This opening was written and preached by a different preacher, truthfully, I can’t remember anything more than that, I lost the name of the preacher from whom I got this material.
My sincere apologies to the author, who must remain nameless. Under other circumstances I would not have included this message, but as this is a series it must be included.
The Scripture reading for this morning is found in the first seventeen verses of the New Testament in the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew chapter 1 verse 1 through verse 17. I am sure you have often wondered how the names in the genealogies should be pronounced, and so I wish you would listen very carefully this morning. We’re giving the official pronunciation of each one of these names.
Matthew 1:1-17 (NKJV)
The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham: {2} Abraham begot Isaac, Isaac begot Jacob, and Jacob begot Judah and his brothers. {3} Judah begot Perez and Zerah by Tamar, Perez begot Hezron, and Hezron begot Ram. {4} Ram begot Amminadab, Amminadab begot Nahshon, and Nahshon begot Salmon. {5} Salmon begot Boaz by Rahab, Boaz begot Obed by Ruth, Obed begot Jesse, {6} and Jesse begot David the king. David the king begot Solomon by her who had been the wife of Uriah. {7} Solomon begot Rehoboam, Rehoboam begot Abijah, and Abijah begot Asa. {8} Asa begot Jehoshaphat, Jehoshaphat begot Joram, and Joram begot Uzziah. {9} Uzziah begot Jotham, Jotham begot Ahaz, and Ahaz begot Hezekiah. {10} Hezekiah begot Manasseh, Manasseh begot Amon, and Amon begot Josiah. {11} Josiah begot Jeconiah and his brothers about the time they were carried away to Babylon. {12} And after they were brought to Babylon, Jeconiah begot Shealtiel, and Shealtiel begot Zerubbabel. {13} Zerubbabel begot Abiud, Abiud begot Eliakim, and Eliakim begot Azor. {14} Azor begot Zadok, Zadok begot Achim, and Achim begot Eliud. {15} Eliud begot Eleazar, Eleazar begot Matthan, and Matthan begot Jacob. {16} And Jacob begot Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus who is called Christ. {17} So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations, from David until the captivity in Babylon are fourteen generations, and from the captivity in Babylon until the Christ are fourteen generations.
Please take note of the five women mentioned in the line of the Messiah:
The first mentioned is Tamar in verse 3; Tamar was the wife of Judah’s oldest son, Er. By the direction of Judah, in accordance with the society of the time, And later, in the law of Moses, The deceased’s brother was to take his dead brother’s wife and give her a son to inherit the dead brother’s property. Judah’s second son was Onan. And Judah instructed Onan to give Tamar a son for his dead brother, an heir to inherit Er’s property. Onan went in to Tamar but allowed his semen to spill on the ground. For this act of disobedience Onan died.
Judah had a third son, but he was too young. Judah promised Tamar that she would be given to the third son, Shelah, when he was old enough. However, that never happened. So Tamar tricked Judah into giving her a son to be Er’s Heir. In the end, Judah acknowledged that Tamar was more righteous than he. Tamar had two son’s by Judah; Perez and Zerah. The line of Christ goes through Perez.
The second woman mentioned in the line of Christ is Rahab. She was the prostitute, of Jericho, that hid the Israelite spies. She asked the spies to save her family when the Army came to destroy Jericho. You see, she was a believer in the God of Israel.
The third woman named in the line of Jesus is Ruth. Ruth was a woman of Moab. She had married the son of Naomi who had moved to Moab from Bethlehem because of a drought. While in Moab Naomi's two sons married women of Moab. After a while Naomi's husband and her two sons died. Naomi thought to return to Bethlehem. Ruth and her other daughter-in-law thought to go with Naomi. But, Naomi convinced the one woman to go back home, but Ruth would not. Eventually Ruth married Boaz a well to do relative of Naomi. It is a beautiful story in the little book of Ruth.
The fourth woman is not named, only alluded as her who had been the wife of Uriah. We know her name was Bathsheba, she committed adultery with King David. David had her husband, Uriah the Hittite, killed. But she eventually became the mother of Solomon.
The last woman named in the line of the Messiah is Mary.
These then are the women named specifically in the line of Christ.
Note: a woman of virtue who set out to do as the commandment of God said and brought forth a son to inherit Er’s property and line.
Note: a prostitute who became a believer and was a gentile named in the line of the Messiah.
Note: a gentile woman who clung to her mother-in-law, her vow is recorded in Ruth 1:16-17.
Ruth 1:16-17 (NKJV)
But Ruth said: "Entreat me not to leave you, Or to turn back from following after you; For wherever you go, I will go; And wherever you lodge, I will lodge; Your people shall be my people, And your God, my God. {17} Where you die, I will die, And there will I be buried. The LORD do so to me, and more also, If anything but death parts you and me."
Note: we have a Hebrew woman who committed adultery with King David.
What is my point? Even though Jesus was sinless and perfect, His line had very imperfect men and women, His line had people of virtue, His line had sinners. And this is to prove that Jesus accepts whosoever will accept Him.
But lets go back and examine the others named in this genealogy.
Please notice, particularly, in that sixteenth verse, which is very important, that there is a change in the structure of this genealogy; It is not “and Jacob begat Joseph and Joseph begat Jesus,” But, “and Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom” that word who in the Greek is in the feminine voice, “of whom was born Jesus who is called Christ.”
So all the generations from Abraham unto David are fourteen generations.
From David unto the carrying away to Babylon fourteen generations.
And from the carrying away to Babylon unto the Christ fourteen generations.
Now this has puzzled me for a long time, Fourteen, Fourteen, Fourteen.
But, as I studied one author explained it this way. If you study the Old Testament genealogies carefully you will discover that there are more than fourteen generations in some of these sections of the genealogy. The reason for this, evidently, is that in the makeup of the genealogy, it was Matthew’s desire to construct it in such a way that it would be remembered and also able to be memorized, for we must never forget that the men for whom Matthew wrote did not have books as we have them. And consequently, much of their learning was accomplished by memorizing, and if we could make it simple to memorize, they would have said to us, it’s much easier to learn. And so fourteen of the links in the generation are chosen, and some of the links are links such as might be in your own genealogy, when you are said to be the “son of your grandfather” or your great-grandfather. Some of the links may be dropped out.
To begin a gospel with a genealogy, strikes us modern Westerns as very unusual, as a Holmes or Watson might say, singular.
And then to reach the forty-second link in that generation, and discover that the forty-second link does not have any connection at all with the other forty-one links that have preceded it, might strike us as being very irrelevant. Clause after clause, we have the monotonous, “begat,” til finally we read, “Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus.”
And furthermore, it seems to us to be rather wretched authorship to open the story of the Lord Jesus with a lengthy and, I’m sure, dreary sounding, monotonous sounding genealogy.
We were taught in homiletics, that one of the important things in preaching is that you catch the attention of your listeners at the beginning. And this seems to be about the worst way to catch the attention of an audience that you could possibly could have, to begin with a genealogy. Why, then, did Matthew give us this monotonous list of names to wade through?
Well, in the first place, it would have meant a great deal more to Jewish people that it would mean to us, because genealogies were important to the Jews. They were extremely important.
And as a matter of fact, if you would have been a priest, or of the priestly line, you would of course realized how important they were, because before you could be a priest, you had to produce an unbroken record in your pedigree that showed you were enabled to have this particular office. Your line had to go back to Aaron. And furthermore, if you were to marry as a priest, it would be necessary for your wife to produce an unbroken record in her pedigree that stretched back for at least five generations.
So it was very important for the Jews that one have a pure genealogy.
We saw on the John Ankerburg show just how important this genealogy is to Tribal peoples around the world. Now it is for us, in more informal ways. We’re very careful about our families, and what it means something to us. My father and his brothers all fought in World War II and many families are very proud of that fact.
If we were having a friendly, informal conversation on a street corner, and a man should pass by, and I should look at him, and there were something about his face that was familiar but I did not know him, I might say to you, “Who is that?” And you might say to me, “We’ll, that’s Bob Smith.” “Bob Smith, I don’t think I know him.” “Oh yes, you do, he’s the son of the President of the First National Bank.” “Oh, that Bob Smith.”
And immediately, I think more highly of the individual, because he’s the son of the president of the bank, and furthermore, I know a great deal about him.
Now, of course, you might not have replied that way. You might’ve said that he’s the president of another company Or that he was a worker in another place. And you remember his father was as nutty as a fruitcake. And that also might tell me something about the individual. But we do, ourselves, lay a little bit of stress upon family relationships.
Now the Jews thought that genealogies were extremely important.
And furthermore, the major reason that Matthew had in giving us this genealogy is surely that in this systematic compendium, which is his gospel, he wished to placard the ancient and regal ancestry of Jesus of Nazareth.
And he wanted to point out, in this genealogy, that the genealogy of the Lord Jesus is both pure – that is, it is traceable to the important men of the past with whom he is connected – and, especially, it is a princely genealogy that is related to King David and ultimately to Abraham the father of the faithful. I think it is evident that as you read through these verses of the genealogy that the Lord Jesus is no isolated figure, that he is no mere innovator. But he is one who can adequately be measured only in terms of what has gone before.
So that as we read the story of the Lord Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, we are to remember that we are reading about a person who is the product of a long line of generations of important men in the history of Abraham and his seed.
And we should, in our reflection upon the person and work of the Lord Jesus, never forget that it is designed to reflect the fact that he is no isolated figure.
The other gospels, some of which do not give us a genealogy at all, are not contradictory to what I have just been saying. Now Mark is the gospel that gives us the Lord Jesus as the servant of Jehovah busily engaged in doing the work of the will of Jehovah in heaven. One never would expect a servant to have a genealogy of any significance, so it is not surprising that the Gospel of Mark does not contain a genealogy.
In the Gospel of Luke, we do have a genealogy. In the Gospel of Luke, the Lord Jesus is presented as the Son of Man. He is presented in such a way that Luke traces his genealogy all the way back to Adam – something that is possible for each one of us, by the way. He is traced back to Adam who is called the Son of God. That is, the created Son of God.
And so, it’s not surprising that in Luke we should have a genealogy. It should be noted that the genealogy in Luke differs from that of Matthew.
The genealogy in Matthew is the genealogy of Joseph the step-father of our Lord. The genealogy in Luke is the genealogy of Mary. The split comes after David, Solomon having gone astray. And so another of David’s sons becomes the great grandfather of Jesus, Nathan, by name.
John does not have a genealogy, and again, we are not surprised, because John is a gospel that treats the Lord Jesus as the eternal Son.
It begins with, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and so you do not expect a man who writes a gospel about an individual who belongs to eternity to give us his genealogy. For a man who exists from eternity has no genealogy, for there is no ultimate source of an eternal being. The Lord Jesus possesses self-existence, just as the Father and the Holy Spirit.
And so in the Gospel of John, we do not have a genealogy.
It’s evident as you compare these four gospels that they are not contradictory to one another, but they are complementary.
And the purpose of the genealogy of the Gospel of Matthew is to present to us the Lord Jesus as a royal figure connected by blood and by life with the line that has gone before him. Now we shall see that the Lord Jesus Christ’s connection with the regal line is not by blood, because he is connected with Joseph. And it is Joseph who possesses the legal rights to the throne of David, and the Lord Jesus is not the natural son of Joseph the carpenter.
He is the son of Joseph by association, perhaps even by adoption, whether formal or unofficial.
Our Savior is the promised son of David, Remember that David was called by God, “A man after my own heart.” And as David’s son, Jesus was “A man after God’s own heart.”
In Matthew 3:17 we hear the voice of God.
Matthew 3:17 (NKJV)
And suddenly a voice came from heaven, saying, "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased."
In Matthew 17:5 on the mount of transfiguration we hear that voice again, but we will turn to Mark 9:7 because there is added two words
Mark 9:7 (NKJV)
And a cloud came and overshadowed them; and a voice came out of the cloud, saying, "This is My beloved Son. Hear Him!"
This is My beloved Son, hear Him..
Jesus the Son of man.
Jesus the Son of God.
Jesus the Son of David.
Hear Him.
