Matthew 1:1-17
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Gospel Project
Gospel Project
Verse: Matthew 1:1-7
M.I: God is faithful to His promises
Intro:
Me:
My kids love this show called Bluey.
You guys know this show?
It is a show from Australia, it is absolutely brillant.
The show is about a family of Dogs, heelers actually.
(Here’s a photo)
That is Bandit, Chilly, Bluey and Bingo.
I say my kids love it, actually I love it as well.
Each episode is only 7min long but somehow they pack a great amazing episode into 7 mins.
I don’t know how they do it but it is incredible.
Anyway they have an episode called promises.
I was going to explain the episode but I figure it 7 mins and I can just show you.
So here is Promises presented by Bluey.
Watch Bluey:
Right this show is amazing.
Anyway:
So naturally kids now ask me all the time to promise to do something.
We were driving back after basketball practice and Rosey said to Brittni my wife, I’m hungry can I get a snack when I get home and of course Brittni said yes.
To which Rose responded you promise?
To which we said yes.
And she did get a snack.
We:
And it kind of hit me, why do we ask people to promise us things?
Because we want them to do it, we want them to keep their word.
Because when people keep their word it builds trust in us.
And when they don’t?
We tend to not trust them anymore.
Or we lose trust in them.
Have you ever broken a promise?
Not the ones where you joke about, but a honest true promise.
One that when you broke it you caused pain to someone, it caused someone to lose trust in you.
Maybe you told a secret that you promised you wouldn’t.
Maybe you did do something that someone asked you to promise you would do.
Like take out the trash after dinner.
We understand that when we break promises it causes pain, it cause others to doubt us and it ultimately loses trust.
Know this because I am sure we have all been on the other side where we ask others to make promises to us, and they have broken them.
It makes us angry, it makes us say things like I will never trust them again.
It hurts.
You see God knows what it is like to have promises broken to him by his people.
As we climb out of the Old Testament we have heard several stories of God’s people breaking their promises to God.
And some of that comes with consequences.
But always God is still faithful to keep his promises despite if we keep ours.
We see this through out the whole Old Testament.
Time and time again— we see God promise to not flood the earth again, we see God promise Abraham that we would have many decedents.
We see God promise to bring his people out of Egypt.
To bring them into the promise land.
We go through the Judges and see most of them fail to follow God and break the promises that they will He will be their God and they will be His people.
We see him promise to raise up David.
We see God promise to bring in the messiah.
The one to save the world.
And after 400 years of silence when the promise looks like it won’t be fulfilled— Enter Jesus.
God keeps his promises.
God:
Jesus coming is God’s promise fulfilled.
As we read Matthew 1, there are a lot of names but it is a reminder that no matter the past, no matter how messy life has been, God still keeps his promises through it all.
The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, and Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Ram, and Ram the father of Amminadab, and Amminadab the father of Nahshon, and Nahshon 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 Rehoboam, and Rehoboam the father of Abijah, and Abijah the father of Asaph,
Matthew has a very interesting way to begin his Gospel.
He opens up with saying look here is where we have been and here is where we are going.
I don’t know about you but when I read through the Bible and when I come to these genealogies I tend to skip them.
They have a ton of names, some that are only mentioned here.
But let me encourage you tonight that if we skip over these we are omitting God faithfulness.
But before we dive into that too much, I want us to look at this phrase in verse one.
The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
Now, Jesus was not a literally son of these two men, but he was a descent of them.
We know that David was this mighty warrior and a great king.
That this Jesus would have royalty in his blood.
But not only was he from the line of David, he was also called a son of Abraham.
Again not a literal son but a descendent of Abraham.
And they have the receipts to show it.
Again Abraham is important because God had made some divine promises to him and those who would follow after him.
Remember the first promise made.
And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
All of Isreal took pride in being descendant of Abraham.
The Gospel according to Matthew I. The Birth and Infancy of Jesus, 1:1–2:23
In combining David and Abraham Matthew is drawing attention to two strands in Jesus’ Hebrew ancestry and implying that he fulfilled all that would be expected in a Messiah with such connections.
As we jump into verses 2-7 it is important to note that 4 women are mentioned here.
Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba.
Why this is interesting not because we see women mentioned in a culture that highlighter the Fathers and sons, as they often mentioned 4 main women.
But these are not the 4 normally mentioned.
They would have been Sarah— wife of Abraham
Rebecca, wife of Issac
Rachel and Leah, wife of Jacob.
Now those women were all jews, but the other 4 mentioned were not most likely.
Tamar was a Canaanite.
And her children were formed out of wedlock.
Rahab was also a Canaanite and a prostitute, as she snuck the Israelites out of Jericho.
Ruth was a Moabite and was actually said that she should not be admitted to the Israelites.
“No Ammonite or Moabite may enter the assembly of the Lord. Even to the tenth generation, none of them may enter the assembly of the Lord forever,
Yet we read one of the clearest showing of Christ in the OT.
As Boaz is the kinsmen redeemer.
Then you have Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba.
Remember Uriah?
King David had committed a sin by sleeping with Bathsheba.
And then she got pregnant and David did the responsible thing, and had Uriah sent to the front lines durning a battle and had him killed.
That was a joke!
So then David could have Bathsheba.
Well Bathsheba was not a Jew either.
And we look through this list we see a lot of messiness.
We some good stuff, but overall we see brokenness.
We see sin.
We sin promises broken.
We see that 14 generation not once but three times that ultimately ends with the birth of Jesus.
And we just highlighted most of the good stuff and even most of that was messy.
And through it all, when the people mess up and they fail and they break their promises over and over again.
God remain faithful through it all.
Look at this:
I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.”
This was the promise of Jesus coming to defeat sin and death.
Yes it would cost him his life but in the end he dealt the final blow to satan.
It was fulfilled (Romans 16:20)
NEXT:
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
It was fulfilled (Acts 3:24-26)
NEXT:
There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.
that stump of Jesse that goes to David and then to Jesus.
It was fulfilled
I can give you countless more.
But what I want to show you that is the OT that we have been working through was written hundreds, thousands of year before Christ and the promises that God made come to fulfillment through Jesus.
Despite God’s people forsaking their promises, cursing God, walking away from Him, It did not matter— God found a way to bring the savior into the world.
And as I was writing and studying this week, the thought I kept going back too was, why do I doubt God’s goodness?
Like why does my faith waver when God is so perfect in keeping His promises.
When we doubt or when our faith begins to slip it is because we lack trust in a promise keeper.
Which seems absolutely insane.
Please hear me when I say, we are allowed to doubt, and ask questions because it helps us grow in our faith but I wonder why we tend to lose our way when God never lost his.
Like I get it when people let us down, we tend to lost trust in them.
But God’s never let me down.
God has never broken a promise, God has never had to rebuild trust because he has never broken trust with me or with you.
Yet we ask questions like, does God really have my best interest at heart?
Can I truly trust Him?
How do I know that God is for me?
And it just struck me that we tend to look down on the disciples because Jesus always told them they had little faith.
And it seems like I am in that same boat.
Like I can’t think of a time when God was not faithful.
Yet, I treat God like he is always spinning falsity, and is going to let me down.
My faith waivers because my trust in him waivers.
I expect him to let me down and I can look at 17 verses and through 39 books of the OT and 27 books of the NT for a total of 66 faithful stories and writing about God’s faithfulness that spans of thousands of year and I still say God earn my trust.
God do you promise to be faithful?
Of course he does because he is never described any other way.
So tonight what does this mean for you?
You:
That you can put your whole trust in God.
I know that it is hard to do this.
You are skeptics by nature.
You want to say you trust God but yet your prayers are surface level.
Or when you do pray you only offer up prayers that you can achieve with or without God.
That shows a lack of trust in the King of Kings.
The one who literally spoke everything into existence.
And you go, sorry God I don’t know if I can ask you this.
I don’t know God if you can handle this.
Man if you can’t trust God to handle your stuff then you can’t trust anybody.
And I know some of you may be thinking that God has let me down.
I am sorry to tell you but you are mistaken.
You see God is not some genie that grants us three wishes.
And he does not answer our prayers at our beckoning.
No, No.
That is not who God is.
Sometimes God is going to say no to you.
Sometimes God is not going to even give an answer to you.
This does not make God any less good.
It does not make God any less faithful.
Why?
Because at the end of the day you are not God.
And it sounds to easy to say this but I am going to say it anyway— it may sound like a cop out answer but I’m going to say it anyway— That you are not God
I remember praying hard for my grandpa not to die, but God said no.
I prayed that my aunt and uncle would stay together and they did not.
I prayed that God would bring salvation to my father in law and it’s a not yet.
And even though God has chosen to answer them in different ways, it does not mean that God is not good, or that he is untrustworthy.
It just means that God is God and I am not.
What you may want does not trump the God of the universe.
Because you are not God.
You don’t have the understanding that God has.
God is for you.
What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?
Or what about in Psalm 56.
Then my enemies will turn back
in the day when I call.
This I know, that God is for me.
God is faithful and he shows it time and time again.
Remember that when you are in the pit when you wonder if God is faithful.
I know it is a bunch of names that we looked at tonight, but those names show that God remained faithful through it all.
God has kept his promises despite you, your past or your present.
This is a promise that we can rest in.
It is a promise that we can find hope in.
You can rest in His promises.
You know what that comfort in God’s promises brings?
It bring security.
Us:
We can live a life knowing we are secure in God’s Promise.
In the Garden of Eden when sin entered the world.
God did not press the panic button.
He knew they were going to fail, and so in Adam and Eve’s failure God remain faithful and gives a promise of the one to come.
The one who would show God’s faithfulness by dying to pay a debt that we owed.
IN Matthew 1:16-17
and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is 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 says it all.
The messiah has come and through it all Jesus has arrived and God has remained faithful to his promises.
And that promise of Jesus was not just so that God would remain faithful, it was to save us.
Who believes what we’ve heard and seen?
Who would have thought God’s saving power would look like this?
The servant grew up before God—a scrawny seedling,
a scrubby plant in a parched field.
There was nothing attractive about him,
nothing to cause us to take a second look.
He was looked down on and passed over,
a man who suffered, who knew pain firsthand.
One look at him and people turned away.
We looked down on him, thought he was scum.
But the fact is, it was our pains he carried—
our disfigurements, all the things wrong with us.
We thought he brought it on himself,
that God was punishing him for his own failures.
But it was our sins that did that to him,
that ripped and tore and crushed him—our sins!
He took the punishment, and that made us whole.
Through his bruises we get healed.
We’re all like sheep who’ve wandered off and gotten lost.
We’ve all done our own thing, gone our own way.
And God has piled all our sins, everything we’ve done wrong,
on him, on him.
He was beaten, he was tortured,
but he didn’t say a word.
Like a lamb taken to be slaughtered
and like a sheep being sheared,
he took it all in silence.
Justice miscarried, and he was led off—
and did anyone really know what was happening?
He died without a thought for his own welfare,
beaten bloody for the sins of my people.
They buried him with the wicked,
threw him in a grave with a rich man,
Even though he’d never hurt a soul
or said one word that wasn’t true.
Still, it’s what God had in mind all along,
to crush him with pain.
The plan was that he give himself as an offering for sin
so that he’d see life come from it—life, life, and more life.
And God’s plan will deeply prosper through him.
Out of that terrible travail of soul,
he’ll see that it’s worth it and be glad he did it.
Through what he experienced, my righteous one, my servant,
will make many “righteous ones,”
as he himself carries the burden of their sins.
Therefore I’ll reward him extravagantly—
the best of everything, the highest honors—
Because he looked death in the face and didn’t flinch,
because he embraced the company of the lowest.
He took on his own shoulders the sin of the many,
he took up the cause of all the black sheep.
God’s promise was to bring freedom from the bondage of sin through one man Jesus.
And all these names played a part for God to use them to bring the messiah that would bring security for all people, if they turn and believe.
That is the hope that you can give others.
We do not give the best hope, I mean we can talk our way through giving good advice and wisdom.
Yet, only one man can give you the hope, trust, and security that you need but we cave in to a world that is desperately trying to tell us that God can’t be trusted.
He is the only one who can because he is the only one who never let us down.
That is what the world needs to hear over and over again.
Give them Jesus.
Give them the Gospel.
Because only that is trustworthy.
Let’s pray
