Sermon Tone Analysis

Bottomline: Scandals of the past don’t define our future.

-Tamar 15 year old pagan girl Canaanite-

-Rahab the prostitute-

-Bathsheba

-Boaz Rahabs son marries Ruth Moabittess not even a jew -the book of Ruth

-Bathsheba

But Matthew also knows that the way it has happened is very strange.

He is about to tell how Mary, Jesus’ mother, had become pregnant not through her fiancé, Joseph, but through the holy spirit.

So Matthew adds to his list reminders of the strange ways God worked in the royal family itself: Judah treating his daughter-in-law Tamar as a prostitute, Boaz being the son of the Jericho prostitute Rahab, and David committing adultery with the wife of Uriah the Hittite.

If God can work through these bizarre ways, he seems to be saying, watch what he’s going to do now.

Wright, T. (2004).

Matthew for Everyone, Part 1: Chapters 1-15 (p.

4).

London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

But when we look at who these women were, and at what they did, the matter becomes even more amazing.

Rachab, or as the Old Testament calls her, Rahab, was a harlot of Jericho (Joshua 2:1–7).

Ruth was not even a Jewess; she was a Moabitess (Ruth 1:4); and does not the law itself lay it down, ‘No Ammonite or Moabite shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord.

Even to the tenth generation, none of their descendants shall enter the assembly of the Lord’ (Deuteronomy 23:3)?

Ruth belonged to an alien and a hated people.

Tamar was a deliberate seducer and an adulteress (Genesis 38).

Bathsheba, the mother of Solomon, was the woman whom David seduced from Uriah, her husband, with an unforgivable cruelty (2 Samuel 11 and 12).

If Matthew had ransacked the pages of the Old Testament for improbable candidates, he could not have discovered four more incredible ancestors for Jesus Christ.

But, surely, there is something very lovely in this.

Here, at the very beginning, Matthew shows us in symbol the essence of the gospel of God in Jesus Christ, for here he shows us the barriers going down.

1. Sinners of all types are saved and redeemed by and through Jesus

-Jesus identifies with sinners

2. Abraham Blessing of all nations....3 of the women were not Jews…Jesus became an outsider or foreigner to make foreigners family

-Foreigners are made family

3. Jesus comes through a line of broken people, so that He could be broken to restore us.

3. Restore

Jesus comes through a line of broken people, so that He could be broken to restore us.

so that He could

be broken to

Scandals of the past don’t define our future.

restore us.