Radical Ideals Introduced At Christmas (Dec 5) Paul Little

Hello and welcome to the Redemption Church Podcast.

We're a church in Newmarket, Ontario, Canada that exists to glorify God through the fulfillment of the Great Commission and the Spirit of the Great Commandment.

Thanks for joining us today.

Oh God, we are in a privileged place.

As we come together, Lord God, we've been singing of your great worth, of your marvelous glory.

And we have the privilege, Lord God, to come together in these moments to worship the great God of the universe.

The God who has called us as his children.

The God who has called us to follow the Lord Jesus Christ.

The God who has given to us eternal life.

And so, God, we come to you because we have the privilege to know you and to love you and to serve you.

So God, speak to us this day.

Give us ears to hear, give us hearts to receive what you have for us, Lord God, because you are the one who has given us life.

And so, Father, we want to follow you.

So, Lord Jesus, we praise you and we thank you.

And we offer ourselves in these moments of reflection and instruction.

And as we receive your word, speak to us, Lord.

Help us to listen in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Well, good morning, redemption.

Open your Bibles to Matthew chapter one.

I'm going to be reading the first 17 verses of this gospel.

And as you're doing that, I'd like to introduce to you our guest preacher for today and for the next couple of weeks.

He's going to be here with us.

His name is Paul Little.

Paul has been in full-time ministry since 1982.

And he's pastored the Georgetown Alliance Church in Georgetown for the last 32 years.

Now, last year the church left the Alliance because of theological differences, and the church bought the building that they were worshiping in from the denomination, and they joined the GCC.

He is now officially retired, but that doesn't mean he's stopped the ministry.

So he has opportunity, as he does today in the next few weeks, to do pulpit supply and also to serve in any other places where the Lord has opened doors.

Now Paul and his wife Cindy have been married for 38 years, and they have two married daughters and two grandsons who were four and one.

And I was told just before the service that Cindy could not be here because she is being a tiger with one of the grandsons.

So they must be playing safari or something like that.

So we miss her.

Hopefully, she'll be able to join us next week or the week after.

Well, Paul, we welcome you to Redemption Church this morning.

We look forward to hearing what the Lord has placed on your heart for us to learn from.

So Redemption, Matthew chapter one.

Let's read together.

This is 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 Pyrez, and Zira by Tamar, and Piraz 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, and 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 Rahaboam, and Rehoboam the father of Abijah, and Abijah the father of Asaph, and Asaph the father of Jehoshaphat, and Jehoshaphat the father of Joram, and Joram the father of Uzziah, and Uzziah 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 Shiatil, and Shiatel the father of Zerubbabel, and Zerubbabel the father of Abihud, and Abihud the father of Eliakim, and Eliakim the father of Azor, and Azor the father of Zadok, and Zadok the father of Akim, and Akim the father of Elihud, and Elihud the father of Eliazar, and 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 was called 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.

This is the reading of our God.

May He be praised.

Amen.

Thank you for reading that challenging passage of scriptures.

Over the next couple of weeks, what I'd like to do is study how Matthew introduces Jesus, how he presents the incarnation to his readers.

And he begins with the genealogy.

And the question that you might ask yourself is why would he begin with something that is apparently so boring, so lifeless?

So I don't know if when you were reading that passage of scripture, you found it a little bit of a challenge to kind of think like there's so much stuff in the Bible that is so good and so rich and so meaningful.

Why would Matthew begin with something that seems to our ears so almost trivial and inconsequential?

And this morning I'd like to explore that with you.

But before we do that, let's just take a second and pray and ask God's blessing as we study his word together.

Father, I thank you that your word is inspired.

It is inerrant.

It is your revelation to us.

Every word is being written by a prophet, a man who, under the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, was led to write what he wrote.

And so it's important for us, Lord, to study passages of Scripture like this that seem on the surface to be fairly inconsequential, but we know, Lord, because of the nature of Scripture, that it is just packed with meaning.

And I pray this morning that you would reveal it to us.

I pray, Father, that you would minister to our hearts.

And I pray that as we begin to explore why Matthew began his book this way and the significance of this beginning, that it would impact and touch our hearts and change us as a consequence, we pray.

And we ask all of this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So here's the question: why did Matthew begin the way that he did?

Why does he start his book in the way that he did?

And to understand or to sort of answer this question, we've got to begin to think like a first century Jew.

Now, in the first century, your genealogy was essentially your resume.

So back then, where you came from really, really mattered.

Today your resume tells us a lot about you.

It tells us your qualifications, it talks about your competencies, it talks about who you are.

Back then, a genealogy did the same.

Back then, your heritage, your history was incredibly important.

And so Matthew begins with a genealogy.

And in this genealogy, the way he writes it, he begins to hint at certain truths, certain very counter-cultural, very, very counter-cultural, very counter-first century Jewish cultural things that are going to become obvious as the book continues to unfold.

Ideas that we celebrate every Christmas.

Jesus, by his coming, introduced a radical change to our world.

A profoundly radical change on a whole on all sorts of levels.

And Matthew, in his book, begins to hint at these changes.

And then throughout the book, he kind of extrapolates these hints.

He kind of unpacks them for us.

And we're not going to have time to sort of follow all that through.

But what I want to do is identify those values, those ideals, those radical truths that Jesus begins to hint at, that Matthew begins to hint at as a consequence of the incarnation, the life and the ministry of Jesus as it relates to the kingdom of God.

Now he does this in a very, very interesting way.

What Matthew does is he introduces four, at least to my understanding of it, there's four, very stark and very shocking, very glaring anomalies in this particular genealogy.

Back when people spent a lot of time thinking about genealogies, there's a way to do it.

There was sort of, this is how you write a genealogy.

It's kind of like if you go online, here's how you write your resume.

What Matthew does is he deviates from that pattern.

And he does it in four ways that are shocking, that are quite glaring.

If you're a first century Jew.

If you're a first century Jewish reader reading this, and Matthew's gospel was written to Jews very clearly, it was primarily focused on Jewish people.

If you're reading this as a first century Jew, you're going to start reading, and right at the beginning, you're going to go, whoa, whoa, hold on a second.

This is not a typical resume.

There's four of those, and I'd like to show you what those four are, so that we can understand these cultural, counter-cultural ideals that Jesus is introducing to our world through the coming of his kingdom, through his incarnation.

And the first one is that Christ introduced a radical kind of love to our world, a kind of love that the world to this point had not experienced.

So the first anomaly that we see is that there are five women in this genealogy.

Now that would have been shocking to a first century Jewish reader.

Because back then, and this isn't, you know, no offense, ladies, but back then it just didn't matter who your mom was.

What really counted was who your father was and who his father was and who his father was.

It was a deeply patriarchal, stratified society.

So Jewish men would pray every day and they would thank God that they were not born a Gentile or a slave or a woman.

Women didn't have any rights in that culture to speak of.

They had no formal education.

They were considered too unreliable to give evidence in court.

They were not to be spoken to in public.

They were not allowed to participate in the synagogue or in the temple.

And there was even a group of very pious Jewish rabbis who were called the bruised and bleeding rabbis, who, when they saw a woman walking towards them so as not to be defiled by looking at another woman, they would close their eyes and keep walking.

Hence the name bruised and bleeding, because they would walk into stuff, they would fall into holes, they would hurt themselves as a consequence of their piety.

But you see not only women in this, you see foreign women, Gentile women.

You see Ruth, who was a Moabite woman, and you see Rahab, who was a Canaanite woman.

And in that culture, Gentiles were thought of as Loa's dogs.

They had no status.

They were contemptuous in the Jewish mind.

And so Matthew includes in this genealogy Gentile women.

But he also includes, more shockingly, sinful women.

Sinful women.

Rahab was a harlot.

The great-great-grandmother of King David was a prostitute.

Tamar, right at the very beginning of the genealogy, played the harlot with her father-in-law in order to seduce him.

Like the immorality is shocking to a first-century Jewish reader.

And what Matthew is hinting at, and he also makes reference, by the way, and we'll talk about this in a second, to Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite.

So what Matthew is hinting at in his genealogy is that in the coming kingdom, and we see this played out throughout the book of Matthew, in the coming kingdom, Jesus is going to destroy the social, gender, economic, and racial barriers that had stratified first century culture, not only Jewish culture, but Roman culture.

Jesus elevated women.

He fed the hungry.

He loved the disenfranchised.

He cared for the foreigner, the Gentile.

He embraced the leper.

Jesus tore down very intentionally by his ministry, in his example, in his teaching, he tore down the barriers that separate us in order to create a kingdom of people that were fully and completely equal to one another.

And he typified and he exemplified a sort of love that destroyed bigotry and prejudice and all of those things that we define ourselves by and find status in and elevate ourselves above other people.

Sadly, today the world still judges each other, and we judge ourselves based on our wealth, our gender, our color, the color of our skin, the degrees in our wall, the cars we drive, the house we live in, our intelligence, how we look, our physical capacities, the clothes we wear.

We are prone as people to judge ourselves based on a whole pile of things and judge others based on a whole pile of things that have no standing, that have no merit in the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So this morning I was I was told to sit at the front, and I said to, I can't remember who I was, I said to, I said, you know, James would say that I should probably sit at the back.

Right?

The rich people are supposed to sit at the front, the poor people are supposed to sit at the back.

But but the Lord turned that whole thing on its head.

Where is our status?

Where do we find identity?

What makes us special?

How do we judge one another?

It is in our likeness to Jesus Christ.

It's in who we are in the gospel.

You see, Jesus introduced to the world a radically new, different kind of love that says it doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter what you own, it doesn't matter where you're from, it doesn't matter your ethnicity, it doesn't matter the skin color, it doesn't matter.

All that matters is, are you a child of the living God?

Are you born again through the work of the cross?

And if you are, you are a child of God and you are precious and you are valued, and you should be esteemed and you should be loved.

And on that basis, you're enabled to love and esteem others.

You see, Jesus introduced a radical new kind of love.

We call it a gap by love.

The New Testament is just full of illustrations and examples of how we are called to love each other.

And what Matthew is telling us right at the beginning of his book is that the ministry of Jesus, the ministry of the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, is going to be rooted, is going to be founded in this principle that we are called to love one another.

We're called to love one another.

Again, it doesn't matter where we're from, what we look like, our intelligence, how many degrees we have hanging on the wall, the house that we live in, the car that we drive, the size of our bank account, do we have a corner office with a window or not?

None of that matters.

None of that matters to God.

And it should not matter to us.

Christmas should remind us, and we should remind ourselves that while the world defines itself based in all of these categories that no longer have any significance, we should be people who love one another.

We are marked by love.

Now it's not an indiscriminate tolerance.

It dismisses what the scripture says and has no regard for sin.

Christian love is not unbridled tolerance and inclusivity, but it's love based on the fact that we are God's kids.

That we're part of his family, and he loves us.

And as a consequence, we're to love one another.

The second thing, and the second anomaly you see in this passage is scripture.

And I just before I say this, I believe in the inspiration of scripture.

I totally believe in the inspiration of scripture.

But here's one thing that we gotta contend with.

Which I'll deal with in my next point.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

So the second point is this.

The second point is this.

In the first century, people were inclined to pad their resume.

Kind of we do the same thing today, right?

People tend to do that, and we don't, obviously, but some other people do that.

They pad their resume and they say things that aren't true, or they take things out of their resume that they didn't want to be there.

So King Herod, for instance, he was the king of the Jews, and he didn't want anybody to really know that he had Gentile heritage, so he expunged his Gentile heritage from his genealogy.

He only kept his Jewish heritage in his genealogy.

And there were certain people that you wanted in your genealogy, in your resume for sure.

And at the top of the list, if you wanted anybody from the history of Israel in your genealogy, that person would have been King David.

And King David is seen here.

King David is clearly in the genealogy of the Lord Jesus.

But what's shocking to see in this passage of Scripture is that right beside King David, we see Uriah, the wife of Uriah.

So we hear the story, the echo of the story of David and Bathsheba.

That is brought right to the front.

And it was a huge blemish on the life of King David.

Now, in other resumes, in other first century Jewish resumes, that would have been expunged.

That would have been jettisoned.

That wouldn't have been talked about.

But here it is, front and center, in the genealogy of Jesus.

An illicit relationship with Bathsheba.

David, the king, got her pregnant in order to cover her sin, he murdered Uriah, her husband.

And then beyond that, a few verses down, we got another reference, we got the reference to Rahab.

So the question that we have to ask is why would Matthew have done that?

Why would he have Talked about.

Why would he have brought up this shameful incident in the life of an otherwise very godly good king?

And why would he remind us that he was the great, great grandson of a prostitute?

Well, I think his point is this he is preparing his readers for the radical diagnosis that Jesus is going to give first century Jewish culture, and that is that we're all sinners.

The Pharisees used to think of themselves as righteous.

They were self-righteous.

People in Jesus' day saw themselves as holier than thou.

The religious people look down on the irreligious people.

One of the things that's so shocking about the Christmas story, the way Luke tells it, is that the people who are first told about the birth of Jesus are the shepherds who were profoundly irreligious.

They were not allowed to give testimony in court either because of their transient lives.

All the theft, all of the problems that happened in particular communities were always blamed on these sort of nomadic shepherds who would show up, feed their sheep, and disappear, and somebody lost a piece of jewelry or some money was stolen.

The shepherds did it.

There was a real stratification in terms of holiness, in terms of righteousness in first century Jewish culture.

There were those who saw themselves as really pious and really good and fulfilling all of the laws of God and righteous.

The Apostle Paul is a perfect example of that.

As to the law, he says, I was found blameless.

So what Matthew is preparing his readers for is the radical diagnosis that Jesus is going to share with first century Jewish culture.

He's going to share it with the world for 2,000 years, and that is that we are sinners.

That we are sinners.

And that if we are going to be saved, the only thing that we bring to our salvation is the sin that makes it necessary.

Right?

It's the only thing that we bring to our salvation.

None of us are righteous, not one.

And the diagnosis of Jesus, the diagnosis of Christ, destroys the self-righteousness of the proud.

The gospel that Jesus is going to preach, the gospel that the New Testament is going to preach, is a gospel that can only be apprehended through the lens of humility.

And that's why it's so critical that this diagnosis be understood and accepted, be understood and received personally.

I don't have a standing before God.

The only standing that I have is one of condemnation.

I am under the wrath of God for my sin.

There is nothing about me that commends me to God.

My very existence is an offense to his holiness.

But he loved me enough to send his only begotten Son into this world.

So that I would simply trust and believe and cast myself upon his grace and in his mercy, I could be saved.

You see, what Matthew is doing is preparing us for the gospel, the truth of the gospel.

That we are sinners saved by grace, that the ground is level at the foot of the cross, that if we are going to be saved, it will be by the blood of Jesus alone.

That we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, that our good works, our religiosity, our philanthropy, our kindness, nothing matters other than the fact that I trust the finished work of Jesus on the cross, where he paid for my sins.

He laid down his life.

Now, those first two I think are fairly straightforward and fairly obvious.

Those first two anomalies bring out two concepts that are fleshed out pretty clearly in the rest of the book.

That Jesus is introducing a new kind of love, and that he's introducing a kind of humility that's absolutely critical if we're going to understand his life and his ministry and if we're going to live well within the kingdom.

There's a third thing here that I think is pretty important.

I'm going to spend more time on this.

Because this next anomaly is not so obvious to us as it would be to a first century Jewish reader.

To them, it would have been glaringly obvious.

So Matthew says something in verse 17 that is important to read.

So to all the generations, from Abraham to David, were 14 generations, from David to the deportation to Babylon, 14 generations, from the deportation to Babylon to Christ, 14 generations.

The problem, strictly speaking, and remember, I believe in the inspiration of Scripture.

The problem strictly speaking is that that's not exactly true.

If you go to 1 Chronicles chapter 3, you'll see that between David and following, there are 17 generations.

1 Chronicles 3 · chapter mention

17 generations.

So what Matthew does is he constructs this genealogy and such, and this is very typical of what people would do back then.

This is quite typical.

Generations were skipped for various reasons.

So what we see happening here is that Matthew is constructing a framework.

14, 14, and 14, and he's doing it very deliberately because he was not unaware of what 1 Chronicles chapter 3 did in terms of its chronology and its genealogies.

1 Chronicles 3 · chapter mention

So why does he do that?

That's the question.

And that's an important question that we ask ourselves.

Why does he do this in this particular place?

And to understand this, we need to understand a little bit of the history of Israel.

So this is going to take a bit of time, so bear with me.

The good news about this is that the second service was amalgamated into the first.

So we can go to like 12?

Yeah, so that's good.

So let's take some time to think about the history of Israel.

In 586, Israel was conquered finally by Babylon.

The temple was destroyed.

The Spirit of God left the temple, the worship of God in the temple ended, and Israel went into exile.

That happened, that defeat of Israel, the destruction of the temple, the judgment of God coming upon Israel in 586 happened for one very, well, a lot of very, a number of reasons, but at the heart of it was this: Israel's disobedience to God regarding the Sabbath sabbatical cycle.

This was a religious, socioeconomic cycle that God had woven into the culture of Israel.

A Sabbath every seven days, every seventh day, a sabbatical every seventh year, and a jubilee every seventh sabbatical years, or after the 49th year.

So on the 50th year, each year, Israel would celebrate a Jubilee.

A Jubilee was a time when all debts in Israel were forgiven.

All slaves were released from bondage.

If a family had sold its land, the land was returned to that family free of charge.

The Jubilee year was a time when all debts were forgiven, when the scales of justice were recalibrated and put right.

The problem is that Israel didn't follow this pattern.

And despite the fact that over and over and over again, the prophets of Israel had regularly told God's people that God was not pleased with their behavior, that they needed to repent of their behavior, Israel persisted in its sin.

Israel kept, well, and the prophets kept warning them: don't amass huge amounts of wealth.

Care for the foreigner.

Be merciful.

Celebrate this Jubilee.

Follow God's pattern.

But Israel ignored them.

And so God sent Israel into exile for 70 years.

One year of exile for every sabbatical year that had been missed in the previous 490 years of Israel's history.

So the exile began in 586, 70 years later, after the exiles were allowed to begin to come back, they came back, remember in three straight stages with Ezra, Nehemiah, Zerubbabel, those guys that came back.

They rebuilt the temple, and in 516, this is a matter of historical fact.

516, 70 years after the exile began, a new temple was dedicated in Jerusalem.

But what the prophets had said would happen didn't happen.

And so if you would have asked the Jew in Jesus' day, is Israel still living in exile?

Has the exile that began in 586 really, fully, completely ended?

Or are we in some senses still living in exile?

They would have said, absolutely, we are still in exile.

There was an understanding that Israel's exile, although many of them were back in the land, was still continuing.

The Romans were still in charge.

Israel was not free.

And most importantly, what Malachi had prophesied in the second last chapter of the scriptures, where it talked about the Lord would suddenly return to his temple.

It hadn't happened.

So the question was this had God failed to live up to his promises?

Had God made promises that he didn't fulfill?

And obviously the answer is no.

And the reason that we can say that confidently is because of what God said to the people in exile through the prophet Daniel.

So if you have your Bibles, swing back to the book of Daniel, the ninth chapter of the book of Daniel.

And I just want to show you this passage of Scripture.

Daniel chapter 9.

Daniel 9 · chapter mention

Now I know that there's this is a passage of scripture where there's a lot of, you know, questions and but let me just tell you my humble but nonetheless accurate opinion of this particular passage of scripture.

I could be dead wrong, but here's my take on it.

After the people had got to Babylon, God began to speak to a man named Daniel.

And we're very familiar with the story of Daniel, or the stories of Daniel.

And in this passage of Scripture, Daniel writes this, he talks about 70 weeks.

And most scholars will say that those that 70 weeks is 490 years.

That's what Daniel is communicating in some sort of cryptic language.

And so what God told Daniel in this passage of Scripture, that in fact, the physical exile of Israel was going to last 70 years.

70 weeks of years, 490 years.

Now, it says in this passage of scripture that after those 490 years of spiritual exile, God was going to do something amazing.

And look at what it says in verse 24.

Seventy weeks are decreed about your people and your holy city.

That's Jerusalem.

And then he talks about six things that are going to happen: to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy place or a most holy one.

So this spiritual exile that is going to end after 490 years is going to accomplish six breathtaking things.

Six things that are just stunning when you think about them.

We're going to bring an end to transgression, put an end to sin, atone for iniquity, bring in everlasting righteousness, seal both vision and prophet, and anoint a most holy place or a most holy one.

So then what Daniel does in verse 25 is he begins to explain when this is going to happen.

He begins to give a timeline.

And he says in verse 25, know therefore and understand that from the going out of the word to restore and to rebuild Jerusalem to the coming of an anointed one, that is Messiah.

So let me read that again.

Know therefore and understand that from the going out of the Word to restore and rebuild Jerusalem to the coming of the Messiah, a prince, there shall be seven weeks.

Then for 62 weeks it shall be built up, speaking about Jerusalem, shall be built up with squares and moats, but in troubled times.

And after 62 more weeks, an anointed one, a Messiah, will be cut off and have nothing.

So he put those seven weeks and sixty-two weeks together, we get sixty-nine weeks, or using Daniel's math, four hundred and eighty-three years.

So here's the thing that we need to understand.

When did that decree, when was that decree that we read about in Ezra chapter 7, that Israel should be, that Jerusalem should be rebuilt and re-established as a city within the Medo-Persian Empire?

Ezra 7 · chapter mention

When did that decree get issued?

The answer, according to history, is 457 BC.

King Artaxerxes made the decree and said, okay, we destroyed the Babylonians, destroyed Jerusalem, let's rebuild the city.

That was 457 BC, many years after Daniel had died.

Now if you take those 69 weeks of years or 483 years, and you subtract them from 457 BC, when that decree by Artaxerxes was given, you end up at exactly 27 AD, or the year that Jesus began his ministry.

The year that he came to his own, and his own began to refuse him.

And so the last seven weeks, or the last week of Christ's life was the initiation or the beginning of this Jubilee.

Now, let me explain, let me read one author who has put it this way, and he explains why Matthew used this stylized three times 14.

I know this is confusing, but just bear with me.

So this is what one author has said.

So through 490 years, although 490 years is indeed a long time, the point is this.

When the time finally arrives, it will be the greatest redemption of all.

This will be the time of real, utter, and everlasting freedom.

That is the hope that sustained the Israelites in the long years of the centuries before the time of Jesus.

And Matthew is making it clear beyond doubt to anyone thinking Jewishly that the moment had come with Jesus.

Instead of weeks of years, he does it with generations.

The generations of Israel's entire history, from Abraham to the present.

All the generations to that point were 14 times three, that is six sevens.

With Jesus, we get the seventh seventh.

He is the Jubilee in person.

He is the one who will rescue Israel.

He is the one that will save his people from their long nightmare.

Jesus is the one who will introduce that final, perfect, spiritual return from exile.

And he did it that day, Palm Sunday, so many years ago, when he rode into Jerusalem, humble, mounted on the colt of a donkey, and the Lord in that moment suddenly, as the prophet said he would, suddenly returned to his temple.

And he began his last week of ministry, his last week of life before the crucifixion, through which he was going to liberate us in the greatest jubilee of all time.

A jubilee that would release us from the penalty, the power, and one day in heaven the very presence of sin itself.

You see, that's why Matthew does what he does here.

He wants to tell his readers, his Jewish readers, who would have known that it wasn't, it was 14, 14, and 17.

Why are you doing this?

Clearly, Matthew was making a statement.

Subtly, he was hinting at it, but he's saying, Listen, listen, Jesus is going to do something amazing.

When you read the story that I'm going to write, you are going to be blown away.

Because it's not just a Jubilee when the scales of justice are recalibrated and debts are forgiven.

This Jubilee is going to be about absolute perfect justice.

This jubilee is going to be about a forgiveness that you couldn't even begin to imagine.

That God is going to punish his own son for your sins and release you from the penalty of your sin.

Because of what his son will do for us on the cross.

We celebrate Christmas because it initiates Easter.

We celebrate Christmas because Jesus introduced a Jubilee that we celebrate that cost him his life.

We are free today, folks.

We stand as forgiven people before a holy God, loved and accepted unconditionally and eternally by Yahweh Himself because Jesus took our place.

And he settled the score.

And so when we celebrate Christmas, and when we give presents and we have that turkey or do whatever it is that we do, and we come here and worship and thank God for the incarnation, never forget that it has to culminate in the cross.

Because that's where Jesus redeemed us.

That's where he paid the price.

That's where he purchased us.

At this particular time in Israel's history, there was a palpable eschatological expectancy, a sense that something is going to happen.

That's why so many people said, Hey, I'm the Messiah, I'm the Messiah too.

Because they knew that in the history of Israel, this was the time.

And then along comes Jesus, who was a radically different Messiah than any of the other ones.

Let's take up swords, let's take up shields, and let's go fight the Romans.

Let's go get freedom.

And Jesus says, it's not about political freedom, it's about forgiveness of sins.

It's about being reconciled to God.

It's being given eternal life through the finished work of Christ.

It's having our debt paid by a Savior who loved us and gave Himself for us.

It is about having a freedom that no one in the first century before Jesus could even have imagined.

But we enjoy today peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Amen.

And the fourth radical idea is the idea of hope.

And there's one more anomaly that I want to point out.

There are 14 generations between Abraham and David.

And then there are 14 recorded between David and the exile.

But between the exile and Joseph, there are literally 13.

You can count them.

There are 13.

And again, the question is: why does Matthew arrange his genealogy this way?

And again, he's not doing anything that wasn't normal and typical in a first century genealogy.

But why does he do this?

Why does he have 13?

Well, the answer is that because Joseph was not the father of Jesus.

When we read the next story, which we'll touch on, which we'll talk about next week, we find out who the progenitor of Jesus actually was.

And you know the answer.

He was the incarnate Son of God.

The Holy Spirit impregnated Mary and she became pregnant with Christ.

So the 14th progenitor on the third list is not Joseph.

It's God.

The Spirit of God.

Now, this is not, clearly not, what any first century Jew was expecting.

Frankly, it's almost too much to hope for.

Yet Matthew, having lived with Jesus, Levi, the tax collector, having spent years with Jesus, having interacted with him before and after the cross, having seen the nail prints in his hands and in his feet, and the scar in his side, he knew, beyond a shadow of doubt, he knew that Jesus was the incarnate Son of God.

And so what he does in the next section, the section we're going to look at next week, is he quotes one of the most wonderful verses from Isaiah, Isaiah 7.14, where it talks about how a virgin would conceive and bear a son.

And that son would be called Emmanuel, God with us, God incarnate, God in the flesh.

And again, as a first century Jewish reader, you are incredulous.

Do I believe this?

How can I accept this?

And a lot of people struggle to accept Christmas.

A lot of people struggle to believe.

Matthew didn't.

He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt.

That's why he built his genealogy the way that he did.

He wanted people to understand that God the Father fathered Christ the Son.

And he wanted a hope.

He wanted a sense of hope to begin to build in the hearts and in the minds of his readers.

So then when he got to the end of the book, they would be able to say, Praise God for Jesus, the Son of the living God.

That's why he ends his book by saying, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me, quoting Christ.

That's where he culminates it.

The King of Kings, the Lord of Lords.

I don't know if you're a Christian, I don't know if you're a skeptical Christian.

I don't know if you're a convinced Christian.

I've only met some of you this morning for the first time.

But I want to tell you a story about J.R.R.

Tolkien and an atheist friend.

Maybe you can guess who this atheist friend was.

They were walking one day in Oxford, and Tolkien and his friend were talking about their shared love of fairy tales, old legends and myths.

And they spoke about five things that they loved about legends and myths and fairy tales.

The characters could step out of time.

They enjoyed loving relationships that would never end.

They loved the idea that humans and non-human relational entities could communicate with one another in fairy tales.

They loved the fact that death could be defeated in fairy tales.

And then finally, that good always triumphed over evil in fairy tales.

And after a few minutes of conversation about their shared love of fairy tales, the atheist friend said to Tolkien, I love those old stories, but myths are lies, even though they're breathed through silver.

And Tolkien said, Don't you ever wonder, though, why?

Why those fairy tales resonate so powerfully in our heart?

Why those fairy tales are so important to us?

Why those fairy tales, why do we love them so?

And then he answered his own question.

And he says, this, in our hearts, Tolkien said, in our hearts, down deep inside, we know that although they can't be true, in our hearts we know that they should be.

There's something in our hearts that just resonates with that idea that life should not end, that good should triumph over evil, that love should not stop at death.

That death should not have the final say.

There's something in all of us that cries out for that.

In every culture, in every age, there is that resonance within all of us, that echo.

And Tolkien said they point, those fairy tales point to a deep longing within all of us, to be free of time, to have loving relationships that don't end, to be able to reach beyond the temporal, to have a situation, a context in which finally and fully evil is defeated and good wins, where death is abolished, and where the story ends with a happily ever after.

And then Tolkien began to tell his friend the story that he knew about Jesus.

He began to talk to him about Jesus, a man who came from outside of time, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, who was born of a virgin, who lived a perfect, sinless, holy life, who did miracles, who was able to suspend the laws of nature that he himself had created in order to demonstrate his love and his compassion and his mercy in a broken world.

And then because of circumstances, he was murdered by the people he came to love and care for and lay his life down for.

And just when all seemed hopeless and all hope was gone, and it seemed like the final curtain was dropping on the story of this hero.

He defeated death and gave the world hope that there could be a happily ever after ending to our story.

And then Tolkien asked these questions.

He said, What does that sound like to you?

One more fairy tale pointing to that which we wish was factual?

And he said, No.

Tolkien said, No, the story of Jesus does not start with once upon a time or in a galaxy far, far away.

The story of Jesus starts in a genealogy.

It starts in history.

It begins in Bethlehem.

It is a story of a person who lived and died and rose again.

And Tolkien said this the story of Jesus is not just another story pointing to the underlying reality that humans love fairy tales.

No, he says the story of Jesus is the underlying reality that fulfills the longings to which all these fairy tales point.

You see, at Christmas 2,000 years ago, the underlying longing, that shared underlying longing of all humanity, that death could be defeated, that right would triumph over evil, that love would not have to be severed, that it would not have to end, that the grave would not have the final word.

That longing became a hope.

And that hope is the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

That conversation, as you've probably guessed, was the beginning of the conversion of C.S.

Lewis.

He began to study the life.

He began to think about the historicity of Jesus, who he was, who he claimed to be.

And gradually he says he became the most reluctant convert in all of Christendom because he couldn't argue with the facts.

Matthew, in this passage of scripture, begins with the story of Jesus rooted in his history, in his genealogy, in his earthiness, in his birth, which we'll look at, or at least his conception, which we'll look at next week.

The story of Jesus is not a fairy tale, it is not a fable, it is true.

It is true.

And because he came, because of his incarnation, he calls us today to love one another, to love one another from the heart.

He calls us today to a profound humility that is rooted in the gospel.

He calls us today to rejoice in who we have become freed slaves because of the jubilee that he introduced to the world at the cross.

And he calls us today to live with hope.

Hope in a world that is filled with despair and filled with confusion and filled with a sense of emptiness and hopelessness.

He calls us to represent hope.

Because it's true.

It's all true.

And so this Christmas, when the news is horrible and people are miserable, and things seem bleak, be filled with joy.

Be filled and rejoice in the Lord because it's true.

Jesus is alive and he loves us and he has saved and redeemed us and he is coming back again for us.

And we will spend eternity with him.

And the grave is not the final word if you know Jesus.

And if you don't, if you don't, just trust him.

Just believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Your good works don't get you into heaven.

Going to church doesn't get you into heaven.

The only thing that gets you into heaven is the finished work of Jesus Christ.

Christ is the Savior.

Believe in Him and be saved.

Let's pray together and we'll be dismissed.

Father, I just thank you for how you inspired Matthew to write this genealogy.

The things that you led him to put in there that speak so subtly yet clearly about who Jesus is.

And so I pray for us this Christmas, Lord, that we would, as believers and followers of Jesus, love in extraordinary ways, love as he loved.

That we would banish and put out of our life and jettison from our thinking all of those things that tempt us to define ourselves and define other people by what they own or where they live or the color of their skin or the degrees on their wall.

Father, give us a heart to love one another as you have loved us.

Humble us, Lord.

Help us to see the gospel.

Help us to find our worth in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Lord, help us to celebrate this Christmas, that we have been freed in this great jubilee that was the cross.

That you came as you promised you would, that you bore our sins, took our punishment, gave us your righteousness, and released us from our debts.

Lord, let that joy fill our hearts, I pray.

And then let's go out of here today with a hope, a hope that we can share with the world that everything that the scriptures teach about Jesus is not a fairy tale, but is our reality, the foundation upon which we build our lives.

Grant that to us, I pray.

So that the joy of the Lord will flow out of us, out of this church, out of our home, out of our families, and out of our personal relationships, that people might know that we believe that Jesus is alive and that he has saved us, that the grave does not have the final word.

And that you are alive in our lives.

Jesus, I pray.

For your honor and for your glory, we ask in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

Well, may God bless you.

Redemption New Market.

It's a pleasure to be here.

I look forward to being with you for the next couple of Sundays.

And know this you are deeply, deeply loved.

God bless you.

Go in peace.