The Wise Men are like so many things in the Bible a subject of controversy as is the star they followed. There are a lot of “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” arguments over the Christmas star and what it was and how it worked. To me the Bible is pretty plain that they saw some kind of celestial alignment that developed into a big, maybe a planetary conjunction that had been prophesied and they went to find the King that was announced and it seems that the star disappears, until they are told about Bethlehem and then it appears again and leads to the place where the child was It was miraculous by any definition. One of the mysteries of the star is why didn’t anyone else seem to know about it or see it. The scribes in Jerusalem knew their Bibles but appear to have been ignorant of a star even though it is mentioned in umbers
That has led to another “controversy”. Why everything has to be a controversy is also a miracle. Anyway the issue is over how people come to faith and how the Gospel works. We know we need a preacher. But there are people that came to faith without technically hearing the Gospel at first, and not seeing Jesus at first. The most stunning are the magi. Much of what motivated their journey to search for the Jewish king will remain unknown, but it seems that they interpreted a unique celestial event in light of Numbers 24:17 about a star rising from Jacob and concluded that the messianic figure had come. They know the first five books of Moses and they knew 2 Samuel but not the prophets because they have no knowledge of Bethlehem. Prof David Scaer says, that unlike the Palm Sunday crowds who can acknowledge Jesus as no more than the Son of David (Matt 21:9, 15), the magi actually recognize him as God (Matt 2:2,11). They had preachers in a sense because the scribes preach the Gospel from Micah. The fact is they were believers in Christ long before they got to Jerusalem or Bethlehem and they themselves became preachers.
Here is a song I wrote about this along time ago –
