Intro: Do you remember the Disney cartoon version of Robin Hood? I used to love watching that and recently we’ve gotten it at home and I have sat and watched it with my kids and I still love it. Robin Hood is the dashing hero who brings relief and care to a poor oppressed people, who are under the rule of Prince John. Prince John fancies himself a king and takes everything that the poor people own for himself. Robin Hood serves the true King and spends the movie robbing the rich to give to the poor. The entire movie builds up to the end when the true King returns and order is restored to the country.
Or more recently, we have the movies based on the Tolkien trilogy: The Lord of the Rings. The basis is the same. Evil is running rampant and for order to be restored, the king must rise and take his rightful place. In this story, the King turns out to be one of the main group of characters. He has been walking among them, living with them, fighting by their side and they never knew he was the king until the proper time came and he returned to his throne.
Today we begin a look at the Book of Matthew. The theme is similar to these stories. Evil and corruption reign and the world is in need of salvation. A people wait for their king to come and most don’t recognize the fact that He’s there walking among them. Matthew is the story of this King. It covers His birth, His death, His claims, His laws, and it looks at what makes this king different than any other in the history of the world. In Tolkien’s novels, the return of the King brought peace and prosperity. In Matthew, this King brought upheaval and turmoil. It changed the way things had always been, it challenged the authorities of the day, it shook the foundations of ritualistic religion, and it led to the King being sentenced and crucified just like a common criminal. But the return of this King brought something more than peace and prosperity for that day. The return of this king, His triumphal resurrection from the grave, His defeat of death and hell, and His victory over sin brought with it a peace between God and man that was from that moment and will stretch into eternity. The story has been copied, the themes have been played out in the stories of men for centuries, but the original Return of the King is a story unlike any other because of what it means for every man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth.
These other stories are entertaining. They are fun to watch or to listen to, they are full of suspense and drama, but they can’t compare to the original. This story is life changing. This story is not always comfortable because to believe this story is to radically change the way that we think and live, it’s to give control over to another, to the only one who truly knows who we are and what’s best for us. This is the story of a King who changed all of history, but it’s also the story of the King who changes individual lives, like mine and like yours. Many who are sitting here this morning can give testimony to the life changing power of this King.
Introduce the Study Questions and the Verse Book.
When I was a kid, baseball was my passion. I thought about it every waking moment and dreamed about it when I slept at night. Babe Ruth was my hero and I knew everything that there was to know about him. I read every book I could, I watched every documentary. I memorized his stats and could tell you how many home runs he hit in any given year and what his batting average was. I studied this man. I wanted to be just like him.
Babe Ruth was not a man worth following, Jesus Christ is and yet so often as Christians, we fail to study the life that He lives, the commands that he left, and the Truth that He taught.
As Christians we are to 1JN 2:3 We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands. 4 The man who says, "I know him," but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him. 5 But if anyone obeys his word, God’s love is truly made complete in him. This is how we know we are in him: 6 Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did.
walk as Christ did. We are to be a reflection of Him to this world and we cannot be that without knowing Him and we get to know Him by studying the Word that he left behind, specifically the accounts of His life and words found in the Gospels.
So, for the next few months we are going to dig into this book. We are going to grow together as we learn about this King. This is what it’s all about, Jesus and our relationship with Him, understanding what He came to do and what he asks that we do to build His Kingdom.
INTRO TO MATTHEW.
I want to give you a little bit of background on this book. Matthew is one of four Gospels in Scripture. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, each one is written with a different style and a different perspective, but each one is in perfect agreement with the others and together they give us a history of the life and the teachings of Jesus during His ministry on Earth. Gospel literally means Good News and they are appropriately named because they are the record of God’s Son and what He accomplished for us. These four books truly are Good News for mankind.
Who wants to take a wild guess as to who the author of this book is? Matthew is written by one of the disciples of Christ.
MT 9:9 As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. "Follow me," he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.
Matthew was a tax collector. In those days, tax collectors were not looked upon very favorably (not much has changed over the years) They were usually corrupt and evil men who were looking to benefit from cheating others. These were the sinners, these were the opposite of the Teachers of the Law and the religious leaders. Jesus asks Matthew to follow Him, to be one of His disciples, His inner circle. Very quickly Jesus’ reasons for coming were being made know and it included men like Matthew. Matthew would have had a comfortable life, but He was willing to leave everything behind to follow Christ.
So, the author was Matthew. The Gospel was written in about 55-65 AD primarily for a Jewish audience. Matthew goes to great lengths in this book to point out to the Jews all of the ways that Christ fulfilled the OT prophecy and because the Jews were expecting a Messiah King, the term Kingdom of God is used and emphasized throughout the book.
When you look at the author and the date that it was written, it’s important to note one thing, this was an eyewitness account to the life of Christ. This was written by a man who walked with Jesus day in and day out for three years. He saw the miracles, he heard the preaching, he knew the power. If someone was going to write my life story, who would do a better job, my wife or one of you? My wife of course, she could write things that none of you know. That’s how it is here. This gospel is written through the inspiration of God’s Spirit, literally God-breathed, but it flowed through the pen of one of Jesus’ own disciples. Not just a follower, but a companion and friend.
This book is: 1) Historically Accurate
2) Morally Absolute
Over the centuries, many books have been “discovered” and brought forth that contradict the Truth found in God’s Word. Just recently, the Gospel of Judas has been discovered. This is a book that preaches a much different message than the gospels of the Bible. Another example is The DaVinci code, a work of fiction that claims to be based on Truth and claims the Gospel of Mary Magdalene as its source. This book says that Christ was just a man and was married and fathered children like any other man. Scholars are claiming that these books prove the inaccuracy of Scripture and many Christians are confused. Why are “scholars” so quick to believe these gospels and so quick to discount Scripture?” There’s some problems with these writings, both of these so called gospels were written over 150 years after Christ’s death. Both were written by a group called the “Gnostics” which was a heretical sect of Christianity that made many claims outside of Scripture. These gospels were penned to further their own claims. They are no different than writings today by groups like the Mormons or the Jehovah’s Witness who claim truth that is not found in God’s word. Where have these gospels been, why are they just being discovered? Because the early church recognized them for what they were, false writings and they rejected them completely.
These are the things that set Matthew and the gospels of Scripture apart from these other books that claim to be the Truth:
1) They were written by eyewitnesses or contemporaries of eyewitnesses
2) They were accepted as God’s word immediately by the apostles and the early church.
3) They have survived intact through attacks and criticisms over the last 20 centuries
4) Millions of lives have been changed by the work of the Spirit through these Gospels.
People can call the Bible whatever they want and they can choose whether or not they want to accept it as truth, but they cannot overlook the life changing effect that its message has had on the lives of millions of people over the course of time. This is a book of Truth. God’s Truth, the only truth worth placing your trust in and basing your life on.
So that’s a little bit of the background of Matthew, its history in a nutshell.
In the first chapter, Matthew begins with a record of Christ’s lineage, a genealogy. These have become very popular today. There are web sites devoted to finding your family tree. Everyone is hoping that somewhere along the line, there was a famous name. We had a lady in our church in Ohio that traced people’s ancestry for them. This was her full time job. I had her trace some of mine, I was trying to find fame and fortune among my relatives, but I came up a bit short. The claim to fame in my family is that we’re related to Goober Lindsey from the Andy Griffith Show. That’s not exactly what I had been hoping to find, I was looking for a little more prestige. Everyone wants to know where they’ve come from, what they’re family was like. However, when we see a list like this in the Bible, so and so begat so and so who begat so and so, etc. we tend to skip over it and quickly move on to the next section, to get to the good stuff.
But Matthew put this here for a reason and there are a few things that we can learn from this family tree. First, as we mentioned, Matthew was writing this as a Jew and for Jews. In those days, the lineage of a person was extremely important. There were twelve tribes of Israel and it was essential that you knew which tribe you traced back to and in whose line you were born. Everything from status, to land ownership, to who you could or could not marry, to career and function within the tabernacle was determined by your lineage. It was also very important to the Jew that a lineage remain pure, there was great pride in being born of Jewish parents, whose parents were both Jewish and so on. So, when Matthew begins his book, He points out right away, the line that Jesus has descended from.
I’m not going to read all of it to you this morning, but it is a very interesting family tree. It begins, of course with Abraham, weaves its way through some very familiar and some not so familiar names, goes through King David and his son Solomon, and ends with a carpenter named Joseph. Some of us have family trees that include some branches that we’re not too proud of or that the family doesn’t talk about and Jesus’ line is no exception. There is a prostitute, a cunning widow who gives birth by her father-in-law, a Moabite woman and a Gentile, both non-Jewish women, and a baby born of an affair that led the murder of an innocent man. It’s quite a tree with a lot of crooked branches. But in this genealogy Matthew conveys a wealth of information to his readers.
I. Ties the Testaments together.
First, Matthew uses this intro to tie the Old Testament together with the account that He is about to give. He is showing that everything that the OT taught, everything that it pointed towards, all of its prophecy, all of its teachings, all of its history, was fulfilled in the birth of this child. He is setting the stage for the rest of the story that God began with a promise to Abraham centuries before and letting the reader know that this was God’s word as well.
In this genealogy you see the entirety of God’s plan and vision for man laid out. It ties together all of the stories and the events of the OT and gives them meaning.
Have you ever seen those pictures in magazines or on TV that are extreme close ups and you have to guess what they are from the picture? If it’s on TV it will slowly zoom out until the picture is clear and you can tell what the big picture was, that’s what this genealogy does for the Jews. Throughout the centuries, they were living these events and the big picture was impossible to see. Why would Tamar trick her father in law? Why would God allow a Gentile prostitute to survive when the rest of her village was wiped out? Why did Ruth refuse to leave her mother-in-law to return to her own people? In this genealogy the picture becomes clear, the puzzle pieces are lined up in the right places and you can see that all of history has prepared the world for this, the arrival of this baby King, Jesus of Nazareth. What started with Abraham and God talking outside and looking at the stars, with God promising that Abraham who have descendants as numerous as those stars and then giving him a son in his old age, what started with that, would find completion in this child. God is the ultimate visionary leader! His plan to save man took far longer than men would have liked but the timing was perfect and Matthew was going to tell that story, but first he wanted to make sure that the Jews knew that this story was a continuation of their journey with God. It tied the Old and the New together.
II. Shows the Ways that God Works
Secondly, Matthew uses this genealogy to show the way that God works. The Jewish relationship with God was about Holiness. It was about obedience to all of the rules and regulations that a Holy God required so that they could remain in a relationship with Him. It was about being ceremonially clean and it was about being wholly Jewish, having that great Jewish lineage like we talked about earlier. Matthew was about to present to them, the life of Christ. Christ came to befriend the unclean, the disobedient, the unholy, and the non-Jew and to bring them into a relationship with Israel’s God. There would be many Jews who simply would refuse to believe that God could work in that way. That this Holy God could become a man and eat with tax collectors and sinner was an impossibility. Matthew includes several names in here, that we’ve already hinted at, to show that God has always worked through the unclean, the impure, and even the non-Jew to bring about his purposes.
Tamar was the daughter in law of Judah. Her husband died and the custom in that day was to have the next son marry her and provide an heir. Her husband’s brother died and Judah refused to give her the third son so she covered her face, pretended to be a prostitute and tricked him into sleeping with her. It sounds like a Jerry Springer episode, but it’s the line that God brought Christ through, using what was wrong and evil to bring about what was good. Ruth was not Jewish, the Jews would have looked at this as contaminating the bloodline, Matthew used it to point out that Christ would come for the Jew and non-Jew alike. Rahab aided the spies who were checking out the promised land. Not only was she not a Jew, she was a prostitute, but God used her to further the line of Christ. Bathsheba is mentioned as the former wife of Uriah, the woman David slept with and then had her husband killed. An ugly sin but the one who would defeat sin came through David’s line by way of Bathsheba.
Each of these is mentioned for a reason, each of these shows the way that God works and His ability to make all things work together for good and they are a cross-section of the very people that Christ came to save.
III. Confirms the Messianic Line
The third thing that Matthew accomplishes with this genealogy is that he firmly establishes that Christ is born in the line of the Messiah. Matthew’s desire here is to show the reader that that this is indeed the promised Messiah, that this is the one who fulfills the words of the prophets. To do that, he must show the humanity of Christ and how he fits into the prophecies of the OT.
The Prophets said that he would come from the line of Judah:
MIC 5:2 "But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times. "
They said he would be from the line of Jesse:
ISA 11:1 A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
They also said that the Messiah would come from the line of King David, establishing his role as a king:
JER 23:5 "The days are coming," declares the LORD, "when I will raise up from David a righteous Branch, a King who will reign wisely and do what is just and right in the land.
The Messiah had to come from the line of Judah and through the families of Jesse and David and Matthew painstakingly takes us through the genealogy to show that Christ fits the bill. He also knows that prophecy says that the Messiah is more than just a man, this Messiah will be called the Mighty God, he is divine, He is not just another man. The prophet Isaiah spoke of the Coming Messiah and said:
ISA 9:6 For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
He would be both man and God, Matthew easily establishes the humanity, he takes a more subtle approach to set up his readers for Christ’s claim to divinity. As Matthew concludes the genealogy, his wording changes. He goes through the whole list by who was the father of whom until he gets to Christ. For this child, he says this:
MT 1:16 and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.
The wording he uses in the Greek leaves no doubt that Matthew is excluding Joseph completely from any biological link to Christ. If Joseph wasn’t the father, whose son was Jesus? The reader would have been scratching his head at the way Matthew does this, but he’s set them up for the next part of the story and he states very clearly who this child is.
MT 1:18 This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit.
This child is the Son of David but He is also the Son of God.
The Jewish reader would have read much in to this genealogy and learned much from it and there’s much that we can take from it this morning. We can see three Truths about God in this easy to skip passage.
1) God keeps His promises
Abraham believed what God said was true, even when it seemed impossible, he understood that God’s promises will always be kept and though he wasn’t around to see the ultimate fulfillment of that promise, He had faith in God that was unmoved by the circumstances around Him.
Ps 145:13 The LORD is faithful to all his promises and loving toward all he has made.
God keeps His promises BUT:
2) God’s Timing is not Ours
It took thousands of years for the promise of the Messiah to be fulfilled, but when He came, the timing was perfect. Scripture says it was in the fullness of time that Christ came, just the right time. God doesn’t move or act according to the same schedule that we have in mind.
2PE 3:8 But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. 9 The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.
God’s timing is not ours, and Faith includes waiting on God’s timing for his promises to be fulfilled.
3) God Accomplishes His perfect will through imperfect people.
This is the Truth that most impacts us today as His church. We fall for the same lies over and over again that God cannot use us because of who we are or what we’ve done. God has been using imperfect sinners for the good of his kingdom since Creation! God used Rahab and David and Tamar and God will use us if we are obedient to his call. He will use us to build this church and to build his kingdom worldwide. Because He accomplishes his perfect will through imperfect people.
With this genealogy and these truths in mind, Matthew has set the stage for the story of the Messiah, The Return of the King
