Census Sense

Here in the UK, Sunday was census day - filling in the 32-page document cataloguing how our lives have changed since the last one ten years ago. There's been the usual furore about what questions that are and aren't asked. And a campaign by the British Humanist Association to get the non-religious to definitely state that they have no religious affiliation - see here for their reasoning. The government has defended its position on the questions we have been asked – and they’re in charge, so they had the last say.

Skip back 2000 years, to a different government. The rulers of the Roman Empire would have scoffed at the idea that they were being controlled by someone else. It was their idea to take a census - decreed by Caesar Augustus himself (Luke 2 v 1). They were in charge.

Or were they?

But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel…
(Micah 5 v 2)

The Lord had decreed that the Messiah would come from Bethlehem - over 700 years previously - and so the mighty Romans meekly did His bidding.