The Genealogy of the King

Matthew 1:1-17

(vv. 1, 3-7, 16)

I have always been both fascinated by genealogy and a little apprehensive about discovering the history of my family. I know that it is likely that I will not be proud of everything I find out. And if you know much about your ancestors, it is likely that you know of a few skeletons in your family closet. If you were drawing up a family tree for the world to see, there are perhaps a few individuals that you would be tempted to leave out; family members whose lives we may not wish to be made public knowledge. Somewhere in my family lineage is a Binns who lived in Canada and tried to sell forged Declaration of Independence around the War of 1812. During the War, an ancestor named Binns actually owned the largest safe in Virginia and the national documents were stored there while Washington was burned by the British.

Matthew begins his story of the birth of Jesus with a genealogy, which seems like an exceedingly dull way to begin a book much less to launch the New Testament. We might wonder why God would devote so much space in the Bible to recording a boring list of difficult to pronounce names of people who live thousands of years ago, half way around the world. Why is that relevant to us?

The fact that we have here a genealogy of Jesus Christ (1:1) establishes an important truth: our faith is rooted in history, not in myth or legend. As we noted in last week’s message there are more than 300 hundred prophecies concerning the coming of Jesus. Last week we looked at the centerpiece of the Old Testament prophecies concerning the coming king in Isaiah 9. Isaiah prophesied that the Messiah would “reign over the house of Israel forever” (Isaiah 9:7). So the coming king, the Messiah, would be a descendant of David, through Solomon, and would have an eternal reign. The presentation of Jesus, in Matthew begins by showing that Jesus is the fulfillment of those promises, He was the promised Messiah!

Notice three things as we examine the genealogy of Jesus!

First, Conflicts in the Genealogies of Jesus. (Matt. 1:1-17, Luke 3:23-38)

There are in fact two genealogies of Jesus given in the New Testament, one in Matthew and the other in Luke. Matthew, written to the Jews, starts at Abraham goes forward to the birth of Jesus. Luke, written primarily to the Gentiles, goes backwards from Jesus, not just to Abraham but all the way to the father of all humanity - Adam.

If you study the genealogies in Matthew and Luke you will find that they are in pretty much in agreement until they get to King David. In Matthew the line is traced through Solomon and in the Luke the line is traced through another son of David, Nathan. Does this mean that there is an error in the Bible? No it does not!

Most people believe that Matthew is recording the line of Joseph and Luke is recording the line of Mary. Matthew shows that Jesus was legally in the kingly line of David. There are thirty-nine “begats”or “Fathereds” in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus but the most important one is the one that is not there! Matthew is careful not to make the claim that Jesus was the biological son of Joseph. He chooses his words very carefully when he says, “Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.” (Matthew 1:16). By saying “of whom was born Jesus” -“whom” is feminine in Greek, showing that Joseph was not the physical father of Jesus. Still it was important that Jesus be shown to have legal claim to the throne of David through the father’s side, and this was true because he was “legally” Joseph’s oldest son. Thus Matthew established the legal claim to the throne that Jesus had.

Luke wanted to show that Jesus was human and traced the blood-line back through Mary to David. Both Joseph and Mary have the same lineage up to a point, they were distantly related but not close enough to be problem. But they were both descended from David the king.

Secondly, Outcasts In the Genealogy of Jesus.

Since Matthew is a Jew writing the genealogy of Jesus to a Jewish audience to prove that Jesus was their king, you would think that he would go out of his way to show that Jesus’ family tree was without any shame or embarrassing relatives. But the Bible doesn’t keep the door shut on the skeletons in the family closets of its heroes. Even when it comes to tracing the ancestry of the Messiah, he shows us the unsavory characters in the family line. The list includes an adulterer who murder-ed his lover’s husband to cover up the misdeed. There is a man who committed incest with his daughter- in-law, whom he thought was a prostitute (which says some-thing about his lack of morals). Another woman in the list was a prostitute. And, there is a notoriously wicked king who burned his sons to death as offerings to a pagan idol. It’s a rather unlikely mix to produce the Savior of the world!

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

2 Abraham fathered Isaac,

Isaac fathered Jacob,

Jacob fathered Judah and his brothers,

3 Judah fathered Perez and Zerah by Tamar,

Perez fathered Hezron,

Hezron fathered Aram,

4 Aram fathered Amminadab,

Amminadab fathered Nahshon,

Nahshon fathered Salmon,

5 Salmon fathered Boaz by Rahab,

Boaz fathered Obed by Ruth,

Obed fathered Jesse,

6 and Jesse fathered King David.

David fathered Solomon by Uriah’s wife,

7 Solomon fathered Rehoboam,

Christian Standard Bible. (2020). (Mt 1:1–7). Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers. …

16 and Jacob fathered Joseph the husband of Mary,

who gave birth to Jesus who is called the Messiah

There are forty-seven names in the genealogy altogether, but I’ve obviously greatly abbreviated the genealogy of Jesus given in Matthew for the sake of time.Ordinarily women were not listed in genealogies in the Old Testament, but there are some women listed here. But the list does not include the women that you might have expected; Matthew does not include Eve, or Sarah or Rebekah. Instead strangely enough, particularly of a Jewish genealogy, three of those women where Gentiles, the fourth was married to a Gentile, and three of them were noted for immorality. None of these women characterize the kind of person we would expect to see in the genealogy of the “King Of Kings.” It seems apparent that from the very beginning of his gospel that Matthew is spotlighting the grace of God.

In fact the four women in Matthew’s genealogy illustrate from different vantage points how the “good news” saves sinners.

• Tamar (v. 3) - Saved by Grace Alone.

The first woman we want to look at is named Tamar and her story is told in Genesis 38. It is a sordid tale of deception, prostitution and incest. She is the daughter-in-law of Judah, one of Jacob’s sons. Judah had chosen Tamar as a wife for his first-born son, Er.

Er was evil. We don’t know specifically what Er did, but God struck him dead (Gen. 38:7). Er’s brother, Onan then became Tamar husband but he not give her a child, so God took his life (38:10).

Frustrated at being childless and unwilling to wait any longer on the Lord’s timing for the right husband, Tamar conceived an evil plan to become pregnant. She seems to have understood her father-in-law all too well, because she dressed up as a prostitute and waited by the road until her father-in-law came along. He hired her, without realizing who she was and he had relations with his own son’s widow, and she became pregnant. When Judah found out he was going to have her killed until it was revealed that he was the father. Because of the deception she had two children, twins, Perez and Zerah. Perez was born first and carried on the Messianic line.

What a sordid tale! It sounds like a plot line from the modern soap opera television show doesn’t it? A woman losing two husbands and then having to trick her father-in-law into having a child with her by acting like a prostitute. That people like Judah and Tamar are included in the line of the Messiah sends a strong message about the pure grace of God.

There is no need to bother looking for redeeming virtues in Tamar’s story. Scripture does not record any happy ending to her life. But Tamar’s history does illustrate that Jesus is the Savior of sinners. He deliberately associated with the tax collectors, who were notorious scoundrels. Matthew, the author of this Gospel, was a tax-collector when Jesus called him, one of the most hated of people in the society of that time. Jesus was known as the friend of sinners (prostitutes and others, Matt. 11:19). When the religious Pharisees expressed their disgust with this, Jesus replied, “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick” (Matt. 9:12). And in the next verse He added (Matt. 9:13b), “I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” By that He did not mean that some are righteous enough to get into Heaven on their own. Rather, He wanted the Pharisees and others like them to see that they were sinners who needed a Savior every bit as much as the tax collectors and prostitutes did.

There are two ways of reacting to this. One is to say, “Well I may not be perfect but I am not as bad as Tamar!” That is a position that one has to be very careful about taking. That is the mistake that the Pharisees made, in their self-righteousness, they could not see their need for a Savior.

The other and opposite extreme is to say, “I am every bit as bad or worse than Tamar and there is no hope for me.” The good news in all this - is that no matter how bad you are, no matter how bad you have been, no matter what mistakes you have made: Jesus still came to save you.

• Rahab (v. 5) – Saved Through Faith.

 Her Character

Just as we can’t think of Thomas without thinking of “doubting,” so we can’t think of Rahab without thinking, “the harlot.” Like Tamar, she was a Canaanite woman, excluded from God’s covenant people. She lived in Jericho and her story is told in Joshua 2.

So how then did Rahab find her way into the genealogy of Christ? After forty years of wandering in the wilderness, the Israelites are finally preparing to enter the Promised Land. So Joshua sent out two Jewish spies to scout out the city of Jericho. They stayed in the home of Rahab who we are told made her living as a prostitute (Josh. 2:1). When word leaked out, the leaders of Jericho came looking for the spies, Rahab protected the men and helped them to escape, on the promise that they would spare her and her family when they captured Jericho (Josh. 2:8-13)..

 Her Belief.

She knew that the city was going to be destroyed and she believed in the God of the Hebrews, that “He is God in heaven above and on earth beneath” (Josh. 2:11). So she hid the Hebrew spies and pleaded with them to spare her life and the lives of her family. In the great New Testament chapter on faith, Hebrew 11, we read, “By faith Rahab the harlot did not perish along with those who were disobedient, after she had welcomed the spies in peace.” (Heb. 11:31)

 Her Demonstration Of Faith.

But James says, “In the same way, was not Rahab the harlot also justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way?” (James 2:25) There is no contradiction between the statement about faith in the book of Hebrews and what James says here. James is making the point that genuine saving faith is not merely intellectual agreement. The demons have that kind of faith, but are not saved. Rather, saving faith always results in a life of obedience. Rahab proved that her faith was genuine by her obedience in risking her life to protect the Hebrew spies.

Believing in Jesus, does not mean just to agree that He is the Savior, but then to go on living as you’ve always lived. Genuine saving faith always includes repentance for your sins. If you truly believe in Christ, you will live in obedience to Him. As 1 John 2:3 states, “By this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments.” When the invasion of Jericho came Rahab was spared (and her family) and in the course of time she became the great-great- grandmother of David the King. By faith she was made a part of Jesus’s family tree.

• Ruth (v. 5b) - Good Moral People Still Need A Savior.

Like Tamar and Rahab, Ruth was a Gentile. She was a Moabite (Gen. 19), and outside of a covenant relationship with God. The Moabites were a race that resulted from the incestuous relationship between Lot and his oldest daughter (Gen. 19:37). But unlike Tamar, Rahab and Bathsheba, Ruth was a moral woman. She was married to a Jewish man who died. And when her mother-in-law decided to return to the land of Israel, out of love Ruth chose to go with her saying, “Your people will be my people and your God, my God.” (Ruth 1:16)

The Book of Ruth tells how Ruth found grace and love in the eyes of a man who was her kinsman-redeemer. Boaz paid the price of redemption and took Ruth, the Moabite woman, as his bride. It’s a beautiful picture of how Christ, our Redeemer, paid the price of our redemption with His own blood. As a result, we Gentiles, who formerly were excluded from God’s people and, even if we were good people, were condemned by His law, were brought into His family as His chosen bride (Eph. 2:11-22)!

Ruth married Boaz and they had a son named Obed who had a son named Jesse, who had a son named David, making Ruth King David’s grandmother. And that is how a person from the hated nation of Moab entered the line of the Messiah.

• Bathsheba. (v. 6b) - People With A Long Spiritual Heritage Still Stand In Need Of A Savior.

Matthew does not even name this woman but refers to her simply as “her of Uriah” or in other words “Uriah’s wife.” We know of course that her name was Bathsheba and her story is found in 2 Samuel 11. In contrast with the other women, Bathsheba was either a Jew married to a Gentile or Gentile herself (1 Chron. 3:5). As such she is a reminder that evil people with a long spiritual heritage can fall into gross sin and stand in need of a savior.

The problem began when King David, later in his life, was home at a time when his armies and generals were out fighting. One day he was walking on the roof of his palace and saw a beautiful woman, as she was bathing. He finds out that she is the wife of one of his generals, and sends for her.

To make a long story short: she comes to him, they commit adultery, and she becomes pregnant. David, try’s to hide his sin, by attempting to make it look like the baby was Uriah’s, but when his plans fail he sends her husband into battle in such a way that he is sure to die, and sure enough, he does. She gives birth and the child dies because of David’s sin.

So, here you have a woman who involved in adultery (though how much of the blame was hers- is a matter of debate). Her story involves deceit, treachery, adultery, and even murder. But, later she gives birth to a son named Solomon, who is another link in Jesus’ genealogy.

Can you understand how shocking these women are in the genealogy of Jesus? This is like the dirty laundry in Jesus’ family tree. These women are: include Gentiles, and therefore considered unclean and out of the ‘pedigree’ of the Jewish people. Sinners, involved in deceit, prostitution, and even murder.

Third, The Culmination Of the Genealogy of Jesus. (1:16)

16 and Jacob fathered Joseph the husband of Mary,

who gave birth to Jesus who is called the Messiah

At the end of the list is one name, the name which is above every name, Jesus Christ. This long procession of individuals; two thousand years of history; culminated at Bethlehem with the birth of Christ.

Conclusion

It is possible that you have been on a spiritual journey. Perhaps you have been asking God to show you the truth. You have said you would believe if only you could be sure of the truth. He it is! Jesus has fulfilled hundreds of prophecies that were spoken thousands of years before His birth. Christmas is the evidence you have been looking for.