"Advent: The Only Savior" Matthew 1:12-17 Sunday Morning Worship Service

Let me read for us our passage this morning before we begin.

Matthew 1, verse 12 through verse 17.

Matthew 1:12

After the deportation to Babylon, Jeconiah was the father of Shiltiel, and Shiltiel the father of Zerubbabel, and Zerubbabel the father of Abiud, and Abiud the father of Eliakim, and Eliakim the father of Azor, and Azor the father of Zadok, and Zadok the father of Achim, and Achim the father of Eliud, and Eliud the father of Eliazar, Eliazar the father of Mathan, and Mathan the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ, or Savior.

So 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 Christ, fourteen generations.

There's something interesting that Americans have in common that you may not notice until you hear of it or until you have spent time overseas.

I used to live in Africa, and when I first realized this, and ever since then, it has just hung in front of me wherever I go.

Whenever two Americans meet each other, they ask each other's name, and then they always ask, Where are you from?

And then the conversation continues until you come up with something the two of you have in common based on the geography of where you're from, no matter how tangential.

For example, hi, I'm Jesse.

Oh, I'm Oscar.

Oscar will ask me, Where are you from?

And I'll say, New Mexico, and he'll say, Oh, I had a sister who once drove through New Mexico.

Oh, great, great, nice to meet you.

Where are you from?

Minnesota.

Oh, I had a neighbor whose aunt once sent their daughter to college in Minnesota.

Oh, that's great.

And then we can have our normal conversation.

But Americans won't have that normal conversation until they first do that little where are you from?

and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You'll notice it now.

I just ruined the rest of your life for you, by the way.

This summer I spent time in Rwanda and I got to go to a Rwandan wedding, which has something similar, only more extravagant.

A typical Rwandan wedding lasts three days.

I only went to the first day.

I learned my lesson.

The first day is not in a church.

The one I went to is outdoors under some tarps.

And what they have at the front there is a like a dining room table, a banquet table set up, and the bride's family is seated around the banquet table.

And then there's all the congregation sitting in chairs all the way around.

And then outside is the groom's family.

And then everybody's sitting down, and everybody in the congregation is just watching the bride's family eat.

And then the groom's family just happens by and just, you know, walks in and walks down the aisle, and the bride's family asks, Who are you?

And the groom's family says, You know, we're just traveling by, and it goes back and forth.

And the groom's family, the goal, it's like a skit, only they're not allowed to practice.

And the goal of the groom's family here is to talk their way into eating with the bride's family.

And it's very confrontational and hostile.

There's a lot of yelling involved at this.

Like, how dare you interrupt our meal?

This is just family time, and like we're just passing by and we're hungry and we're far away from home, and rahr.

And it goes on for hours.

And after a while, the bride's father will say to the groom's family, how something like, How dare you interrupt us?

Who exactly do you think you are?

And at that point, the groom's family has to recite, each person in their party has to recite their genealogy to five generations.

And if they mess it up, they have to go outside and the whole thing starts over.

Pastor Charles tells me, you better pray they don't mess this up.

This is the key part right here.

But it's as if we can't, you know, bring our two families together until we know who you are.

What kind of people do you come from?

Americans, we say that conversation for like the first Thanksgiving.

How dare you?

Who are you?

You call this mashed potatoes?

Come on.

They just get it right out of the way at their wedding.

You see a little bit of this in Matthew chapter one.

What Matthew chapter one starts with is a genealogy that is meant to explain to you exactly who Jesus is and where he comes from.

You can't have an understanding of Jesus Christ and who he is unless you know who his people are.

And that's why Matthew begins with a genealogy.

And if you have a hard time understanding why the genealogy opens his gospel, just think like an American and think you won't have a conversation with a random person you meet until you establish some connection to him.

That's the way the Jews were.

They would not receive Jesus or any claims about him until they knew who exactly he was.

And that's why the genealogy begins in verse 1 with the genealogy of Jesus Christ.

Christ just means Messiah or sent one or even Savior, who is the son of David, the son of Abraham.

There are two overarching covenants in the Old Testament about who the Savior will be.

The Abrahamic covenant is the first.

The Savior will be descended from Abraham, he will be the seed of Abraham.

No one can claim to be the Savior unless he descends from Abraham.

And so Matthew establishes that.

The second is the Davidic covenant that God in 2 Samuel 7 tells David that it will be his descendant who will be the king.

The Savior will be a king from the line of David, and that will be the Savior.

And so the second thing Matthew establishes, or the second covenant, the first thing he establishes, is that the Savior is not only from Abraham, but also a king from the line of David.

And so we understand the first breaks in this genealogy.

Matthew breaks the genealogy up into three parts.

The first is Abraham to David.

We understand that.

That proves he's from Abraham.

The second is David to the Babylonian exile, and we understand that.

That proves the Savior is the rightful king of the Jews.

But the third one is the one that we as kind of evangelical Americans don't see the significance to that often.

And that is from the deportation of Babylon until the birth of the Savior.

But for the Jews, this was a horrific event.

The deportation of Babylon shattered their world.

And that's why it is repeated.

It's the most repeated event in this genealogy.

Did you notice that?

Four times it's repeated.

Verse 11, Jeconiah and his brothers at the time of the deportation to Babylon, it says.

Verse 12, after the deportation of Babylon, verse 17, all the generations from Abraham to David, 14.

David the deportation to Babylon.

That's the third use, 14.

And then from the deportation of Babylon to Christ, 14 generations.

So four times Matthew breaks this genealogy up.

Four times he draws your attention to the deportation to Babylon.

Again, for unless you're studying Ezra or Daniel, most American Christians don't understand the significance of the deportation.

But this was a hugely disruptive event in Jewish history.

This was the big mark on their history.

They had the promise that the Savior would come from them.

They had the temple, they had the priests, they had the sacrifices, they had the feast days, they had all of the ways they worshiped Yahweh, and all of those came to an end when the tribe of Judah and the tribe of Benjamin were kicked out of Israel.

After Solomon, there was civil war.

We looked at this last week.

Ten tribes split from two.

Those ten tribes were exiled.

Then generations later, the tribe of Judah and the tribe of Benjamin, the ones that reigned in Jerusalem, they too were exiled, defeated by the Babylonians, taken captivity, marched to Babylon, and so ended the tribe of Judah as those that reigned over Israel.

Never again until Christ is there a Jewish king.

And still to this day, never has there been a king of Israel who reigns on the throne in Jerusalem.

Something that the Jews just took for granted that this is the way the world would always be.

God had promised them that.

And all of that is gone.

When they get taken into captivity, they lose the temple.

How can you have a Passover lamb if you don't have a temple?

How can you celebrate Passover if you don't have the temple?

If you're a Levite, what are you what good are you as a Levite if you can't do sacrifices?

In Ezra too, it catalogs the people that come back from captivity.

Some of them are gatekeepers, some of them are servants in the temple, some of them are the sons of Asaph for writing songs to be sung in the temple.

What good are they in exile?

There's no temple, there's no gates, there's no songs to be sung.

How can they sing songs of Yahweh in Babylon?

I mean, that's the idea.

They can't.

They hang their instruments up on the tree.

They give up.

They can't do the feast days, they can't do the sacrifices.

There's no temple.

They worship God in Hebrew.

When they go to Babylon, they end up learning Aramaic.

By the time the exile is over, they come back as citizens of the Persian Empire now, and they're speaking Aramaic.

The Jews in Jesus' lifetime, likely most of them didn't even speak Hebrew anymore.

I mean, they lost their language, many of them lost their names, they lost their whole identity, but particularly they lost the hope for the Savior.

That's why the exile is so critical.

And there's one part of the exile that you really have to understand to get the full effect of this genealogy.

The Jews were sent in exile because they trusted horses, not Yahweh.

They trusted the Egyptian armies to defend them against the Babylonians.

They would not turn to God.

They refused to repent and turn to God.

They thought God won't do anything about it either.

After all, we're from the tribe of Judah.

God would never harm us.

He promised us that we would always have a king on the throne.

And so God would never discipline us.

We can do whatever we want.

That was the way they thought.

And so God removes them from the land to break them of their pride.

And when doing so, he gives them one particular promise.

It's Ezekiel chapter 21.

Ezekiel 21 · chapter mention

There, God tells the Israelites, You, O profane and wicked one, the prince of Israel.

By the way, this is a rebuke to the tribe of Judah and to the king of Judah.

It's meant as an insult to call him the prince of Israel.

Israel was the ten tribes that had already been taken captive.

When you look at the context in Ezekiel 21 here, it's very clearly a rebuke to Judah.

It's a warning they will be conquered by the Babylonians.

But here to insult them, Yahweh through Ezekiel calls them the Israelites.

You prince of Israel, whose day is come.

This is the time of your final punishment.

Thus says the Lord Yahweh, remove the turban and take off the crown.

Do you catch what's behind that?

God's saying, your hope in a king is over.

Find your king and take off that turban from his head.

Get rid of his crown.

You don't have a hope any longer.

The kings of Israel come to an end when Judah goes into exile.

And the kings of Israel were Jehoiakim, for example.

He's the one that ripped up parts of the book of Jeremiah and tried to erase the book of Jeremiah.

His son, Jeconiah, who was going to be cursed by God.

His uncle, who was governor of Israel after Jechaniah, he was murdered by the Jews.

There are no more kings after this point.

Then God says, things shall not remain as they are.

Exalt that which is low and bring low that which is exalted.

This is God's motivation in doing this.

He says, I'm going to cripple the tribe of Judah.

I'm removing their king from them to humble these people.

They're so exalted in their own eyes, they think I'll never harm them.

Gotta be kidding, God says.

You're going down.

You're going into exile, and you will lose your king.

The exile will only last for seven years, but your hope of having a king is gone forever.

That's the rebuke in Ezekiel 21.

God goes on to make it more personal in Jeremiah 22.

And I want you to flip there to see this.

I would have put it on the screen, but it's kind of a longer passage, and it just makes more sense to flip there.

So go back in your Bible to Jeremiah chapter 22.

Jeremiah 22 · chapter mention

I want you to see this with your own eyes.

Remember, Jeremiah 22 is a chapter about Josiah who was a good and godly king.

He has four sons when he dies, they become kings.

The first one dies, the second one taken into captivity, then Josiah's brother, the king's uncle, reigns and then is murdered.

So it's not even a clean end here.

The idea is that Josiah had sons, they all they all die.

They all come to their end without the kingship being passed down.

And so in the middle of Jeremiah 22, verse 24.

Jeremiah 22:24

Jeremiah 22, verse 24, as I live, declares Yahweh, though Koniah, the son of Jehoiakim, so Jehoiakim was the king that had ripped up the book of Jeremiah, and God tells Jehoiakim, I'm ripping you out of the genealogy, which is kind of an ironic punishment.

Jeremiah 22:24

You rip up one of God's books, God rips you out of that book.

His son, Konaniah, becomes king.

Jeconiah is his full name.

Jeremiah slices his name in half, I think to make the point, that your kingdom is sliced away from you.

You know, you're disobedient.

I'm going to cut your name in half just like you're cut out of Israel.

So Jeconiah is his real name, Jeremiah calls him Koniah.

Though he be the king of Judah, it says in verse 24, though he were the signet ring on my right hand, yet I would tear you off and give you into the hand of those who seek your life, into the hand of those whom you are afraid, even into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, and into the hand of the Chaldeans.

So notice what's behind this.

If your promise of having a king is like a wedding ring, he says, I'm going to take off this ring and get rid of it.

You know, in premarital we'll often tell couples, hey, there's you're going to have arguments in your marriage.

There's certain things you're not allowed to say to each other.

Like you've got to fight fair.

One thing you're not allowed to do is take your wedding ring off and throw it out the car window.

That would be ridiculous.

But that's what God is doing here.

He says, though the promise that you would have a savior, though the promise that the king would come from the line of Judah would be like a signet ring.

That's a promissory ring.

It's like a wedding ring would be our analogy, but it's the ring.

The king would write something, put it in wax, seal it with his ring.

It's how you knew he meant it.

God says, I don't care if I sign the Davidic promise with my signet ring, I would take that ring and throw it away.

In fact, I'm going to give it to your enemies.

That's what I'm going to do, Kaniah.

You think you'll stand secure forever because you have the Davidic promise?

Whoopdie do.

I'll give that promise to the Babylonians then.

Here, watch.

And he gives the ring away.

In fact, giving it is too nice of a word.

Look at the word God uses for it in verse 26.

I will hurl you and the mother who bore you into another country where you were not born, and there you will die.

So he doesn't just give the wedding ring away, he throws it away.

He throws it into Babylon.

It's as if God is saying, I'm going to hit you so hard, you're going to wake up in the Babylonian desert.

That's what's going to happen to you.

And there you're going to die, he says in verse 26.

You're not coming back.

The promise that you'll have a king is done, and it will be buried in a Babylonian grave.

Verse 27, to the land to which they long to return, they will not return, he says.

Speaking of the line of Kaniah, the line of David.

They're not coming back.

Is this man, Coniah, despised?

A broken pot, a vessel no one cares for?

And God is asking himself now a rhetorical question.

Imagine being Kaniah and reading this.

Is this king despised and no one cares for him?

That's right, God says.

Amen.

Why are he and his children hurled and cast into a land that they don't even know?

Now God speaks to the land.

The Israelites won't listen to God.

So now God is going to talk to the land of Israel.

Oh, land, land, land.

Hear the word of Yahweh.

I love it when God preaches to the land.

Thus says Yahweh, write this man down as childless, a man who shall not secede in his days.

None of his offspring shall secede in sitting on the throne of David and ruling again in Judah.

Do you catch this promise?

The line of David is done, God says.

It ends with Kaniah.

He will not have children.

He will be buried in a Babylonian grave.

He will be childless, and none of his family is coming back.

That's the promise.

Write it down, God says.

Remember it.

They will never sit on the throne of David or rule again in Judah.

Well, ouch.

Chapter 23, if you're familiar with Jeremiah 23, says that there will nevertheless be a righteous branch.

Look at chapter 23, verse 5, from David, a righteous branch who will reign as king and deal wisely and execute justice and righteousness in the land, and in his days Judah will be saved.

So you think, how can both of these things be?

This is the great tension here with the deportation of Babylon.

God says there will be no more kings from the line of David.

But the Savior will still come from his line and still be king.

How can that be?

How can they both be true?

You can flip back to Matthew chapter 1.

Matthew 1 · chapter mention

This is what the genealogy answers in Matthew 1.

It answers this riddle that's been hanging over the Old Testament.

How can God end the line of David with Koniah and yet still insist that the Savior will come from that line?

And you see this hinted at in verse 11, Jeconiah and his brothers.

Notice that phrase, his brothers.

That's a phrase that was only used earlier with Judah, referencing that Israel is bigger than this one person, yet the promise will go through the one person.

And Judah, by the way, has a very basically ends up having to adopt his own grandson into the line.

And that is, I think, what's happening in verse 12 as well.

After the deportation of Babylon, Jechaniah, remember Jeconiah's his real name, Koniah, was Jeremiah chopping it in half.

Jeconiah was the father of Sheeltiel.

Sheeltiel, the father of Zerubbabel.

How could Jeconiah be the father of anyone if he was childless?

Well, in the same way that Judah's sons were all killed, and yet he was able to pass down the line.

There was a son adopted into the line.

That's the way that phrase was used elsewhere in his brothers.

You see it used here again.

You go to 2 Chronicles and you see, lo and behold, that at the end of his life, Jeconiah humbled himself.

He was on the display in King Nebuchadnezzar's dining room.

He was like a trophy king.

Nebuchadnezzar took him and put him on display in his dining room.

If you were visiting Nebuchadnezzar and you wanted to see how powerful he was, he would show off the kings he captured.

Hey, look, here's the last king I captured, King Koniah from the Israelites.

Ha ha ha.

Give him food, he'll do a trick for you, kind of thing.

That's how King Kaniah lived out his days.

At the end of his life, he humbles himself and repents, it seems, and God allows him to adopt a child, Sheelatel.

Probably one of his relatives, adopted into the family, and now the promise will go down through him.

From Sheeltiel, he'll father Zerubel.

So Sheeltiel is the real biological father of Zerubbabel, and he's the adopted son of Jeconiah.

How strange it is in God's promise that he does this.

And a verse that describes this, I'll put it on the screen for you, Haggai chapter 2.

Haggai 2 · chapter mention

This is after the exile.

The Israelites come back to the land, they start building the temple.

Sixteen years go by and they are struggling, they restart their work.

Zerubbabel comes and injects some leadership into them and gets the temple going.

And look what Haggai says about it.

Haggai 2, verse 23.

Haggai 2:23

On that day, declares Yahweh of hosts, I will take you, O Zerubabel, my servant, the son of Sheeltiel.

So notice it's connecting Zerubbabel to Shiltiel, declares Yahweh, and I will make you like a signet ring.

Have you seen that phrase before?

This is what Haggai is saying.

God is undoing the curse.

He found the ring.

God went hunting for the ring in Babylon and found it in a man named Sheeltiel, who had a son named Zerubel, and the ring is back on God's finger.

The promise is back in the land in the person of Zerubbabel.

And that's how God resolves this tension.

Zerubbabel becomes the one who inherits.

It.

And Zerul then gives way back in Matthew chapter 1 to a long line of anonymous people.

Matthew 1 · chapter mention

You don't know any of them from verse 13 down to Joseph.

We don't know anything about any of them because they're not kings.

None of them are kings.

God keeps the curse that none of them will be king again, but he gets around the curse by adopting somebody else into the line.

So the hope is passed down, even though the crown is not.

None of these people will wear the crown.

God saves the crown to give it to Christ, not to these people.

And through all of that, he leads to Joseph, it says in verse 16, the husband of Mary.

Now we'll look at the virgin birth into the next few weeks, but from this last portion of the genealogy, I want to just take a couple observations away for you.

I want to give you a little outline.

The promise of Christmas runs through, and it runs through these four declarations in here, these four really truths that we take out of this last part of the genealogy.

First is that the promise of Christmas runs through adoption.

It runs through adoption.

That God bypasses the curse of Jekoniah by allowing him to adopt a son.

So Jechaniah goes to his grave childless, but he adopts somebody in, and the promise is passed down through adoption.

We have a grid for this.

We understand that even as Americans, if you adopt a child, that child becomes yours legally.

That child can inherit your possessions.

He is part legally, as far as the law is concerned, there's no difference between an adopted child and a biological child.

Zero difference.

And yet that adopted child still has his own biological parents.

He still has his own line.

This, by the way, I think is why Luke's genealogy is different than Matthew's.

Luke's genealogy traces it through the biological line of Joseph, I think, and it goes up to the ancestors, and it does not, this is why it divides at Sheeltiel.

It follows Sheeltiel's actual biological parents.

You get those in Luke.

But because of his adoption, it goes to the line of David in Matthew's gospel.

So Matthew's gospel establishes Jesus' legal right to be king, and Luke's gospel establishes his biological right.

Both of them go back to David, by the way.

In Luke's gospel, the Savior descends from David's son Nathan.

In Matthew's gospel, the Savior descends from David's son Solomon.

Solomon was the rightful king.

But Sheeltiel's parents went to Nathan.

Crazy in God's providence.

I've been thinking about this for weeks now, so this is like crystal clear in my mind, and I hope I'm trying to explain it clearly enough to you.

I'm excited about this, and so I want you to be excited about this as a genealogy, so I want you to appreciate how cool this is, that God gives his people a curse that because of their sin, their hope is cut off.

And that God, through adoption, provides a way around that curse.

And yet through your own adoption to Jesus Christ, God finds a way around that curse.

He brings you into his family.

This shouldn't be surprising when you see this in the gospel because it's in the very line of Christ.

You see all of these wonderful tensions in the gospel.

How can Jesus be God and man?

How can he be crucified and resurrected?

How can he be from Koniah, who's childless, and yet be the king?

And you find all of them come together through this wonderful promise of adoption.

Jesus has the legal right to be king, is the biological right to be king, and they're both established through the glories of adoption.

Secondly, you see God's meticulous sovereignty, that the promise of Christmas comes through God's meticulous sovereignty.

What I mean by that is that God is not a big picture God.

God is not detached keeping a watch of the world from a distance.

You know, like when major events come up, he like interjects himself in history there.

No, God is meticulously sovereign over the details of this world.

Here's a long line of anonymous people.

The line doesn't run out.

The line does not run out.

This is a world with 50% infant mortality where it's so difficult to pass along the family line.

Family lines end all the time.

There's leverate marriages where if your one of your sons dies, you or one of your daughter-in-law dies, you make one of your other sons marry the one that he was married to, very common in the Israelite culture.

So many things can go wrong.

So many ways the line could end.

And yet God keeps the promise going through all of it.

He is meticulously sovereign.

And I hope you see that in your own life too.

This is not just true of Jesus' genealogy.

This is true of you.

God chose your parents for you.

You did not choose your parents.

You were not consulted.

God chose what ethnicity you would be and didn't even ask you.

He chose what country you would be born in, what language you would speak.

He was sovereign over all of these details that lead to you right at this very moment.

He is meticulously sovereign.

You see this over.

You know, there was one point where the line of Christ got down to one person, a baby.

Wicked Queen Ethalia, 2 Kings, tried to wipe out the entire line of David, killed everybody, overlooked one baby.

And God in his meticulous sovereignty protected that one baby to keep the line of Christ alive.

Understand that that same meticulous care is seen in your life.

Thirdly, Christmas comes to us through the promise that God uses the weak things of the world to shame the strong.

That was the promise in the Ezekiel curse.

Ezekiel says, You're not going to have any more kings.

Take off that turban, put away the crown.

Do you remember the next verse?

Because God is going to use the weak things to humble the strong.

This is the promise that gets picked up in the New Testament.

Listen, God chooses David, not his handsome older brothers.

God chooses David, not Saul, who looked like a king.

God chooses Jacob and not Esau.

God loves to choose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.

People are so exalted in their own mind, they think they're so wise.

And God uses barely literate fishermen to just expose the folly of the so-called wisdom of the world.

This is the typical way God has always worked.

He doesn't choose a strong nation and send the Savior there.

He picks Abram, who doesn't even have a nation and makes one out of him.

God uses the weak things of the world to shame the strong.

Paul picks this up in 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians both and says, as the gospel goes into the world, it goes with that fuel running the engine.

That God uses the weak things of the world to humiliate the strong.

I once asked my daughter, I was going to do family tree research to find some kind of sermon illustration for my own family tree, and then like Ancestry.com,$75 or something?

Not worth it.

I'll tell you that right now.

So instead I asked my daughters this question What if we did family tree research and we found out there was like some traitor in our family line, someone that was supposed to fight for our country but didn't, was a traitor to our country.

How would that make you feel?

And Madison says, actually, I think that'd be kind of cool.

Like, okay, why?

And she said, because then we would know that at least we had someone interesting in our ancestry.

All right.

Great.

But I appreciate the sentiment behind that.

Doesn't matter if they're a traitor or a hero, we had somebody interesting.

What you have in this line of people here is a bunch of nobody that we know about.

None of them did anything famous.

None of them would be known were it not for this genealogy.

The fourth promise of Christmas.

The discipline.

The Christmas comes through discipline, which leads to grace.

God uses discipline of his people to bring about the promise of the gospel.

Judah was so exalted, and God rips them out of the land, hurls them to Babylon, purges them, and then what happens to Israel?

I mean, you understand, if Jesus would have come and actually reigned on the throne of David over Israel from Jerusalem, he would have been a political figure.

He would have been engaged in the governance of Israel back then.

It would have been very difficult for the gospel to go to the nations.

He would have been setting the effective taxation rate of Israelites.

That's what he would have been doing.

But God uses Judah's own sin to strip that away so that when Jesus comes, he comes lowly and humble, like his immediate ancestors.

He comes to preach the gospel.

And in the meantime, from Babylon until the birth of Christ, think about what happened in Israel.

Conquered by the Babylonians and destroyed.

Later by the Persians and resettled.

Later by Alexander the Great, who gave some infrastructure to it and put money in there.

Later by the Seleucids, who turned it into a place to worship idols and violated the temple and put all kinds of idols in there.

Then it became a place of blood, bloody revolts, the Maccabean revolt through that time, finally conquered by the Romans.

Romans built a system of roads and finance and money and a system to send letters and mail and governance and unified language.

It brings basically the known world together through that.

Had Jesus come a hundred years earlier, the news of the gospel could not have reached India, could not have reached Africa, could not have reached through Europe.

But the fact that he came when he was born, all of those things were in place that the gospel.

I mean, some of the disciples made it to those places.

The gospel spreads so quickly.

It's hard for us to appreciate, because we live in a world with, you know, A350 airplanes where you can be in India in a few, you know, in a day from right now if you wanted to.

But so providential back then that God designed the world in such a way that through his discipline of Judah, the gospel brings grace to the nations.

You understand about this?

That in 70 AD, everything was lost in Israel again, again.

The temple that Herod was had built was destroyed.

About 40 years after the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, the temple was destroyed.

The Jews were sent into exile again by Emperor Titus, Dekletian, sent them into exile again.

They lose their ancestry, they lose their family trees, they lose their genealogical records.

There is no other savior waiting to come to Israel.

This is Paul's point in Hebrews.

If you reject Jesus Christ as a savior, what do you think is going to happen?

Who's coming next?

There's no savior behind door number two.

There will never be another person who can demonstrate they're from the line of David ever again.

As far as the possibilities of a savior, it has run its course.

Jesus was the one and only person who could be the savior.

His genealogy establishes that.

Nobody else has this family tree.

Nobody else is from the line of David.

Nobody.

Sometimes we often think that there's, you know, some kind of Orthodox Jews are waiting for a Savior to come back.

I mean, some of them might be, most of them are not.

Most Orthodox Jews view Israel as the fulfillment of these prophecies.

They're not waiting for a person, but those that are are going to have a very difficult time because there is no other person who can claim to be from the tribe of Judah.

The Jews have lost those records.

Now the tribal identities in Israel today are about the land.

It's about the part of the country they're in.

It's not based on genealogy.

The point is if you reject Christ as the Savior, then you reject the promise to David.

You reject it.

If you reject Christ as a savior, you reject the promise to Abraham.

You reject it.

He is the only Savior that fulfills the promises.

And that's just in the genealogy.

You can get to the rest of the gospel.

Does anybody else come to bear the penalty for sin?

I mean, I mentioned all of the tensions in the Old Testament.

Can anybody else fulfill one of them, much less all of them?

How the Old Testament says the Savior will be truly God and will be truly man.

He says in Isaiah, I will not share my glory with another, Yahweh says.

I will do it.

Yahweh will be the Savior.

It also says he'll be born to a virgin.

How can he be a person and God?

It's a mystery until you meet Jesus Christ.

The Old Testament says the line will end with Koniah, and yet there will be a righteous branch of David that blooms in the wilderness.

How can that be?

They contradict each other until you meet Jesus Christ.

The Old Testament says the Savior will be from Bethlehem.

And he'll be from Nazareth.

They're nowhere near each other.

How can that be until you meet Jesus Christ?

Another reason the genealogy is so important.

I mean, Joseph was from the tribe of Bethlehem, uh from the house of Bethlehem, the tribe of Judah.

He had no family there.

Joseph goes to Bethlehem for the census.

Nobody knows him there.

He has no place to live.

Those are his people, and they don't know him.

He's such a nobody.

He's from Nazareth.

Nazareth is nowhere.

That's how these are brought together.

Isaiah says that the Savior will be crushed by God, hung on a tree, crucified for our sin, dead and buried, Isaiah says.

And then it also says of his days there will be no end.

Of his offspring there will be no end.

It's the opposite of the curse in Kaniah.

It says the Savior, his descendants will be numerous and will live forever.

Well, how can he be dead and buried and then have children that live forever because he lives forever?

How can they both be true?

And then you meet Jesus Christ.

Ah.

He is the only savior.

Nobody else.

There are no other candidates.

Nobody else comes close.

Let me close with two different stories to make this point.

The first, 1956, a pair of missionaries from New Zealand went to Papua New Guinea to reach a tribe called the Benimerians.

The Binemerians were down to 106 people.

That was it.

They used to be a prosperous tribe.

Their numbers had declined to 106.

Missions organizations were concerned that they would die out before they received the gospel, and their goal was to get every tribe the gospel before they lost any of them.

And so the Benemarians, despite their small number, became a focus of missionary work.

The first to go, there were medical missionaries to figure out why they were dying.

Turns out one of them wrote that they were practicing, and I'm quoting from a book here on this, quote, rudimentary bush birth control, because raising children was hard work, and the women didn't want to put the effort into it.

And I'm going to keep reading this exact quote here.

They instead wanted to spend time hunting with their husbands without the burden of childminding.

They wanted to spend time hunting, and you go on to read about it.

They wanted to do something significant with their lives, like hunting and working in the gardens, are the two examples these missionaries give, not raising children, which they call child minding.

I love it.

These missionaries tried to persuade, and by the way, that is not just a Papua New Guinea attitude.

That is an endemic attitude of the world.

The children are a distraction from doing something really important with your life.

Like do something important, not have kids.

That's the way the world teaches.

Praise God, the Bible teaches an alternative to that, which is to prize children and the joy they bring in the world.

Well, these missionaries tried to convince the ladies of that and to no avail.

So then these missionaries give away these language teachers, Des and Jenny Oatridge from New Zealand.

They begin learning the Benimerian language and translating the book of Matthew.

They don't like the genealogy at the beginning, it would be easy to translate, but they want to open with a bang the Gospel of Matthew, and so they skip the first 17 verses and begin in verse 18 with their translation.

They finish the entire book and read it to the Benimerians who are unimpressed and indifferent to it.

So they decide they're going to go to a tribe that wants to hear the message where there will be fruit.

Before they go, their missions organization says you can't leave until you have actually translated the whole book of Matthew.

So they go back and do the first 17 verses.

They call the tribe back together, all 106 of them, and read to them the first 17 verses of the book of Matthew, expecting to be met with the same indifference as before.

Instead, they were met with stunned silence, followed by mass conversions.

Why?

Well, one elder who wrote about this, an elder from the tribe who wanted to write about this later, said, quote, This is what we wanted to know.

The difference between Jesus being a white man's myth and Jesus being who he says he is comes down to knowing where he's from.

No imposter can fake a family tree.

Only a truth teller knows his ancestors.

What a contrast with this story.

From 1975, Delhi, India.

A lady shows up at a train station, Queen Williot, she declares herself to be, and announces that she is the queen of the Kingdom of Oud.

Now, Americans are unlikely to be familiar with the Kingdom of Oud, but it was a massive Muslim kingdom inside of India in 1854 or whatever, when the British conquered India and took it under their control.

The Kingdom of Oud was given some of their independence when the British finally left India for the partition.

They put all of the Muslims in modern day Pakistan leaving India for the Hindus.

Well, the Kingdom of Oud was in modern day India, so they lost their kingdom.

They were forced to either move to Pakistan, most of them immigrated to London, or they just scattered around the world, and the kingdom of Oud came to a screeching halt.

Lots of bloody wars and just sad tales of tragedy from that time period, by the way.

Until 1974, I think actually 1975, this queen, Williat, shows up at the train station in Delhi with a whole entourage, including some elephants and Nepalese slaves and great Dane hunting dogs and two children, who she introduces as Prince Aliraza and Princess Sakina.

Nobody had seen these people in ever before, and they arrive at the Delhi train station.

She declares herself to be the queen of the kingdom about, and she will not leave until she gets her kingdom and particularly a castle back.

That's quite the demands, huh?

It's all fun and games until she spends ten years in the Delhi train station.

Ten years camped out there.

Her dogs go hunting and bring her back food.

Here you have Nepalese slaves that go purchase her food.

She apparently has lots of money and makes quite the scene there.

Journalists come and write, there's lots of stories written about this.

The journalists point out that to ask her a question, you had to write it down on stationary, put the stationery on a silver platter.

The Nepalese slaves would walk the silver platter to her, hand it to her, she would look at the note on both sides, give it back to the slave, the slave would then read it, then put the note back on the platform and walk backwards out of the room, and then she would answer the reporter's question.

That for every question.

So that was her.

1985, there's a Muslim uprising in India, and so to make peace there, the Prime Minister of India decides to give the Muslims something they want.

He'll recognize the Queen of Owd and give her a 14th-century hunting castle in the middle of Delhi.

Only Delhi would have a 14th-century castle in the middle of the city abandoned.

But they did, and so the queen moves in there with her two children.

She moves in 1985, never seen again.

Surrounds her new castle with barbed wire, lives there until she dies, I don't know, maybe 10 or 15 years ago to this day.

Her daughter takes over as queen.

She dies a few years later.

Her son takes over as king.

Prince Ali Raza, he died just this year, actually reigning over the Kingdom of Oud in Delhi, India.

After they died, Western reporters go to their house, uncover correspondence, uncover their family identity, and are able to trace out their ancestors, and they were imposters.

The guy, Prince Ali Raza, his real name, he's from London.

His real name was Mickey Butt.

From London.

And this is why they would never divulge their family ancestry.

They didn't want to be found out.

Listen, Jesus was accused of lots of things in his life.

Nobody ever accused him of not being from the line of David.

They accused him of making himself out equal to God.

They accused him of being a usurper and trying to take the throne away from Caesar.

But nobody called into question his identity.

They knew he really was from the line of David, and that forced every Jew to make a decision.

Do you recognize who he is or do you reject him because you will not bow the knee to Christ?

Lord, we're grateful that that saving promise comes to us.

It's not ambiguous.

It's not ambiguous who Christ is.

He validated his identity through his miracles.

He validated his power through forgiving people of sin, through healing lepers and the blind and the mute and raising the dead to life.

And he validated his identity through his own genealogy.

He alone can be the savior.

There are no other saviors.

And the choice now comes to us this morning.

We are here this morning.

We have no excuses.

There's no way to look at this and walk away saying Jesus is not who he said he is.

He is the Lord of truth.

He is Lord of life.

He is the only savior the world knows.

We're thankful for him.

We bow our knees before him this morning in the name of Christ.

Amen.

Thank you for being with us today.

And now a parting word from Pastor Jesse.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, emmanuelbible.church.

If you're not a member of the local church and you live in the Washington, D.C.

area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel.

I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.

But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.

Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.