Grace Abounding! Series

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Matthew’s gospel demonstrates that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah whom Jews were longing to see. He is the King of the Jews, but His own people rejected Him, and Gentiles accepted Him, and someday will return to reign as King of kings and Lord of Lords! It is the arrived King, the rejected King, and the returning King’s story. Most of all it is the story of Grace Abounding to the least expected.

Jesus is the king. Most kings rule with an iron fist. Most kings rule by the law. Jesus is not a king who rules with law, but he rules with grace abounding marvelously. Jesus is the Gracious King with that grace abounding to us.

INTRODUCTION

Matthew the tax collector wrote this gospel. At the time when Christ was born, Israel was under Roman domination. And there were many things about the Roman domination that were oppressive to Israel. One aspect of the oppression of Rome was the crushing taxation system. There were two particular taxes – the “poll tax” (income tax) and “ground tax” (property or land tax).Roman law makers would hire tax collectors to do the actual tax gathering. All tax collectors and harlots considered as notorious and wicked as highwaymen, robbers, and murderers in those days.

Now one of these tax collectors who worked for some wealthy coalition of Roman law maker was a man by the name of Matthew Levi, Matthew, or Levi. And when Jesus spoke to him, he immediately followed, which leads us to believe that he was perhaps very familiar with Jesus. Jesus drew this man into an amazing inner circle of 12 people. Matthew wrote this gospel sometime between 50 and 70 AD, sometime before the destruction of Jerusalem.

THE PRESENTATION OF THE KING

If a king is to be heralded as a king, then it must start with the proof that he comes from the royal line. Matthew is doing that in Matthew 1:1-17

There was a royal line in Israel, and it came through David. In 2 Samuel 7, God said through the prophet Nathan to David that it would be through the loins of David that the king would come who would ultimately reign in Israel and set up an eternal kingdom. That was never fulfilled in Solomon. And so, they waited and waited for one born of the seed of David to fulfil the prophecy. And so, if Jesus is to be the king, it must be established that He has the right to reign because He descends from the genealogy of royalty.

IMPORTANCE OF ACCURATE GENEOLOGY TO JEWS

Now that is precisely what verses 1 to 17 present. Why do we have all of this? First of all, the Jews were tenacious about their pedigrees. And if anybody was going to be presented to them as a king, it was absolutely essential that he have the pedigree to prove it.

For example, after the conquest of Canaan when they went into the land of Canaan and took the land flowing with milk and honey as God had promised, it was essential to determine what your tribe was and what your heritage was so that you knew where you were to live because the line of all the land was divided into tribes.

Transfer of property required accurate knowledge of the family tree. God wanted to keep tribal land within the tribe, and so there had to be pedigree in order to make some business transactions with land.

IMPORTANCE OF GENEOLOGY AFTER CAPTIVITY

In Ezra 2:62, what it means, is that when after the Babylonian captivity, the people started coming back to Israel, at the end of the 70 years, they started flowing back many of them were claiming to be priests and they were claiming to be the tribe of Levi. And so, when these people came back, they had to be proven on the basis of their genealogy.

Luke 2 talks about Joseph and Mary are going down to be registered according to their own ancestry in their own place, because they were still identifying people in that manner.

You see, those identifications were still in existence at the time of the birth of Jesus Christ. The Jews really were interested in everybody having their pedigree and knowing exactly to whom they belong.

IDENTITY THROUGH GENEOLOGY

Paul says in Romans 11:1 1 am an Israelite myself, a descendent of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin. You see, he was still laying out his pedigree. To the Jewish people it was very important. And this is why you see there are at least 50 genealogies in the Old Testament. Because there were reasons for that. Not only the royal line, the priestly line, but in terms of property transfer, and so forth.