In the genealogy of Jesus that we see in Matthew chapter 1, we know that Matthew has divided it into three chunks of 14-ish generations, and that all of this leads us up to Jesus himself. But we've been wrestling with the question of why? What is he going for? Why has Matthew arranged it this way? And part of the answer is, well, these are the names that you would expect to see in here. But I think part of the answer is that these aren't just names. All of these names tell a story. Every single one would conjure an entire narrative in the mind of Matthew's original audience, and those narratives would have all these nuggets of theology, and frankly, all of these loose ends where the story and the theme isn't quite resolved. And like all of the Old Testament, it is begging for completion or resolution. The Old Testament, both at a micro and macro level, is basically dun dun dun dun dun.
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SPEAKER_00And it's it's missing the d-dut. Well, Jesus, according to Matthew, is the d-dut of the Old Testament. And so when we start off in block number one that runs from Abraham to David in verses two through six of Matthew chapter one, what we see is a block of Jewishness. Now they weren't called Jews back then, but Hebrewness, a block of the chosen people, the descendants of Abraham. And there are all these little narratives in here that leave you a scratch in your head when you read them in the Old Testament, and they feel like this ark being thrown forward into history indiscriminately. Like that's gonna land somewhere, and it's gonna mean something eventually later on. We're gonna get the bup up, but we don't know exactly when it's going to happen. So this thing leads with Abraham. Like we've talked about, Abraham, he's the first Hebrew, he's the first chosen person of God, and God makes a covenant with them, and Abraham is up and down and all over the place personally, but God is faithful and consistent as God is. Abraham is a mess, as humans tend to be. And then you look a little bit closer and you're like, oh, that's right, his kid was Isaac. Well, what does Abraham and Isaac in the same sentence conjure? Not just for you and me, but especially for the original Jewish audience Matthew is writing to? Well, it's gonna conjure this story about God telling Abraham to sacrifice his own kid. And what's crazier is that Abraham is willing to do it. Ultimately, God stays Abraham's hand. He provides a substitutionary sacrifice, Isaac is spared, and you've got this story that is, I guess, Abraham is really loyal to God. Why didn't God test that some other way? It feels like there's more to the story. Why did Abraham sacrifice Isaac? What did that mean? Well, I think what you're seeing here is that Matthew is again giving us the dun dun in Jesus because this genealogy opens with a story of a father sacrificing his son, and it closes with a story, or it closes with a character who is a son who was willingly sacrificed by his father. Except the one with Jesus actually happened. It actually went down. He is the ram in the thicket as well as the sacrifice that was offered. So, right off the bat, rich in theology, and we're talking about these pre-monarchy, proto-Jewish stories that everybody would have known. So you got Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah. Oh, that's right. Jacob's the father of Judah, Judah's one of the patriarchs of the tribes of Israel. And how did Judah work out again? Wasn't there some weird story about how his line was proliferated? Oh, yeah, there was, and it's right here. Judah the father of Perez, and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar. Ah, that would have made people's skin crawl. I wonder if they maybe didn't tell their kids this story, and they felt uncomfortable when they even got to this verse in Matthew chapter one, because, like, oh no, I don't want to have the uh Tamar talk with the kids, sweetheart. We need to let them get a little bit older. Let's buzz past that one. Judah is Tamar's father-in-law, and ultimately they end up being intimate and producing the offspring that preserves the line of Judah moving forward because of all kinds of complicated things that we're going to get into tomorrow when we talk about Tamar and the other women in this story. So that is incredibly loaded. Wow, God went to such lengths to preserve the line of Judah. Why would he do that? Well, if you think forward, you're like, that's right, there are a couple of key verses. And the original audience would have remembered these, things like Micah 5.2. But you, Bethlehem Ephratha, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from old, from ancient times. Ah, we're getting a sense of the dot dot here. Isaiah chapter 37 and verse 31. This is a big one. Once more a remnant of the house of Judah will take root below and bear fruit above, for out of Jerusalem will come a remnant. Okay. Again, we're only three verses in, but to the original audience, Judah means something. And the reminder, just by listing the names of how complex and bizarre and flawed it was for Judah's line to be precariously preserved and carried forward, would point to the dunt dunt that is Jesus. We get the story, the beloved story of Ruth and Boaz, and out of that comes Jesse and ultimately David. And we're reminded at the end of this first chunk of how God can use the twists and turns and weirdness of this story to get us to a landing place like David, which is awesome and what everybody looks back to happily. So if the first chunk communicates the Jewishness of Jesus, the second chunk communicates the kingship of Jesus. In fact, these are all kings, right? David is the father of Solomon. Oh, well, there's a story with this one too, isn't there? My goodness. An ugly, twisted, convoluted story, but yet this line continues. Even in the face of adultery and murder and intrigue and civil war, Solomon was the father of Rehboam, Rehoboam, the father of Abijah. Oh, these stories hurt. These are not happy memories. This is the breaking up of God's chosen people, a failure to realize what they could have been. This is the beginning of the collapse of the promise to David that people who were reading Matthew would now wonder you know, how could this promise ever be fulfilled? It's just lingering out there, this promise to David, that there'd be this eternal kingdom and this eternal throne, and that his descendants would sit on it forever, bop, bad, dun. And coming out of the Old Testament, there is no bop bop. But the attentive reader, just in hearing those names, would remember all the stories and start to suspect that what Matthew is proposing is that Jesus is the Ba-Ba to the Old Testament. So the first section demonstrates the Jewishness of Jesus. The second section demonstrates the kingship of Jesus. Not just that he is of this lineage and therefore set to inherit, but also that Jesus would just have the qualities of kingship. If you say somebody is descended from the family tree that includes people like George Brett and Cal Ripkin Jr., you'd guess they'd be good at baseball. If they're descended from a family tree that includes Tom Petty and Bob Dylan, you would guess they could sing a little bit. Well, if Jesus is descended from this list of people who are all kings, you would suspect he can rule a little bit and knows what to do, even if some of the people on this list weren't the best at it. The third chunk, then, describes the providence and faithfulness of God, even when it seems like stuff is broken or a mess. After the exile to Babylon, we get a whole bunch of names. Most of them are people we barely know anything about or maybe know nothing about, but we do see a couple, like Zerubbabel. And Zerubbabel is a very significant name. We're going to talk about that a couple of episodes down the road and get to why his name matters particularly in this list. But what we see here are names that evoke the memory of God restoring something that looked like there was no future to it, of God superintending history to bring healing and restoration to something that looked completely lost and completely wrecked, and then we come all the way down to the last of the women named in this list, Mary and Jesus, who is called the Christ. I'm telling you, this would not have read like a list of names to the original audience. This would have read like a story. If I say Harry Potter, if I say Luke Skywalker, if I say Bilbo Baggins, if I say Neo, those aren't just names. Immediately the story associated with those names and the themes associated with those names are conjured in your mind because those are the stories that we grew up around. Likewise, the original audience, by the time they get to verse 16, verse 17, they are intrigued because they would see exactly what Matthew is doing. And as we move forward into this, we're going to see that there is a phrase that Matthew uses again and again. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken through the prophet. Like 10-ish times in the early going of Matthew, he uses this language. And when Matthew uses this language, he isn't usually saying, so-and-so said that this exact thing would happen on this exact day, and his prediction came true. It's a little bit that, but more so Matthew seems to view Jesus as the completion, the bump bump of the story of the Old Testament. So he will draw out conclusions to that story, fulfillments to that story that might make you or I scratch our heads as we think about smoking gun prophecies, prediction, and accuracy. Matthew is instead treating this as a story that has not been rounded out, that everything that happened in the Old Testament leaves this open-endedness or casts incomplete arcs just lobbed indiscriminately into the future, waiting to see where they all might land. And Matthew seems to be arguing that all of these story arcs from the Old Testament are converging into one singular point of focus, and that is Jesus, who is called the Christ. This is why this podcast is so hard, because I want to go for an hour every single time, but we're going to keep breaking this up into manageable chunks. I'm trying to keep it in the 10 to 12 range. We are going to look closely at the women on this list tomorrow, and there is so much to be gained just from digging in more deeply there. Hope to catch you tomorrow. Thank you for being a part of this with me. I'm Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. We'll catch you soon.