The Bible Binge: The King that Nobody Wanted: The Family (Matthew 1:1-17)

DNA and Doubt

It seems like every week we hear or read about how a DNA match has solved something unknown, whether it is a crime, proving paternity, tying people to past relatives, proving the identity of someone buried long ago, or connecting people who had no clue they were related. Or finding a long lost relative. There was a story a few months ago about a family in California that was reunited with a relative that had been missing for more than 70 years. Luis Albino was 6 years old in 1951 when he was abducted while playing at an Oakland, California park. A relative making a search using ancestry DNA found him living on the east coast. The man and his brother were reunited recently after being apart for more than 70 years. That is a lot of catching up to do after years of no communication.

Science has a way of clarifying the unknown or removing doubt. As we move into the advent season, we are considering another book in our Bible Binge journey, and it is a book that is meant to address doubt and the unknown. This is the book of Matthew. In fact, all of the biographies at the beginning of our New Testaments are addressing doubt and the unknown. Matthew is answering this question:

Who is Jesus?

And the irony of Matthew is that, in answering the question “Who is Jesus?”, he is going to double down on the very things causing doubt. “You’re having doubts about Jesus because of XYZ?” Well, the very thing that makes Jesus who you believe him to be is precisely XYZ. Over the next few weeks, we are going to be looking at this book of Matthew and the story of Jesus. Here are some things we are going to highlight:

Matthew’s purpose statement: Jesus is the anticipated King of Israel, not just for Israel but for the whole world

Jesus, the King of Israel, is the Promised Messiah, Savior, Son of God, Emmanuel

Jesus is the Promised King, Messiah, Savior, Son of God, and Emmanuel because he fulfills or brings to fulness all the Old Testament promises

Jesus’ purpose statement: Jesus came to save His people from their sins

Everything in the book of Matthew has some sort of connection to the main purpose and these supporting statements. But what we’re going to see is that Matthew is going to do everything upside down because Jesus is doing everything upside down. Matthew’s audience, living some 30 or 40 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection are wondering… is Jesus really “The Guy?” Is Jesus really the one he or others claimed him to be? And the reason we have these questions is that there’s a lot about Jesus that just doesn’t match what we were expecting. We expected our Messiah to be all these things… and Jesus wasn’t doing all these things… and Matthew is going to say, Yes, Jesus is the Messiah and it’s precisely because he wasn’t doing all these things. Jesus doesn’t look anything like we expected. Or even wanted. The King nobody wanted.

And it all starts with Jesus’ family tree. I get that reading these 17 verses can be pretty boring… all these names we can hardly pronounce. It’s really easy to skip right over this in our Bible Binge because it doesn’t seem all that exciting. But Matthew does this because he has something very important to show us about this coming King.

If you’re going to make a case that Jesus is a king, you need to establish the pedigree. So, Matthew begins his biography like this:

Matthew 1:1 An account of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham:

The story of the birth of Jesus that follows is a new beginning. God has been silent for more than 400 years… in fact, the time between Malachi and Matthew is known as the 400 silent years. When the Old Testament ends, some of the Jews have returned from Babylon to rebuild the temple and restore much of Jerusalem. What doesn’t happen is that Israel is no longer in charge. The Persians, then the Greeks, then the Romans all owned the land we know as Israel. The Jews were allowed to live in Jerusalem, but they did not control it. There was no Jewish king. There was no Jewish military. Israel was simply part of the Roman Empire. And God has been silent.

But all that is about to change. God starts communicating again. God is again intervening in history… imposing himself directly on the storyline of history. And he does so in the person of Jesus, or as Matthew says, Jesus Christ or Jesus, The Messiah. The Messiah that Israel has been waiting for. This is the story of the One who was Promised, the King who was Promised. This opening line also hints at the main theme of Matthew’s biography:

Matthew 1:1 Jesus Christ, the Son of David

Now… for our purposes, we’re not going to focus on Jesus being the Son of Abraham. Matthew does unpack that in his biography. But we’re going to spend time with this line because it is germane to the main point of his book. Jesus comes from the royal line of David. Jesus has a legitimate claim to Israel’s throne. One the one hand… this is exactly what you would expect of the Messiah. And Matthew goes to great lengths to show how this person Jesus could be rightly called the King of Israel. He has the right pedigree. It can be traced through David and through Judah, the line that held the Promise of the Messiah.

The King Nobody Wanted

But.... Matthew goes to great lengths to show that Jesus is the Promised Messiah of the Old Testament even though Jesus wasn’t the kind of king anybody was looking for.

What if you had all the credentials, had all the skill, did all the right things, and yet you aren’t wanted? The story of Jesus defies all human reason and expectation. If you’re going to be a Messiah… the King of Promise… you need a palace, you need a white horse, you need a kingdom, you need a throne, you need to have the right family tree. And Matthew is going to write a biography where Jesus has a kingdom, has a realm, has a throne, has a family tree, but all of it isn’t simply unconventional, or even unexpected… it isn’t what we want. That’s not the kind of king we want. And it all starts with the pedigree… the family tree. Yes, Jesus is from David and yes, Jesus is from Judah… but that line of Judah? Really?

How many of you have gone on the Ancestry websites or done the DNA things to find out more about your past? I find it funny… you hear people doing this and we’ve all done it… we’re looking for some connection to royalty or a famous name. But wow… are we prepared to find out that there’s quite a bit of other stuff going on in our family trees? I remember a few years back someone sending me a news clipping from a really old newspaper and there was a story about a pretty bad character in the small town and he had the same last name as me. Yeah… there aren’t too many Bressons on the planet so, yeah… I’m probably related to that guy and let’s not ever share that story again. That’s going on with Matthew here.

The Scandalous Family Tree

Matthew begins his ancestry.com account of Jesus by mentioning Abraham, Issac, Jacob and Judah. It doesn’t get much bigger in Jewish family history. The patriarchs. All of Jewish history starts with these guys. And all of the great promises of the Old Testament regarding God’s blessing on his people were given to these four. Judah is the one through whom God would send a King who would reign over His people and all the earth forever and ever. Not a bad start to the family tree. But then that’s where things get dicey.

Judah fathered Perez and Zerah by Tamar, (Matthew 1:3)

Oh boy. Here we go. Really? Did we have to go there Matthew? Matthew isn’t sticking to the script. Jewish genealogies don’t mention women. But Matthew does. And the first one is Tamar. What is she doing here? Tamar doesn’t belong here, and not just because she’s a she. Do you know the story of Tamar? Do you know what she did and who she did it with? Probably not, because it’s R-rated even though it’s in the Bible. Genesis 38 is where we find the story of Judah and Tamar. Tamar has more faith in the promise of the messiah than Judah does and when Judah doesn’t hold up his end of keeping the Messianic line going, Tamar seduces Judah. This is a story you’d rather not tell when reciting your family history at the dinner table. That’s not a story we would highlight for our King.

But Matthew doesn’t stop there, though. We get to verse 5:

Salmon fathered Boaz by Rahab, (Matthew 1:5)

Boaz we know. He’s a good guy. But his mother? Why is she here? Anyone remember her story. Yeah, when Israel is getting ready to take the Promised land, two guys from their CIA stop in at the brothel she owns. She’s a prostitute. And she’s not even Jewish. Tamar is involved in sexual scandal. Rahab is a prostitute. She’s in Jesus’ line. Matthew’s genealogy is not progressing in the way we’d expect, and sure enough in the very next sentence...

Salmon fathered Boaz by Rahab, Boaz fathered Obed by Ruth, (Matthew 1:5)

Oh boy, here we go again. Another woman in the Jewish genealogy. And more scandal. Ruth. We tend to think of Ruth as one of those nice Christmas Hallmark Movies, young widow moves home with mother-in-law and wouldn’t you know it, one of mom-in-law’s relatives is rich and single. But even that story is PG-rated and Ruth is not Jewish, but belongs to the hated enemies of Israel, the Moabites, people whose own history involved terrible sexual scandal in the Bible… something having to do with Lot and his daughters. Oh c’mon. What is going on, Matthew? Highlighting the Moabites in Jesus’ family line? This is not the pristine genealogy we would write of ourselves. Or a king.

Matthew’s not done. He continues:

Matthew continues:

Boaz fathered Obed by Ruth,

Obed fathered Jesse, and Jesse fathered King David.

David fathered Solomon by Uriah’s wife,

Wait. What? Uriah’s wife? Wow. I was not expecting that. Matthew really went there. Doesn’t name the woman. But Matthew’s audience knows the woman, knows the story. David, the king after God’s own heart, the one who killed Goliath, the one who wrote a lot of the Psalms in the Bible, that David was the father of Solomon through Uriah’s wife. Not his own. Uriah’s wife. The one David had an affair with, or more like took advantage of, and then killed Uriah to cover up his own adultery. More scandal, quite possibly the most scandalous story in the Old Testament.

And it’s not just the women. So many of the guys’ names here are notorious… wicked. Evil. Beyond the pale.. read up on Manasseh some time. If all these characters were in the line of the King we’re related to, we’re burying their involvement.

But not Matthew… Matthew begins the Jesus story with a shady family tree filled with shady characters, because he knows, because he spent 3 years with Jesus, that shady people and shady women are not just a part of the story of Jesus, but are the point of the story. In fact, Matthew knows this. Matthew himself was an outcast, a rich one. A tax collector. An extortionist. Yet Jesus made him part of his own story.

We don’t want this kind of king

If we were writing the story of a king who was promised, we would not have written the family tree that way. We’d highlight all the champions, all the great names… we would simply highlight the ones who put the best shine on the background of our king. We want our king to be a winner. We want our king to be the ideal for our lives. When my life is bad… well, I want the king to make it all OK. And we want our king to be someone we can name drop, brag about. I want a King driving the best cars, flying the best planes, getting the best education, having the most popular podcast, living the best life, doing the latest and greatest thing… and I want a king who has the best DNA, with the family trees of people of importance and power. I want that to be the story of my king, because that’s what I aspire to… and I expect that King to be the supreme example of all that can be gained in life.

And Matthew does the opposite. Oh sure, we have David and Solomon here and Abraham… but if you’re going to write the king’s history, we’ll just forget the scandal parts of their own story. Matthew is going another direction. And Matthew is just getting started. There’s more where this came from. This King is eventually going to die the death of a criminal. How terrible. How awful. What kind of king is this?

The King we don’t want is the king we need

This is precisely the King who came and is the King we need… This King’s family tree is telling us that this King is coming for sinners and he’s going to die for that family tree. You see, sinners aren’t just a part of the story, they are the point of the story. Matthew is not going to mask over the flaws and the sin in Jesus’ background. It’s why Jesus came. Jesus is turning the King’s story on its head.

Because he is the King who died in scandal, in infamy, scandal never wins in Jesus’ economy. Shame never wins. Grace has the last word. Do you think those women, Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba, didn’t wonder if scandal and shame would be the last word for them? It’s never the last word where Jesus is involved. Matthew is pointing out that This Baby that is coming into a world full of scandal will have the last word. And that last word is life, salvation, and forgiveness… a King we don’t want, but a King we need.

Which means if you are struggling today, if there is a burden you are dealing with, if there is a past you just can’t move past, and you think that somehow you got to get your life together in order to be acceptable to God, you can stop. Your shame, my shame, your sin, my sin, doesn’t get the last word.

And that’s really the point of this really boring genealogy at the beginning of Matthew’s story. That’s Jesus’ story. And because that’s Jesus’ story, that’s your story. Those 17 verses are important because it shows us that Jesus is all about sinners, he’s all about you and me and he’s all about including us in his family. That’s how much he loves us. He died for that family tree, a family tree that includes you and me.

This King is FOR YOU. This King, who has a terrible, sordid family… is FOR YOU. Jesus family tree is nothing but shady. Because Bresson is shady. We’re all shady. This King has made us a part of His family tree. The King we don’t want, is the King we need.

Let’s pray.

The Table

We get better than we deserve. That’s the story of this Table. This Table is soaked in scandal because it is for sinners. It is for those who know they need Jesus to save them from their sins. This table is the opposite of coal. We deserve the worst. He gives us the best. He gives us Himself. Right here. It’s here he forgives us, and gives us life, and reminds us that we are part of his shady family tree.

Benediction

Numbers 6:24–26

May the Lord bless you and protect you;

may the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you;

may the Lord look with favor on you and give you peace.