The Birth Of The Messiah Foretold

I love watching all those television programmes where people explore their ancestry. Do you?

In the words of the Ancestry website – it brings their back-story to life. Which is exactly what Matthew seeks to do with his genealogy of Jesus. Matthew wants to bring the back-story if Jesus, the Messiah, to life.

God’s people had been waiting hundreds of years for the promised Messiah to arrive, and now the time had come. That’s why Matthew declares that Jesus is the Messiah.

Just for clarification, the Greek title Christ, is the same as the Hebrew title Messiah. So wherever you read or hear the word Christ you can swap it with the word Messiah, and vice-a-versa.

While we are clarifying terms, I want to distinguish in this talk between Israelites – who were all descendants of Abraham, Ancient Jews – who were the remaining tribe of Israel anticipating the arrival of the Messiah, and modern Jews – who are the remnant of the Ancient Jews, who did not accept Jesus as the Messiah.

Just for the record, there is a further group, called Messianic Jews, who are modern Jews who have converted to Christianity, because they have personally accepted that Jesus was their Messiah and as their saviour. But this group will not feature in this talk.

Matthew, the writer of this gospel, is the same Mathew who as a thieving money lender/Roman tax collector (collecting money with menaces) was called by Jesus to become one of His disciples. The gospel of Matthew was written about 60AD (30-ish years after the death of Jesus). This date will become important later on in our talk, but it is also important because Matthew, (and his critics), still had access to the official authorised genealogies of Jesus, Joseph, Mary, and King David. So when it was written, if anyone doubted Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus, they could simply go to the temple in Jerusalem and look it up for themselves. We, of course, don’t have that option, because the official, authorised, genealogical records of the Ancient Jews were destroyed by the Romans in 70AD.

Matthew is writing his gospel primarily to the Jewish nation. He really wants to show that Jesus is the Messiah they have all been waiting for, so he starts by addressing the biggest objection of all: that some say Jesus is not the son of Joseph. And he does it by examining the genealogy of Jesus.

In verse 16, instead of saying: “Joseph was the father of Jesus”, it says “Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born”. Matthew takes this potential problem —that Jesus isn’t Joseph’s son, and thus not necessarily a descendant of Abraham and David – to show that Jesus, and only Jesus, is the Messiah.

Some argued that Jesus couldn’t be the fulfilment of God’s promises, since Jesus was not a direct biological descendant of Abraham and David, i.e. illegitimate. Matthew anticipates this objection, by including four women in his genealogy.

What Matthew does in effect, is hang out the dirty washing hidden in the ancestry of King David – their righteous Priest, Prophet, and King, whom they all revere. Matthew shows that the bloodline of King David is not quite as pure as they like to pretend.

Lets take a very brief look at these women:

For example, Tamar’s family line would have died with her (Gen 38). She was not just a widow, but her father-in-law Judah refused to let her marry her brother-in-law, as was her legal right at the time. But, in a dramatic twist, Tamar pretends to be a prostitute, tricks Judah into sleeping with her, and gives birth to two sons. These sons become part of Juda’s family tree, but only by adoption, because they, just like Jesus, were illegitimate. Because Judah never married Tamar.

Likewise Rahab the Canaanite, Ruth the Moabite, and Bathsheba the wife of Uriah the Hittite, were all women who, because of their nationalities, had to convert to Judaism before marrying their Jewish husbands. For some hard-line Ancient Jewish groups, as with some Modern Jewish groups, conversion was not enough to make their children proper members of the Jewish people. If you follow that line of reasoning, then King David was not a ‘proper’ Jew either.

Matthew is saying, “As it was for King David, so it is with Jesus.”

What Matthew has given us, is not a direct blood line from Abraham to David to Jesus. But a legal or royal genealogy, where the legal or royal rights are passed on by legal adoption as well as birth right.

So the sons of Tamar did not automatically have legal succession from Judah to David, but acquire legal succession by being legally adopted by Judah. Which is very important for Jesus, as we will see later.