Alright, amigos, it is time to land the plane on this conversation we've been having for a couple weeks about the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew chapter 1, verses 1 through 17. We have looked at this from so many different angles, but this is part of the fun of doing this as a podcast, is we can take the time we need to really dissect the thing and again come away from our time with each of these passages and with this book in general, feeling like, all right, I might not know everything about that, I might not agree with everybody, I might not be the smartest, but I got that in my hip pocket. I understand the questions, I understand where it fits. And in this conversation, I want to put a bow on it so that we come away from this clear on what it looks like we're supposed to take from this unusual seeming opening to the story of Jesus as described by Matthew. So here's what we're seeing. One, we looked at a whole bunch of the controversies that are involved here. Again, I'm always gonna lean into that stuff. We're gonna try not to duck it. If any of these controversies proves to be something that is head scratching for you or even damages your faith or causes a hiccup, I still think it's worth it. We can't lie to ourselves about Bible things and Jesus things. We have to do this with eyes wide open. And if that means that it raises questions and it's hard at times, um, tough. I think that's good. If we get in a habit of feeling like we cut corners or lie to ourselves, that's a faith time bomb just waiting to go off. If we walk into the hard stuff and we stare it down and we think about it, even if we can't reconcile everything immediately, that's not a faith time bomb. It's the opposite. That little voice in the back of your head says to you then, well, that might be tough, but you're not cutting corners and you're not lying. So we can live with it being tough, but we're not cheating in order to believe something that we just want to believe. And you want that voice on your side. You don't want that voice snuffed out or suffocated through self-deception. So thank you for enduring some of the really challenging parts of this. Here's what I can say about the controversies, though. This worked. Whatever Matthew was trying to accomplish with this, he succeeded. How do I know? Uh, because there was some obscure homeless guy that lived in some desert in another part of the world 2,000 years ago, and you've heard of him. Because there was some guy like that who wandered around and only had a career of three years, one of many criminals to be executed by the Roman government, and you're here putting your time into this conversation. And you have a document that's maybe open in front of you or up on your phone that records his story. This casts a very long shadow. Whether you believe everything about it or not, Matthew set out to make a case. It caught on early, it was effective, and so whoever he was trying to convince with this, enough of them were convinced that it got rolling and kept rolling. Okay, second big thing. Clearly, what Matthew is doing here is saying that Jesus is a continuation of what we call the Old Testament. This is not a new religion, folks. This is not a new God. This is not a new trajectory. This is not a new thing. This is the completion of all of those thematic and storytelling arcs, those prophetic arcs that were cast forward into history from the Old Testament past, and now they are all landing at the same time, once again, converging on Jesus. We are moving forward with the same story. We are not rejecting the old story and making something new. How do we know? All those names, all those stories. And further, the three big covenants are all referenced directly or indirectly. The covenant with Abraham to say God's gonna make a people and all the nations would be blessed through him. The covenant with Moses and the Hebrew people to say, I'm your God, you're my people. If you obey me, I'll bless you. If you disobey me, I'll curse you, and everybody's gonna know that I'm your God and you're my people. And the covenant with David that's unconditional that says there's gonna be a throne that'll last forever and a kingdom that will last forever, and your descendant will rule on that throne forever. It's all there. Jesus is the completion of this stuff, not a departure of this stuff. That's the but dot da dot thing. Third, we're supposed to be compelled by this. Now look, we might have to do some extra work to put ourselves in the shoes of the original audience to understand what's being talked about at all here, but we can do it. I mean, we just did it. It took you a couple weeks of commutes or workouts or whatever, but we got it in. Yeah, with a little bit of effort, I can see how somebody would look at this list of letters and names and see a story here and see something cohesive and understand as they read through the book of Matthew, and maybe as they get done with the book of Matthew, and like, wait a minute, what was the genealogy again? Let me go back to the beginning. And they flip through the genealogy, like, dang, that actually really holds up. It was meant to be compelling to them. It is meant to be compelling to you. You are supposed to be so compelled that you put your trust in Christ as king after reading the document that is to follow in the book of Matthew. You are to be so compelled that you acknowledge Christ as king after reading this document. He wants the story to be overwhelming. This genealogy lays the groundwork of what Matthew is going to go on to prove. He's going to demonstrate that all of this happened in fulfillment of these stories and these things, and that if you think God did this stuff in the past, then you gotta think that Jesus is the completion of that stuff now. What he's trying to say is you should be on board with Christ as king because look, who can oppose him? God is the God of history. He moved all of these elaborate pieces around. And look, when we were back there, we couldn't tell what he was doing. It didn't add up, it didn't make sense. I mean, you got some some guy sleeping with his daughter-in-law dressed up like a prostitute, you got some lady threshing leftover grain or something in a field, you got some weird affair, and a Hittite gets murdered and people getting taken away into captivity and people arguing about where walls should be built. What? How does this add up to anything cohesive? And what Matthew is demonstrating is, I'll give you cohesive. It is cohesive in the person and work of Jesus Christ, and there's blessing in acknowledging him as king. To acknowledge Christ as king is to be on the same team as the God who has orchestrated all of this history. Finally, what he's illustrating here is that there's a family of faith. It's a genetic family of faith that starts with Abraham and proceeds all the way down to Jesus. But as we get into Matthew, we see that not only is Jesus the fulfillment of this family of faith, he is the initiator of a new family of faith that is rooted in belief and acknowledgement of Christ as King, in being participants in the kingdom that he is creating, in participating and sharing in the values of this kingdom that he's going to lay out here in just a couple of chapters. And implicit in all of that is that you are invited into this new family of faith. And not just you, if you happen to look like the people on this list or sound like the people on this list, you, no matter who you are, are invited into this new family of faith. And that is energizing and exciting and paradigm changing. And that's what we're going to be exploring as we move forward with this thing. I'm pumped for this. Thank you for being here. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's keep getting after this.