Matthew 1:1-17

Lord, we are doing this morning and for the probably next couple of years we will be in

the Gospel of Matthew taking breaks periodically but there are 28 chapters and we will spend

our time.

There are some intensely doctrinal chapters and others narrative.

But we are going to begin this morning and really with the section that a lot of people

would just assume skip over that we assume is not that important.

And this is genealogy that you find here in Matthew 1.

Luke also records I think in Luke 3 another genealogy.

And so out of respect for the Word of God I'm going to ask if you would stand as we read

the text.

I did not put this on the wall behind me, I just put verse 1.

Matthew writes the book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son

of Abraham.

Abraham begat Isaac and Isaac begat Jacob, Jacob begat Judah and his brothers, Judah

begat Pharez and Sarah of Tamar, and Pharez begat Ezra and Ezra begat Aram and Aram begat

Amenadab and Amenadab begat Nesson and Nesson begat Sammon and Sammon begat Boaz of Rahab

and Boaz begat Obed of Ruth and Obed begat Jesse.

Jesse begat David the king and David the king begat Solomon of her who had been the wife

of Uriah and Solomon begat Rehoboam and Rehoboam begat Abia and Abia begat Asa.

Asa begat Jehoshaphat and Jehoshaphat begat Joram and Joram begat Uzziah and Uzziah

begat Jotham and Jotham begat Achaz and Achaz begat Ezekias and Ezekias got Manasseh

and Manasseh begat Ammon and Ammon begat Josiah and Josiah begat Jeconiah and his brother

about the time they were carried away to Babylon.

And after they were brought to Babylon, Jeconiah begat Silatio and Silatio begat Zerubbabel,

Zerubbabel begat Abiod and Abiod begat Eliakim, Eliakim begat Esor, Esor begat Sadak

and Sadak begat Akeem and Akeem begat Eliud, Eliud begat Eliezer, Eliezer begat Mathan,

Mathan begat Jacob and Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary of whom was born Jesus

who is called Christ.

Saw the generations from Abraham to David are 14 generations.

From David into the carrying away into Babylon are 14 generations.

And from the carrying away into Babylon into Christ are 14 generations.

Let's pray.

Father, help us this morning to see your Son.

This is the gospel, the good news of Christ.

Lord, the one you have sent not to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through

him.

Oh, Father, open our hearts this morning by your spirit we pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

You may be seated.

For me personally, one of the hardest things I find to do in life is to wait.

I've said this the 20 years I've been at Mamrie, this is no surprise.

I've told you all I am by nature an impatient person.

I wish I weren't, but I am.

I will go if I'm at Chick-fil-A, I will look for the shortest line and try to nudge my

way in to make sure I get there faster.

If I'm at a self-checkout line, I'm going to make sure that I'm not going to get behind

the person who I think would be the slowest.

I'm wired that way.

It's not something I like.

It's something I battle against.

But I'm just impatient and that is a character flaw.

Waiting the Lord is always working on me in that area.

And because of that, really one of the verses that the Lord has brought to my attention

time and time again, it's one of the verses the Lord has used most often in my life as

well.

It's Psalm 27 verse 14 where David says, wait on the Lord.

Psalms 27:14

Be of good courage and he shall strengthen your heart.

Wait, I say, on the Lord.

But it's hard to wait.

I mean, and I was thinking about this, I wonder why do we find it so hard to wait?

It's unpleasant.

But it's unpleasant many times because it's uncertain.

While you're waiting, you are left wondering, is the desired outcome, is what I'm hoping

for, is this ever going to happen?

I mean, sometimes you're left waiting for test results and some of you have been there.

And it seems like it's just forever.

You're just waiting for that test result.

What is it going to reveal?

Other times you're waiting for relationships.

You may be single and you're like, am I ever going to get married?

You're waiting for children.

There's conflict and you just want that conflict to pass.

So in each of those scenarios, we are left to wonder, is what I'm hoping for, is it

going to come?

Is that test going to reveal anything that I'd rather not know?

Will I ever be married?

Will we ever have children?

Is this relationship that is fractured, is it ever going to be restored and be like it

was?

I mean, will we ever have peace?

And when we open the Gospel of Matthew, we find what was happening in Israel was exactly

the same thing.

Israel as a nation had been waiting.

I mean, waiting for a very, very long time.

They had been in the dark, if you will, for about 400 years.

Four centuries of silence from heaven.

I mean, during that time, there were no prophetic visions.

None.

No prophet on the scene.

There was no new word from the Lord.

You didn't have anyone coming and proclaiming afresh, thus saith the Lord.

It wasn't there.

So people were left to wonder, as you and I would have been, I mean, had God forgotten

his people.

We've heard the stories of yesteryear.

We've heard how God did valiant things, but had he abandoned us?

I mean, how much longer are we going to be forced to wait?

We've been waiting 400 years.

Something ought to be taking place.

And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, you have this man dressed crazy.

John the Baptist is his name.

He arrives on the scene and he preaches this fiery message of repentance, not to the outside

fighters, but to Israel.

And he's announcing something.

He says, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

The king is about to arrive and you need to get ready.

And Matthew, in this gospel, is going to chronicle all of that.

Now if we were to summarize the entire Old Testament, many ways you could do so, but

the Old Testament prophesies of a coming great king who was going to crush the head of the

serpent and bring in God's eternal kingdom.

Now there are four gospels.

And each of these gospels essentially tells the same story, but they do so from a different

perspective, a different vantage point, if you will.

So you're chronicling the same story, but giving emphasis to different parts.

So when we see Matthew, the first gospel, he is presenting Jesus as the great king.

But if you read through Mark, you get a different feeling altogether.

He shows Jesus to be the suffering servant.

You read Luke, Jesus is the son of man.

And then you come to that kind of outlier gospel of John, and Jesus is there, the divine

son of God.

But we have Matthew here, and it's the gospel of the kingdom, the gospel of the king.

But his kingdom and his gospel is presented, Matthew's gospel is presented with a very

Jewish flavor, if you will.

It's really, it has a lot of Jewish customs and allusions.

In fact, it's written primarily to a Jewish audience.

And he's doing so because he wants to show Israel that this man, Jesus, truly is the

Christ.

Now why do I say that it was written primarily to a Jewish audience?

There's many reasons.

First of all, there are several Aramaic terms, which is what the Jews would have spoken

at that time.

And Matthew does not translate the Aramaic terms.

He just assumes that his readers will know what they mean, because he's assuming they're

Jews.

Matthew refers to Jewish customs and practices, but he never stops to explain them.

But again, he takes for granted, you know what these are, because they're Jews.

He starts the genealogy with Abraham.

If you were writing to a Gentile audience, Abraham does not show any particular relevance

to Gentiles.

He refers to Jesus often as the son of David.

Now again, that would be a particular interest to Jewish readers, but Gentile readers would

probably not really understand, Gentile at that time, who is David and who is the son

of David.

Matthew also, instead of using the term kingdom of God, he uses this phrase, kingdom of heaven.

Many quotations, around 60 in the Old Testament are found in Matthew, and at least 75 Old

Testament allusions.

In fact, I would suggest to you, it is impossible to understand Matthew unless you have some

basic understanding of the Old Testament.

You're not going to understand it.

He just kind of picks it up.

Now as we're starting the series, it's important we understand a little bit of the background

so we'll get into the content.

When was Matthew written?

Is it an early book?

Is it a late book?

Well, it happens to be very early.

Almost all scholars mention an early date, possibly as early as 50 AD.

If we understand Jesus was crucified and rose again in 33, so just 15, 17 years later.

So we don't know if it's 50, but there's no reason to believe it would be after 70 AD.

Now why would we say it has to be somewhere between 50 and 70?

Matthew writing to Jews never mentions the destruction of the temple.

The temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD.

And by the way, that would have been of monumental importance to the Jews.

So almost everyone believes it was written prior to that.

So it's a very early book.

Well, who wrote it?

Now it says gospel Matthew, right?

If you're in the New Testament, you're at the top of the page, we'll say Matthew across

there.

Well, it's Matthew, but who's Matthew?

Do you know a man named Levi?

Well, this is Matthew.

Matthew was also Levi.

Well, who was Levi?

Oh yeah, he was a tax collector.

Now again, today to be a tax collector, we don't particularly love the IRS, but that

doesn't hold any significance for us.

But the fact that a tax collector was called to be a disciple of Christ was a big deal.

It was all of grace.

Why?

Because if you understand, the tax collectors were among the most hated people in Israel.

They were looked down upon.

Because why?

At that time, Israel was under Roman occupation.

Romans ruled them.

And so with the Roman rule came Roman taxes.

So you had these Jewish men like Levi, who would tax his fellow Jews and give that money

to Rome.

So they just hated them.

But also most of these tax collectors were crooks.

And they would line their own pockets as well.

See, the Romans had two taxes for Israel.

You had a toll tax, kind of like an income tax.

And then you also had a ground tax, kind of like our property tax.

So this is interesting.

I did not know this until studying this custom.

At public auctions, high ranking Roman officials or even Roman senators would bid and they would

buy from Rome, the central government, the right to collect taxes from certain regions

like Israel, occupied territories.

Now why would Roman senators want to be able to collect the tax from places like Israel?

Because they knew they could get rich in the process.

So what happens, these Roman senators would contract with Rome and they had to pay them

a certain amount of money that came from Israel that whatever they took in excess, they would

keep.

So you had these corrupt officials, these corrupt Roman senators, they would hire local

tax collectors, Levi or Matthew.

And he essentially did the same thing.

See, these tax collectors had to pay the Roman senators who had to pay Rome.

But these local collectors then would charge more than what was actually due and they would

pocket the extra as well.

They were getting rich off the back of God's people.

And people knew it.

So the fellow Jews looked at men like Levi as some of the worst people, just the scourge

of society.

No one liked them.

They were extortioners and they were traitors to their own people, working for that evil

room.

And so they viewed them on the same plane as prostitutes.

You see that in Matthew 21, Jesus saying to the religious leaders, assuredly, I say to

you, this gives you more insight here, tax collectors and prostitutes will enter the

kingdom of God before you do.

And he's talking to religious leaders.

So Matthew, or Levi, the tax collector, he was called, called by our Lord to be one of

his disciples.

Can you imagine?

I mean, this is grace.

I mean, he's hated.

And this famed, popular rabbi says, come, follow me.

So Matthew then, Levi, throws a big party where he invited all his friends.

And we read about that in Luke chapter five.

After these things, he, that is Jesus, went out and he saw a tax collector named Levi

sitting at the tax office.

And he said to him, follow me.

So he left all, rose up and followed him.

Levi, I'm sure if we're reading between the lines, I was such a great joy.

Levi gave him, that is Jesus, a great feast, a big party in his own house.

And there were a great number, well, who was the guest list?

A big number of tax collectors and others.

Well, the other gospel fills in the blank, tax collectors and notorious sinners.

Why?

That's something that people Levi could associate with.

No respectable member of society was going to be with him.

So you have this big party and it's full of notorious sinners and they sat down with

Jesus.

Now look at verse 30.

And the scribes and Pharisees complained, of course they did, against Jesus and his disciples

saying why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?

I mean, don't you know what these people are like?

And notice the answer of our Lord.

Jesus answered and said to them, basically those who are well, now you're healthy, you

don't need the doctor.

Who needs the doctor?

Those who are sick.

He's basically saying you don't think you have need of me.

These people understand their need.

I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners repentance.

Now that last part looks a little ambiguous.

So does that mean there are righteous people who don't need to be called?

He's like those people who think they're righteous are not going to be called.

There isn't anyone righteous.

And Levi, Matthew and his friends all understand that.

Now Matthew experienced great grace.

And when you do so, he so badly wanted others to experience the same grace, which is why

he threw a big party to invite his friends to meet Jesus because he assumed Jesus is

one of them going to talk to him, if you will.

Now here's an unlikely convert.

That's the author here.

And it's an unlikely convert who's been called by Christ.

Jesus our Lord calls a deeply sinful outcast to be one of his disciples.

And it gives us a hint about something.

The nature of his kingdom is not going to be like what we thought.

The nature of his kingdom is going to be really different than what we might expect.

So you have Matthew, he goes from being one of the most hated men in all of Israel to

being one of the 12 disciples who would later lay the foundation for the church of the Lord

Jesus Christ.

I mean, isn't that grace?

I mean, you have a notorious sinner, crook, who's going to come and help lay the foundation

of Christ's church.

Now it is interesting to me that Matthew's genealogy includes some names of people that

we might be surprised to find their name in Jesus' genealogy.

There are some outcasts even here in the name list.

First of all, Matthew includes women.

Luke doesn't include any of them.

Again, women were not really viewed highly at that time.

But you have not just any women, he includes four women.

And not just any four women, four non-Jewish women, four Gentiles.

You have Tamar, you have Rahab, you have Ruth, and you have Bathsheba.

So let's talk for a moment.

Tamar, we know she's a Canaanite.

She was a Canaanite, and I don't have time to really get into her story, but she pretended

to be a prostitute to trick her father-in-law, and she actually had an incestuous relationship

with her father-in-law who was Judah.

You know the lion from the tribe of Judah?

That's that guy.

Rahab, you know her.

She's Rahab the harlot.

She is a Canaanite prostitute.

Several times when you read her name in scriptures, several times it will say, Rahab the harlot.

This is in the ancestry of Christ.

You have Ruth.

Ruth was a Moabite.

She like the first two, she's an outcast.

She's an outsider.

She's a Gentile.

This is not a Jewish lady.

And then we, Matthew doesn't even mention her name.

He just simply says the wife of Uriah the Hittite.

Well, he's talking about Bathsheba there.

Bathsheba, only mentioned as the wife of Uriah, was the one with whom King David committed

adultery.

Now, why do we say that she was an outsider?

Because Uriah was a Hittite, presumably, so also with Bathsheba.

All four women, all four Gentiles, all four outsiders.

The message we get from chapter one, just looking at the ancestry, is there is a foreshadowing

that our Lord is going to welcome sinners and outcasts into his kingdom.

That's really good news for us today, because none of us would have been on this list.

So Matthew, he begins his genealogy, and he does so in a very unique way.

Look at verse one.

The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

In the Old Testament, genealogies are consistently named after the earliest person or ancestor

in the lineage.

Why?

Because the Jews considered the earliest ancestor to be the most significant, because everyone

else derived from them.

But notice how Matthew, he begins his genealogy with the Lord Jesus, who is the final descendant

in the lineage.

Well, why would he do that?

Because he's highlighting to show that Jesus is more important than everyone who preceded

him.

That's significant, because there are some pretty impressive names from Jewish history

that make that list.

Abraham, yep.

Isaac, Jacob, you know, they've got the patriarchs there.

Boaz, David, Solomon, and Matthew in just the way he words his genealogy is saying,

Jesus far surpasses them all.

Matthew is writing.

He's wanting to know his Jewish countrymen who's going to read this gospel.

Hey, the one you've been waiting for, that long awaited king and savior of the world,

it is here.

And he is here.

And he offers two pieces of evidence in verse one.

Jesus, our Lord, he's son of David, he's son of Abraham.

So we know all Jews descended from Abraham.

Of course he did.

Abraham is the father, the progenitor of the Jewish people.

But our Lord is also a descendant of David, not all Jews descend from David.

Jesus is a descendant of Israel's greatest king.

Matthew is the gospel of the kingdom.

So from the very first verse, Matthew is wanting to try to prove that our Lord Jesus is Israel's

great king who would come.

Now he mentions Abraham, he mentions David.

It's interesting there because God made a covenant with both of those men, the Abrahamic

covenant and the Davidic covenant.

God promised in a covenant that the entire world is going to be blessed through Abraham

or his seed, his descendant.

And you read about it in Genesis 12.

God speaking, I will bless those who bless you, I will curse him who curses you, that's

Abraham, end in you and later on we know it's the seed, all the families of the earth shall

be blessed.

So a worldwide blessing is going to come through one of the descendants of Abraham.

The whole entire world through the seed of Abraham is going to be blessed.

Well God made a promise to David, 2 Samuel 7.

God speaking, when your days David are fulfilled and you rest or you die, you rest with your

fathers, I will set up your seed after you, another descendant here, who will come from

your body, has to be in the line of David, and I will establish his kingdom.

He shall build a house for my name and I will establish a throne of his kingdom forever.

So you got a coming seed of Abraham and David who's going to bring both of those promises

together in fulfillment.

So the Messiah is going to bring blessing to the entire world through his kingdom.

Martin Luther said that Jesus is the son of David, is the one who will restore the kingdom

to Israel and as the son of Abraham he's going to bring the kingdom of God to the entire

world.

I love that.

This is not going to be simply relevant for those living in Israel or Palestine.

So he's now, Matthew, he's a scholar.

One thing about tax collectors, they had to be very meticulous bookkeepers.

They had to be very detailed and he is here.

So the Jews were meticulous in keeping genealogical records because many of the prophecies concerning

the Messiah were very specific.

For example, 2 Samuel 7, one who will come from your own body, speaking to David.

So the promised Messiah is going to be the seed of Abraham.

It's going to come through Isaac, not Ishmael.

It's going to come through Jacob, not Esau.

He will actually come from the tribe of Judah, not the other 11, and he will be through the

family of David.

So what does that mean?

Imagine you're in first century before the destruction of the temple and some man comes

on the scene and he claims that he's the Messiah.

Well, the very first thing he's going to have to do, he's going to have to prove his pedigree

to lay claim to the title.

You can't just say it, you got to prove it.

However, when the Romans came in and ransacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple in 8070,

almost all of the genealogical records were destroyed at that time.

They no longer exist.

What that means is today there would be no way for a man who is living today to prove

his ancestry from Abraham through David.

He can't give you his tribal ancestry.

That's very important.

Ray Pritchard says this.

He said, we routinely skip genealogies.

If you're reading your Bible, how many of you all kind of skip over Matthew 1 verses

Matthew 1:1–17

1 through 17?

We all kind of, the begats get a little tedious.

So let me go down to verse 17.

He says, so we want to get to the good stuff.

But the Jews of the first century would be quite surprised by our attitude.

To them, the genealogy would have been absolutely essential as a setting for the story of Jesus'

birth.

They, the Jews, routinely paid close attention to questions of genealogy.

For example, whenever land was bought or sold, genealogical records were consulted to ensure

the land belonging to one tribe was not being sold to members of another tribe.

Land had to stay within their tribe.

Thus, destroying the integrity of the ancient tribal boundaries.

You could not just put money down and take the deed.

You had to prove that your ancestors came from that same tribe.

Genealogy was also crucial in determining the priesthood.

Why?

Because all the priests, all the temple workers had to come from the tribe of Levi.

You had to prove that.

Genealogy also helped determine the line of airship to the throne.

That you had some claim in it.

You had to be able to prove that.

So to say that genealogy mattered to the Jews, well, I mean, that's quite an understatement.

So what Matthew is doing in the opening verses of his gospels is critical because he's proving

that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ of God.

So now we can read through these genealogy, and I have this past week, and it was actually

very fun to do.

It was interesting.

Many things you can learn.

First of all, the thing that just stands out is that the Son of God did not come through

a pristine family line.

His line was a mixed bag like ours.

One man said, family trees are a lot like fudge, mostly sweet.

They all have a few nuts in them.

And that's true, right?

I mean, we all have crazy members.

You may be that.

But as we look closely, that's true in Jesus' line too.

As we look closely at this list, God in his wisdom has preserved for us a list of people.

Some are faithful.

Some are deeply flawed, and some have been forgotten.

And God's the only use of them all.

So let's use the very first thing.

God does use the faithful.

Men like Abraham, that's the first one.

Here we have the progenitor of the Jewish people.

He's a man of faith, the father of the faithful even.

Here's a man who when God called him, he leaves his father, he leaves his own country, and

he goes out to seek that city whose builder and maker is God.

By faith, we know that he was willing, even willing to offer up his son, Isaac, as a sacrifice,

as a sign of his obedience to God.

James tells us that he was called, Abraham was called the friend of God.

And that's incredible.

Abraham's a faithful man, right?

You move on to David.

Here's Israel's illustrious king, the great one.

He was also a great songwriter, the sweet psalmist of Israel.

Great military leader, strategic, great political leader.

And we are told in 1 Samuel 13 that David was a man who's after God's own heart.

He's a faithful man.

You may not know some of these.

Asa, down in verse eight.

Who's Asa?

The king.

He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, as did his father David.

He banished the perverted persons from the land.

He removed all the idols his fathers had made.

Asa was a righteous man.

Jehoshaphat, many of us know about him.

There in the Chronicles.

He says, now the Lord was with Jehoshaphat because he walked in the former ways of his

father David.

He did not seek the Baals, those false gods.

But he sought the God of his father.

And he walked in his commandments, not according to the Acts of Israel.

Jehoshaphat was not like the others.

There's a man who's devout and pious and faithful.

You have Hezekiah.

Down in verses nine and ten, he's mentioned.

And he did what was right in the sight of the Lord.

According to all that his father David had done, he trusted in the Lord God of Israel.

So much so that after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah, nor who were

before him.

Hezekiah, again a righteous man.

We know he had some flaws, but he's a faithful man.

Josiah.

Now before him, there was no king like him who turned to the Lord with all his heart,

with all his soul, and with all his might.

That's a great testimony, isn't it?

According to all the law of Moses, here's a man who loved the Lord his God with all

his heart, all his soul, all his might, nor after him did any rise like him.

These men that we just are sampling here, they're faithful and they sought to be obedient

to the Lord.

But if you look carefully, guys, if you look carefully at these men, what you notice that

none of them was perfect, and all of them had their flaws.

Which is why Paul, writing in Romans 3, he said, for we have previously charged both

Jews and Gentiles that they are all under sin.

As it is written, there is none righteous, no not one.

So in this genealogy, we see there are faithful men, but even the faithful men have their

flaws.

And you see, God's going to use the flawed.

So let's go back to Abraham, a man of faith, right?

Yeah, he was.

And on at least two occasions, he was a coward.

On two different occasions, you have this man, Abraham, lying about Sarah, his wife,

saying she was his sister because he was so afraid.

Here's what he did.

He offered his wife Sarah to Pharaoh to be a part of his hara.

Go in and sleep with her, Pharaoh.

It's not my wife, it's my sister.

That's what he said.

And by the way, he did essentially the same thing again in Genesis 20 when King Abimelech

saw her.

Sarah must have been a striking beauty.

And Abraham's like, oh, she's not my wife, she's my sister.

Here, marry her.

Take her as your wife.

Now, of course, God wouldn't let Abimelech touch her.

And then Abimelech's mad at Abraham.

But out of fear, you have this man of faith, Abraham, who is willing to give his wife to

other men to be their wife, and they would just leave him alone.

Can you imagine?

Poor Sarah.

So Abraham, he's not always a man of great faith.

David, yes, he's a sweet psalmist.

He could write like no other.

He's the great king of Israel.

He's a great political leader, and he's an adulterer, and he's a murderer.

He took Bathsheba, that lady we mentioned earlier, in lust.

He saw her bathing.

He liked what he saw.

He goes, he has a one-night stand with her, and he gets her pregnant.

Finds out she's pregnant.

He's trying to cover it up, and he's trying to get Uriah to go home and sleep with his

wife so that Lisa Uriah thinks it's his baby.

Uriah is such a devout soldier, he's like, he didn't even go down to his house.

So David said, I have no choice, kill the man.

Killed him, murdered him.

That's David.

Then you have Judah.

Remember the lion of the tribe of Judah is the Messiah.

The Judah is going to be the tribe that brings in the Messiah, but to make a long story short,

Judah, he thought he was going in to visit a prostitute who had veiled herself.

That's what he thought.

He's going to go in and visit a prostitute.

This lady who was veiled actually turned out to be his daughter-in-law who was tricking

him and Tamar.

And in the process, Judah gets Tamar pregnant, and she has birth, she gets birth to twins,

Perez and Sarah.

Our Lord, the Lord Jesus came through the line of the fruit of this incestuous relationship.

Christ was a descendant of Perez.

What's the message?

Friends, God uses failures and flawed people.

What other people are there?

Go on.

Manasseh.

Manasseh is a king.

And it says, Manasseh seduced them, that is the nation, to do more evil than the nations

whom the Lord had destroyed before the children of Israel.

Manasseh was like making Israel to be more wicked than even the pagan neighbors around

him.

He's the most wicked king in Judah's history.

He sacrificed his own son to the pagan god Molech as a sacrifice.

He led his countrymen into gross idolatry.

He would bow down to sun and stars and moon and worship them.

And if you tried to disagree with this Manasseh, he had you killed.

And we look at this and we're saying, thankfully, that's not the end of the story.

This is how merciful God is.

God judged this man, and he humbled himself.

Therefore, the Lord brought upon them the captains of the army of the king of Assyria,

who took Manasseh with hooks, bound him with bronze fetters, carried him off to Babylon.

Now when Manasseh, he was in affliction, notice what he did.

He implored the Lord his God and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers and

prayed to him.

And he received his entreaty, God did, heard his supplication, and God brought him back

to Jerusalem into his kingdom.

Then Manasseh knew that the Lord was God.

That's mercy.

You're kidding me.

This man is a gross idolater, leads the nation into paganism, sacrificed his own son, killed

righteous people, and he humbles himself and God receives him?

Yeah.

Listen, life in this kingdom is going to be radically different than life in another kingdom.

That's what he's, Matthew's starting to show that.

All these men have flaws, and many of them end up as failures.

So you see this, it's a sorted list, and you wonder how in the world could the Son of God

be born into this wicked line?

Don't lose sight of why Christ came.

Matthew 1, and she will bring forth the Son, and you will call his name Jesus.

Why Jesus, Jehovah saves.

For he will save his people from their sins.

He came for a sinful people.

Paul writes in 1 Timothy, this is a faithful saying, it's worthy of all acceptance.

Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.

That's why he came.

So when we're reading the ancestry of our Lord, it reminds us of the very reason he

came to free us, his sinful people, from the tyranny of sin.

It was our Lord who repeatedly said, I have not come to call the righteous, but rather

sinners to repentance.

That's who I've come for.

So there's faithful men, yeah, but they're flawed.

There's flawed men who end up as failures.

But let's be honest, there's some men that none of us know.

There's forgotten ones, and God uses them.

Look down at verse 14.

I don't think you know them.

You can't.

There's no record of them.

Asor begat Sadok, Sadok begat Akeem, and Akeem begat Eliud.

Do you know any of these men?

No.

We don't have a record of them.

Their deeds, I don't know, were they good or bad?

I don't know.

They're not recorded for us.

But God knows them.

And God used forgotten men like this to be the ancestors in the human line in which his

son would be born.

These aren't celebrities.

These aren't Jewish celebrities.

You don't have a Moses or an Abraham or David or a Solomon.

You have a Akeem, Sadok.

Here you find a record, nondescript, ordinary men, whom our God used to bring his son into

the world.

Are you getting the picture of what Matthew's painting here?

I mean, who's in this family tree?

Yeah, faithful men with their falls, flawed men who became failures, and forgotten men.

But here's the point.

This is the point.

None of them is the hero of the story.

All of them are pointing away from themselves so that the spotlight shines brightly on Christ.

So now what?

What do we do?

One of the favorite and most often used titles that our Lord used for himself was Son of

Man.

Why?

He completely identifies with us in his humanity.

Completely.

Why?

He came born of a woman, so he took on real flesh, he's a real man, so that he might redeem

his sinful, cursed people by bearing the curse for them.

Our Lord Jesus came to save his people from their sin.

The first Adam led the people into sin.

The last Adam came and he will lead his people out of sin.

How do you know if you're one of his people?

That's really, I want to be led by him.

I want out of this tyranny of sin.

How do you know?

John 1-12.

But as many as received him, just received him, to them, those who received him, to them

he gave the right, the authority to become children of God, even to those who believe

in his name.

Isn't that grace?

Isn't that wonderful?

Isn't that what Levi or Matthew experienced?

See his people, friends, are those who see their sin and they see in Jesus, the son of

Abraham, son of David, their rescuer.

That's what it means.

Years ago I read a book by Randy Alcorn and it's called The Grace and Truth Paradox.

It's a great book.

And in it he tells a story about a man named Wesley Allen Dodd.

And I'll close with this.

Wesley Allen Dodd was a man who tortured and murdered three boys in Vancouver, Washington,

15 miles from where Alcorn lived.

Dodd was scheduled to be hanged, it was the first U.S. hanging in three decades, shortly

after midnight, January 4th, 1993.

Randy says, at dinner that evening, both of our daughters, who were 11 and 13 at the

time, prayed earnestly that Dodd would repent and place his faith in Christ Jesus before

he died.

He writes, I agreed with their prayer that only because I knew I should.

He said Dodd's last words were this, quote, I had thought there was no hope and no peace.

I was wrong.

I have found hope and peace in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Gasps and moans erupted from the gallery.

He said the anger was palpable.

How dare someone who has done anything so terrible say that he has found hope and peace

in Jesus?

Did he really think that God would let him into heaven after what he had done?

Shut up and go to hell, you child killer.

You won't get off so easy, you'll see.

The idea that God would offer grace to Dodd was offensive to the people that day.

And yet, didn't Jesus die for Dodd's sins as he did for mine?

No sin is bigger than the Savior.

Grace is literally, he writes, not of this world.

He said I struggled with the idea of God saving Dodd only because, and get this folks, only

because I thought too much of myself and too little of my Lord.

I had imagined that the distance between Dodd and me was the difference between the South

and North Pole.

I was nothing like him.

And yet when you consider God's viewpoint light years away, that distance is negligible.

In my own standing before a holy God apart from Christ, I am Dodd.

He writes, I am Dahmer.

I am Mao.

If God isn't big enough to save Dodd and Dahmer, he's not big enough to save me.

The cost of redemption cannot be overstated.

The wonders of grace cannot be overemphasized.

Christ took the hell he did not deserve.

So you and I can take the heaven we do not deserve.

Friends, this is the King that Matthew is writing about.

This is his story.

This is his gospel.

And we do well to approach it.

As one writer said, to take off our feet, or take off our shoes for we are standing on

holy ground.

My prayer is that you understand who this King is.

He's the Savior of the world.

He's the one who finds fulfillment of all the prophecies.

And he's the one who came to save sinners.

And if you know your sinner friend, the only thing for you to do is you receive him.

You cast yourself upon his mercy.

You run to him.

There's nothing you have to offer.

You find in him your peace.

And everyone who comes that way, Jesus receives.

And he brings them in with authority as children of God.

Let's pray.

Father, thank you.