Hey, I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, and everybody who's been hanging out with me for the last couple of weeks here, welcome back. To everybody who's here for the first time checking it out, welcome for the first time. Glad you're here. What you're gonna figure out pretty quickly is that we are working directly through a book of the Bible, in this case, Matthew. And today's a big day because we're gonna dip our toe just into the water of the actual text of Matthew chapter one for the first time. We've been working on context and backstory and that kind of stuff to set the stage. But here's the deal I understand that if you're just getting here, you might feel like, oh no, I'm in the wrong place. I need to go back and start at the beginning. And you can if you want, but I want to make this podcast really shareable and really easy to get on board with because I think as we get into it, a lot of you are gonna be like, I want someone to talk with about this stuff. And if I make it so that you you gotta invite them to go back and get a hundred episodes to lead up to it and get into the conversation, it's gonna be difficult to bring people on board. So I'm constantly going to be resetting some context and referencing back to things we've talked about in order to keep those of us who've been with it for a while sharp on what we're doing and also to make it so that anybody who shows up at any point in any episode will get something out of it from day one. So here's the deal Matthew chapter one opens in a weird way. Now think about this: you're Matthew, you got a pen in your hand, you got a great big blank scroll, you can do whatever you want, and you are trying to convince your Jewish friends and neighbors and enemies that this Jesus thing is a really big deal, and that Jesus is in fact the completion of all of the stuff in the Old Testament, that Jesus is the Messiah, that he is the one who has come to complete God's redemptive plan, that his crucifixion and resurrection are the culminating events in God's redemptive plan, that this is the completion of the covenants and the completion of all of the stuff that the prophets said about hope and the redemption for all mankind. How would you lead that story? If it were written today, we would probably want to lead with a clever storytelling technique. Maybe a really interesting, mysterious, mythical feeling backstory that raises lots of questions. And so people are hooked after the pilot episode and they have to come back to find out what happened. Maybe with some scandal that would alarm and upset people, so that you would trigger their emotions and they would want justice or clarification. Maybe you would want to start with something quirky and goofy, like some Roman is just about to hit a nail into Jesus' hand, and then Jesus looks into the camera, freeze frame, record scratch, and he's like, hey, that's me right there on the cross. I bet you're wondering how I got here. Well, it actually starts a long time ago back in Nazareth. Don't discount that last one so quickly. I've seen that work out really well a lot of times. Matthew, instead of doing any of that interesting stuff, goes with a list of names of dead people. Yay, that sounds incredibly boring to you and me. And it's especially boring if we're not super fresh on who all of these names are and where they fit and what they mean. But if we have thought about the Old Testament and the other 70% of the Bible that Matthew comes after, we figure out that each of these names in this genealogy of Jesus that Matthew chooses to open with is a history lesson, a theology lesson in and of itself. And over the next few episodes, we're going to be breaking down what each of these names, no, come on, settle down now. Not each of these names, what many of these names would have evoked and why they were included and what this would have made people think about in terms of who Jesus is and where he fits. So I don't know. For you and me, we live in a time where it feels like you know it's the age of the self-made woman, the self-made man. You don't really care about who somebody's parents were. But do we really think that? I think if you look close, you realize that there is still a lot of interest in where people came from and who they're related to. In 2017, my favorite football team, American football team, had just won the championship two years earlier, but now they're on hard times. They don't have a coach, they need to restock their roster with some young talent coming out of the amateur ranks and into the professional ranks. And so within a couple of months, they needed to get a new coach. So as they're looking for a new coach, there's a name that surfaces that everybody's excited about, even though this guy has no head coaching experience, and it's Kyle Shanahan. And you might be wondering why would people in Denver, Colorado care about someone who seems unqualified for the job with no experience or background? And the reason is the last name. His dad was a guy named Mike Shanahan, who was the head coach of the Broncos 20 years earlier in their glory days when they were winning championships and everybody respected them, and Broncos fans felt great about their team. And so I think there was an interest in hiring this Kyle Shanahan guy to recapture some past glory because they like the name. They could imagine that name being associated with success. And the way it's playing out, it looks like Denver probably should have hired them and missed on a great opportunity to do so when they went with somebody else. Then the draft rolls around, and everybody's really excited about this kid from Stanford named Christian McCaffrey. But Stanford's like half a continent away from Denver. Why would anybody care, right? Again, the last name. His dad is a guy named Ed McCaffrey, who was this blue-collar gangly receiver who would go out and run around in the middle of the football field and just get wrecked by defenders in bone-crushing collisions, and he'd always just pop right back up. Well, until he didn't, and that was basically, I guess, the end of his career. But, you know, he was kind of a hero of the people. And again, he was a part of the dynasty, the glory days. It worked out that neither that player nor that coach ended up in Denver, but it was kind of a reminder to me that the name really does still matter in terms of how we think about people and where they're coming from and what their sealing or potential might be. But genealogies really meant a lot to the Jewish people at this time. And there's some history to this that we got to cover real quick. And we've talked about some of this, it'll sound familiar, and if it does, that means it's working and that's good. So around 1000 BC, you got King David, you've got a united kingdom with all the tribes of Israel functioning together. David's son Solomon has a pretty good reign as well. But after that, civil war splits into two parts. A couple hundred years go by, the northern kingdom gets conquered by Assyria in the 8th century, the southern kingdom holds out longer, but ultimately falls to Babylon and Nebuchadnezzar in the 6th century. Well, that's a bummer because now there's no more Israel and no more Judah, and no way for the promises of God to be fulfilled. That's very, very challenging. But eventually the Persians conquered the Babylonians, the Persians are more sympathetic to conquered people groups, and they let the Israelites, the people of Judah, go back and rebuild Jerusalem, the walls, the temple. And during that time, in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, there are people who come in and they were kind of laxadaisical and they didn't really care about the stuff that needed to be done to rebuild the walls or the temple. They cared about their own stuff and not God's stuff. And as a result, things got kind of muddled and there became this value on who was related to who and who had actual credibility to help with this project and take ownership of it the right way as part of God's chosen people from the right lineage. And so what that means is that for basically 500-ish years leading up to the time of Jesus, you got, well, once again, five centuries of momentum behind this genealogy thing and who's connected to who and who came from what tribe and how did that all work? A lot of your credibility and your standing in this ethnic religious community came from that. So by leading with a genealogy, what Matthew is doing is speaking the language of his audience, and he's arguing that Jesus has the exact right genealogy. And I guess this is the right place to read the first verse of the book. A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Aha. Well, those aren't just names, right? And there's a thesis in those particular names. Now, I suppose it could have read a record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of Ahaz, the son of Aminadab, because those guys' names are on the list too. But he references Abraham and David because Abraham and David are specifically connected with key moments in the history of God's redemptive plan. Remember, God made a deal with Abraham out of the blue. And the deal was, I'm going to make a great nation out of you. Why? Because I've decided to, and all the nations will be blessed through your descendants, and there's going to be more of them than you can possibly count. David, remember, same thing, 2 Samuel. There's that promise to David about how there's going to be this eternal kingdom, and David's descendants are going to sit on this throne forever. So if Jesus is descended from David and Abraham, there's your thesis. Jesus is the rightful king, descended from David, and he is the completion of the promises made to Abraham to be a blessing to all the nations and to accomplish God's redemptive purposes. So that first sentence to you and me, yeah, I don't care about those names, sound like old dead people to me, but not to the original audience. To the original audience, this is a dramatic intro. This is carefully plucking the ends of the glove off of each of your five digits, pulling it off and slamming it onto the ground in front of your opponent. Here is a bold proclamation. You're going to have to answer this because, yeah, I'm saying without saying, Jesus is the Messiah. Now to you and me, that might not be evident, but it is smoking gun obvious. And someone in Matthew's original audience would have read that first line, a record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham, and known, okay, it's on. And they either would have read this thing to disprove it out of hot anger, or they would have read this thing out of cool curiosity, trying to figure out if Matthew can actually make this a case. But probably most people wanted it to happen. They've just been burned so much. I mean, think about how many times you've been lied to by politicians, by advertisers, by people who want stuff from you. There are all kinds of claims that you hope people will deliver. I wish that the things people say they'll do for the country could come true, but you get used to being lied to by politicians and you're jaded. The same thing here. Of course there have been other claims to Messiahship. Lots of people had claimed it. In fact, we get reference of it in the book of Acts that other people held rebellions and were like, it's me, and then it wasn't. We get extra biblical accounts of messianic attempts on the parts of Jews and the Samaritans, and we get accounts of how those things were quickly snuffed out and dispersed, but something different is going on with Jesus because by the time people read this document, they knew this thing had traction. They already knew that this wasn't like those other claims to Messiahship. And the original audience, I think, would have been very, very, very cautiously optimistic that maybe this could turn out to be the one, ranging to openly hostile because if it does turn out that he's the one and people come to believe that, it would cost some of the people who were in powerful positions a bit of their power. So there is a ton more that we need to dig into on this topic. It's going to take us a nice long time to get through Matthew chapter one, but I think it's going to be a blast. Thanks to everybody who's helping to make this thing go on patreon.com slash the TMBH podcast. And thank you to all of you who aren't making things go there. I'm just thrilled that you're here either way. I appreciate you. I look forward to doing more of this tomorrow. I'm Matt, it's the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Do it again soon.