 Ask yourself, what am I doing with Jesus now?<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Thank you for the question.\u00a0 Hope this answers it.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em>Pastor John\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Good morning Pastor John, \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 I am not sure if I understand the full meaning of Matthew 2:3: &#8220;But having heard of this, King Herod was troubled, and all of Jerusalem with him.&#8221; \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Was Jerusalem troubled because a king was born and the leaders were afraid to lose their positions, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-qa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16089"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16089"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16089\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16090,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16089\/revisions\/16090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}