133 - A Pedigree with a Surprise

You pick up your Bible and wonder, is there more here than meets the eye?

Is there anything here for me? I mean, it's just words printed on paper, right? Well, it may look like just print on a page, but it's more than ink. Join us for the next half hour as we explore God's Word together as we learn how to explore it on our own, as we ask God to meet us there in its pages.

Welcome to More Than Ink. Away in a manger, no crib for a bed. Okay, wait, wait, wait. That's the Christmas story, but you know, we're starting into Matthew today and that's not in his story.

The manger is not in Matthew. Amazing, but other things are that we sort of overlook. So today we start Matthew and the birth of Jesus on More Than Ink. Well, good morning and welcome. I'm Dorothy. And I'm Jim.

And this is More Than Ink. And we are about to embark on a whole new adventure. A new adventure. Looking at the gospel according to Matthew. Yes, I'm excited.

And I am excited too. I love Matthew. Many people are familiar with Matthew because all kinds of familiar quotations come out of it. Oh yeah. Everybody knows the beatitudes, blessed are the, right?

Yeah, yeah, right. And that comes along about chapter five, so pretty early on in the book. But it begins, Matthew begins with a genealogy. And why is that important? Well, that's important because Matthew is writing this book to detail the coming of the Promised One, the Messiah King.

Big deal. That God had said from the very beginning, he would send this one. And so Matthew is going to begin by tracing his human genealogy, not from creation, but from Abraham, from the beginning of the Jewish nation. And especially for Jews, this genealogy is a big deal because they would challenge and question who Jesus was. And when they'd say the Messiah, they'd say, well, listen, the Messiah has to come from a certain line. So tell us his genealogy, tell us where he comes from. So where he comes from is a gigantic thing in Jewish thinking. So we got to tie that together. This is an interesting genealogy because it's very, it's in proportion, right? We have, it's laid out in certain numbers of generations so that it would be easily memorized. Yes, exactly.

And there are, there are some bookmarks, right? If you're familiar with this, you know, we start with Abraham and go through David the King and then kind of starts the cycle again from David the King through the deportation to Babylon and then from the deportation to the birth of Christ. So, and when we read it, that'll become clear. But that, that gives us a place of knowing exactly where in the history of the nation Messiah was born.

Yes. So remember, we're going to read this, these genealogies to you. Well, okay, so it's not going to be boring because we may make some comments along the way. Exactly, exactly.

There's some fascinating people here. But remember, the point of this isn't just a document, you know, something historically. The point is to say that according to the promise of who the Messiah was, Jesus fits. In fact, there was an occasion in the Gospels where people challenged him and said, you can't be the guy because you came from Nazareth and we know he's got to come from Bethlehem because Bethlehem is the city of David.

So I mean, this is in people's minds. So this is critical before you start talking about Jesus is to talk about where he came from and what his lineage is. And fortunately, we have someone like Matthew and the apostles, who is, he's a learned man, you know, he was the tax collector, which they despise, but he knew Greek well. And people have kind of surmised over the years that Matthew was sort of the note taker of the 12. He was the one that sort of wrote stuff down. And so in fact, he's the only one of the apostles whose name is on the Gospel, except for John.

So it's just interesting to know. Well, his name actually isn't in the Gospel. Right.

It doesn't appear here. But very, very early tradition says Matthew wrote this. He wrote this right. Okay, well, let's just do it. Let's do this genealogy. Remember, we got to find out where this guy came from.

Okay. And like I said, beginning we're pay attention here, because he's going to give us the overview starting in verse one, right, the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. So we know right out of the gate, we're talking about the Jewish promised one, right, promised to God's God's man of faith through the through the divinity had to have connections. In fact, with Abraham, God said he'd bless all the nations.

Remember that? Right. So this is part of that and the seed of Abraham Paul writes, right, comes from Abraham. So yeah, here we go. Okay, here we go. You want to read?

No, you do. Okay. I want to hear you say all these names. Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac, the father of Jacob, and Jacob, the father of Judah and his brothers. Okay, so we've got the three patriarchs. And then with Jacob and the 12 sons, we begin to see the chosen line emerge through Judah. So picking it up in verse three, and Judah, the father of Perez and Zara by Tamar, and Perez, the father of Hezron, and Hezron, the father of Ram, and Ram, the father of Amenadab, and Amenadab, the father of Nashon, and Nashon, the father of Salmon, and Salmon, the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz, the father of Obed, by Ruth, and Obed, the father of Jesse, and Jesse, the father of David, the king. Okay, so we've got the Abraham to David.

First segment. Abraham to David. But there's three women here who are fascinating. And I want you to take note, if you don't know these women's stories, Tamar was a mistreated daughter-in-law by Judah, and her story is in Genesis 38. I encourage you to go and read it, because Judah, the chosen line through which Messiah would come, did not behave righteously towards Tamar, but God blessed her anyway, and brought her into the line of Christ. Didn't she actually sell herself to her father-in-law? Well, she... Go and read that in Genesis 38. There's some squirmy stuff in there.

There definitely is. Okay, and then... What I was just gonna say, as you quote these women, which, by the way, is the most surprising factor in this entire genealogy. You do not quote men's names in genealogies. The genealogy... Women's names, you mean?

What does it say? Oh, yeah, women's names. They're all men's names. They're all men's names, yeah.

Because the legal connection in terms of the inheritance comes to the men, so you don't put women in here. And on top of that, these are not women of the most stellar character. Mostly, they are, but they have different...

They have non... What do you wanna call it? Non-classic kind of traits. Well, they were all women of dubious character, in one way or another, but from their background. They're all distinct in a funny kind of way. Okay, so Tamar is one who had to, in order to get Judah to fulfill his obligation to her, present herself as a prostitute and entice him, which he gave into, and thereby were produced the children to carry on the line through Judah.

That's the squirmy stuff. Isn't that amazing that God would do that? Yeah, that's Tamar. And then the next woman we come to is down in verse five, and maybe you remember Rahab from the story of Joshua, when the Israelites were entering the Promised Land. You can find her story in the book of Joshua, chapters two and the end of chapter six.

And six, yeah. And she lived in the wall of Jericho, just to remind you. And she was a Canaanite prostitute.

Prostitute. Again, see, not your most stellar characters to put in the line of the Messiah. Okay, but she came to believe in the God of Israel, and she married an Israelite and lived faithfully among the Israelites later in life.

So, there's Rahab. And she's an ancestor of David. She's a Canaanite, she's David's great-grandmother. And then we have Ruth, who was a Moabite. A Moabite woman. Which were people that God had forbidden Israel to intermarry with because of their idolatry. And yet, here she comes in as the grandmother of David. Yes. Your people will be my people.

Your God will be my God. That's her qualification to be here. So, isn't this interesting? Here in this first go-round of the genealogy, we have... We don't know that Tamar was a Canaanite, but it's likely that she was.

It's likely, yeah. But Rahab was definitely a Canaanite. Ruth was a Moabite. And here they are in the direct lineage of David the King. Exactly.

He just would not do this. And what's God's point in all of this? Well, God's point in all of this is the Messiah is born not just for the perfect and the credentialed. He's for people who are even outliers, even people who start off resistant to God, but eventually come to Him. I mean, it's so inclusive, it just blows my mind. It's so beautiful. And these are not just paragon of virtue women.

These are women with checkered backgrounds. And yet women who believed God. They believed God.

And that's the key uniting factor here. They believed God. They believed the promise. They believed who He was. And that's just a simple way of saying the promise of the Messiah and life, good life that comes from this Messiah is promised not only just to men, but to women and to anyone with a checkered background, if you come to believe who He is. And it's all stated right there.

Yeah. And so this first pausing place in the genealogy is with David the King. Now, because Matthew has started out saying this is the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, son of Abraham. Look at 2 Samuel 7, 12 and 13 and 16, where God promises to David that your kingdom will be an everlasting kingdom.

You will never be without a man on the throne. And so that is what we know as the Davidic Covenant, when God promises to David your kingdom will be an everlasting one. So it's very important that Messiah is descended from King David.

Every Jew knew that too. He had to have a connection to David, just had to. Well, we've covered three women. There's another woman to come. Yeah, just in the next verse. You want to read on? I've been talking a lot.

It's your turn. Yeah, well, hold on to your seats while we know about David. So David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah, otherwise known as Bathsheba to us, and Solomon the father of Rehoboam, and Rehoboam the father of Abijah, and Abijah the father of Asaph, and Asaph the father of Jehoshaphat, woohoo, love it, Jehoshaphat, Jehoshaphat the father of Joram, and Joram the father of Uzziah, and Uzziah the father of Jotham, and Jotham the father of Ahaz, and Ahaz the father of Hezekiah, woohoo, like Hezekiah, Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, and Manasseh the father of Amos. Why, there's a lot of familiar names.

Yeah, keep going. We'll comment in a minute. Amos the father of Josiah, and Josiah the father of Jeconiah, and his brothers at the time of the deportation to Babylon.

Okay, take a breath. So we went from David to the deportation of Babylon. Which is a fascinating portion of the history of Israel, right? Because under David and Solomon the kingdom reached its zenith. Oh, big time.

Right? And then immediately following Solomon we go into the time of the divided kingdom. And so we start following the kings of the southern kingdom of Judah.

Yeah, yeah. But you want to back up and comment on her who was the wife of Uriah. Her whose name we will not speak. Isn't it interesting that her name is not here, but her husband's name is here.

Well, it's interesting because, well, there's a couple things about that you can comment on. Uriah himself wasn't even Israelite. He was a Hittite, which is an interesting thing. But it's her, it's Bathsheba, and here again we have a woman with a checkered past. And yet from her comes Solomon. So it's the same message as the other three women. You know, we're not talking about an immaculately virtuous person, we're talking about someone with kind of a checkered background when you look at the history of the Old Testament.

But they are included. But go and read her story. It's in 2 Samuel 11 and 12. And really, you know, you might think of it as David's story, but it's Bathsheba's story. Yes, yes.

Because there was a pregnancy that came out of that adulterous relationship and the loss of a child before Solomon was born. Traumatic. So there's a lot of things in there that women can identify with. Yeah, yeah. It's just very hopeful for those of us that don't have perfect backgrounds. And perfect backgrounds and a woman. In fact, it reminded me, you know, when the Jews at the time of Jesus were doing their public prayers, they would pray, God, I thank you that I'm a woman. But I'm not a woman. Yeah, I know.

It's like, oh, man, you know. But here they are, honored, honored in the genealogy of the Messiah himself. Not an accident. This is deliberate on God's part. Well, and if we're tracing the line of Judah, it's interesting that in this portion of the genealogy, we have all of these kings, only four of whom after Solomon were righteous kings.

Yes, yes. The rest were wicked and did not follow in the ways of the Lord. So you know, Solomon is Solomon, we won't talk about him a lot. But the righteous ones, Jehoshaphat, Uzziah, Hezekiah, and Josiah, go and read their stories. Yeah, fascinating. You'll find them in Kings and Chronicles.

Yeah, yeah. And you know, when you read Kings and Chronicles, you also find an interesting tidbit here. You find out that he's left out names in the genealogy.

Yes. And a really principal one back in verse eight, you know, Jorms, the father of Isaiah. Well, there were three kings.

There were some other kings in there. So you have to wonder in a second here why this is that he's left some out. And he's, you know, he's counting generations, but he leaves some out. He leaves some out also in verse 11.

So he's picked out the historically significant, right, they're like signposts in a way. And the one he leaves out in 11 is Jehoiakim, who has curses against him. And there's lots of wonderful Bible study about why Jehoiakim is left out of this list. And the curse that's placed on his descendants. So anyway, we're not going to go into that.

But it's a fascinating, it's a fascinating piece of detective work if you really want to get into it, but it's not really relevant to what we're talking about here. We're talking about here, the fact that the Messiah Jesus is connected to Abraham and David and that's important. So let's finish the last of the, Okay, by in verse 12, after the deportation to Babylon, Jeconiah was the father of Shealtiel and Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel, Zerubbabel was the one under whom the first people returned, and Zerubbabel the father of Abiud and Abiud 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 Eliad and Eliad the father of Eleazar, Eleazar the father of Mathen and Mathen the father of Jacob, it's getting close, and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who was called Christ. This is our last woman in the genealogy. The unmarried virgin, the nobody from nowhere. The nobody from nowhere, exactly. The one who bore up under the rumors of an illegitimate pregnancy. Yeah, and yeah, exactly.

And it was horrible. I think it was in John 8, it comes up a couple of times. Right, yeah. Jesus was kind of dogged by that accusation while we knew who our father was. Yeah, go read John 8, you'll kind of get a chuckle out of that. But then did you notice in the language right here, everyone's the father of someone until you get to Joseph. Joseph, the husband of Mary. The husband of Mary, as deliberate as well, because he's trying to tell you, he's not literally his father.

Right, right. Yeah, the Holy Spirit is. He was the man in the house when Jesus was growing up, up to a point, but he was not the father, the biological father of Jesus.

So that's deliberate. So let's read his summary in verse 17. So all the generations from Abraham to David were 14 generations. From David to the deportation to Babylon, 14 generations. And from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ, 14 generations. And like we said, these aren't literal 14 generations because we leave stuff out. And that's not unusual in historic genealogies for the Jews.

That's just not unusual. But what you do is you record the principal ones. And for instance, if a man had a very famous grandson, let's say, you might leave out his father in the mansion just so you can connect the two famous ones. So that's kind of what's going on here. But what he does is he gives us an overview from heaven that basically there's a measured kind of genealogy of how God goes from Abraham to the Messiah, and that's not an accident. It's all by plan. And it's not a straight line through holy, righteous people the whole way.

No, no. It's a twisty line that passes through so many broken relationships, families, backgrounds. Not only the women, but I mean, look at those kings. So that just drives home, he truly was the son of man, the son of human descendants. And I might add, if you're going to invent a genealogy, you wouldn't put a lot of people in this list. You wouldn't include these guys.

You just wouldn't do it because they make you raise your eyebrows to go, wait a second, that's not a person of great prominence. In fact, that's the opposite. And you're saying they're an ancestor of the Messiah?

Really? That's the whole point. That's the point.

That's the point of this genealogy. He begins saying the genealogy of Jesus Christ, Yeshua, which means God saves, the anointed Messiah, the son of David. And then in verse 16, he says, and the husband of Mary of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ. So Jesus, again, the one named God saves, the appointed one, God sent. Yes.

Yes. And don't get messed up about the fact that there's a lot of names going on here. Jesus, you know, Jesus literally means the salvation of Yahweh, the salvation of Jehovah. But then he's named Christ, which is the anointed one. His title. It's his title. It's his title. So there's a lot of titles to who Jesus is.

And by the way, just as an aside, a tidbit is the fact that the name Jesus was very common during the first century. But for him, it was literal. He actually is. He was the salvation of God. He is the salvation of God. Yes. Yes. Well, let's get him born.

What do you say? Verse 18. So we get his name again in verse 18. Now, the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream saying, Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and they shall call his name Immanuel, which means God with us. Amen.

Yeah. When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him. He took his wife, but knew her not until she'd given birth to a son and he called his name Jesus. Is there any doubt about who we're talking about here? He called his name.

His name was, name him. And yet what a beautiful thing from Isaiah 7, he's called God with us, Immanuel. Yeah. What an incredible thing.

In fact, I think it was, my recall's bad here, John Wesley, one of the Wesley brothers, who almost on his deathbed said, the best thing about the Bible, the best thing about the gospel is exactly that, is God with us. That's an astonishing phrase and here's the birth of God with us. Someone who is fully God and fully man at the same time, who has this miraculous birth through this virgin.

Yeah. What do you make of the fact that in the dream, the angel addresses Joseph, Joseph who's married Mary as the son of David. Who's not married yet. Oh, that's right. They're just betrothed.

Son of David. I think that's significant. That's right.

They're betrothed at this point. It emphasizes his lineage as the son of David. Yes. That's kind of a sneaky way to underwrite why he spent so much time talking about the lineage. Because that's the legal lineage.

Right. However, we don't have a blood lineage because the father is God and not Joseph from a racial perspective. But from a legal perspective, he is a son of David.

And so they would actually demand that. In the case where we have a virgin birth, you would have to demand that both sides, Mary and Joseph both had some connection to David. And here he's just emphasizing that Joseph does. Right. This is Joseph's story. Yeah.

Right here. We get Mary's story in Luke. But this is Joseph's story. Yeah.

And I've always found it kind of comical. The fact that although Mary gets Gabriel, you know, right there in front of her. Right. You've got to wait until Joseph goes to sleep and he has a dream. And God speaks really, really well to Joseph.

In the history of the young Jesus, it's like four times that God comes in a dream to him. So it's very clear. So that's the other thing I say, you know, God can very clearly lead you.

He also can clearly speak to you without ambiguity. And here he's doing exactly that. Well, and we have this emphasis a couple of times about he's conceived by the Holy Spirit.

Yes. And you had nothing to do with his conception, but you will be identified as the man in the house when he's grown up because you are the husband of his mother. And there was a lot of controversy, a lot of criticism because of this entire thing, you know. But it's very clear. In fact, there's a lot of criticism about the Isaiah 7 passage he quotes here because people have said, well, that term for the virgin is actually used just for a young woman. But when you look here, you realize, you know, even it says verse 25, but he did not know her until she had given birth to the son. So they hadn't consummated their relationship until then.

So yeah, so anyway, it's very clear we're talking about a virgin here. But you know, it's interesting that we would not maybe apply this to Jesus specifically unless until Matthew did. Because in Isaiah's time, that prophecy was directly directed at the king of Israel and said, you know, a virgin is going to conceive and bear a son and before that child is old enough to know left from right, right from wrong, you'll know that God is with you. So you know, Isaiah is laying down a very specific timeline in his time for the king of Israel to know that God was with them, or the king of Judah, I should know the king of Israel. Well, anyway, go back and look at Isaiah 7 during the time of the divided kingdom. In any case, here, Matthew picks up that prophecy and says, oh, no, no, this is what he was really talking about.

A literal virgin, a literal birth, a literal God with us. Yeah. Well, when you go back to the Septuagint, which is a Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, which was that work was done about 100, 150, 200 years before Jesus. So those are good Jews who understand their theology. When they translated this word, this virgin word into Greek, they use the specific Greek word for virgin and not young woman. So if you can trust their interpretation a couple hundred years before Jesus, then it's okay.

Yeah. And actually, Mary asks that question, you know, when you read in Luke, she says, you know, how can that be? Because I'm a virgin. This doesn't work.

I've never had a sexual relationship with a man. Yeah, this doesn't work. So how can this be? She was smart enough to know that. Yeah, that's right. And it troubled her because she saw this doesn't make a lot of sense. Right.

Yeah, I don't know how this is going to work. Well, interestingly enough, in terms of the birth of Jesus, you only have two Gospels that talk about the birth of Jesus. So Mark and John, neither one talk about it. It's Luke in Matthew, and you get much more detail in Luke, but they're complementary. And so we have the baby born. His name is Jesus, which means the salvation of Jehovah, salvation of Yahweh. And he is God with us, Immanuel, and he's the Christ, the anointed one, the Messiah.

All of these labels and titles are all wrapped up in this little baby who's born in obscurity. But it's interesting that Matthew wraps up this part of the story, not by talking about Jesus as much as he does about Joseph. And he says, when he woke up, he did what the Lord had commanded him, through the angel. He believed what God had told him. And then he acted. And then he acted.

He married her and he kept her a virgin until she gave birth. So he was a man who believed God and obeyed. He acted on what he believed to be true. Well that is what we know, the scripture says, the righteous live by faith.

By faith, yep. Joseph is really forward here in this particular Gospel. And he'll have other very pivotal roles very soon here. And we're looking at Joseph again still. And we always get captured by Mary because she's quite central in Luke. But Joseph has a part to play. But Joseph has a part to play that's pivotal in God's picked the right man. He wanted to divorce her, which in betrothal you had to do.

I mean, even in the betrothal. He wanted to do the tender, loving, kind kind of thing. And God said, nope, we're moving forward. And he said, well, okay. And he says, Joseph was a just man, a righteous man. All Jewish men want to be counted a righteous man.

Yep, yep. And so he followed through faithfully. So God picked the right guy and the right woman.

And he follows through with his plan. And I also like the fact that when the angel talks to Joseph in this dream, he says, he'll save his people, not from Rome, but from their sins. And this is a gigantic issue that was really quite unknown in the first century. We don't need a Messiah to save us from ourselves. We need a Messiah to save us from Rome. But in that dream, he says, nope, he'll save them from their sins.

And that's the point. Well, we're out of time. We're off and running. We got Jesus born. That was good work this morning. And so we're going to continue on and follow the life of Jesus from Matthew's perspective and come back and join us here on More Than Ink. There are many more episodes of this broadcast to be found at our website, morethanink.org. And while you're there, take a moment to drop us a note. Remember, the Bible is God's love letter to you. Pick it up and read it for yourself, and you will discover that the words printed there are indeed more than ink. Well, that's pretty good. That's pretty good. Let's leave that alone. I'll leave that alone. This has been a production of Main Street Church of Rhythm City.