JesusX30 Challenge—Scene 2: THE PREPARATION OF THE KING

 JesusX30 Challenge—Scene 2: THE PREPARATION OF THE KING

1. Key Texts

•      Luke 2:1–52

•      Matthew 2:1–23

•      John 1:14

2. Outline / Notes

Date & Place

•      2 BC – 27 AD.

•      Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem during the census.

•      Early years as a refugee in Egypt.

•      Childhood and youth in Nazareth, Galilee—remote, poor, overlooked.

Main Account

•      Joseph embraces Mary after angelic confirmation—choosing shame and trust over reputation.

•      Jesus born in harsh conditions, laid in a manger.

•      Shepherds receive the first announcement from angels—God reveals the news to the lowly.

•      Magi from the east follow a divine sign, honoring Jesus while Herod plots to kill him.

•      Joseph and Mary flee to Egypt as refugees; later return to Nazareth.

•      Jesus is circumcised, named, presented at the Temple; Simeon declares him light to the nations.

•      At age 12, Jesus amazes teachers in the Temple—listening, learning, asking questions.

•      Long stretch of silence: Jesus’ hidden years in Nazareth, working, learning, being formed.

Meanwhile

•      Herod’s paranoia and Rome’s dominance highlight Jesus’ vulnerability under empire.

•      The Magi, not kings, but Persian-Babylonian scholars, see God’s hand and recognize the true King.

•      Jesus’ obscurity in Nazareth parallels the way God often works—in margins, not centers of power.

Main Point

•      Jesus’ hidden years were not wasted—they were preparation.

•      God’s revolution begins with humility, obscurity, and trust, not power or privilege.

•      Nazareth wasn’t an accident. It was the plan.

•      Exegetical Insight

•      “Jesus” (Iēsous, from Hebrew Yehoshua) = “The Lord saves”—his very name embodies his mission.

•      Luke 2:32: “a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel”—already a global scope for the Messiah’s mission.

3. Devotional / Reflection Questions

•      How does Joseph’s choice to embrace shame rather than preserve his reputation challenge you?

•      Why do you think God chose Nazareth, obscurity, and hidden years to prepare Jesus for his mission?

•      In what ways might your own “silent years” be a season of preparation rather than wasted time?

•      How does Jesus’ story as a refugee shape the way you think about God’s presence among the vulnerable?

4. Action Step / Challenge

•      This week, reframe one area of your life that feels hidden or unimportant as preparation. Ask: how might God be forming me here for something bigger?

5. Share & Join the Movement

•      Share your reflection with #JesusX30Challenge, #JX30Challenge, or #JX30.

•      Invite someone to join the 30-day journey with you.

•      Subscribe on YouTube / follow the podcast to stay on track.

✦ Lekh Ulmad—Go and learn. Come back for Scene 3 of the JesusX30 – 30-day Discipleship Challenge.

Important note: 

This 30-day challenge is based on my book trilogy entitled Jesus: The Strategic Life and Mission of the Messiah and His Movement (3 Volumes, Hekhal Publishing Co., 2025).

•      The Challenge follows the same “scene-by-scene” structure: historical, strategic, exegetical, devotional.

•      Designed to bring together scholarship + discipleship in a way that’s both accessible and transformational.

You can buy or borrow the trilogy at:

•      Hekhal Publishing Co. (look for free samples of each book as well)

o   Jesus, vol. 1

o   Jesus, vol. 2

o   Jesus, vol. 3

•      Amazon (print or ebook)

•      Barnes & Noble (print or ebook)

•      Hoopla (borrow)

•      Many more booksellers worldwide!

 

Episode Transcript

(00:09):
So let me ask you this. If you had the chance to shape
the childhood of someone who would go on to change the world,
how would you do it? So it's a big question.
It's probably not one that many of us have ever been asked
before, but how would you go about it?
Probably give them every advantage, right?
Education, networks, resources. You'd want them close to the

(00:29):
action around power, influence, opportunity.
If it's basketball, you're goingto get them on the best AAU
teams with the best personal coaches.
Put them on traveling teams, drive them to the gym every
change you get. If it's education, you're going
to get them into the best schoolsystems.
Make sure they have private tutors, take AP courses

(00:49):
concurrent work as early as possible as often as possible,
and have the strongest possible resume for their college
applications. Jesus's story is a little
different. He's born in harsh winter
conditions, he's sleeping in a feeding through, and he grows up
in a backwater town. He spends most of his life in
the back, and I wonder if many of us have ever really thought

(01:11):
about why. What's up everybody?
I'm Tyson put off and this is scene 2 of the Jesus X30
Challenge. Today we're looking at Jesus's
birth, childhood, and emergence into public life.
And what we're going to see is that this quiet stretch, these
years of obscurity, that the gospel writers and historical

(01:32):
records really are just almost completely silent on, this
stretch of Jesus's life that we don't know much about.
It was absolutely not wasted by any means.
It was preparation, it was intentional, it was strategic,
and it says a lot about what kind of King Jesus actually came
to be. We're talking about the years

(01:53):
chronologically, historically, from about two BC to 27 AD,
Jesus is born under the shadow of Rome.
Joseph and Mary live up north inNazareth in the Galilee, but
have to make the trek to Bethlehem in Judea for a census.
It's about a 90 mile trip on foot through the hills and in

(02:14):
Roman roads in the winter. Not exactly a baby moon, which
apparently is a thing that people do before they have a
baby anyway. Bethlehem matters.
It's David's city, it's tied to prophecy.
It's also a small town, so in the bigger picture of the Roman
world in the broader ancient Near East, it's really nothing

(02:35):
noteworthy. Same with Nazareth.
It's remote, poor, and look downupon, even by others in the
Galilee. But that's where Jesus is
raised. Not Jerusalem, not Rome, not
even Judea down in the South, the region surrounding
Jerusalem. Jesus grows up in the Galilee.
And that's an important detail because it really gives shape in

(02:56):
many ways to Jesus's whole mission.
So here's how this all unfolds. We know the story, but let's go
over it. Mary's already pregnant,
divinely pregnant, and Joseph isstill trying to figure out what
to do. Remember, he's a he's a good
man, but he's caught in a tough situation that could really cost
him more than his reputation. It could cost him his family,

(03:18):
his family name, everything. So in Jesus world, the loss of
honor in a situation like this and the type of shame he would,
he would have brought upon himself and everyone around him,
he would eventually have led to his demise, his social and
religious and possibly economic bankruptcy.
But after an Angel appears to Joseph in a dream, he, he comes

(03:42):
to embrace the situation and he really leans in and he stays, he
sticks around. He takes Mary as his wife.
Even though it's complicated andagain, messy.
Jesus's story is so messy. Think about this for a minute.
The birth of Jesus, the son of God in human form.
It doesn't happen in the light of celebration, but under a

(04:03):
pretty suspicious and shameful and hush hush situation.
In spite of all of this, Joseph and Mary embrace it and they
step into it with trust. And probably the angels in
angelic visitations helped, but they, they, they take the leap
and they no doubt had a lot of nerves, moments of doubt, but

(04:23):
ultimately they move forward with what God has called them to
do. So Jesus ends up being born in
Bethlehem in the lower room thatserved as the stable in the
cold. The empire is busy counting
people for taxes. And here's this couple, they're
forced to travel under imperial orders, give birth to a child
they believe is from God. And there's no room for them, no

(04:45):
comfort. It's just survival, pure
survival. But it's in that space away from
the centres of power and in prestige and wealth and honour.
It's in that space where a lightbreaks through.
Angels appear to shepherds in the fields, not to kings, not to
priests, to night shift workers who get the news first among any

(05:07):
humans that a saviour's been born.
And way out east, remember the Magi?
They see something in the sky, some sort of divine sign, and
they head W. They show up in Jerusalem
sometime later asking about thisking of the Jews, and it really
sets off a firestorm. Herod hears about it.
And remember, Herod is a paranoid, vindictive ruler.

(05:28):
He can't take criticism. He can't stand it if there's any
threat to his power and his honor and his prestige and his
wealth. So he hears about it.
He panics. He starts scheming, which is
what we'd expect from a guy likeHerod.
He's infamously brutal and desperate to hold on to his
power. He's even known to have killed

(05:50):
his own family members whom he thought were a threat to his
throne. So these magi were more than
what we call wise men or mistakenly called magicians.
Magi were well known in the ancient Babylonian and Persian
world for being these people whohad a pulse on what was
happening in the heavenly world,and they were critically

(06:11):
important for informing rulers of the empire's about happenings
and threats that they learned about by reading the stars.
So they see this celestial sign this this thing in the sky,
which is probably not an actual star or anything, but it's
probably an angelic figure who leads them to the West and they
follow it to Judea where Jesus is born.

(06:32):
They get there. They're not.
It's not just three wise men traveling alone, like we often
depicted or imagined it, but they're part of a massive
caravan traveling from a long way away in the east, and their
arrival in Jerusalem definitely would have caused a stir.
Naturally, as the local ruler, Herod, invites him to his
palace, which leads him eventually to launch his search

(06:54):
for the newborn Jesus. So while Jesus is being honored
with gold and frankincense and myrrh, he's also being hunted.
And you got to understand too, that Herod is already on shaky
grounds with Rome because he's had a bit of trouble keeping the
peace on this eastern edge of the Roman Empire.
If you if you picture the land of Judea at this time, it's

(07:17):
basically the the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire.
And so part of Herod's rule and part of his job is to keep peace
over on this end of the empire. And he's, he's had some issues.
So he's in some hot water already with the Roman Empire.
Joseph gets another divine message and this one tells him

(07:38):
to leave. So they flee to Egypt for
safety. Another long and dangerous
journey. Again, they're refugees on the
run from state violence, and that's peculiar.
And it's all part of Jesus's earliest story.
Skip ahead sometime. Herod dies.
An Angel tells him, hey, it's safe to go back, but go back up

(08:00):
north. So this is what they do.
That's where Jesus ends up. They arrive into back into the
Galilee. That's where Jesus grows up.
Quietly, though he learns carpentry.
He lives among ordinary people. He grows up an otherwise normal
life, but he grows into his identity.
OK, he didn't just walk around with infinite knowledge of who

(08:23):
he is, of the makings of of eternity and of heaven.
He has to learn who he is From conversations with mom and dad,
from conversations with his cousin John, from conversations
with religious teachers and leaders, from synagogue learning
and studies in scripture. He grows into his self
understanding as the Messiah andSon of God.
And it's interesting too that there are all these little

(08:45):
moments scattered throughout thestory that show us just how
rooted in his world and culture and the traditions and contexts
of 1st century Judaism, Jesus isfrom the start.
He circumcised on the 8th day, brought into the covenant of
Israel, right? He's named Jesus or Yeshua,

(09:05):
meaning the Lord saves, which really sets the tone for
everything that's coming. He's brought to the temple in
Jerusalem as a baby, where Simeon, remember Simeon sees him
and declares that his eyes have seen God's salvation, a light
for revelation to the Gentiles and the glory of the people of
Israel, which is in Luke 2. Then later, when when Jesus is

(09:27):
12, we get this kind of one timeglimpse of him as a kid and he's
in the temple again and he's dialoguing with teachers, asking
questions, listening, learning. And he's not in there, you know,
grandstanding, declaring who he is and witnessing and
evangelizing. He's just learning and even then

(09:47):
people are starting to notice that this kid is a little bit
different. But then we don't hear anything
for the rest of Jesus teenage years and into his mid 20s
nothing. He just grows up in Nazareth.
We we just know that during those silent years, he's
preparing for the moment when he'll finally take his identity,
his mission, his messianic campaign public.

(10:09):
It's easy, I think, for us to skip over these early years, but
I think that they matter a lot more than most of us are ever
taught. Jesus grew up in otherwise
normal life, but remember, he had a messy story too, that he
always had to live with. He wasn't rushed into the public
eye. He didn't show up out of
nowhere. He didn't drop down from heaven

(10:31):
in some spiritualized bodily form.
He lived real years in obscurity, doing chores,
learning a trade, getting sick, having good days, having bad
days, walking the dusty roads ofa nowhere town, playing on the
rocky cliffs surrounding Nazareth.
I mean, I can even imagine that he and his friends probably make

(10:51):
believe, you know, that they were soldiers, that they were
pretending that they were the Maccabees from a couple
centuries before King David and his troops ousting their enemies
and rescuing God's people. Jesus was a kid, a regular kid,
living a regular life during this time, and he also grew up
seeing what life was really likeas a minority in the world's

(11:13):
most powerful nation, the most dominant and expansive empire
the world had ever seen. He watched his dad work as a
laborer, sometimes struggling some years to find work when
building was slow and being goneat times when the job took him
away from Nazareth, possibly andprobably to booming cities like

(11:35):
Sephora's. He watched his mom, and despite
her resolve and faith that we all know about, that Jesus was
from God. And in memory of Gabriel's
message to her that night beforehe was born, he watched his mom
walk to the markets each day to the whispers she was the unwed
teenager who got pregnant with God's son, a blessing she knew

(11:58):
to be true, but in the minds of of the doubters and the haters,
and this was a mark of shame. And at some point between the
time he was 12 and the day he went public with his campaign,
Jesus's dad was no more. We're not told what happens, but
we know Jesus had to carry the family from that point on.
And so he did. And all along the way, his mom,

(12:20):
Mary, who cherish these things in her heart, we know from
Jesus's birth in Luke, taught Jesus who he was, helping him as
he grew intellectually and physically and spiritually and
emotionally to understand his identity as the Son of God and
his mission as the Messiah. And that slow and otherwise
quiet preparation time, that time before we really hear

(12:44):
anything about Jesus, that was all part of the plan.
You got to understand that all of those years Jesus was just
sitting back and waiting to become the Messiah.
Through life, through relationships, through
experiences, He was prepping to be the Messiah.
His entire public campaign lasted just over 2 years, from
sometime in the early part of 27AD to the spring of 29 AD when

(13:09):
he's crucified and raised duringPassover.
The rest of his life, from threeor two BC to 27 AD before he
goes public, we're just sitting on the sidelines waiting for God
to put him in. They were preparation, they were
practice. And many of you know a lot more
about this than I do, but I lovephysics, I love cosmology, I

(13:30):
love astronomy. It all just blows my mind what
everyone has heard about Albert Einstein, right?
E equals, MC squared, the theoryof relativity, things like that.
Did you know Einstein wasn't in some fancy lab or hammering out
his mathematical equations with scholarly colleagues when he

(13:54):
came up with his big ideas aboutgravity, what we now know as
general relativity? He was literally sitting in a
Swiss Patent Office in the early1900s, going through paperwork,
stamping patents. For someone with his brain
power, this was mindless work. You've got to imagine that.
And somewhere in that quiet, ordinary space, he's looking out

(14:17):
his office window and he starts imagining literally picturing
gravity in his head. Up until this time, for the last
hundreds of years, gravity was thought to be this thing that
pulls on you. It pulls you down to the ground,
right? That's what gravity, and that's
what most of us still think. But he's picturing gravity not
as something that pulls us down.Most of us think that when an

(14:39):
apple falls, it's being pulled to the Earth by gravity, right?
Einstein starts to imagine it assomething that literally bends
space and time. Like if you basically put a
bowling ball on a trampoline andit warps the the flat surface of
the trampoline around it, and everywhere that bowling ball

(15:02):
rolls, it warps the space aroundit.
That's how Albert Einstein imagined and proved gravity to
work. OK, so so for those of us who
aren't as familiar with the world of science, with this
idea, Einstein literally changedthe way we understand science
even today. It's a pretty wild story.

(15:25):
But it goes to show that sometimes these world altering
ideas aren't always born in the spotlight, right?
Many times they're born in the most hidden, overlooked times
and places of life. In the Monday for Einstein, it
was sitting in a Patent Office. He wasn't an academic at the
time. He wasn't a professor.
He wasn't a world famous researcher.

(15:47):
He was just sitting there looking out a window and
imagining. And in those mundane times, in
those times when we just feel like we're just wasting our life
waiting for God to put us in thegame to give us that
groundbreaking idea, sometimes that's when God is doing his
greatest work to prepare us. The majority of Jesus's life

(16:08):
took place before he ever stepped onto the public stage.
OK, from the year 2 BC to the year 27 AD, nobody really knew
who Jesus was. And then in just over 2 years,
from 27 to 29, he changed the world.
I know that a lot of us been long stretches of our lives

(16:30):
feeling unseen, like you're waiting for something to happen,
you're wondering if who you are and what you're doing even
matters. But I think that this part of
Jesus story that we tend to skippast the part that really we
don't know anything about. I think it's this part of the
story that makes it clear that the quiet seasons aren't wasted,

(16:51):
that God works in those hidden years, that formation takes
place during those years, and when the time is right, he's
going to use the one nobody everexpected to launch a revolution
that will fundamentally change heaven and earth as we know it.
We started by asking why didn't Jesus grow up in power and
privilege, in the center of influence.

(17:13):
And I think we can see why. Because the kind of revolution
he came to bring doesn't start at the top, doesn't start at the
halls of power. It starts on the margins.
It starts with humility, with the humiliated, with trust, with
time. Nazareth wasn't Plan B, it was
the plan. And if you're in your own
Nazareth right now, stay there, keep preparing, keep listening,

(17:39):
keep learning and be ready because your time to go big, to
go public is about to come. It's just around the corner.
Lake Omad. Go and learn.
Come back for scene 3 of the Jesus X30 Challenge 30 Day
Discipleship Challenge.