About this sermon
Matthew opens his Gospel with the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham, arranged in three sets of fourteen generations. The line runs through great kings and through scandal, and it names Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and the wife of Uriah. Matthew establishes from the first verse that Jesus is the royal Messiah promised to Israel, and believers speak boldly of him as the Christ who came to save.
Sermon transcript
turn in your Bibles to Matthew chapter 1. Matthew chapter 1. We’re going to be looking at this, this morning and this evening. This morning, as you’ll notice, we’re looking at the first 17 verses, looking at the royal bloodline that’s there. And then this evening, the incredible incarnation. So please come back as we explore that further in the next section in Matthew.
Now the U.S. does not have a lot of bloodlines, not a lot of royal bloodlines for sure. Some might think themselves, Kennedys, Rockefellers, maybe even the Carnegie’s might think of themselves as bloodlines, but not like those over in Europe and around the world where there are emperors and Typically, in that setting, there’s a very careful genealogy.
You want to keep track of these things. If you know your history, which I am not great at, this was always a big issue. Was this person in the line? Who was next in line? All of those issues around that are extremely important. And genealogy was important in my family at some level.
My mom is the one who has kind of followed these things in our lives, and she has traced back to Henry II in the 1100s for our heritage. I don’t think that’s good. If you know Henry II, but at least there is a track record there. A better name might be Jonathan Edwards. Apparently our family has some relation to Jonathan Edwards, which is at least better than Henry II.
But genealogies, they’re important. They’re especially important to Israel. And if you look through the Old Testament, there are many, many sections of genealogies. You find them several times in Genesis, in Exodus, Numbers, the Chronicles, first 12 chapters. It’s slow reading if you try to go through those genealogies, but they’re there for a reason. Ruth has them, Ezra has them, Nehemiah has them.
This is something that we need to think about as we look at Matthew. And Matthew, being the Jew and speaking of these things, from his heritage and his culture and his perspective also finds them very important. And that’s why when we begin the book of Matthew, we begin with the genealogy. And so we’re going to look at this and find out what’s in a name as we look at these bloodlines. So we’re going to read Matthew chapter 1. 1-17, and forgive me if I don’t say all the names exactly right, but these are the names that are written in God’s Word for us. So listen to this, Matthew 1, beginning at 1.
The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah 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 Nashan, and Nashan 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.
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 Jehoshaphat. And 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. And Hezekiah the father of Manasseh. And Manasseh the father of Amos. And Amos the father of Josiah.
And Josiah the father of Jeconiah and his brothers at the time of the deportation to Babylon. And after the deportation to Babylon, Jeconiah was the father of Shittil. And Shittil, the father of Zerubbabel. And Zerubbabel, the father of Abiad. And Abiad, the father of Eliakim. And Eliakim, the father of Azor. And Azor, the father of Zadok. And Zadok, the father of Akeem. And Achim the father of Eliad, and Eliad the father of Eleazar, and Eleazar the father of Mathan, and Mathan the father of Jacob, and 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.”
We’ll end our reading there. Let’s pray. Our Lord and our God, Help us to see Your truths, to help us to have that mindset that understands why we have a list of names of people in Your Word as the beginning of this Gospel. Show us Your truths, help us to see its significance, that we would be challenged and comforted and encouraged in these very words. We pray this in Jesus’ name, Amen.
So we said genealogies are important, and this is the first one in the New Testament, but there’s another genealogy similar to this in Luke, Luke chapter 3. We’re not going to read through it, but I want us to see something of the relationship between the two of these, because I think it’s valuable to compare one to the other.
In terms of the flow of them, the directional flow, Luke, starts with Jesus and then moves back towards Adam. Matthew begins with the source and moves towards Joseph. The earliest person in each of these genealogies, Matthew, as you’ll notice here, begins with Abraham. And it’s through Abraham that God chooses for himself a people and from whom the Redeemer of the world would come. Abraham was the beginning of that people that would become Israel, the Jews, and that world. Now Luke, much more humanistic, much more world-like in that sense, his approach presents Christ as the son of Adam for all mankind, not just the nation of Israel.
So he broadens his genealogy in that way. Now notice the line of descents here. Luke uses Mary’s line, the natural line of descent, and it has greater exactness than that that we find in Matthew. Luke could not bypass any names in that natural line of descent. They needed to be there because that’s how that genealogy worked through. Thus, there are more names, actually, in the genealogy in Luke. Matthew traces by Joseph, Luke by Mary, Matthew by Joseph.
And Matthew presents his legal, we might call it this royal descent, this royal bloodline by which Christ would rightfully take the throne as that lawful successor. So he arranges the names to come out in these three groups of 14 as it says in verse 17 there. It says that these are three groups of 14 names as we shall notice as we look at this.
So genealogies, we’ve already said these are something that are important to the Jewish people. Matthew us is the fulfillment of that Old Testament prophecy that the Messiah would come and that Matthew is giving us this good news, which is the gospel, the good news. And he proclaims this in the very beginning. Verse one, look at verse one. It says, the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. So we notice here two key names, Abraham And David, these are the main figures in Jewish history as they look back to the Old Testament. Who’s Abraham? Well, Abraham is the one who received those promises of a nation of many people.
Genesis chapter 17, verse 7. I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come. to be your God and the God of your descendants after you.” So Abraham is noted in this way by God Himself and makes this covenant with Him. Now David is the one who received the promises that his seed would be on the throne forever. David was the king, the anointed one, and at some level he was the messiah of his time, but there was one who was greater who was coming. 2 Samuel 7 verse 13 says, He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.
So we see Abraham at one point, and then we see David as the king who is going to have this successor. And now notice that we said in verse 17, I want to come back to these three time periods, just so we’re noting them here. The first one we see is from Abraham to David. It’s a patriarchal focus. Prior to the tribe of Judah coming to power, we have these pre-monarchy days, these days before there’s a king that culminates in David and now the beginning of a kingdom established under him. The second period is the kings that come after David.
Under David is the established king, the royal authority is now on the scene, and it goes all the way up to Jeconiah. Jeconiah on our list here. And it is at that point that the kingdom is abolished, the sin has gone on long enough, and it’s the end of the kingdom as they knew it at that time. Now, I’m sure that you were counting the names as they were on the list, right? Nobody was counting the names, I’m guessing. Okay, okay.
Well, I want you to realize that there are three kings, if you were, that are omitted in this list. It’s not a full-blown list, not because they were unworthy, not because they’re forgotten, It’s just a way that we need to think about this is Matthew is confining his list to 14 names, but there’s three more that existed in that line of kings. And so when he says 14 kings, it’s a representation of that time period. It’s not comprehensive of listing every king that was in that grouping. Now, scribal error may have been a reason that there are 13 names instead of 14, but we don’t really know for sure why that came to be. The last period, the last listing are the kings after the exile.
When they returned to the land of Israel And we see them at that point under the authority of Zerubbabel. And it’s not that he was established a king in that way as clearly as the other, but he was the one who was in the line, and he becomes the leader of that time. And so you have this fragmentary type of kingdom established. The royal scepter, sort of there, but not in the same way that it was under the kings in the line of David before Babylon. And yet, according to the prediction of Jacob, the scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet until Shiloh comes.
And that was from Genesis chapter 49. Now, this last group, again if you’re keeping count, only has 12 names in it. Why might that be? Well, again, Matthew takes his ways of presenting this under this kind of presentation of the grouping. Some would suggest that maybe the time of the captivity when there was no established kingdom authority in Jerusalem would be one of those. And then Jesus is the 14th in that line, which would make sense that he is the Christ, the 14th in that group.
So these are the names of the patriarchs and the kings of Israel. And so you’ll look at them, all of these leaders of the people of God through the Old Testament. Here you have the who’s who of the Old Testament. If they were going to create the Heroes of the Bible video series, you’ve got the list right here, right? Well, let’s just take a look at the men on this list, the people on this list. Royal bloodlines, not always the best groups, not always the royalist of bloodlines, not always the best at being heroes in this sense. So I just want us to remind ourselves a little bit about these men who are on this list, this royal who’s who in God’s plan. Abraham, God’s chosen. Here is the man that God has picked to be the father of the generations in this position.
But what does he do? He lied twice. about Sarah not being his wife but his sister to protect himself. He distrusted God enough that he thought he needed to help God along in his plans to have someone come after him. So he takes Hagar, his wife’s handmaiden, to get an heir to his name because it didn’t look like God was going to be able to pull this off.
And so that’s our picture of Abraham. How about his son Isaac? Isaac, a godly man. But he follows in the same line as his father Abraham did about his wife. And what does Isaac do? He played favorites with his son. He loved Esau more. Jacob. Well, Jacob is the father of the 12 tribes. His name is changed to Israel. It is his prodigy that is the peoples of Israel in that very clear sense.
But what do we know about Jacob? the deceiver. He swindles his brother Esau out of the birthright for soup because he was hungry at the time. The deceiver of his father. And he goes in and pretends to be Esau so that he can get the firstborn’s blessing. Is this one of the heroes of the Bible?
And then what happens to Jacob himself? He gets swindled himself, the swindler gets swindled by his father-in-law Laban. And he marries the elder daughter, who was not his choice as we know, and then goes on to marry the younger daughter. And so now Jacob deals with this rivalry and tension that exists when you have two wives and just the favoritism of his life and with his own sons that he had.
We see that picture. Again, not the hero of the Bible that we might imagine. Well, Judah. Judah, the Lion of Judah, from whom the Messiah would come. This is that picture. But what does Judah do? He sells his brother Joseph into slavery. He leaves his family behind and marries a Canaanite woman. Judah has three sons. Two die because they are so wicked in the eyes of God that God deems it better for them to die than to keep on living. And then Judah has two sons by Tamar. Who was Tamar? while Tamar was his widowed daughter-in-law.
And she deceives him by acting like a prostitute, and he negotiates with the prostitute, not knowing who she is, that he would be with her, but she wouldn’t say anything about it. But she’s smart enough that when she’s found out, convicted of prostitution, and Judah makes judgment on her, but she says, hey, wait a minute, look who’s staff I have. Look whose seal I have. Look whose cord of authority I have.
And it’s shown that Judah is the one who engaged with her as a prostitute. It’s an incredible line of royal blood here. Rahab. Rahab is the great, great grandmother of King David. She was a Canaanite prostitute in Jericho when Israel came to destroy it. That’s part of this bloodline. Ruth. Ruth is David’s great-grandmother, but she’s a foreigner. She’s a Moabite.
She’s not Jewish. And she marries a Jew and escaping the famine in Bethlehem, she experiences the death of her own husband and her brother-in-law. And then what does she do? She traveled with her widow, mother-in-law Naomi, back to Judah, setting aside everything that was in Moab.
But here again, this non-Jew in the royal bloodline of Jesus. And then we come to David. David, the man after God’s own heart. And after God’s own heart, we hear this again and again. Here’s the one who suffered under Saul, that constant chasing. Saul bent on killing him, and David lives under that, and then eventually does become king, and so then all is great, right?
Until he’s caught in lust for another man’s wife. Bathsheba. Bathsheba is not even mentioned, but we know the wife of Uriah is Bathsheba. And so what does David do? He becomes an adulterer. He becomes a murderer. And he lives the rest of his life with the consequences of his sin. The household of David is a terrible place in that sense. Amnon, one of his sons, falls in love with a half-sister, Tamar. He rapes her and then despises her because he didn’t love her after he finally got her. And then what? Her brother, Absalom, revenges her by killing Amnon.
What a household this is. What a house of David. Absalom then brings more sorrow upon King David because what does he do? He conspires against his own father, takes over the kingdom, pushing his father out, steals the kingship. And how does this end? Well, Joab’s commander ends up killing Absalom, his son. What a terrible household that David has in his life. the man after God’s own heart.
Well, what about Solomon? The wise man Solomon, the one who God bestows incredible wisdom on, who knew peace, knew God’s blessing under the kingdom of Solomon. It was an amazing time for Israel. What a time of growth and prosperity. And yet, what happens to Solomon? He fell into the worship of idols. He had many, many concubines and wives. And so what happens for King Solomon?
The kingdom is ripped out of his hands and given to his servant. To his servant. king after king in the line of David when it says that they did not follow in the ways of their father David. Again and again these kings are said this. A few that were fairly good but over and over we see this. This is the royal bloodline of Jesus Christ. This is the line of those who became.
And so Matthew tells us this genealogy And notice he gives this, and then he includes some of these instances by talking about Tamar, by talking about Rahab, by talking about Ruth and bringing in Uriah’s wife. All of these things are mentioned, but I don’t think these would be normally mentioned when you’re talking about a royal bloodline. Matthew could have left these out. He could have been silent on these events, and yet, since it is Christ’s lineage, since it is the truth, Matthew is not silent.
He mentions these in this very beginning of his gospel. And I think the inclusion of these women and these foreigners shows that God’s tender care and power that he has for you and I, for his people, as he brings redemption through the likes of these sinful men and women. This is Christ’s earthly heritage.
Jesus did not come to avoid people like this. Jesus came to embrace the likes of His royal line, the likes of the Gentiles and the prostitutes and the Pharisees of His time. He came not to escape this sin and disgrace, but He came to bear it upon Himself on the cross. his death on the cross than all of these who came before him. He didn’t shun his birthright, but he accepted it as required in order to offer salvation to his people. Regardless of what their shameful acts, regardless of what his history was in terms of this royal line, he came because he came. to save us. Christ was not of a pure line of unblemished royalty.
He came from this line of those who were sinners. In fact, those who are changed in Christ are those he came for. Adulterers, prostitutes, murderers. They’re no longer identified with their sin, with their identity. Their identity is now in Jesus Christ. They become a new creation.
Listen to 1 Corinthians 6, verse 9. Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, and think about this list that we’ve just talked about. Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor male prostitutes, nor homosexual offenders, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor slaves, inherit the kingdom of God.
That sounds like the list that we just went through. The list is these types. And then we see this promise here, this great blessing. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. That’s the hope. That’s the glory. That’s the promise.
Why else might Matthew want to include these names for us to understand? It might be so that the people of Israel, the Jews, would see, look what these ones are really like. They paraded the name of Abraham in their world. Their genealogical lines were incredible to them. And yet, if they really saw them for what they were, Matthew lets us know.
There’s no glory in this line of Jesus Christ. Even Paul himself, who was a pretty great guy in his time as a Jew, had a great pedigree. He went through all of that, told us that in Philippians about how incredible he was, but then he says, I put no confidence You and I cannot put any confidence in whatever pedigree we think we have in our life, who we came from, what our studies were, how we have lived our lives, or what we’ve done. There’s no confidence. And Christ’s lineage was not His glory, and it couldn’t be for the Jews of His day, and it can’t be for us in our own time. Why is that?
Because all of us are under the bondage of sin. The great forefathers and the kings of Israel, they were under the bondage of sin and so are you and I. We are in the same place. Judah stands condemned by Tamar. David knew his sin in the face of Solomon. Could you imagine, every time he sees Solomon, he has to remember how Solomon came into existence. The son of adultery.
None of these great ones were able to fulfill the law for themselves, let alone for us. They were without hope in themselves. They were all lost and dead in their sins. We need to see them as they are. We need to see them as so great that they didn’t need Christ? Absolutely not. We need to see them as they are, the sinners that they are, those who needed Christ’s coming as much as you and I do.
And Christ came to do away with all the sins of these patriarchs and kings who are elect of God. Even one such as David, with all that he had done, Christ came to pay for his sin. That was the Church of the Old Testament. And just as much as they are in need of a Savior in their time as we look at this, so we are in our day.
We need the same things. Any one of us has to realize that we are fully capable of committing the sins that we have looked at in these royal bloodline people. On the list, we could do any of these things. Maybe we have. I’m sure we have done some of these sins.
Our lineage is no better. Why is that? Because we come from Adam. We’re in the line of Adam. We have Adam’s sin upon us. None of us has anything that we can present to God and say, well, look at me, I’m not like them. We’re in the line of Adam. We are those like him. We are lost in our sin. Is there anyone on this list that strikes us as someone who might actually have good character and is expressed that way? There’s at least one. Boaz. Boaz on this list.
He didn’t despise the foreign-born Ruth, this widow who was left with nothing. She who had come renounced her country, her race, her family, everything behind her, and yet Boaz accepts her. He’s a picture of Christ in this way, who accepts his church. Christ accepts us, aliens without merit, without resources. And just as Boaz took in Ruth to be a partaker of the blessings that he could provide her, so Christ on our behalf that we might live forever and he takes our sin upon himself and pays for that on the cross through redemption. Just as Ruth had her life redeemed by Boaz, so Jesus Christ redeems us for eternity in the spiritual sense. Ruth’s redemption was only physical. It was only for a time. It ended when her life ended. But when we come as Christ’s bride, when He redeems us for Himself, it’s for all eternity.
How much greater is this that Christ has done for us than what Boaz did for Ruth? And so we know this Jesus is the Christ. The Christ. That’s what it says here. We see this name Christ, this word Christ used. Look at verse 1, a record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ. Jacob, the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ. At the end of verse 17, it talks about these periods from the exile to the Christ. What is this Christ? How do we understand Christ?
Well, Matthew points out his office to inform us that this is not just a private person. Christ is not Jesus’ last name. It’s a title. It’s an important title. It’s not His name in that sense. It is one that was given to Him. It is divinely appointed to Him.
He is divinely anointed to this office of Redeemer to be the Christ. And so after the royal authority of David’s king is abolished with the exile, the name Christ becomes less and less about a royal bloodline and more about the Redeemer, the Messiah, the one who is to come, the one who would bring more than just physical kingship, who would bring a spiritual heavenly kingdom that was to come. And we see that that’s what Matthew establishes Jesus as the Christ from the very beginning of his gospel here. We see that his messianic, royal, regal duty is the foundation of everything that Matthew is going to go on to say in his gospel. This is the true King of Kings. This is the truly anointed One who comes in the line and in the form like one of us, lowly sinners, in need of what only He could do.
Does He sin? Is He in that line of sinners in the sinning? No! And we’ll talk more about this tonight, how He’s not in that line, yet He lives the sinless life. Like none on this list, like none of us, like no one else has ever been, He lives perfectly. And then what does He do?
He dies for those on the list, on God’s list of those elect, for those who are trusting in Him alone for their salvation. This genealogy, this list, should fill us with hope. This should fill us with joy that He came Not from a line of spiritual elite, just for the spiritually elite. He came from a lowly position, born in a manger. All of these things that he went through, suffering under Pontius Pilate, crucified, dead, and buried. We know these things in our understanding. And he came and rose again from the dead in that time.
You and I are no worse in God’s eyes than anyone on this list. But I also want to remind us, we are no better than anyone on this list. And that’s the good news, the joyful news, the message that what comes in the Messiah is for you and me. We can have these blessings. We can have these benefits. by delivering us from the corruption of the flesh and renewing us by the Spirit, we can have new life in Him.
We can know the glory that is to come. Our Redeemer came and accomplished what He was to do. He established His kingdom. We know His kingdom now. This is what Matthew talks about. The kingdom is here. The kingdom is at hand. It is in Christ. Jesus is that Christ. Jesus is that Anointed One. He has come and redeemed His people.
There can be no greater joy, no greater gift in this time of year than knowing Jesus Christ as your Anointed One, as your Lord and Savior. So you today, do you know Jesus Christ? Is He your Lord and Savior? Is He your hope today and for all eternity that you’re trusting in Him alone for your salvation? No bloodline, nothing that you’ve done, but Jesus Christ alone. That’s what we celebrate in our Lord’s Day every week.
That’s what the world around us is open, I think, to hear in this season. Let us share the true Redeemer, the Messiah, Jesus the Christ. Let’s pray. Our Lord and our God, this is a time of year that people are at least aware and maybe open to the truths of who you are and what you have done. in this season to speak of these truths, to relate to others what we have our hope in, what we truly believe. Because Lord, if we believe it, if it’s true for us, we should be talking about it to those around us. It should be just as important as the sports team, the news of the day, the things that we enjoy, the foods that we love, the restaurants we want to go to. Lord, this should be of even greater value and greater significance.
So Lord, give us your Spirit to be bold, to speak of Jesus, not just a baby in a manger, but Jesus the Christ. What if there’s any here today who do not know Jesus as their Christ, as their Savior? Open their eyes to see these things. Give them hearts of flesh that your Spirit would come upon them and change from dead to alive in Jesus. That they might know the good news of Jesus Christ, what we celebrate so much in this time. We pray this in Jesus’ name.
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