Jesus: The Arrival of the King-Matthew 1:18-25

Key Elements

In Matthew 1:18-25, Matthew records the birth of Jesus, a King unlike any other who has come to save His people from their sins.

Main idea of the message: God sending His Son, the birth of Jesus Christ, is the most transformational event in the history of the world; and when we fully realize what God did for us through sending His Son, it will transform us as well.

I want my audience to open their eyes to what the birth of Jesus means and allow it to transform their lives.

Intro

Open your copy of God’s Word with me to Matthew 1:18-25 today.

The arrival of a baby changes everything for a family especially if it’s that first child. The birth of a second child can be life changing as well and then, as more children are born into the family, it’s not really as shocking because you are used to multiple children; but there is really nothing as life transforming and exciting and even a little scary as finding out that you are pregnant with that first child. And if you’re a grandparent and this is your first grandchild, well forget it. Because that first grandchild will be spoiled forever. And it’s interesting how things have changed over the years when a couple finds out that they are pregnant. Married couples mine and Kristi’s age, when we found out we were going to have a baby, after everything had been confirmed, we would take our parents to dinner or have everyone to the house and figure out some creative way to surprise everyone revealing that there was a new grandchild on the way. And then, when we found out whether the baby was a boy or a girl, we actually would just tell them. Things have really evolved over the years, though, of how married couples surprise their families when they find out they are pregnant. With social media, it really is a whole new level of revelation when a couple reveals they are pregnant. And then it really goes to a whole new level when it’s time to reveal the gender of the baby. It’s definitely true that the arrival of a baby is a transformational event and is something to celebrate.

And today, as we continue our new series on The Book of Matthew we are going to talk about the most transformational and celebrated arrival of a baby in the history of the world, the birth of Jesus Christ the Son of God. For it is here in our text today in Matthew 1:18-25 that Matthew records for us the birth of Jesus. A King unlike any other. A King that did not come to rule by force, a King that did not come to reign by coercion, but a King that came to save His people from their sins and set all people free from the oppression and the captivity and the power of an enemy who has nothing on his agenda but destruction. It is here in Matthew 1:18-25 that we see the most transformational event in the history of the world. An event that would change the course of human history forever and transform the lives of countless people. For it is here in our text today that we see more than just the Christmas story that we celebrate once a year in December. It is here in our text today that we see the birth of Jesus, we see the arrival of the King.

Message

Now, last week when we began this series on The Book of Matthew we began by setting the stage for where Matthew is taking us in his gospel. As we walked through the first part of Matthew 1, the Genealogy of Jesus, what we noticed is that Matthew begins his Gospel by pointing his audience and us to Jesus as the promised Messiah from the Old Testament and the King of Israel. This is one of the major themes that we are going to see all throughout the Book of Matthew. As Matthew writes to his audience of Jewish believers and those considering becoming followers of Jesus, he stresses that Jesus is the Messiah that Israel has been looking for from the line of King David. He is the promised one from the OT that the prophets prophesied about hundreds of years before. In Jesus Christ, all prophecies are fulfilled of the OT and through Jesus Christ, God will make salvation available to all people and will bring it about in the lives of all who place their faith and trust in Him as the one true Son of God. And that’s what Matthew continues to emphasize today as he moves into the story of the birth of Jesus Christ. He’s continuing to show his readers and us that Jesus is the King.

Insights on the Book of Matthew: So, let’s pause for a moment and look at an insight in the Book of Matthew that’s going to set up where he is taking us today.

The betrothal process in the 1st century-The betrothal process in the 1st century was the same as being married in our time without the consummation of the marriage. It’s similar to when Jesus says later in one of his teachings that a man went and bought a field and negotiated an agreement; it’s a legal agreement that two families have engaged in and cannot be broken except by divorce. So, betrothal is the same word for engaged, it’s a promise that’s legally binding between a couple and their families for the couple to marry. To take this a little further to show the significance and the seriousness of this betrothal, it’s not like today’s dating scene. In the first century, two families would come together and the father of the husband would go out and select a woman to be the wife of his son. The age of the husband was around 18 and could be up to 23 and the age of the bride would be as young as 12 years 6 months and a day up to 14 to 15 years old. This seems unusual for us and a little weird but in that culture and day this was common. The son (husband) would at some point see the daughter (soon to be wife) for the very first time and was told this is who you are going to marry. The father would take the son and meet the would-be bride and they would sit down and the father would negotiate a bride price with the father of the bride. This was because the children of the families all contributed to the income of the family and because she was going to leave her family and join the other family, there was a price to be paid to make up for the void of income. This price represented the fact that the loss of the daughter was a precious loss to the family. After the price was agreed upon by the two fathers, they would take a glass of wine and toast the agreement between the families. The groom would then drink from the glass and then offer the cup to the bride symbolically saying that he wanted to make a covenant and would be willing to give his own life for her life. The bride to be would seal the betrothal by drinking from the same glass of wine as the groom. At that point, the son would go back with his father to the town that he lived in and the couple would never see each other again until the time for the wedding. If they were in the same town, they would cross paths but they didn’t hang out. They didn’t date. The bride is left waiting for the groom to return to get her. Now, the whole time during this betrothal period, the groom is preparing a home for he and his bride to be to live. He did this by adding a room onto the family house which is where they would live. While he’s doing this, he is constantly going to his father and asking him “is the home ready for my bride?” The father would constantly inspect the room and say “it needs work” until it was ready. The point of that is that the son never knew when the time was right for him to return to get his bride. The only person who knew when the time was right for the son to go get his bride was the father. When the time was determined by the father that the son could go get his bride, the father would come to him and say “go get your bride.” The son would make his way back to the bride and would have a forerunner that would go ahead of him to give the bride and her family notice to that the groom was coming. This forerunner would prepare the way for the groom. He would run through the streets of the town yelling “prepare the way, the bride groom is coming.” Now, what’s even more interesting is that while this is happening, every bride to be in the town would be wondering if this was her bride groom coming for her. So, every bride had to be ready. The bride groom would at some point come to the door of the bride’s house and knock on the door, she would open the door and it’s at that point she would realize that he had kept his promise. He promised that he would come back for her after he had prepared the room in his father’s house for his bride. Now, before we go any further, let’s make a quick application and I’m jumping ahead a little in the book of Matthew. Jesus uses betrothal and bride groom language all throughout His teachings. He is the bride groom and the disciples and now the church are the bride of Christ. And he tells the disciples at the last supper, who are nervous about His departure, and this promise is for those of us who are believers in Jesus as well, “don’t let your heart be troubled, don’t be nervous about my departure. I am going to prepare a place for you and when it is ready, when my Father gives the word, I will return for you.” And next, we see this in Matthew 26 but we have to go to Luke 22 to catch the significance, after Jesus has talked about His departure and His return, He takes a cup of wine and as the bride groom He seals the promise with the disciples and this promise is for the church also as the bride of Christ, that He will return one day for His people. How incredible is that? To see the significance of this betrothal process that really goes back to the OT all the way into the first century of Jesus’ day and is used to represent a promise fulfilled in Jesus the Messiah.

And so, this is the cultural context in which our text in Matthew 1 falls today. This is the serious situation in which we find the birth of Jesus occuring. And this is what Matthew has been preparing us for in the first 17 verses of chapter 1. The scandal that is going to surround the birth of Jesus is actually the only perfect situation that sets up what has to happen for the Messiah, the Savior of the world, Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, to be born.

So, as we look at the birth of Jesus, the arrival of the King, here’s the main idea we want to focus on: God sending His Son, the birth of Jesus Christ, is the most transformational event in the history of the world; and when we fully realize what God did for us through sending His Son, it will transform us as well.

So, let’s read about the most transformational event in history and then we’ll notice how this event transforms our lives: (Read text)

1. The birth of Jesus, the arrival of the King, reveals God’s perfectly orchestrated plan of salvation. (vs. 18-21)

The event that we are talking today, the birth of Jesus, is really something that we only seriously focus in on once a year. Again, Christmas time is really the time of year that this story comes to the forefront. In fact, it seems very unusual that we would talk about this incredible event in March. And I really think that speaks to the danger that we can fall into even as followers of Jesus. Because it’s almost like the birth of Jesus has become so common to celebrate only at Christmas that it has lost its wonder, its lost the awe and the amazement that it should bring in our lives as we consider that God sent His one and only Son to be our Savior. The birth of Jesus Christ is at the center of our faith, it should be something that is constantly on our minds and something that is constantly celebrated because it is here that salvation finds its beginning for all of us.

Theologian J.I. Packer describes it in this way. He says that “It is here, in the thing that happened at the first Christmas, that the profoundest and most unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie.”

For it is here that the God of the universe provided a way of salvation for all who would trust in Jesus as Savior and Lord by sending Jesus for us. And as we think about that and as we try to wrap our minds around that, although I don’t think we ever fully could, there are some factors that we must consider that took place for this incredible act of salvation to be possible.

First, there are the cultural circumstances. And we’ve talked about the betrothal process in detail already and the cultural context in which everything occurred. But we see Matthew emphasizing and giving us a little more detail into Mary and Joseph’s situation. He says in vs. 18-19… Joseph and Mary were in the midst of the betrothal process. The families had met, the agreement had been made, the deal had been sealed between the father of the groom and the father of the bride. Joseph and Mary were to be married, in fact it was like they already were. Joseph was in the process of making preparation for Mary to be his wife and waiting for word from his father to go and get his bride. And then Matthew gives us a very important detail, in the midst of this process, Mary has become pregnant. Now, when we look at Luke 1, we get a little background on how this has happened, an angel has visited Mary and told her that she will become pregnant by the Holy Spirit of God and that she will give birth to the Messiah. But who in Nazareth is going to believe that? And the seriousness of this situation intensifies because the Jewish law requires the punishment of death for a woman who has been caught in adultery. So the circumstances surrounding the birth of Jesus are somewhat scandalous. And what we’ll see later in the book of Matthew is that this scandal of illegitimacy will follow Jesus the rest of His life.

Second, there is the virgin birth. Now, think about how shocking these word would have been to the original readers of Matthew and how shocking they are even to us. I mean this is naturally impossible, which further solidifies the supernatural aspect of Jesus’ birth. Physically, Jesus is Mary’s son which means that He is fully human. The virgin birth emphasizes Jesus’s humanity. He is biologically the son of Mary. Jesus was not born with a halo around His head. He wasn’t a baby that slept perfectly every night. He came into this world as all of us do crying, fussing, hungry, and wetting the bed. Jesus was born like us as a human baby to His mother Mary, yet He was conceived by the Holy Spirit. Which means that Joseph was not his biological father. Jesus was born to his biological mother Mary and to His adoptive father Joseph. And Matthew is careful to make this point by not calling Joseph the father of Jesus. All throughout the genealogy of Jesus, we see that fathers are listed but when we come to vs. 16, what does it say, “Joseph the husband of Mary, by whom Jesus was born.” But although Matthew never explicitly refers to Joseph as Jesus’ biological father, through the birth narrative and from what the angel tells Joseph, we know that Joseph is Jesus’ adoptive father, the man that God has chosen to raise His Son. Because Joseph is the one to legally name Jesus and take Him into his family, legally Jesus becomes Joseph’s son which means that this adoption ties Jesus to Joseph as a royal son in the line of King David. The virgin birth of Jesus Christ is so important because it brings out Jesus’ humanity but it also emphasizes Jesus’ deity. Jesus is fully human but He is also fully divine, He is the perfect sinless Son of God. Just as Jesus would have possessed the full range of human characteristics, Jesus also possesses the full range of divine characteristics. And we see this all throughout His ministry-He has power over disease, He has power over nature, He has authority over sin. He is in control over death. Jesus is fully able to identify with us because He was human and He is also fully able to identify as God because He is divine. And this is the greatest, most awe inspiring mystery in the universe because for Jesus to be both fully God and fully man at the same time is only possible through the virgin birth.

And this is God’s perfect design and this is God’s perfect plan to bring salvation to the world, through the virgin birth of His Son. It could not have happened any other way. If Jesus had come into the world without any human parent, there would be no way we could conceive that He identifies with us in our struggles. If Jesus had come into the world through two human parents-a biological mother and father-there would be no way we could conceive that He could be fully God since His birth would have been exactly the same as ours. But God in His wisdom and sovereignty, orchestrated the virgin birth of Jesus Christ to perfectly implement the plan of salvation for the world and to show us that salvation has nothing to do with any good in us. That there is nothing in and of ourselves that we can do to earn salvation. But, that salvation is totally and completely the work of a supernatural God who, in His grace and mercy and love for us, sent His only Son to make a way for us back to Him. May we never get over what God has done for us.

The birth of Jesus, the arrival of the King, reveals God’s perfectly orchestrated plan of salvation.

David Platt, Exalting Jesus in Matthew, ed. Daniel L. Akin, David Platt, and Tony Merida, Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary (Nashville, TN: Holman Reference, 2013), 17.

2. Second, the birth of Jesus, the arrival of the King, rekindles a trust in God Who sees the big picture of life and the grand narrative of the future. (vs. 18-21)

So, I think we all believe in our hearts that life would be much easier for us if we could see the future. If we could get just a glimpse down the road of life into the events that are coming and what we might face, I think we all believe that life would go much smoother for us. And it might. We might be able to plan ahead, we might be able to prepare ourselves for what’s coming in life for us or our family. Or we might find it overwhelming. For me, I think it would increase my anxiety and my worry and I think the worse effect it would have on all of us is that we would try everything in our own power to handle every situation in our lives. I believe if we could see into our future, it would have a devastating effect on our total dependence on God. And that’s why I believe the main reason we can’t see into the future is because God wants our total reliance to be on Him. Because He is the One who can see the future. In fact, He is so powerful that He has already been there and come back. He is so powerful that He already has the solution for what’s coming in the future before those situations even darken our door. And this amazing God who see the big picture of life and knows the grand narrative of the future, if you have placed your faith and trust in Jesus, is the God who lives inside of you.

And that’s a truth that we see coming out in Matthew 1:18-25. Look at vs. 19-21...

So, put yourself in their shoes for just a moment. We are back to the circumstances again. You have this young couple, Mary and Joseph, beginning their lives together. They have everything in front of them, a wide open future and then they are both visited by an angel who reveals to them this news. Life changing news! Imagine the thoughts and emotions they are going through. Imagine the confusion and the worry that is flooding their minds. And consider Joseph: you are looking forward to spending the rest of your life with Mary and now you find out she is pregnant. And in your mind, there’s only one clear explanation for this.

And so Joseph has a choice. He can divorce her publicly and she will be executed publicly or he can send her away quietly divorcing her without disgrace. And Matthew tells us the last option is what he’s decided to do. But before he can go through with his decision, an angel visits him and makes clear God’s plan and tells Joseph exactly what God has called him to do-he is to raise Jesus the Son of God as his own son. And what does Joseph do? He obeys. Probably puzzled, probably confused, probably not fully understanding it all and maybe not fully believing it all, Joseph obeys God.

Did Joseph and Mary know the future, did God map out completely what was going to happen, could they see what was coming and how difficult it was going to be? No. All they both knew was that God had chosen them-Mary to give birth to the Son of God and Joseph to raise the Son of God as his own. And that through Jesus their son, God would save His people from their sins. In a moment where their lives were turned completely upside down and with no details, Mary and Joseph simply obeyed and as they did their trust in God was rekindled as they looked to the only one Who knew the future they were about to face.

And in the life of Joseph and Mary in this moment, we discover such an incredible truth-although we may never see the big picture and the grand narrative of life, as followers of Jesus, there is a God who lives in us and loves us Who does. The God who knows the future, who has been there and come back is our Savior. There is a God who we can trust with every moment of our lives, with every fiber of our beings, who knows what’s next and will be with us every step of the way as we walk this road of life. And as He continues to be faithful, as He continues to provide, as He continues to walk with us never leaving us or forsaking us, there is a trust that grows in us for Him as He proves Himself faithful over and over again.

The birth of Jesus, the arrival of the King, rekindles a trust in God Who sees the big picture of life and the grand narrative of the future.

Which leads us right into our final truth...

3. The birth of Jesus, the arrival of the King, reminds us that in His glory God is far above us but because of His grace God is near to us. (vs. 23)

Pastor David Platt share the story of an opportunity that he had to share about the birth of Jesus while sitting across the table from a group of Muslim men in the Middle East on a mission trip. He recalls “they were finishing a meal late one night and they asked him to share with them what he believed about God. Knowing that Muslims believe Jesus was a good man, but certainly not God in the flesh (such a claim is blasphemous in Islam), He began to share about who Jesus is. He told them that when he decided to ask his wife to marry him, he did not send someone else to do it for him; he went himself. And then he asked the men why they thought he did that. And the men replied, “in matters of love, one must go himself.” And then he said, “the beauty of the message of Jesus Christ is that God has not sent a prophet or a messenger, God has come Himself, because in matters of love, one must go himself.”

And this is the message of the Gospel. That God has come for us Himself.

Speaking of the birth of Jesus, one theologian put it this way, “The astounding truth of Christianity, the reality that God became flesh, may be incomprehensible to many but to those of us who believe, it is irresistible.”

And this is what Matthew communicates in vs. 23. He says that the birth of Jesus, the arrival of the King, fulfilled a prophecy found in Isaiah… (read vs. 23)

God made a promise through the prophet Isaiah that was fulfilled 700 years later in the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. This God who will never leave us or forsake us, who is our refuge in times of trouble, who nothing in life or death can separate us from, who promises one day to wipe every tear from our eyes and that there is coming a day where there will be no more death, or grief, or crying, or pain. This same God who is far above us and exists in glory and power, who is seated on the throne of heaven and has conquered sin, death, hell, and the grave; who we should stand in awe of, who has saved us by His grace; this same God is near to us. He is walking with us through every sorrow and victory, He is walking with us through every struggle and triumph. And this same God who promises to never leave us or forsake us is the one who spoke the universe into being, He’s the one who rules over all creation, He’s the one the angels bow to in worship, this same God is with us. And He sent His Son Jesus to endure the penalty of sin by dying on a cross to give His body and shed His blood so that we could be rescued and restored and reconciled to Him. This is the God we worship. This is King Jesus.

Conclusion