The Unedited Genealogy of Jesus | Matthew 1:1-16 | Coleton Segars

The teaching text for today is Matthew 1, 1 through 16.

Apologizing in advance, this is an actual genealogy that I'm just gonna read the whole thing.

Alright.

This is the genealogy of Jesus, the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers.

Judah was the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar.

Perez was the father of Hezron, Hezron the father of Ram, Ram the father of Aminadab, and Aminadab the father of Nashan, Nashan the father of Salmon, Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab, Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of King David.

David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah's wife, Solomon, the father of Rehoboam, Rehoboam the father of Abijah, Abijah the father of Asa, Asa the father of Jehoshaphat, Jehoshaphat, the father of Jehoram, Jehoram the father of Uzziah, Uzziah the father of Jotham, Jotham the father of Ahaz, Ahaz the father of Hezekiah, Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, Manasseh the father of Ammon, Ammon the father of Josiah, and Josiah the father of Jeconiah and his brothers at the time of the exile to Babylon.

After the exile to Babylon, Jechoniah was the father of Shealtiel, Shealtiel was the father of Zerubbabel, Zerubbabel the father of Abihud, Abahud the father of Eliakim, Eliakim the father of Azor, Azor the father of Zadek, Zadek the father of Akim, Akim the father of Elihud, and Elihud the father of Eliazar, Eliazar the father of Mathan, and Man the father of Jacob.

And Jacob was the father of Joseph, Joseph the husband of Mary, and Mary the mother of Jesus, who is called the Messiah.

This is the word of the Lord.

I don't know if you've ever done anything in your life, and if you have, share your story later.

But just ever done anything in your life that maybe you thought, this is the thing that will lead my family to disown me.

Like, this is it.

I did that thing.

I have a lot of those moments in my life, and I was trying to pick one of things where I was like, this is it.

This it was finally enough.

They're gonna, they're like, well, we had a good run.

You're like 17 now, goodbye.

Um senior year of high school, I was supposed to do a prank, senior prank, and I had this brilliant idea of light the um football field on fire at our school and burn our uh we I graduated in 05, burn 2005 on fire on the football field.

That was my idea.

And so I went to the gas station with a couple of my friends that were dumber or as dumb as I was, and we got uh a pesticide spray can, filled it with gasoline, went to the football field, and uh just as well as you could, we just spelled out gigantic numbers on the football field, and um before we were able to actually light it on fire, uh someone showed up and we had to leave, which is probably for the best.

Um but we did get caught, and I my dad asked me, like, hey, did you do this?

Um, because there was rumors going around the school, did you do this?

And I was like, no, no, please love me.

Um and uh anyways, found out that I ended up I ended up doing it uh the football field itself, even if you don't light it on fire, apparently uh gasoline kills the grass, anyways, and so things you don't know until later.

Um but it was uh homecoming weekend, and uh and so we get to the football field and there's this gigantic 2005 in there, and it felt really cool for like three seconds, and then people were like, all right, let's watch the game.

I was like, man, what a dumb idea for something that didn't make that big of a difference.

But got in so much trouble and had to do community service at the school and all this different stuff, and I was like, this is it.

My dad's gonna be like, you know what?

Call your Colton Taylor and then get a new last name because that's just that's rough.

Um but he didn't.

Um, anyways, I don't know.

I'd love to hear your story where you felt like you might be disowned, but that was one of one of many of mine.

The reason I say that is just to give you some insight into the sinner that I am.

Um, but also like in this genealogy, Matthew gives us a very shame-filled, sin-filled, broken family tree, and it's the family tree of Jesus the Messiah.

And so he goes into this thing saying these names and doing this stuff, and he does not hold back.

He doesn't, he just he doesn't like blot out certain different people because they have done stupid stuff in their time and in their lives.

He gives us this whole thing.

And so, what I want to do today is I want to look at this shame-filled genealogy and why it's so filled with those types of things, and then I want to give you two things that we learn from that.

So I want to look at it very honestly, and then two things we can learn from it.

So, the shameful, sinful, broken family tree of Jesus.

This is what Matthew writes.

And back in this time, when people wrote genealogies, what you would normally do is you would leave people out in order to create a shorter one, so it's not completely long, and that was a long one.

But you would automatically leave people out, and they knew that, and father would be used as like forefather or something like that.

And so that's what they would normally do.

With space like that to edit out your genealogy, what most people did was they edited out the black eyes and the black sheep and the people that made terrible mistakes and the people in your family that you'd rather forget and not remember.

You would just be like, we had this person, this person, skip, this person, this person, skip, and you would just leave them out so that your family tree sounded more reputable, so that people would look at your family genealogy like what a respectful, holy, godly thing.

Where's so-and-so that, yeah, we left them out.

Like, that's what they did there, okay?

And so Matthew actually does the same thing.

He is writing in the customary way of writing the genealogy, but we see in verse 8 that he he begins leaving people out.

And so Matthew calls Jehoram, this is from the Bible background commentary, he calls Jehoram the father of Uzziah, skipping Ahaziah, Joash, Amaziah, so that father is used in the sense of forefather.

And so it's important to see Matthew is actually doing this as well.

He is leaving people out.

The difference is that he's not leaving out the people that everyone would expect him to leave out.

He's leaving out just random.

One of those people, one of those kings was really good.

Joash was pretty good most of his life and all those different things.

And so Matthew leaves out people, but the difference between the way he writes his genealogy and everybody else is he doesn't leave out people that make the family line disrespectful and disreputable.

He actually leaves those people in.

He tells the family story with the black sheep, with the shame-filled people, with the sin.

He he tells those things and he leaves all that stuff in.

And honestly, if you if you had this genealogy, and instead of using people's names, you just input, like instead of your name, I'm gonna just gonna input your most um noteworthy sin.

Like if that's what you did, here's what the genealogy would sound like if you just replaced the name with the noteworthy sin of the person.

It would sound like this This is the genealogy of Jesus, the Holy Son of God.

It begins with a man who heard God speak a promise to him, but doubted God and chose to sleep with his wife's servant instead.

It's a strong start.

That led to his lying, cheating grandson who took advantage of his own father's blindness to steal his brother's blessing.

From that liar came a man who sold his own brother into slavery for a profit, lied to his father about it, and then later, as you do, went looking for a prostitute to sleep with and accidentally slept with his own daughter-in-law because she was dressed as a prostitute and she knew that if she was dressed as a prostitute, he would sleep with her.

From this line came a man who fathered a son through another prostitute from Jericho.

Their son married a widow from a pagan nation, once cursed and excluded from the assembly of God.

This eventually led to the birth of a shepherd boy who would become king of Israel and then sleep with one of his best friend's wives, and then have his best friend killed to cover up the adultery.

From that union came a king who had thousands of wives and concubines to satisfy his own sensual desires, and was so controlled by his passions that he allowed his wives to lead him and the nation of Israel into worshiping pagan gods.

From him came a prideful, arrogant leader who tore the 120-year united kingdom of Israel in two after only being king for a few days.

Terrible leader.

From this broken throne came kings who worshipped idols, trusted political alliances more than God, shed innocent blood, including prophets, built and rebuilt pagan altars, practiced witchcraft, sacrificed their own kids in the fire, and led the nation deeper into rebellion until finally they were destroyed by pagan armies and carried away to foreign lands because they would not turn back to God.

This, believe it or not, is the genealogy of Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God.

Like it sounds like a Game of Thrones spinoff.

Like it's, and I haven't even watched Game of Thrones, but like it sounds like something just it's just wild.

Like it's just the craziest thing, and Matthew tells this story like this, and he leaves all these things in, and people reading this would have these ping moments in their lives where they're remembering the stories of these people.

But the point is that Matthew is being very selective, very selective in who he keeps in this thing.

Super selective.

He is leaving people out and adding people in and making sure, not to not to change it, but just to shorten it and make sure it's in the customary way.

But he's just selective the opposite way.

Everybody else is selective to leave the bad people out.

And he's like, let's make sure we keep those people in.

And he goes out of his way to show the brokenness and the dysfunction of this family.

And you see this again if you look at verse 6.

I think we have it up here.

Uh it says, Jesse, the father of King David, David, who is the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah's wife.

And the woman's name is Bathsheba.

And it's like, why don't you just say her name?

Like, just say Bathsheba.

You don't mind talking about other women?

You you've mentioned some women before, just say her name.

But he doesn't do that.

Instead, he instead of calling her Bathsheba, he points out that this woman used to be someone else's wife, and David has taken her as his wife, and he he brings up, he goes out of his way to highlight that sin that happened in David's life.

And I can be honest, if I were David, I'd be like, bro, just say her name.

Like you want, you just said, you just said like Jesse, the father of David, David, the father of Solomon.

You know, you don't have to say anything after that.

You can just move on and just treat me like everybody else.

Why'd you have to say it like that?

Why did you have to bring this up?

Why'd you have to do that?

But he does it on purpose.

Matthew is trying to include and wanting to include the broken, the sinful, the failures, the black sheep.

He wants to include them as part of Jesus' family.

And so what you see in looking at this genealogy is you see all of the people that every other family tree would blot out and try to remove and try to forget.

All of those people are actually a part of Jesus' story and a part of Jesus' family and actually included in his family tree.

And so that's the genealogy.

And what it's supposed to teach us is two things, a number of things, but I just grabbed two.

The first is it's supposed to teach us that anyone can be a part of God's family.

Anyone can be a part of Jesus' family.

If those people make the cut and they're in, then anyone is allowed to be a part of his family.

D.A.

Carson says it like this.

He says, This genealogy shows that Jesus will thus be the Messiah for the least, the last, and the lost of the world.

Charles Spurgeon says, Jesus is heir of a line in which flows the blood of the broken.

He is near to the fallen and to the lowly, and he will show his love even to the poorest and most scandalous.

And so the type of people that Jesus comes from are the type of people that he comes for.

He came from broken people, and he has to show that he is coming for broken people.

I've come from seemingly irredeemable people, so that but I'm coming to actually redeem those people that everybody thinks they're just way too far gone.

And so Matthew is showing us with this lineage that anybody can be a part of his family.

And so for you and for me, if you've ever wondered, do I fit in his family?

Do I, does he want me as part of his family?

The genealogy is supposed to reveal, like, if they can get in, certainly I can get in.

Or if they're allowed to be a part of that, maybe I'm allowed to be a part of that.

I know that so many, so many Christians, they they understand that like it was by grace that they came into God's family.

Grace has brought us in.

It's not because we're so great.

Grace brought us in.

But somewhere in the life of a Christian, they'll sit in the church and they'll be, they'll believe and say, Grace brought me into this family, but then they'll begin thinking, but the way to stay in the family is I gotta be real good.

I gotta make sure I stay righteous.

And that's like, no, no, the way that you were brought in is the way that you stay in.

It is only by your grace that you are saved, and it's by His by His grace that you are kept a part of the family.

Your good behavior didn't bring you in, and your bad behavior can't kick you out.

It doesn't work like that.

And so it's supposed to be this thing where it's like, does God want me as a part of his family?

The answer is yes.

And so if you're like, but my past, I got things in my past, I got things in my present.

I don't know that I even how much I believe some of these things.

I got all these doubts, I got all this stuff.

I I don't know how good I would be as a Christian.

Like I don't know how much I'm gonna, like, if I join into this thing, like how's how's that gonna go?

Because I don't know how good I'll be in that thing.

Some people that I've talked to are like, I just I don't know that I'd fit inside the church.

Like, I I just I I understand the views of Christianity, and I get that you're telling me that God loves me so much and and all this stuff that He came for me to do all that, but like I just don't know that I'd fit inside the church.

And to me, I'm like, look at the genealogy.

None of those people would pass a church membership class.

Like they'd never be like, can you imagine the conversation with Abraham?

Like, hey man, how's your faith?

It's like, that's pretty good.

Pretty good, yeah.

Uh I'm doubting a little bit.

It's like, oh dude, don't worry about that.

People doubt their faith.

It's like, like, what do you do?

Well, you like you pray to help with that, you you know, read the scriptures or spend time with God.

It's like, kinda, yeah.

Lately, my wife just told me to go sleep with her servant girl, so I'm gonna go try that, and then uh I'll get back with you and see how that goes.

And be like, okay, membership class over, you're done.

And he's like the forefather of the thing.

And it's like, what'd you do when you doubted your faith?

I slept with the servant girl.

Like, not a great day.

Like, that's not it.

Or Judah, like the the conversation.

If you know Judah's story, if you were like, Judah, hey man, how's your day?

How'd you what'd you do today?

And he's like, ah, pretty good day.

Sold my youngest brother to slavery, made a little cash, that's pretty sweet.

And uh lied to my dad about it.

He's not really happy, but he'll be fine.

He'll be fine.

And then uh then I popped into the city looking for a prostitute, you know, normal Thursday Thursday.

And uh, funny story though, I accidentally slept with my daughter-in-law.

She was dressed as a prostitute, isn't that wild?

What'd you do today?

Like, if you're telling the story, like it's it's it's scandalous, the whole thing.

Like, who of those people that want some church elders listening to this story and be like, yeah, we should put him through?

Like, this is gonna be great, but they're included, they're not included maybe in many churches, they wouldn't be included, and that's the church's fault.

That's not Jesus' fault.

They're not included in those spaces, but Jesus is like, they're part of my family tree.

This is where they are, they're included in these things.

And so none of them would fit neatly in the church, maybe, but they do fit in Jesus' family.

And I'm not saying in your sin or with mine or in any of their things that God like condones this stuff or that Jesus is okay with those things.

I'm not saying that.

But it also doesn't exclude them from those things.

And I think that's true from us as well, for us as well.

Your sin, your struggles, your addictions, the things that you battle with and deal with and your thought life and your heart and all those different things.

Those things don't exclude you from his family.

They actually are the reason that you're included because he has come for people who are broken.

He comes from people who are broken to show that he has come for people who are broken.

And so he has come for you.

And so, what this is supposed to testify to this thing is you read it and we don't know half the names and all the different things.

It's supposed to remind us, like, man, this is a scandalous genealogy.

And it's like, but I have a scandalous past.

And it's like, well, if they can be in, maybe I can be in as well.

And the answer is yes, he wants you.

You can be a part of his family.

You're brought into his family because of his love and his grace, and nothing that you did, and nothing that you can do will exclude you.

Nothing, no sin that you can do will exclude exclude you.

The only way to be excluded is to not want it.

But if you're like, I want it, I just don't think I'm worthy of it.

Like, join the club.

No one's worthy of it, but he has made us worthy.

He became unworthy to ultimately lift us up.

He descended so that we might ascend.

Like, that's what he's done.

And so he brings you into his family.

Not because of good things that you did, but because of his own mercy and his own love for you.

And so that's the first.

Teaches us anyone can be a part of his family.

The second thing that we can gain from this and that we learn is that God can bring good out of our worst mistakes.

He can bring good things, life from death, good things from bad things from our worst mistakes.

This whole genealogy is showing that.

And even from these broken, sinful, rebellious people, God can still bring something good out of it.

And to me, as I was looking through the different stories, the one that stands out to me is David in Bathsheba.

And like you just see good being brought out of this horrible, horrible thing that David did.

On a scale of one to ten, like ten being the worst thing you can possibly do, David would probably light this up there, like it's it's a ten.

It's probably the worst thing he ever did.

Sees his best friend is out fighting a battle for him.

And he sees his best friend's wife and is like, I need that.

And so then he goes and commits adultery with her, she gets pregnant, brings the guy home from war to be like, hey, could you like go hang out with your wife and do the thing how babies are made?

And then then it'll be like, it'll be your kid, but it'll be my kid, but nobody will know that.

We can cover this thing up.

And Uriah won't.

He's a faithful soldier.

He's like, while the men are out battling, I will never go and do that with my wife.

I will just I will join in with them.

Just an incredible soldier.

And so David's like, okay, well, that's weird.

Um, I wasn't, I don't understand that kind of loyalty.

Um and so why don't you head back out there, carry this note, and don't open it, because it's your death note.

Um, and so he's carrying his own death note, and he brings it to the commander Joab, and Joab's like, all right, the note says that this guy's gotta die.

And so he basically sends Uriah out, and everybody pulls back, and Uriah is killed, and he hasn't murdered.

And then David continues to lie about it.

Like, it's just this horrible, like, what is this thing that you're doing?

And if it just to rank it, one out of ten, worst thing you've ever done, David would be like, that was a bad one.

That was a bad day in the life of David.

And you would think, and he probably did, and people probably did, nothing good can come from that.

There's no way that anything good can come from this terrible decision that he made.

And yet, they have this kid named Solomon, and God makes Solomon the wisest king that anybody's ever seen.

And then he chooses Solomon to build a temple for his name so that all of Israel will come and worship at this temple and actually experience and encounter God in their time.

And it's like, why would you choose the most sin-filled, scandalous relationship to bring a child from that one?

Like David has better wives.

I just go snag a kid from like Abigail, she was pretty strong.

Like I just maybe that lineage, but why would you choose this one?

And it's this really broken but really beautiful thing.

God, God takes David's most shameful story, shameful sin, and he redeems it and brings something good out of it.

So that now when people look back at it, they might still remember that thing, but they also know that like it's been written.

Look, we have Solomon now, we have a king that now we're the richest kingdom on the earth, all these different things.

And now we have a temple that we've never had before.

We've been working with a tabernacle, now we have this beautiful thing.

And God just brought this really, really beautiful thing out of something that was David's most shameful part of his life, and he chooses to redeem it and bring something beautiful out of it, and that's what he does.

And that's what he wants to do in our lives, that's what he wants to do in your life.

He wants to take the embarrassing, shameful stories and the spaces where you blew it and just tanked and it was bad and made this huge mistake.

He wants to take those things and he actually wants to grab them, redeem them, and bring life where there was just death.

He did that.

I mean, y'all know Rainey's in my story.

We we killed our relationship.

It was thriving and then we killed it.

And it was this thing like we made sinful decisions, we were lying to each other, deceiving one another, and just broke our relationship into the space where literally I was like, it's dead.

This thing is dead.

And so we go to this counseling space, basically telling her, like, it's dead, our relationship is dead.

But then we have this option of like, do we want to try and build this thing back up?

And so we sought to follow the Lord in that, to seek counsel and to be humble enough to confess our sin and to be honest with one another.

And then from just bringing that thing back to him, we took this dead thing that we're like, there's no way this thing can breathe, have life breathed back into it.

And he just did that.

And he breathed life back into this thing, and he brought something really good out of a relationship that really was dead.

And now, from our story, if we hadn't had all that, I'm not saying that the brokenness was good, but from that brokenness, now we're the premier people to talk about counseling.

Like it will like go to counseling, like we have experienced a dead relationship being breathed back to life.

And so now we're able to tell people like I'm hopeless, my relationship seems hopeless, like I've been there, but God has redeemed my story.

And now, because even though this stuff was bad.

He has brought good out of it, then now I'm able to tell you that like he still can bring dead things back to life.

He can do that thing.

And that's what he wants to do.

He wants to redeem all of our tragic, terrible things that, like, I don't want to tell anybody about that.

He's like, I want you to tell me, because if you give it to me, I can actually do something from that.

In your hands, it's just dead and you can't do anything with it.

But with me, I can bring good out of terrible things.

He did this with me going to New York City to be a pastor.

I went there.

There was not a single righteous reason to do that.

I wanted to be a pastor.

I wanted to say to people, where do you pastor?

New York City.

I wanted to say, and it's like, so what?

Nobody cares.

But for me, like it mattered.

It was like ego and just pride and all this stuff.

Like I needed to say that.

And so I made this sinful decision in going to New York, and then it blew up in my face.

And Randy was like, I think that's the only time I've ever seen you depressed.

You talked about throwing yourself in front of a bus.

I was like, I was depressed.

I was actually, it was not a good day.

But he took that season of my life and he like shaped me as a like he could have just left me there.

Like you made a sinful decision.

Just enjoy your decision.

I told you not to go.

You had people tell you not to go.

You didn't listen to counsel.

You knew you were making this decision out of sin.

Fine.

Enjoy your sinful decision.

But he didn't do that.

He actually used New York to shape me as a pastor and to make me somebody completely different and make me a better father and a better husband.

Like he has used things out of this sinful decision to bring life out of something that's like, this is dead.

He's like, I can still bring life out of that.

This is what he wants to do.

And I've seen him do this with other people people struggling with addiction, redeemed out of their addiction, then going back into people's stories who struggle with addiction and helping them.

He redeems their story.

And it's a whole like I of course a bad thing about being addicted to anything, but he redeems the story and then uses that story to go back in and draw something good out of that.

Randy's reading Lee Strobel's book, Case for Christ, and I was just thinking about his story.

If you know he was a journalist who started out, he's like, I'm gonna disprove Christianity.

I'm gonna do research and then write a book to disprove Christianity.

He comes to faith and then writes a book proving Christianity.

Like if you're talking about a story that, like, this is a dead decision, this is a sinful, I'm gonna, I wanna try and prove that Jesus isn't real, he takes the exact same research and then uses it now to preach around the world and write books to prove that Jesus is actually real.

Like that's what he wants to do.

He wants to take decisions that began in sin and began in mistake and began in shame and actually redeem them and do things in that.

You see it with a woman at the well.

She's like hiding from everybody, and then she meets Jesus, and then everything that she's been hiding, she runs back into town and starts shouting those things.

She hadn't been talking about them before, but Jesus turned her shameful story into a glory, glorious story, and she begins shouting those things.

My point is that that's what he does.

He wants to look at your story, look at your mess, whatever that is for you specifically.

And he actually wants to bring life out of those things.

I've made bad decisions.

It's like, yes, you have, of course you have.

And he wants to breathe life into those things and actually bring something good out of that.

And this is why he tells us to confess our sin.

This is why he says to bring those things to him.

You don't have to tell everybody, but we should bring that stuff to him.

Because our mess in our hands, he's like, I actually, you can't do anything with that.

I can do a ton with that.

I can still take this and piece it back together.

And I know it's gonna be hard and the sin's still gonna have consequences, and all these things are gonna be very, very painful in some ways.

But he's like, I will eventually breathe life from this thing.

What what was intended for evil, I can actually bring good out of that.

Judah sold his brother into slavery, and then from that decision, Joseph becomes someone in Egypt that then saves the whole family of Israel that were gonna die because of a uh a famine.

Like, oh, it's well then it's good that I sold my brother into slavery.

Like, well, no, it's still terrible.

You're a terrible person.

You should really not do that.

Like, don't do that.

It's not because your decision was good that good came from it.

It's because he is good and he is just able to just pivot a thing and do something that's miraculous and take a horrible decision and actually go, like, I'm gonna bend my power in this thing, I'm gonna make it something that's really good.

That's what he does.

And he wants to do that in every single aspect of our story.

Confess your sin, not to be shamed and not to be condemned, but so that it will be redeemed, so that something good will actually come out of it.

So, I want to close with this.

Jesus' family tree teaches me and it teaches you that anyone can be a part of his family.

And he can redeem our worst mistakes and bring good from the spaces that we feel most ashamed.

He can bring good out of the spaces where we feel most ashamed.

The areas that we failed, the areas where we think that like there's no way that good or life can come from this space.

That's what his family tree shows us.

And so, what I want to do, if you don't mind, to get to not have to, I just encourage you, could you bow your heads, close your eyes?

Worship team, y'all can come on up.

But I just want you to, in your mind, just to consider.

What is your worst mistake?

What are you ashamed of in your life right now if you had to pick?

What is something that you would say, I messed that up?

It feels like there's no going back.

It feels like there's nothing good that can come from this decision.

And then I just want to ask, if you have something like that in your mind, would you just hand him that?

Hand him that thought.

Whatever comes to your mind when you're like, this is definitely something.

I don't know.

He can bring anything good out of.

Hand him that thought.

Or maybe it's not a thought, maybe it's like this space in your mind.

You just have this memory that you're just remembering these things.

My encouragement to you is to invite him into that memory and just ask him to redeem it.

This is what he wants to do.

And so invite him into that memory that you're ashamed of.

I think for us, there are things in our lives that we might be embarrassed by, but he's not embarrassed by your story.

If he was, he never would have had this genealogy written for Jesus.

And he doesn't want to shame you, he doesn't want to condemn you.

He actually wants to bring life where there's death.

And so my encouragement to you is just to give those things to him.

Whatever is in your mind right now.

To give that thing to him.