Well, as you are well aware, it’s the holiday season. Just look around you, red and green everywhere, the stores are crowded with shoppers, and the extended family is getting friendlier and more loving toward one another as each day passes, right? It’s true that the holiday season is billed as one of the premier family times of the year, but you know as well as I do that when you get together with all the people you love, it can drive you crazy! I saw on the cover of one of Pam’s Good Housekeeping magazines a title of an article, "Family! The Holidays! How to make peace, not war." If your family holiday celebrations aren’t the highlight of your year, don’t feel bad. You aren’t alone.
Now I have a question for you. How many of you wouldn’t have to shake the family tree very hard to see several nuts fall out? (Raise Hands) Go ahead, be honest! If you didn’t raise your hand, it’s probably because you are afraid that some of your family in the room right now will think you’re talking about them. I’m not trying to be disrespectful here. It’s just reality. When you get lots of people together who know each other’s history and quirks, there’s bound to be some friction. It’s part of the human condition.
That’s why I think that Matthew began his story about Jesus with one of the most family oriented texts in the entire Bible. From now through Easter we are going to be exploring the life of Jesus from Matthew’s perspective. We begin here at Christmas time celebrating the Savior’s birth, and we will conclude at Easter as we celebrate his resurrection from the grave. This morning we start at the beginning of the story according to Matthew, the family of Jesus.
Read Matthew 1:1-16
Pretty dramatic, huh? Maybe the most compelling text you’ve ever heard read I bet. One more note of honesty here. How many of you have at some point in your life committed to read through the entire New Testament, sat down to begin, faced that list of intimidating names, and skipped right over it to verse 17 without even attempting it? (Raise hands) That’s understandable.
Now you might think, "Why in the world does Matthew begin the most important story in the history of the world like this?" I mean we all know that the first thing you have to do if you are going to convince somebody of something is to get their attention. And Matthew is so convinced that Jesus is the Son of God that he writes a book to convince others of that. But like any good author, Matthew is smart enough to know his audience.
He is trying to convince Jews that Jesus is the Messiah, and he does grab their attention from the very first words, "A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham." To them that was the boldest statement you could make about a person. You see, we’ve gotten so used to hearing Jesus referred to as "Jesus Christ," that we almost think of "Christ" as His last name. But really, Christ is a title that means "the anointed one." Calling Jesus "the Christ" was a claim that God had sent this man as the fulfillment of thousands of years of anticipation. Prophecies from a thousand years earlier had proclaimed that the Christ would be a Jew who could trace his ancestral line back through King David. So next, Matthew proves his point by tracing Jesus’ genealogy from Abraham, the father of the Jewish nation, through King David. Even though to us this list of hard to pronounce names might seem dry as dust, to the Jew awaiting the coming of the messiah of God, it would be dynamite. Even today, if you read it closely, it is a powerful statement about who Jesus is and what God is like. You see, embedded in this genealogical record is a very important lesson that Matthew wants us to learn about God and His Son.
CT. God uses flawed people and difficult circumstances to accomplish his will.
When you look through the list of characters that make up Jesus’ family tree, it’s not hard to recognize some deeply troubled roots here. Some of these guys are pretty rough. Abraham regularly played fast and loose with the truth. Jacob was a con artist whose very name means something like "cheater." Jacob’s son, Judah was the father of Perez and Zerah through Tamar, but Tamar wasn’t his wife. Tamar was Judah’s daughter-in-law. If that’s not strange enough, when the twins were conceived Judah didn’t know who Tamar was. He thought she was a prostitute. It’s a pretty weird story from Genesis 38, but the result is that Matthew goes out of his way to highlight both Judah and Tamar in the heritage of Jesus.
Move down to verse 5 and you will see Rahab. This woman was a prostitute in the city of Jericho, a non-Jew. Then there is Ruth, a good woman, but she was a Moabite, a people shunned by the Jews. Further down the list is David. We think of David as being a great hero of the faith, but Matthew highlights a severe flaw in his character. Look at the second part of verse 6, "David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife…" Do you remember the story? David had sexual relations with Bathsheba, then to cover up the problem when she became pregnant he had Uriah, her husband, killed in battle. So of all of David’s great qualities, Matthew highlights the fact that David is an adulterer and murderer. Between David and Jeconiah the list is comprised of kings, but most of them were pretty notorious. Manasseh is one of the worst mentioned. In 2 Kings 21 it says of him, "He was a terror to his people." He worshipped idols and even sacrificed his son in a fire to Baal. Many of those kings listed here were terrible. They rejected God by worshipping idols, and they destroyed people without any conscience.
So why does Matthew write the list like this? Instead of hiding all the nuts in the closet, he highlights them, points out their flaws and imperfections. There might be several reasons. First of all, we learn that Jesus is just like us. He isn’t born into a perfect family filled with "halos and harps." There are some nuts in Jesus’ family tree just like yours and mine. But I think there is even a bigger lesson here. It’s a lesson about God’s providence.
Webster defines the word "providence" as "divine guidance or care." I believe what Matthew is doing here is showing us that in spite of the deeply flawed, sin soaked nature of these people, God was still accomplishing His will of saving the world. Even through the lies of Abraham and the trickery of Jacob, through the sexual misconduct of Judah and Tamar, Rahab and David; even in spite of the idolatry and murder of the kings of Judah, God never lost control. That is an important lesson to recognize, because sometimes we have our doubts, don’t we?
It happens to us all occasionally, when circumstances get piled up on top of us. If nothing seems to be going right and your life feels like it is spinning out of control, you can’t help but wonder if God has let you slip through His fingers. If you’ve ever been there, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t yet, some day you will. When you find yourself wondering if God has let you out of his sight, you might want to pick up Matthew and start reading from the very beginning. Look up some of these characters and read through some of the situations that came about in the family history of Jesus, and then give thanks. Just because everything in your life isn’t going perfectly doesn’t mean that God isn’t present. Just because sin seems to have the upper hand and pain is a part of your everyday life, don’t despair. God hasn’t forgotten you. He works out His will through some pretty amazing circumstances.
Jay Bakker found that out. His name might not ring a bell with you immediately, but his parents names probably will. In the 1980’s millions of people tuned in and followed the teachings of televangelists Jim & Tammy Faye Bakker. In 1987 their television ministry was destroyed by scandal. Whatever you think of them and the situations that brought them down, you have to sympathize with their children. Nobody gets to choose their parents. At the time when the scandals broke, Jay Bakker was eleven years old. He had lived a pretty cushy life to that point. He played on the set of his parents TV show, and spent his days being spoiled on the grounds of Heritage USA, a theme park put together by PTL, the ministry his father founded.
When Jim Bakker was indicted for fraud, Jay Bakker’s entire world collapsed. His father, whom he loved dearly, went to prison. He went from living a pretty opulent lifestyle to having almost nothing. He had grown up around Christians who thought very highly of his family, and suddenly every Christian he knew used his family’s name either scornfully or as a joke. His parents eventually divorced. As you can imagine, it’s safe to say that the world seemed as if it was spinning out of control to Jay Bakker.
He responded like a lot of people do. He escaped through drug and alcohol abuse. He lived a wild and rebellious life. Occasionally he would reach out to the Christian community, but from his perspective, every time he did he was slapped down. It seemed to him that he had been rejected by Christians, and ultimately by the God they followed. This past week I read his book, Son of A Preacher Man. It’s an interesting story as he tells about what he learned. Although he no doubt still has a lot of learning to do (like all of us do), through all of his difficulties he came to grasp how incredibly filled with grace God is.
Jay Bakker now works as a pastor of an outreach to twenty-somethings in downtown Atlanta. These aren’t your typical 22-year-olds. They are the pierced and tattooed fringe people who have often been rejected by the establishment in our culture. Most of us can’t relate to these people very well, but Bakker can. He’s learned a lot through his difficult life, but I couldn’t help but be drawn to his understanding of suffering. On the last page of his book he wrote,
"God, however, gave me a grasp of grace. I now know that I had to go through all those trials to fulfill God’s purpose for me, to bring the message of Christ’s unconditional love to the saved and unsaved alike…. Sometimes God has to break your heart to open it. That’s what He did with me. And with His help, I came through everything strong enough to start a revolution (the name of his outreach in Atlanta). Although my Revolution may fade away, I will continue to show those who have been labeled as outcasts that Jesus loves them unconditionally, no matter what."
What about you? Have you come to realize that God loves you unconditionally? That list of people that Matthew lists in the genealogy of Jesus contains a wide variety of people, every one of them a sinful, flawed human being. But God used them to accomplish his purposes, and He loved them unconditionally, no matter what. And the same can be said about you and me. Every one of us is sinful and flawed. We aren’t perfect. As a matter of fact, if we were totally honest with ourselves, we’d recognize that we aren’t out of place among the nuts in our family tree. But that doesn’t mean we are rejected or forgotten by God. It means he cared enough about us to enter into history in the person of Jesus Christ, and to take care of our sin. Thank God He didn’t wait for everything to be perfect before He did that!
You know, over the course of time philosophers have developed several perspectives on the way history works. Greek philoso-phers believed history was a series of cycles, everything moves in circles; what goes around comes around. More recent thinkers came to believe that history is simply a meaningless progression of events. They follow a scheme of thought that life comes from nothing and is going nowhere in particular. From that perspective, historical events are random, determined by chance and natural selection. They don’t hold any grander meaning.
The Bible rejects those ideas. From a Biblical perspective, history is "His Story." The things that occur in this life are a part of a grander scheme. The Bible doesn’t teach that God micro-manages history, causing every event and manipulating us like puppets. However, it does teach that there is a definite, God initiated movement. From a Biblical perspective, history begins at creation with God molding the universe out of nothing. God’s perfect creation was corrupted by sin, but He is in the business of salvaging His creation. The Bible teaches that God entered human history to redeem it. That sounds grand when you talk about history as a whole, but it is also true of your and my personal history. God is working today to bring about His best in your life and mine. To do that, He calls on us to place our faith in Him.
The Bible also teaches that history is progressing toward a point of conclusion. At some point, we don’t know exactly when, God will send His Son to call an end to history. This time He won’t come as a baby in a manger. This time Christ will return to earth as a triumphant King, bringing judgment on sin. Whether that is the best day of history or the worst day of history will be determined by one thing. It won’t be determined by whether you are a good person or not. The only way you will believe that day is wonderful is if you have placed your faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. If you have trusted Him with your personal history, He will save you. If you have chosen to live your life without Him, His wrath will be poured out on your sin.
So the question is not "Are you a sinner or not?" We all are. The most important question you will ever answer is this… "Do you follow Jesus Christ as your boss?" The answer to that question will determine your destiny for eternity.
