When the Expected Happens in an Unexpected Way

Today on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. A sign of spiritual maturity in your life is when you begin to recognize that everything that God does in world politics or the details of your life are in pursuit of the great commission with Jesus at the center. What if you begin to evaluate when God reshapes your allotted times and the boundaries of your dwelling place that he's doing it so that other people can see God? Welcome back to another week of gospel-centered teaching here on Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. As always, I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. Something I've noticed in recent years is that there's been a growing interest in family histories. In fact, multiple companies have popped up that'll trace your family line through a DNA sample. And for some people, the results may be exciting, learning about historical figures or even royalty in their lines.

For others, the findings may be a little less glamorous. Well, today we're looking at Jesus's family history and what it reveals about God's overarching plan. J.D. preached this sermon in 2016, shortly before the presidential election.

So if you note any references to that, you'll understand why. He titled today's message, When the Expected Happens in an Unexpected Way. Let's join him right now. If you have your Bible, I'd love for you to take it out and open it to the gospel of Matthew, the first book of the New Testament, chapter one. Matthew chapter one is where we're going to begin into the New Testament. And we're going to begin in what you will probably think of as an unusual place, but we're going to begin there because Jesus came just like he had promised he would come, yet still the disciples missed him because his coming was so unusual, so unexpected that they didn't recognize him even when he fulfilled all the symbols and performed all the miracles. Which is why I believe the manner in which Matthew opens up the New Testament is so important because Matthew, in a sense, is going to give you Jesus's resume. That's how you should read Matthew one, Jesus's resume. He's going to show you why Jesus came the way that he did. He's going to show you why Jesus is uniquely qualified to be our savior and why he came in a way that was so confusing. Most of us plow right over Matthew's introduction. We skim read it without realizing the significance of what he's doing.

So let me actually read it here for us. Matthew chapter one, verse one, the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham was the father of Isaac and Isaac was the father of Jacob. And Jacob was the father of Judah and his brothers. And Judah was the father of Perez and Sarah by Tamar.

Perez was the father of Ezra. Ezra was the father of Ram. Ram was the father of Menedab. Menedab was the father of Noshon. And Noshon was the father of Salmon who swam upstream against God's enemies.

Verse five, and Salmon was the father of Boaz by Rahab. And Boaz was the father of Obed by Ruth. And Obed the father of Jesse and Jesse the father of David the King. And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah and Solomon the father of Rehoboam and Rehoboam the father of Abijah. And Abijah the father of Asaph and Asaph the father of Joshua. And Joshua the father of Joram and Joram the father of Uzziah.

Uzziah the father of Jothem. And Jothem the father of Ahaz. And Ahaz he was the father of Hezekiah, Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, Manasseh the father of Amoz. And Amoz the father of Josiah and Josiah the father of Jeconiah. And his brothers at the time of the deportation of Babylon. And after the deportation of Babylon, Jeconiah was the father of Shiltil.

Shiltil the father of Zerubbabel, Zerubbabel was the father of Abiad, And Abiodo the father of Eliakim, and Eliakim the father of Azor, and Azor the father of Zadok, and Zadok the father of Achim, and Achim the father of Eliud, and Eliud the father of Eleazar, Eleazar the father of Matan, and Matan the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ. So all the generations from Abraham to David were 14 generations. And from David to the deportation to Babylon, 14 generations.

And from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ, 14 generations. Amen. Amen. All right, let's close in prayer.

No, I'm just kidding. All right, be honest. How many of you zoned out during that reading of the sacred text?

Be totally honest. Put your hand up and say like, I did not call yourselves serious Christians, committed Christians. No, I know that's very unusual. And I know that very few of you stay with me and probably would not point to this passage as your favorite and most meaningful passage of scripture. But I read it because this genealogy is the key to understanding who Jesus really was and why he had to come in the confusing way that he did. Notice verse one that Matthew is going to call his whole gospel the book of the genealogy.

In other words, all the rest of the gospel of Matthew is an explanation of what he introduces in the first 17 verses. Then he points out at the end, the organization pattern, and that's important too. He says there are three sets of 14 generations. Now 14 is two sevens and seven is the biblical number of completion or perfection. It's pretty obvious by the way that he left some generations out and how he put these together.

That was a very commonly accepted practice in those days. So he's not trying to pull the wool over your eyes, but he presents it in this way, according to these three sets of 14 to show that God has super imposed his perfection. He has super imposed his perfect 14, if you will, onto world history, shaping it entirely and perfectly around Jesus.

History, as I've heard it said before is his story, which is number one. Matthew is trying to show you that though it often does not seem so, Jesus is the center of history. When Matthew wrote this and when the people that he wrote it to first read it, none of the major actors in world history were paying any attention to Jesus. Jesus was born to an obscure family in a small backwater, middle Eastern country, nobody in Rome or Athens where the action really was, was taking any notice of these things.

And when Jesus died, very few people outside of Israel had even heard Jesus's name. Yet Matthew shows you that despite what it looks like on the surface, God is guiding all of history according to his perfect plan in perfect 14s with Jesus Christ right in the center. And what that means for Matthew in his day and what it means for us in our day is that despite what it looks like on the surface, the powers of the world, those who think they control everything are really an illusion. In those days, it seemed like Rome was in charge, but Matthew says, no, this is the center. This is what is happening. In fact, everything that Rome is doing feeds back into this story where Jesus is the center.

I'll give you one quick example of that. One of the details that most people know about the birth of Jesus is that Mary and Joseph, Jesus's earthly parents had to travel to Bethlehem when Mary was great with child because Caesar Augustus had decided the whole world should be taxed and everybody needed to go to their hometown to be counted where they could pay the tax. And so Mary and Joseph are from Bethlehem and they traveled to Bethlehem. But the gospel writer explains that God's purpose in that was because Micah had made a prophecy, Micah 5 2 that the Messiah was going to be born in Bethlehem and that needed to be fulfilled. So think about that for just a minute. God taxed the whole world to move two people 90 miles so that you and I would have further proof that God was behind the birth of Jesus. It looks like on the surface that Rome or Washington or New York City or Hollywood is in charge, but that's just an illusion. The book of Proverbs explains the King's hand is like a river in the hand of the Lord.

And then he turns it whatever way he chooses and the way he chooses to turn it is in pursuit of the great commission with Jesus at the center. Y'all stop freaking out about this election. I realized you're like, oh, we got two terrible candidates. I don't know who to choose from. One's a phony and one's a liar.

And I don't even know which one is which. It's the end of the Republic. Y'all yes, elections are important, but God is not dependent on Washington to fulfill his purposes. He weaves all of this back into his perfect 14 so that at the end, Jesus reigns and Jesus comes. A sign of Christian maturity is when you begin to understand that in everything God does, in everything, whether we're talking about major movements and world politics, or we're talking about the particular details of your life, that this is what he is pursuing. When I was overseas, one of our missionaries said, I thought this was profound. He said, the great test for our generation is whether they will recognize God's hand in the refugee crisis as the rearranging of the nations for the purposes of the great commission.

That's the big test. And then he quoted Acts 17, 27. God determines the allotted periods and the boundaries of the dwelling places of the nations on earth. Why?

What does he do with them? He wants them to be able to seek God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Now, let me be clear. This is not a political statement about what our government should do about refugees.

I am not saying I'll throw out our immigration system and let everybody in. What I am saying is can we, as the people of God, recognize the hand of God in what is happening and know what we are supposed to do, regardless of how the situation got in there in the first place. One of the things that we did overseas was we worked with Syrian refugees. And one of the Syrian refugees that our teams work with over there who had come to faith in Christ made this statement. And I thought it was so beautiful and moving that I wrote it down word for word.

Listen to this. He said, I thank God for the war in Syria and the many terrible things that happened in my life because God used them to bring me to a saving knowledge of the Lord and savior, Jesus Christ. Maybe we couldn't get to him in Syria.

Maybe we weren't able, we wouldn't have been able to so God brought him out to a place where we could get to him. Will we recognize in this moment what we are supposed to do because we recognize that what God does in world history, he does for the purposes of the great commission. Again, a sign of spiritual maturity in your life is when you begin to recognize that everything that God does in world politics or the details of your life are in pursuit of the great commission with Jesus at the center. What if you begin to evaluate when God reshapes your allotted times and the boundaries of your dwelling place that he's doing it so that other people can seek God.

Maybe you get assigned to a job you didn't want. Sure, you can be unhappy about it, but you can still look for God once for you in that job. Or maybe your house didn't sell because God still has purposes for you where you are.

Maybe the pain gives you the ability to relate to others going in that same situation so that you can share Jesus with them in a more meaningful way. A sign of spiritual maturity is when you begin to say about all things, why did God give me this for the purposes of the great commission, for the purposes of Jesus, the blessings in your life. Maybe you're at a place in your life where you can retire early and maybe God gave you the ability to retire early, not so that you could travel around the world playing golf in different countries. Not just that, that's fine, but maybe he freed up the best chapter of your life, which is when you're the most mature and most unfettered so that you could use the gifts that God has given you strategically on mission for the great commission somewhere. Maybe God made you wealthy. I mean, maybe he made you fabulously wealthy and maybe the wealth that he gave you was not just so that you could enjoy the blessings that come from wealth, although he doesn't begrudge you that at all. Maybe he gave you that as a stewardship because he was putting resources in your hands for just this time so that you could be a blessing to peoples around the world so that they could begin to seek God. What if you begin to look at everything like Jesus and the great commission were at the center?

A sign of spiritual maturity, I'll say it one more time, is when you begin to view everything in your life, every blessing, every teardrop, every heartache as according to God's perfect 14 and how it can be used to help the great commission, the mission of Jesus, which brings me to point number two. Matthew shows us that God is working even in the chaos and the junk of your life. This genealogy is unusual because typically genealogies only listed out the father's names. That's the way they kept record. But Matthew fills this genealogy with the names of women as well as he includes all these little, what seemed like superfluous details that are just sort of, you know, they are, for example, verse three, Judah was the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar. Now in the genealogy, only Perez's name is essential, right? The reason that he mentioned Zerah and Tamar is because he wants you to think about that story.

So here's the question. Do you know the story that goes with Judah and Perez and Zerah by Tamar? The story is found in Genesis 38. There's a man named Judah and Judah has three sons. One of his sons, his oldest son is married to a girl named Tamar, but his oldest son, Judah's oldest son dies, leaves Tamar as a widow before they can have children. And so in those days, the law was that if your brother died and his wife didn't have children, that you were supposed to take his wife into your house and you were supposed to give him children through her.

And that's the way you would continue the family line. So Onan, who is the second brother, doesn't want, doesn't like Tamar or doesn't want the hassle of kids or something. So he just refuses to have kids with her.

So God gets mad and kills him. So now the custom is Tamar supposed to go the third son, right? But Judah, the dad is like, okay, this girl Tamar has been married to two of my sons and they're both dead. I'm starting to think this girl is bad luck.

So I don't want to kill my third son. So he stalls and like, you know, I can't pay for the wedding. Well, Tamar gets really ticked off about this because she figures out, you know, I'm never going to get married and never going to have kids. And so she take matters into her own hands. So she goes to the place one night where Judah likes to go to the bar and waits till, you know, he gets a little tipsy. She's dressed like a prostitute.

She's got on her tight jeans and her clear heels. And after he gets tipsy, she gets him crunk and then seduces him to sleep with her. He doesn't realize it's his daughter-in-law because, you know, he's so crunk. So they sleep together and she gets pregnant with Perez and Zerah.

Okay. So three months go by, she starts to show that she's pregnant. So Judah says, my daughter-in-law is pregnant. She obviously got pregnant out of wedlock.

Doesn't realize it's his babies, of course. So she's got to be stoned. So they dragged this girl out to stone her. And right before they stone her, she reaches inside of her pocket book and says, wait, I've got the belt of the man whose babies they are. And she pulls out Judah's belt. Now talk about an awkward moment, right?

And she was like, well, I'm you feeling better about your family yet? This is some messed up stuff. I mean, we're talking, God, here's what Matthew is trying to show you. God arranges even all of this messed up dysfunctional stuff into his perfect 14. And I share that because there's a lot of you that got some messed up dysfunctional families of your own. Isn't that right? But there are some of you, you look back in your history, like, oh, you just don't understand the home I came out of.

Let me be clear. I am not saying that God was pleased with the pain that came into your life. He was brokenhearted by that pain.

He's a perfect father. And I get angry when somebody hurts one of my kids. God is angry when somebody hurts one of his. But what you should see is that God has one overriding purpose in your life and God stamps his perfect 14 on even the chaotic mess of your life. We often compare life here to a tapestry. Tapestry is a rug that looks like a beautiful design.

Not one strand is out of place. Flip it over on the back and it looks like this chaotic mess of where all these threads are going. And life often feels like we're in this chaotic mess where these random things are happening. What's gonna happen, Matthew shows you in eternity is God flips it over and all of a sudden you see it's a perfect picture.

What not one molecule, not one strand was out of place. Charles Spurgeon used to the 19th century British pastor used to describe it like this. He would say, life for us is like walking into the back of a theater where there's a three hour stage play going on catching about two minutes of that play and then walking out and say, it doesn't make any sense because you know, it just, nothing that's happening makes sense.

He says, of course it doesn't make sense. It was a three hour stage play. You just got two minutes. I mean, I'm 43 years old, but that means that my adult life is what 20, 25 years in my adult life. And that's a nanosecond in a five hour movie. Of course, there are a lot of things that feel random and chaotic. What Matthew is showing you is it felt random and chaotic to them. It didn't feel like, yeah, we're in the middle of the blood line of the Messiah, but God took all of this.

He took all this chaotic mess and he arranged it into his perfect 14, not one generation, not one strand was out of place. Here's third thing he shows you. Number three, he shows you that the gospel is for the outsider.

The gospel for the outsider. Another thing that you notice about this genealogy is how many people are listed who have very embarrassing stories. The kind of people you don't want others to know are in your family. Many of you have asked me why my family spells our last name Greer in the creative way that we do. If you don't know, it's G-R-E-E-A-R. It's three vowels. And people always point that out to me like, I've never noticed that. Oh, you've got an extra vowel. Oh, thanks for pointing that out. I've never known that, even though I've had the name for 43 years. But they are like, why don't you spell like a normal person? So I was like, so I always said that the extra vowel was a sign of Scottish royalty.

That's not true at all. But it sounded good, so I made it up. We had a girl that worked for our church, or went to our church, who used to work for one of those ancestry places. And she came to me after service one day.

And she said, hey, I had a free hour at work. And I did some research on your family name. I found out some really interesting things.

Would you like to know? And I said, actually, no, I wouldn't. And she said, well, I'm going to tell you anyway. She said, I was able to trace your lineage.

It's really clear. She says, the first Greer to come here in your line was Shadrack Greer in 1735. Shadrack Greer was his name. But he spelled his last name G-R-E-E-R, the way a normal person would. And that goes all the way down to about 1840, she said. And in 1840, inexplicably, it changes from E-E-R to E-E-A-R. She said, now, I talked to some of the people where I worked. That is always an indication that somebody is trying to run from the law. And so they wanted to keep their last name.

So they put an extra vowel in it. So the law couldn't track them. She said, the good news is you come from a line of criminals. So that's not the kind of thing that you typically are excited about people knowing about your family line. Here, what Matthew does is he shows you that four women, all of whom have a shady past, are going to be a part of Jesus's line.

And just in case you miss the fact that there are these chaotic stories, he puts in detail, so you'll think about it. We've already talked about Tamar, the seductive daughter-in-law, who sounds more like a character from a made-for-HBO drama than she would a great granny of Jesus. Verse five, you got Rahab, another prostitute, the second prostitute in Jesus's line, a Gentile that God saves from Jericho. Then you got Ruth, remember her?

We went over her story. Then you've got the Moabite homeless girl. Verse six, you got David and the wife of Uriah. Why would he say wife of Uriah and not just give her name? Her name is Bathsheba. Well, because he's trying to make you think of the story. She's not just Bathsheba, she was David's best friend's wife.

And David slept with her and then had Uriah killed to cover it up. He's wanting to make sure you think about that as you read this resume. What is more striking about this is that in those days, your genealogy functioned as your resume. So back then, like today, resumes were fudged to make sure you include the best parts and you omit the unflattering details. You know, they say there's an art to writing a resume where you brag without actually looking like you're bragging.

Nobody, nobody explained that to me when I wrote my first resume. My first resume for a ministry job, I thought it was supposed to be an essay about how awesome I was. It was 17 pages long.

I kid you not. It was 17 pages long. I listed every place I'd ever spoken, all the awesome things anyone had ever said about me. I got the job miraculously and I'm still your pastor today. No, this was somewhere else. I got the job and the guy, the supervisor, after I'd been there a few months, he said, man, he goes, yeah, I'm not gonna lie to you. Your resume made quite an impression. He said, we passed it around.

We laughed about it for several weeks. But in those days they had less shame. So when you became a ruler or when you were campaigning for the job, you would publish your resume to show how your bloodline qualified you for the position by being nothing but a string of awesome. We got a great example, by the way, from the time of Jesus. Herod, who was the king when Jesus was born, published his genealogy, but it was missing anybody who was at all unimpressive or shady. So Matthew, perhaps in response to Herod, includes a bunch of people in Jesus's genealogy that would not have helped his case for being king.

And just in case you miss how shady they are, he makes sure he puts the details in so you'll think about it. It's filled with moral failures and mess ups, the broken and the weak, those outside of the circles of power. Moral outsiders like Judah, David, whose lineage to Jesus includes an adulterous affair. You got ethnic outsiders like the Gentile Rahab. You got social outsiders like Ruth.

And all that is supposed to give you a very clear message. Jesus came to include you. No matter what your past is, or no matter who you are, he came to include you in his family. He is the redeemer. So are you a part of God's family?

Guess what? He came to include you. That's the message today from Pastor J.D. Greer in Summit Life. If you're not sure if you've been adopted into his family, we'd love to help you learn more.

Send a message to requests at jdgreer.com. And no matter where you're at in your walk with God, we have a resource we'd like to send you today to help you dive deeper into the gospel message found in the Bible. It's a set of 66 cards that will help you as you read to make connections with the context of the original audience. Each card includes an illustration representing the book, details about the book, three key truths gleaned from the book, and where the book points to Jesus and the good news of the gospel, and a reflection question to help you apply the book's message to your life. They're simply called the books of the Bible cards. We'd love for you to have this resource as a reference for any time you're reading through a book of the Bible. They come as our way of saying thanks when you donate to support this ministry or when you become a monthly gospel partner. Summit Life is funded by listeners like you and we are so grateful.

You're helping more people learn and grow through these gospel-centered programs. Ask for the books of the Bible cards when you give today by calling 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220. Or if it's easier, you can give and request the book online at jdgrier.com. If you'd rather mail your gift, write to J.D. Greer Ministries, P.O.

Box 122-93, Durham, North Carolina, 277-09. And remember to include a note requesting the books of the Bible cards. Before we close, let me remind you that if you aren't yet signed up for our email list, you'll want to do that today. It is the best way to stay up to date with Pastor J.D. 's latest blog posts, and we'll also make sure that you never miss a new resource or series.

It's quick and easy to sign up at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch. Be sure to join us tomorrow when we continue this message, Finding Gospel Truths in the Genealogy of Jesus. We're learning how God has been working through all of history to reveal the plan of salvation on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.