Hey I'm Matt, and this is the 10-Minute Bible Hour podcast where we take a little bit of time every weekday to incrementally process through a book of the Bible. Right now we're working on Matthew, and we're right at the very, very beginning. Matthew opens his book with a long list of the names of dead people who were descended from other dead people. Strategically, in our 21st century brains, that might not seem like the best way to make your sales pitch, but that's what he did. And I want to try to wrap our brains around why. And in order to make this case, I want to talk history here for a minute. We're rewinding to about 1300 AD and moving forward. Now, I understand that history class might not be the most fresh for all of us, but I think I can orient you quickly this way. Braveheart happened a little bit before 1300. So if you remember the bad guy in Braveheart, that was Edward the Longshanks, Edward I. And his son, who wasn't very effective, was Edward II, and he was married to a lady from France, who the main character of Braveheart, William Wallace, kind of took a liking to, and her name was Isabella. The reason that this story gets so complicated actually dates back to 1066 A.D., when William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy, so he's not the King of France, he's just the Duke of part of France and owes loyalty to the King of France. He's like, you know what I'd like to do? I'd like to conquer England. How hard can it be? I mean, nobody's pulled it off for the thousand years since. So apparently it's very hard. And he up defeating a couple of different armies, and well, what do you know? He just wakes up one day and now he's in charge of England. Now that's good and all, but it really does raise a question, and that is if a Duke under the authority of the King of France goes and conquers England, who owns England? Over time, a lot of French kings are like, uh, we do, because someone working for us went and got us all of England. That's great. But all of the people who succeed William Duke of Normandy in ruling England would say, well, we rule England. And normally this would just get sorted out by stabbing each other and stuff, but that little English channel really does make a difference, and so it's fairly hard to sort out this conflict. So that's 1066. Fast forward to around 1300-ish. The France-England thing, it's still not worked out, but you have these robust family relationships, and a strategy that both sides devised to try to make it better was to have Isabella, who was a part of the Capetian dynasty, that dated all the way back to before 1000 A.D. in France, she was the sister of the king, Charles IV the Fair of France. And Charles IV is like, here's what we're gonna do, sis. You are gonna go and marry that goofy Edward II of England. And when you guys are married, we'll get along better, and also you'll kind of be my inside woman in what's going on in the English court, and maybe it will be to our advantage. Well, stuff gets weird though, because Edward II and Isabella have a kid, Edward III, cleverly named. Charles IV, he was figuring, like, I don't know, I'll probably have some kids and stuff, or they'll get older, I guess some brothers if the kid thing doesn't work out, and it doesn't work out. He dies without any male heir. There's no one from the House of Capay, the Capetian dynasty that is older than the United States of America at that point. There's nobody to take over. So you've got a crisis of succession in France because the right blood no longer exists to be king. And so what effectively happens is when Charles dies, everybody wakes up on both sides of the channel one morning, and I suppose they start doing the math on succession. Like, okay, well, let me see, we got this, this, and this. Hey, wait a second, guys. I think we just conquered France. Because unless I'm wrong, Isabella would be the next in line. And they got some rules there in France where it says it can't be a lady, but her kid is not a lady. Edward III, he's the king of France. Well, the French people are like, uh, it's not really how we want to give up our country and lose this whole thing. So they create a new line called the Valois under Philip of Valois. And so now they've got a whole new dynasty that they just created out of thin air. Well, the English are like, that will not stand. We own France now. And what ensues is a thing called the Hundred Years' War. Here's why all of this matters for the sake of our conversation. One, because I just really like telling you stories that are interesting from history, and I think this one is super cool and fun. Two, this is why genealogy matters to the pre-modern mind more than it does to the modern mind. It's weird when kings just appear out of thin air. More often what we see in history is a robust debate about who's related to who and who's the ninth cousin of this person and who would be the most reliable claimant to the throne. Why? Because the pre-modern mind expects that there is going to be a genealogical connection and some sort of blessing of heaven that is conferred upon a certain house or a certain family that gives them the right of nobility to rule. This is not just a European idea. This is one that, again, in pre-modern societies, seems to exist all around the world. The Jewish people at the time of Jesus were no different. And the question of messiahship for them was not just a question of a doe-eyed, brown-haired individual who would one day appear and therapeutically make people feel better about their problems, and with his piercing eyes look deep into your soul and make you feel stuff and learn stuff about yourself and make you feel good and you'd want to sing songs to him. I mean, that's kind of the squishy modern version of Jesus, but those weren't really the stakes for the Jewish people. Messiah and King went hand in hand as notions. Why? Well, again, we looked at chapter 1, verse 1 of Matthew last time around, a record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Jesus Christ, the son of David, is important because that is Matthew saying, Jesus, I'm going to prove to you, is descended from David and therefore genealogically qualified to be the king who will sit on the throne forever that was promised to David by the prophet from God in 2 Samuel chapter 7. Everybody who was Jewish was sitting around wondering if this king might come. Now, what we're going to see as we go along is that a lot of people imagine that that king would come, that he would take up a sword, that he would be a great ruler, that he would throw off the oppressors as the Maccabees had done a couple hundred years earlier, that Rome would go away and that all of the promises of God would be delivered through a political nation whose laws and constitution, obviously that's an anachronism, would effectively be the laws of the Old Testament and the bonus laws that have been added to that along the way. They weren't picturing somebody like Jesus. And Jesus had already come, done his thing, died on the cross, been resurrected by the time this document was in circulation. So they had a little bit of knowledge about what to look for, and King didn't seem like the right title for Jesus based on what they knew of kings. So Matthew's going to try to do two things here in this narrative. One is demonstrate that Jesus has the right genealogy to fulfill, to be the completion of the covenant promise made from God to David, and therefore that would make him conceivably the Messiah. The second thing that Matthew is doing is he's recrafting the notion of kingship and what this spiritual eternal king looks like, which means as we go through Matthew, we're going to see him recast not just the idea of king, but also the idea of kingdom. And that I believe is why when we get to Matthew chapter five, we'll see that he opens with Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, which is effectively his subtle announcement and presentation of himself as king, and his much less subtle announcement and description of his kingdom. It is a kingdom manifesto for the kingdom of God, the kingdom of Jesus. So again, this just looks like this simple little one-verse thing that is a couple of dead people in Jesus. I hear some rock star names from the past, and there we're there we go. But it's a multi-layered, multifaceted thesis right here in the first sentence. And if Jesus doesn't tick the box of descended from David in the minds of the original audience, he could not be king, he could not be Messiah, and we can just wad up this entire document and we don't even have to read it because Jesus couldn't be it. So right from the get-go, we have to answer these questions in order to move forward and look at more of the nuance of who Jesus was, what he did, what he said, and what the deal was with the cross and the resurrection. So much more on these genealogy questions coming up. I'm really enjoying moving through this at a pace where we can get in the deep water with all of it and hopefully talk about it in ways that are going to make sense to everybody, regardless of how long you've been around the Bible or not. You got questions? You can go to r slash tmbh podcast on reddit.com or just click on the link where it says discuss this episode here, right down below in the show notes. I'm enjoying the conversation so far. I love that you're here to be a part of this thing. Looking forward to getting after it with the next one, where surprise, we're going to talk more about the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew chapter one. I'm Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. We'll catch you soon.