Matthew 1.1-17 "The Path of the Promise"

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Good morning.

Welcome.

Glad to have you with us this morning.

I was glad that Webb said that there is something about singing together that is good.

And that's true.

It's wonderful to be able to sing together and to consider the Lord Jesus Christ.

Something happens within us when we take our eyes off of ourselves and put them on Christ.

And it's a wonderful way to do that in song.

Well, I would like you to take your Bible this morning and open it to Matthew chapter one with me as we look at the fulfillment of God's promise.

Fulfillment of God's promise in Matthew chapter one.

In 1983, Ancestry.com began helping people discover the details of their family history.

Now, back in 1983, it was through a magazine, not the Internet.

Some of you in here are not old enough to have known that.

That's okay.

There was a world before the Internet.

It did exist.

But since then, Ancestry.com has transformed into a massive online community helping people discover their family history, their family trees.

You can even have your DNA analyzed to see what nationalities might be in your bloodline.

Ancestry.com claims to be able to help people trace their lineage back about 600 years.

For most people, it becomes much more difficult beyond that point in time.

I've been able to trace my family tree back on one side about 500 years.

That feels like a really long time.

I have a hard time really wrapping my brain around what that exactly means.

500 years is hard to process in my mind.

But that amount of time is insignificant compared to the genealogy found in Matthew chapter 1.

Matthew 1 · chapter mention

The genealogy in Matthew chapter 1 is about 2,000 years in length.

Matthew 1 · chapter mention

So imagine gathering together with your family on Christmas Day, talking about your family tree, and you're talking about folks in your family 2,000 years ago.

That's Matthew chapter 1.

Matthew 1 · chapter mention

Now I know it may sound strange to be thinking about and be challenged by a genealogy and a Christmas themed service.

But I ask that you follow me as we see the amazing grace of God in the path of his promise in this chapter.

Let's read together.

I'll read in verse one all the way through verse seventeen if you would follow along.

It says the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, and Judah the father of Perez and Zara by Tamar, and Peres the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Ram, and Ram the father of Aminadab, and Aminadab the father of Nashon, and Nashon the father of Salmon, Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of David, the king.

And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah, and Solomon the father of Rehaboam, and Rehaboam the father of Aviah, and Aviah the father of Asaph, and Asaph the father of Jehosaphat, and Jehosaphat the father of Joram, and Yoram the father of Uziah, and Uziah the father of Jotham, and Jotham the father of Ahaz, and Ahaz the father of Hezekiah, and Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, and Manasseh the father of Amos, and Amos the father of Josiah, and Josiah the father of Jeconiah and his brothers at the time of the deportation to Babylon.

And after the deportation to Babylon, Jeconiah was the father of Sheeltiel, Sheeltiel the father of Zarubul, and Zarubal the father of Aviud, and Aviud the father of Eliakim, and Eliakim the father of Atsor, and Atsor the father of Zadak, and Zadak the father of Akim, and Akim the father of Eliud, and Eliud the father of Eliazar, and Eliazar the father of Matan, and Matan the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Christ.

So all the generations, from Abraham to David, were fourteen generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ, fourteen generations.

Amen.

Ancient genealogies like this generally did not include every single person that could be included.

They would often skip generations in order to show a particular truth.

Ancient genealogies were intended to prove a path of descent.

So sometimes they skipped some generations in order to do that.

And Matthew does that here.

Not every single person in these generations was included.

We don't know exactly why he made that decision.

Probably the simplest decision is he wanted to put it in sections of 14 to make it easy to memorize for a Jewish person.

But we don't know.

In the end, what we do know is that Matthew's purpose here is to demonstrate a single truth.

Jesus is the fulfillment of God's promise.

And he has the lineage to prove it.

See, Jewish people were particularly focused on their family trees.

Not so different from some people today, I suppose.

And since they were Matthew's primary audience, he wanted to prove to them the pathway of the fulfillment of God's promise in Jesus.

He wants to show that Jesus, in his humanity, was of the royal line of Israel.

So he begins by telling us that this genealogy is about the Messiah.

That's what the word Christ means.

In Hebrew, it means anointed one.

And as the anointed one, he is the son of David, who is the king of Israel.

As the appointed son of David, this person, whom this genealogy highlights, would be the one person with the right to rule as king in David's place.

And Matthew says, Jesus is that one.

He is the descendant of Abraham through David.

He has the right and the authority to rule as king because of his lineage.

It's important to know that because at the end of the book, Matthew comes full circle, and he ends his book with Jesus saying these words All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

He is the Son of David.

He is the Messiah, the anointed one with the right and the authority to rule.

That's what Matthew wants to demonstrate in this family tree.

And it's supported by the rest of Scripture.

We find that Jesus in the rest of Scripture is the King of kings.

He is the King of the Ages.

He is the King of nations.

He is the King of the Jews.

He is the King of Israel.

He is the King of eternity.

He is the promised one.

The fulfillment of all of God's promises about the coming Messiah.

Jesus is the realization of all of the hopes, all of the promises, and all of the prophecies of the Old Testament.

He is the realization of all of your ultimate hopes.

Matthew's first step is to demonstrate the path of God's promise.

To prove in this list of people's names that Jesus is connected to the ancient King David.

That's what he's telling us.

This is God's sovereign plan.

This is what God intended all along.

Here's how he carried it out.

This is the fulfillment of his promise.

Over and over and over again, God promised to send a king.

Now that was known for centuries, perhaps millennia.

Sort of like a photo that's not quite in focus.

You can kind of see the general idea of the photo.

But then when David comes on the scene, everything then becomes clearer, comes into focus with King David.

We know that because of 2 Samuel chapter 7, verse 16, where God promised David, Your house, that is your family, and your kingdom, shall be made sure forever before me.

2 Samuel 7:16

Your throne, your authority, your right to rule, shall be established forever.

Now we know that God in his character, in his being, is eternal.

He's always existing.

There is no beginning, there is no end, he always is.

What does it mean then when God says, your right to rule, your authority as king will be established before me forever?

It means forever.

There is no end.

And so with varied strength and trust, Israel began to anticipate this promised one from the line of David.

We see that demonstrated in Matthew chapter 2.

Matthew 2 · chapter mention

When the Magi came to Herod after following the star, they asked Herod, Hey, where can we find this newborn king of the Jews?

Well, Herod didn't have a clue, so he brought in the pastors and the priests.

He said, Help me out.

And they said, Well, Micah tells us.

God prophesied in Micah chapter 5, verse 2, that it's in Bethlehem.

Micah 5:2

It's in Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, small place that is by no means least among the rulers of Judah.

Because out of her would come a ruler.

A ruler who would shepherd God's people.

It was God's sovereign plan to send a king descended from David who would come out of David's city, his hometown of Bethlehem.

For thousands of years, his people anticipated the fulfillment of that promise.

They knew the general path.

They knew it was sort of like getting an eye 29.

We know the general direction, but they could not see the exact path of God's promise.

They just knew that somehow it went through David.

That's why this genealogy hinges on David.

We see in the first verse, Jesus is the son of David.

Then again in verse 6, David is the king, who's the father of Solomon.

And then again in verse 17, David is the central figure in God's path of bringing about his promise.

So Matthew is using David sort of as a hinge point of Israel's history.

Everything in this pathway, in this family tree, surrounds David the king.

Jesus, the Messiah, fulfilled God's sovereign plan to provide a king for Israel from one of the descendants of David.

That truth ought to be of tremendous encouragement to you.

Because it tells you that you can trust God.

You can trust what he says because he keeps his word.

What God says, God does.

It is true, it will always be true, and God himself will always ensure that all of his promises are kept, just as they were with the birth of his promised king.

We can trust even what God has to say about the future of this king.

He now sits at God the Father's right hand in the realm of glory and authority, and he promises us that he will come again and he will gather his own to himself.

We cannot yet see that, but we can look back and see the path of the promise has been fulfilled.

Therefore, we can trust that what God says about the future will also be true.

He promised a king from the line of David, and he provided a ruler, descended from royalty.

But we cannot stop there.

There's much more for us to see here.

One of those things that we need to see is that God's sovereign plan is very clear, but so also is his sustained patience.

Allison and I have enjoyed watching the television show from time to time.

Who do you think you are?

Now, nobody in the first service had ever seen that show.

Please tell me somebody here has seen that show.

One.

Wow.

Again, what does that say about me?

This show, Who Do You Think You Are, follows the journey of a celebrity working with Ancestry.com as they work through their family tree, sort of trying to discover their family history.

Occasionally they will be surprised as they discover that somewhere in their family line is a criminal or someone with a questionable history or a poor character.

This genealogy is filled with embarrassing characters.

Let's think about them.

Abraham.

Abraham was from Ur of the Chaldeans, modern Mesopotamia, Iraq, Iran, those areas.

God called Abraham and said, I want you to leave your family and I want you to step out in faith and go to a place that I'm going to show you.

I'm not showing it to you yet.

I just want you to start walking.

And so we we see Abraham stepping out in faith, leaving everything behind to follow God's command.

What a wonderful example Abraham is.

But then he gets into the land and then he starts to question and wonder what is God doing?

Is God going to fulfill his promise?

Is God powerful enough to protect me?

So we see him going down to other areas and lying about his wife.

He says, Oh, she's not my wife, she's just my sister, which is half-truth, also called a lie.

God asked him to wait.

And he waited.

And God asked him to wait some more.

And he waited some more.

And then Abraham began to question whether or not God would keep his promise.

And so Abraham decided that he would try to fulfill God's promise through his own works rather than trusting God in faith.

And so he took a slave, his slave woman as his wife to conceive a child that he hoped God would accept.

Over and over again, he put his wife Sarah's life on the line by lying about their relationship.

He set a pattern because their son Isaac did the same thing.

Then we come to Jacob.

Jacob was a schemer and a cheat.

If he could swindle something out of you, he would.

He was a scoundrel of scoundrels.

Judah was dishonest and selfish.

Oh, and don't forget David, that man after God's own heart who was the king.

He was a murderer and an adulterer.

And full of pride from time to time.

Should we go on?

Solomon, the wisest of the wise, was disobedient to God later in his life and departed from faith in God, and that disobedience led to the division of his nation, with part of it following his servant as king rather than his son Rehoboam.

Because Rehoboam was a foolish, impetuous young man lacking his father's wisdom.

Second Kings chapter 16 tells us about Ahaz, a king who wanted nothing to do with God.

2 Kings 16 · chapter mention

But instead killed his own son as a burnt offering sacrifice to a false God.

Again and again and again we see that the Lord's human genealogy is filled with sinful people, not only capable of the most heinous of sins, but in some cases actually committing those sins.

In spite of God's gracious calling out of Abraham and choosing him out of all the nations on the earth, Abraham's descendants continually displayed the truth that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

See, being part of God's path, of God's promise, of God's plan, does not negate the need for some way to deal with sin and evil.

But that shouldn't be all that surprising.

We are familiar with sin in all its forms, aren't we?

We know the depth of sin in our own hearts.

And if you're honest with yourself, the longer you walk with Christ, the more you recognize how sinful your own heart is.

And yet God's astounding patience with such sinful people still surprises us.

This list covers some 20 centuries of perpetual sin from generation to generation to generation, over and over and over again.

In some cases, fathers and sons committed the same sins.

Some generations were worse than others.

Some blatantly rejected God, but the pattern of sinfulness keeps on flowing throughout this genealogy.

Peter tells us in the New Testament that God was patient in the days of Noah.

The Apostle Paul tells us that it is God's character to be patient with his sinful creatures.

I, for one, am thankful for that.

It's astounding, though, to see just how patient God has been.

God's sovereign plan was in place before the foundation of the world.

And he kept that plan.

He followed that path even though it required stunning amounts of patience towards these creatures.

I hope you sense the encouragement in that.

Maybe you wonder whether God could ever work in your life.

Maybe you wonder if your sins are just too great for God to overcome.

Maybe you think that your sins will keep you back from being a part of God's great work.

Well, this ought to calm any such fears.

This list of names, a family tree, ought to encourage you because our sin does not inhibit God's ability to include us in his plans.

Maybe you have a friend or a family member or a neighbor, and you wonder if they will ever see God's grace to them.

Well, you can be assured from this passage that God will extend to them the perfect amount of patience, giving them the opportunity to come to Him.

This is what God's sustained patience is for.

God's patience is intended to lead us to repentance.

God is patient so that people might turn to him in salvation.

When we recognize our sin and we begin to understand just how patient God has been with us, we ought to be moved to repentance, to turning away from our sin and turning towards him in obedience.

See, when we begin to recognize the characters in this list, it is not supposed to make us feel good about ourselves.

Say, ah, I'm thankful I'm not like good old Jacob.

No, instead, it's to move us to humility and to understand God's patient with me too.

God to move us to humility.

Because when we turn to God in repentance, the blood of Christ cleanses us from all sin, doesn't it?

There is grace extended to us when we come humbly to Him.

And we see that this grace is simply amazing.

It is saving grace.

It is stunning grace.

Again and again and again throughout this genealogy, we see God's stunning, saving grace.

You see, this flow of this genealogy is interrupted by an unusual characteristic.

Matthew includes five women in this genealogy.

Now that that wasn't unheard of in ancient times, but it was a patristic society.

And so everything revolved around the men.

Sorry, ladies, that's just the way it was then.

So Matthew moves through this genealogy, seeing the male connection all along, but he interrupts that with five women.

It wasn't unusual for women to be included in lists like this, but what is unique about the inclusion of these women is that they are particularly striking examples of God's saving grace.

Consider the first four: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba.

Each of those women played an important role in the lineage of Jesus.

But there are a couple of characteristics, while they're all different and unique, there's a couple of characteristics that fit all four of them.

The first one is they all have a connection to foreigners, to outsiders, to Gentiles, to non-Jews.

People who were considered outside, on the boundary, outside of the boundaries of the people of God.

They were not part of God's chosen people, Israel.

They were on the outside, not my people.

Tamar was a Canaanite, one of the peoples that Israel refused to destroy when they entered the land of Canaan.

You remember, right?

God said, Go in there and wipe everybody out.

Their sinfulness has reached its limit.

I'm done with my patience.

Wipe them out.

Israel refused.

They didn't obey God's command, and so we have Tamar.

Rahab was also a Canaanite from Jericho.

She's the one who hid the Israelite spies.

Ruth was a Moabite woman.

Moabites were the descendants of Lot who lived across the Jordan River from Israel and were generally Israel's enemies.

Bathsheba isn't named, instead, she's identified by her husband, Uriah.

And while we don't know Bathsheba's nationality, we do know that Uriah, her husband, was a Hittite, one of the Canaanite peoples.

Either directly or by marriage, these women were all outside of the chosen people of God.

Their birth excluded them from inclusion in the pathway of God's promise.

But in God's sovereign, saving, stunning grace, they not only were brought into God's people and made a part of God's people, but they were brought into the very lineage of the Messiah himself.

And so that then prepares us, doesn't it, for the very last command of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew?

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.

See, the Lord Jesus is descended from the very same kinds of people that he intended to reach with his grace.

A second distinguishing characteristic of these four women is their connection to sexual sin.

Tamar acted like a prostitute to trick her father-in-law, Judah, into sleeping with her.

Rahab was a prostitute.

Ruth was a Moabitus woman.

The people descended from the drunken, incestuous relationship between Lot and his daughters.

And Bathsheba was an adulteress.

In that culture, these women would have been marked as sinful women to be avoided.

In the New Testament times, they would have been classified by the Pharisees of the time as belonging to the group of tax collectors and sinners, people you should avoid.

But in the Lord's stunning grace, their sin was forgiven, and they became a part of his family tree.

God's grace is available to even the worst of sinners.

And even though we look on the outside and mark those worst of sinners, God sees the inside.

And if we are to truly grasp what Christmas is all about, we must be like him and begin to look at what God does on the inside.

If God's grace was great enough to extend forgiveness and salvation to those in this list and then graciously include them in the line of the Messiah, then his grace is great enough to grant repentance and salvation and forgiveness to the greatest of sinners today.

You have not done anything that is beyond the stunning grace of God.

I like what Sam Melberry said just a few days ago.

Oh come, all ye faithless, joyless and defeated.

Oh come ye.

Oh come ye to Bethlehem.

Christmas is for the weary, for the messed up, and for the broken.

If your life isn't Instagrammable, Christmas is for you.

Stunning grace.

If we were to look only on the outside, which we're not supposed to, but we do anyway, we would classify Mary with those first four women, wouldn't we?

Judging by appearances, we would say that this young teenager sins sexually just like those other four women bearing a child outside of marriage.

But we are not to look on the outside, are we?

Things are not as they always seem in God's program.

And that may be what Matthew is hinting at.

Those other four women had questionable morals, but look at what God did in his grace for them and through them.

In the same way, we must not be distracted by the appearances of Mary's situation.

God is at work in a mighty way, and things are not as they may appear.

In fact, Matthew seems to emphasize that point.

In verse 16, where it says, of whom Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, that of whom is feminine in nature.

It can only refer to Mary.

So what Matthew is doing is demonstrating that Jesus, the Messiah, has the legal right to rule as David's son because of his father Joseph.

But concerning his human biological heritage, he was not Joseph's son, but Mary's.

And so when Mary became pregnant when she was engaged, that brought tremendous cultural shame on her and Joseph.

And there again is the grace of God.

Every Jewish person would have looked back at this list of names and acknowledged that God did work through those four specific women with questionable histories.

So Matthew is sort of subtly saying, why can't God do that a fifth time?

What keeps God from using Mary?

A young teenager about to get married?

Could it be, could it be that using these other women in this genealogy, showing that God's pathway included them as part of his plan was preparation for God to be gracious to Mary.

Mary then joins a list of people standing tall as shining examples of God's grace.

Our God is not limited by our sin.

Preach that to your heart, to your mind, and to your soul.

Your God is not limited by your sin.

Instead, the exact opposite is true.

When we come to Him, this babe in Mary's womb, Mary's son, that son of David, Messiah the King, he atones for our sin.

So when we put all of this together, it points to one astounding truth.

The path that God chose was composed of people just like those he came to save.

His genealogy anticipated people, the kinds of people who would make up his spiritual family.

That brings us then to a final point to make, this time from the very beginning of this passage.

Do you see how it says in verse 1, the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ?

Literally, translating it woodenly, it would be the book of the beginning of Jesus Christ.

Beginning or genealogy here is the same word from which we get the word Genesis.

In Genesis, that word points to a new section, a new avenue of God's work.

And it seems as though Matthew is doing the exact same thing.

He's telling us that the birth of Jesus is a new beginning, a new avenue of God's work.

And he does that in a very interesting way.

In Genesis, when we find this word that is then followed by a genealogy, the generations are listed by showing the pathway of descendants.

And so it says, for example, that Adam fathered a son and named him Seth, and Seth fathered a son and named him something else.

I don't remember off the top of my head.

So on down the line.

That was a way of saying that everyone in the list was dependent on the father, the one at the head of the list.

By starting with Adam, Moses is telling us, you need to know Adam.

Later on in Genesis, it begins with Abraham, saying everything needs to be focused in Abraham.

Matthew begins his genealogy with Abraham.

But Abraham is not the focus, is he?

Instead of focusing on the person at the beginning of the list, Matthew's focus is on the one at the end, of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Christ.

His focus is on Jesus as if to say, This is the one we've been waiting for.

This is the one upon whom all are dependent.

So when we read those Old Testament genealogies, they always begin with the point person of interest.

Matthew puts an end to that.

In this genealogy, this is the genealogy to end all genealogies because this is the new beginning in Jesus.

The path of God's promise ends with Jesus because Jesus is the new beginning.

And so for all who are part of God's family tree, Jesus is the new beginning.

The old is passed away, the new has come.

It's the coming of God's promised King, Jesus the Messiah, and that is what made it possible for you and for me to become children of the living God and so be part of a new family tree.

Spiritually speaking, this is our family tree, with the focus being on Jesus the King.

That highlights the importance of Christmas, doesn't it?

If Christmas does not point to your new beginning in Christ, then it's time for you to set down your own fight for supremacy.

It's time to relinquish the building of your own kingdom over which you rule and come to the promised one who was born a king in order to offer you a new beginning by faith in him.

Let's pray together.

Lord Jesus, we come and we bow before you, confessing our sins to you.

Recognizing that it's simply astounding that this would be, that the path of God's promise would look like this.

And that this would be accomplished so that we might be a part of your family tree.

Indeed, who would have dreamed?

Who would have dreamed?

We give you thanks that by faith in you our sin can be washed away.

Thank you for including us in your book of life.

So that one day, when the books are read and the genealogy of Jesus from all eternity is displayed, our names will be there, standing tall as demonstrations of your saving grace.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.

You can learn more by visiting our website at faithfree.com.