POST OVERVIEW. A commentary on Christ’s genealogy in Matthew 1:1-17, tracing Jesus’ ancestors all the way back to Abraham through the kingly line of David.

Matthew 1:1-17. Matthew begins his gospel account by presenting the genealogy of Jesus. Ordinarily genealogies are not that exciting, but then this is no ordinary genealogy. While most of our genealogies would go back four or five generations covering 150 years, Jesus’ genealogy covers forty-two generations and approximately two thousand years.

WHY SUCH PRECISE RECORDS? Have you ever wondered why the Hebrews kept such remarkable genealogical records? Why would anyone keep track of ancestors back thousands of years? The answer is that the Hebrews kept these records so that they could validate or invalidate whether someone was authorized to take a role. For example, the only people who could ever become priests in the tabernacle (and later the temple) were males who were physically descended from Aaron. The only people who became kings in Judah were male descendants of David. Land in Israel was allocated based on your genealogical tribe, and so on. But by far the most important person to validate (or invalidate) by their genealogy was the promised Anointed One, the Messiah. The Old Testament contained many genealogical clues about the identity of the Messiah and He, when He came, had to fulfill all of them. Along these lines (pun intended), the Messiah must be able to track His lineage all the way back to Abraham through the line of King David. And we see that Jesus meets that criterion. So, Jesus satisfies the genealogical test for being the Messiah.

There is another very important fact that Matthew establishes by presenting Jesus as the product of a long line of Hebrews all the way back to Abraham. What is that fact? Jesus is a human being! Jesus is not an angel and He is not a myth. Angels and myths do not have genealogies. They do not have ancestors. But Jesus does. He is the fulfillment of God’s covenant with Abraham in Genesis 12:3, “And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.” God promised Abraham that the Messiah would be one of his descendants. Jesus, then, is the Seed of Abraham through His genealogy. And Jesus is human.

ONE THING IS ORDINARY. Maybe the reason that Matthew begins his gospel with Jesus’ family tree is to show that there is at least one thing that is ordinary about Jesus – He has a genealogy. After Matthew 1:17 where the genealogy ends, we are hard-pressed to find a single detail of Jesus’ life that could be considered “ordinary.” From Matthew 1:18 on, nothing about Jesus is ordinary. So Matthew quickly dispenses with Jesus’ “ordinary” genealogy.

THE GENEALOGY ITSELF. Now we want to study the contents of the genealogy itself. We might think that the line of the Messiah would be pristine and would be star-studded, but if we thought that way, we would be wrong. Instead we find that Jesus’ genealogy is littered with sinners, people who are expressly revealed in the pages of Holy Scripture to be flawed and fallen. But this is exactly as it should be. Jesus’ family tree is composed of the types of people that He came to save. As we work our way through the forty-two generations, the best we best we find are a few individuals who are relatively a little better than the rest. Then we reach the end of the genealogy and suddenly encounter one who is completely unlike the rest. As we read the name “Jesus,” we can sense the curse of sin being removed. Finally, here at the end of the forty-two generations we read of our Hero, our Savior, our King.

Matthew begins his lineage of Jesus by mentioning David and Abraham. One of Matthew’s themes in his gospel is that Jesus is the promised Davidic King, so he mentions that Jesus is the son of David. (We will see that “Son of David” is also a messianic term that several people use when calling out to Jesus in this gospel.) But Jesus is also the son of Abraham, meaning that He is as Hebrew as He can be and He is the fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant.

We won’t cover every person in the list, but some are of special interest. Tamar is the mother of Perez and Zerah and Judah is the father (v. 3). This is scandalous because Tamar is Judah’s daughter-in-law (Gen. 38). A little farther down (v. 5) we encounter Rahab, the prostitute from Jericho who protected the Hebrew spies (Joshua 2). A Canaanite prostitute in the line of the Messiah? Then there is the widow Ruth, a foreigner from Moab, who is redeemed by Boaz (Ruth 4) and thus is added to the messianic line. When we reach to David, the anointed king, we discover that David’s son Solomon was born by Bathsheba, “her of Uriah,” whom David stole from Uriah through adultery and murder. The lineage then weaves its way through the kings of Judah, both noble and wicked, past the deportation to Babylon and through a number of unknown men before arriving at “Joseph the husband of Mary, by whom Jesus was born, who is called the Messiah” (v. 16).

From the genealogy, then, we see that Jesus is the human descendant (or “seed”) of Abraham through the kingly line of David. Up to this point in the gospel, Jesus is presented as a fairly ordinary Person who has a slightly unusual family tree, but really nothing more. But that “really nothing more” is about to profoundly change. (Next post, Jesus’ conception and birth, Matthew 1:18-25.)

Soli Deo gloria            rmb                 11/11/2024                 #712