Jesus’ Resume

Today on Summit Life, J.D. Greer kicks off a new Christmas study in the book of Matthew. You see, Christianity's most important feature is that it is actual history, which is absolutely amazing when you consider some of the messy, random, chaotic stuff that is in this genealogy.

When we tell someone the Christmas story, most of us start with the angel appearing to Mary and telling her that she's going to have a son. But that's not where the New Testament starts. If you flip to the first page of Matthew, it actually starts off with a genealogy, a long list of the names of Jesus's ancestors.

So I'm sure you've asked yourself this many times. Why do all these names matter? Pastor and author J.D. Greer answers that question today on Summit Life as we dive into a new series called Upside Down Christmas. Pastor J.D. aptly titled this message Jesus's Resume. We might think that it is odd for Matthew to lead off his gospel with what feels to us like a snoozer, right? If you're writing something, you're supposed to have something engaging at the beginning that draws people in. Matthew leads off with a genealogy. That's a snoozer.

But there is a reason that he does that. In this genealogy, listen to this, in this genealogy is everything you need to know about Christianity. In this genealogy is everything you need to know about Christianity.

All the essentials are in there. As I have studied this these past few weeks, I have learned so incredibly much diving into commentaries, listening to other pastors teach on this. If you are interested in sources for what I'm going to say, they are all in the transcript that I post on my blog each week. I have realized that the amount of things that Matthew is trying to teach you through this very simple list of 42 names is remarkable.

I am going to, by sheer act of self-discipline, limit myself to only five observations, all right? But there are many more that are in there and these are what you have to know about Christianity. The first one I borrow from Tim Keller, number one. The gospel is not good advice. The gospel is good news. First thing you learn from this genealogy is that the gospel is not good advice.

It's good news. You see, most stories or fairy tales start out with once upon a time or somewhere in a galaxy far, far away or something like that. But Matthew does not start out his story that way. Matthew starts out with a genealogy, which is a way of saying what I'm going to tell you about actually happened in time and space. You see, Christianity's most important feature is that it is actual history because the core, listen, of Christianity is not a set of principles that Jesus taught to us. The core of Christianity is something that Jesus would do for us. Most religions, you see, when you peel back the layers are built on teachings and principles that really would be true whether their religious founder ever lived or not. The religious founder was merely the mouthpiece for those teachings. For example, the principles of Buddhism do not depend on Buddha being an actual person. Those principles, Buddhists believe, are eternal and they are timeless.

They undergird the universe and Buddha was merely the mouthpiece for those eternal principles. The same thing is true for Islam. Islam is a pattern for how Allah wants us to live. Muhammad was merely the prophet. He was the mouthpiece for that teaching. Now Muslims, of course, will tell you that Muhammad was an actual person but the principles and the teachings of Islam do not depend on him being an actual person.

Does that make sense? That is not true for Christianity. Christianity depends on a set of events that actually took place in time and history because the core of Christianity is not what Jesus taught us to do.

The core of Christianity is what Jesus would do for us, which means that if these things did not actually happen then all of it is useless. Scholars point out that the Gospels, and by that I mean the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, that contain the record of Jesus's life. The Gospels are basically just prologues to the death of Christ. The central element in each Gospel is the death of Christ. The Gospels skim over 33 years of Jesus's life and skim through three years of his teaching and they focus on one week in which Jesus would go to a cross and bear the penalty for our sins, die in our place, and rise again. Now the Gospels, of course, do contain a lot of things that Jesus taught, but the focus of the Gospels is not on what Jesus taught. The focus of the Gospels is on what Jesus did. That's why I say the Gospel is not primarily good advice. The Gospel is good news. In fact, that's what the word Gospel literally means.

The word Gospel we get from the Greek word euangelion, a combination of two words, eu meaning good, eu meaning good, and eangelion meaning the message. It was an announcement of a good message. Imagine that you were living in ancient Greece and word came that an invading army was coming into your country and they were beginning to take over. And the army general that was in charge of fending off this army realized that he was short-handed and that the enemy way outnumbered him, way outnumbered him. And so he sends out a message throughout the countryside to say, I need help.

I need every able-bodied man to come to my aid because we are going to be overrun if we don't have more soldiers. That message would not be a Gospel. That message would be a request for help. Now, if he had defeated the invading army and just put them down handily, then he would send out a message that he had won and that peace now reigned in the land. That message, that announcement of victory would be called a Gospel. And the messenger who brought the Gospel would have been called in Greek an angelos, an angelos or an angel. Now, when Jesus was born, who showed up? Angels.

And what did they announce? God needs help? No, they announced peace on earth, salvation for men. They didn't show up saying the great teacher is here, listen to him.

They showed up saying the savior has been born, receive him. You see what we, what we, the world, what humanity needed was not just one more religious teacher. And we hadn't listened to the previous ones, right? Why would we listen to a new one? That'd be like taking a seventh grader who's failing his multiplication tables and shoving them into a college calculus class and thinking that higher level teaching is what he needs. That's not what he needs.

C.S. Lewis said it this way, there has been no lack of good advice for the last 4,000 years. A bit more would not have made a difference. We never have followed the advice of the great teachers. Why would we be likely to begin now? Why would we be more likely to follow Christ than any of the others? Because he is the best moral teacher, that makes it even less likely that we shall follow him.

If we cannot take the elementary lessons, is it likely that we are going to take the most advanced ones? If Christianity only means one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is really of no importance at all. It's just like every other religion. We needed a different kind of salvation. We needed a new kind of savior.

And God became that for us by entering into history and doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. Now, those who believe that and receive it will be forever changed. But they're not changed primarily because of what Jesus taught, they're changed because of what Jesus did. Listen to this, the most important thing about the gospel is that it must be believed and received like a gift. Which means you are not a Christian if you merely emulate the moral teachings of Jesus. Let me say that again. You are not a Christian if you merely emulate the moral teachings of Jesus, even if you do that really well.

Even if you do that much better than everybody around you. Because the core of Christianity is not a set of teachings to be followed, the core of Christianity is a gift to be received. The gospel is not primarily good advice, the gospel is good news. Secondly, this genealogy shows you, number two, that Jesus is the center of history. He's the center of history. Matthew takes what the world would have considered to be an insignificant family line and he organizes all of human history around it.

Here's why that's important. At this point in world history, it certainly did not seem like Jesus was the focal point. Israel was a small backwater Middle Eastern country that was under the rule of somebody else.

Nobody in Rome, nobody in the halls of power, Herod, nobody was paying attention to this family line. But God, you see, had made a promise to Abraham to bring salvation to the world through Jesus and to bring the whole world into subjection to Jesus. At this point in history, you've got these really powerful nations and people that seem like they are directing everything, but what Matthew shows you in this genealogy is that God is the one who is guiding it all according to his plans for this Messiah that nobody's thinking about. He's showing you that the powers of the world are an illusion.

In fact, let me give you one quick example of that. One of the details that most people know about the birth of Christ is that Caesar Augustus sent out a decree that all the world should be taxed and that Mary and Joseph had to go to their hometown, Bethlehem, where everyone was going to Bethlehem, where you had to pay your tax, and that's when Jesus was born, right? We know that detail, but Luke, the gospel writer, tells you that God's purpose in having them go to Bethlehem, and I'll follow this, God's purpose was he had made a promise to the prophet Micah several hundred years before that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. So God moved Rome to everybody so that he could get Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem.

Now, here's my question. Why did God go to all that trouble just to move those two people, right? I mean, could God not have appeared in a dream to Joseph and be like, hey man, go to Bethlehem, right? I mean, he'd done all other kinds of, I mean, he appeared to Joseph other times in dreams and all them things. Why did God tax the whole world?

It was to show you something. It was to demonstrate to you that God moves powerful nations around like chess pieces to bring to pass his purposes in Jesus. He taxed the whole world. He taxed the whole world to move two people 90 miles, because he's trying to show you that the most significant events in world history are quite often not about what you think they're about, that God is actually the actor behind all the actors arranging things for his purposes. He has for an insignificant family line and that is the purposes of the Messiah.

Here's why that should be encouraging to you. It doesn't look now like Jesus is at the center of history, does it? CNN is not here this morning. They're not here this weekend paying attention to what we do. They're watching what they think are the most important powers in the world. They're watching the markets. They're watching the White House. They're watching world politics.

But these things are like an insignificant drop in the bucket. The center of history is what God is doing in the kingdom of Jesus. The accomplishing of his purpose to take salvation to every nation on earth and to bring the world into subjection to him.

And he moves around the most powerful nations at will to accomplish those purposes. There is an unseen story behind the story. History is his story. So you can see that word.

It's his story. Many of the Israelites were at this point discouraged because they looked around and didn't see how God was fulfilling his promises. They're like, Rome's in charge.

Herod's in charge. Many of you look around and are discouraged. You see unbelief growing. You see secularism taking over, corrupting our institutions, destroying our nation, but do not be deceived. It did not look back then like God was accomplishing his purposes, but he was.

In fact, he was doing his greatest work. My wife and I did not watch 24 when it first came out because my wife and I are late adopters on everything. And so when it first came out, we did not watch it. About 95 people told us how awesome it was so we started to watch it. By the time we got around to it, it was on season five or six. So we went back, got the DVDs for season one and just began to watch them through.

It made for several long weekends because we watched TV for 24 hours straight. But I remember several times, if you remember that series, several times during that series, Jack gets in a pretty bad way. Remember this? In fact, several times, in fact, I think a couple times he actually died in the series. And if my memory recalls right, it was at the end of season three that Jack actually died. And I remember my wife and I sitting in the living room watching this on TV and Jack just died and I was like, I got season four right here and Jack's picture is on the front of the box. And I'm like, something, I know this is not ending. I think it's going to end because his picture's on the box. Jesus' picture is on both sides of the Bible. And so what that tells you is that, yes, there are times when it looks like things are not turning out like you think it's going to turn out.

But you know his picture is on the other side of that and so you know this is where it's going to go. The same thing is true, by the way, in your personal life. You may be discouraged because it may look like you are subject to forces that you can't control. But God, you see, has an infallible purpose in your life. God's infallible purpose is to reveal Jesus to you and to glorify himself in you.

And everything in your life has ultimately been about that. He is bringing forth the Messiah. He is bringing forth the Messiah in you. And you can interpret all of these things that look to you like they were under the power and the direction of others as being superimposed by God to accomplish his purpose in your life, which brings me to number three. God is working in all things good and bad for his purposes.

God is working in all things good and bad for his purposes. You see how in verse 17 the author organizes the progression from Abraham to David and then from David to the exile and then from the exile to Jesus into three sets of 14? Now, 14 is two to what? Sevens. That's right.

A little early, I guess. Fourteen is two sets of seven. And seven in the Bible is a very important number.

It's the biblical number of completion or perfection. Now, if you will compare Matthew's genealogy to some of the records in the Old Testament, you'll see that Matthew actually skipped several generations. That was a commonly accepted practice in reporting Jewish genealogies. Matthew, listen, chooses to organize this genealogy in three sections of 14 to show, watch, that God has superimposed his seal of perfection on history, which is absolutely amazing when you consider some of the messy, random, chaotic stuff that is in this genealogy. You see in verse three?

You see this? Judah was the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar. First of all, why did he include Tamar's name there? I mean, you never included a woman's name in a Jewish genealogy. They never put women's names. Why did he put her name in there?

Because he's trying to call to your mind the story that is behind those names. Do you know that story, by the way? You know that story?

If you have a child in here that is 12 years old or under, this might be a really good time to take them to the kid's ministry or at least run them to the bathroom for just a minute because this next part might be slightly PG-13, all right? Genesis 38, Tamar was the wife of one of Judah's three sons. After they were newly married, her husband died before they had a chance to have kids. In those days, Jewish law said that if your brother died before he had a chance to have children, then you, as his brother, were to marry his wife and to bring kids to your brother through her. So Judah's son's brother, a guy named Onan, Onan marries Tamar, but he does it begrudgingly because evidently Tamar didn't like her. And he certainly doesn't want to have kids through her because kids are expensive, you know that.

So why have kids you don't like? And so Onan, whenever he and Tamar came together, he didn't quite, shall we say, seal the deal with her. The KJV puts it very delicately.

He spilled it on the ground so that he would not give seed to his brother. Well, God was pretty ticked off at this, so he kills Onan, all right? So now Judah has two sons down and he's only got three.

And so Judah is like, okay, this woman has, I think, been the cause of the death of two of my sons. She's not getting that third one. So he's like, no, you're not marrying her. And so he keeps making up excuses for Tamar as to why she can't marry him. Oh, you know, we got too much stuff on the calendar right now.

I don't have any money. Just got to wait. So he stalls and he's stalled. Eventually Tamar figures out that Judah is never going to let her marry the third son, so she devises a plan. Turns out Judah has a weakness for prostitutes. So one night after Judah has kicked back a couple of cold ones and lost his sense of direction, she dresses like a prostitute, goes in and sleeps with Judah, her father-in-law. She gets pregnant with Perez and Zerah. Three months after she gets pregnant, she starts showing, and Judah, outraged by the fact that she's obviously been sleeping around, drags her out to the city square and tells them to stone her. And right before they stone her, she opens up her purse or whatever and says, I have the belt of the man whose babies these are, which in those days was like the wallet.

And she whips out Judah's belt, which had to have been an awkward moment for Judah. By the way, you feeling better about your family yet? You feeling better about your family? I had a pastor friend who was about my age said he bought a dramatic Bible reading CD for his kids to listen to as they were going to bed at night.

I thought that was a great idea. He said one morning, my six-year-old comes down and said, daddy, what is, and just begins to spell out the details of this story. And his wife and he looked at each other and he was just horrified. He said, where did you hear those terms? He's like, from the Bible that you bought for us to listen to. And he said, my wife glared at me and looked at me and I was like, that's it kids, no more Bible. You're watching TV from now on before you go to bed. And by the way, for those of you parents who chose to not heed my warning to take your kids to the kids' ministry, Merry Christmas. Okay.

That's my gift to you. This is some messy, chaotic, random stuff. I mean, did you know that's in the Bible?

Right? You're like, that doesn't sound like the Bible. It sounds like the, you know, the script for a Jerry Springer show. Yet in all of this, listen, this was God's plan to bring the Messiah forward. God was working through all this messy, chaotic stuff, bringing about a perfect plan.

That's why the number 14, twice seven is imposed on each of these sets. He's working in your life too, you see, even when he seems absent. Some of you have had some pretty messy dysfunction in your life. And I am not saying to you that God caused it. I'm not saying to you that God was okay with it.

I'm not saying to you that God was not deeply grieved by it and angered by it the same way I would be angered and grieved if anybody did anything to one of my children. But what I am telling you is that God has one overriding purpose in your life. And that is to accomplish Jesus' purposes in and through you. And he is working in all things. He is working in the darkest parts of your personal genealogy to bring to pass his perfect purpose for you.

He is superimposing his perfect 14 on the messy, random, chaotic details of your life. Romans 8 28, all things work together for good to them who love God and are called according to his purpose. Now, most Christians know that verse. Do you know the verse after that verse? After that verse. This is one of those verses you really ought to know the verse after the verse.

Romans 8 29 says, for those that he called, those he predestined, he predestined to be conformed to the image of Jesus. What is God working all things in your life together for? He's working them for the greatest plan he's ever had. And that is to bring forth Jesus, to bring forth Jesus in you, to make you love Jesus, to make you look like Jesus, to make you glorify Jesus. That's his purpose for you. God is working in all things, always.

Even if your resume has some holes in it, his plans are perfect and he can use you no matter. With the first message from our new series called Upside Down Christmas, you're listening to J.D. Greer and Summit Life. To listen to this message again or to browse through Pastor J.D.

's blog, visit us online at jdgreer.com. You know, one of our primary functions here at Summit Life is producing these daily programs, and we love hearing responses from you on how the messages impact you. Pastor J.D., could you share one of those letters with us? I have a letter here that we just got this week from Alisa. It was such an encouragement to our entire team. I wanted to share it with you. She says, she says, I've been listening to Pastor J.D.

Greer's messages since 2013. I don't live anywhere near the Carolinas, but sometimes I wish I did. I'm going to say, Alisa, you are welcome anytime you are close by to just come by the Summit Church.

We'd love to see you. She says, Pastor J.D. has been incredibly influential in my walk with the Lord, and I just wanted to say thank you. I'm so, so thankful for easy access to countless podcasts and sermons, books and messages. God has used this ministry, Summit Life, to grow me, to change me, and therefore change the people that I lead. Hey, Summit Life community, that is a perfect example of why we do this. Your gifts, your generosity enabled her to respond that way because it's not just the teaching of the messages that blesses her.

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Thank you so much, Alisa. If you'd like to share with us how you've been impacted by Summit Life, you can email us at requests at jdgreer.com. Again, that's requests at jdgreer.com. We've put together another resource that we think you'll really enjoy in the new year.

In fact, it's a fan favorite each year. It's the Summit Life 2021 Day Planner. J.D. often talks about having wisdom and how we manage the resources that God has given us, including the resource of time. And this day planner will help you do that during the coming year.

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Or if it's easier, you can give and request the planner online at jdgreer.com. I'm Molly Vitovich inviting you to join us tomorrow when we'll continue looking at Jesus' genealogy and what it reveals about the gospel. That's Friday on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.