No Sanity Required
No Sanity Required is a weekly podcast hosted by Brody Holloway and Snowbird Outfitters. Each week, we engage culture and personal stories with a Gospel-driven perspective. Our mission is to equip the Church to pierce the darkness with the light of Christ by sharing the vision, ideas, and passions God has used to carry us through 26 years of student ministry. Find more content at swoutfitters.com.
No Sanity Required
Christ’s Genealogy and Why It Matters | Advent Series
Brody explores Jesus’ genealogy in Matthew 1 and connects it with Isaiah 9, seeing how God keeps His promises through broken and unexpected people. From Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth to Mary, We see how Jesus’ family line tells a story of grace, mercy, and faithfulness in the middle of human failure. Brody also looks at the titles given to Jesus in Isaiah, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace, and what they reveal about the kind of King He is. This Advent series from Red Oak offers hope for anyone who wonders if their past disqualifies them and points us toward the coming kingdom marked by peace, justice, and righteousness.
Jesus and His Crazy Grandmas | Rahab
Jesus and His Crazy Grandmas | Tamar
Jesus and His Crazy Grandmas | Ruth
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Okay, what we're gonna do this week is uh gonna be a little different. We're going to uh play back a message that I gave at Red Oak Church uh last let's see, two Sundays ago. And it was the first Sunday of our Advent series at Red Oak. And the reason we want to do this is uh actually a couple of reasons. Uh first, there was a ton of feedback. I got more feedback from that from that message than I've uh seen in a while. And it was a l it was positive feedback, but it was also a lot of continued conversation, um, just a lot of dialogue with people that said, Man, I've never thought of this or I've never I've never looked at these passages that way. And it was nothing nothing new, but it was maybe something that uh would be useful for you. And so as a as an NSR listener, we want to what we want to do is we want to share that message because it's a message that looks at the genealogy of Christ and then the prophecies of Isaiah that sort of merge with the genealogy of Christ and Matthew's Matthew chapter one and Matthew's recording of that and how those two passages link up and then what that means for us today, what that would have meant for the Jews back then. But what we'll do is we'll we're gonna we're gonna have this episode where we're just gonna play that. It was a it had more of a lecture, not lecture, I don't like that word. It had more of a conversational feel than a sermon feel. At least that was the feedback I got, and that was my goal and the way I presented it. And then we're gonna come back after this episode, and JB and I are just gonna sit down. We're gonna have a bonus follow-up episode because we a couple weeks ago we didn't post an episode. So we owe y'all an episode anyway. We're gonna have a bonus follow-up episode where we're gonna we're gonna unpack some talking points from that message and just have a dialogue about it, kind of do a deep dive into that, kind of a beyond the flannel graph. So that's what the next two episodes are gonna look like. We're gonna drop those together, and I hope you enjoy it. And then we'll actually have another episode later this week that's uh sort of Christmas focused. So anyway, uh appreciate you listening. Welcome to No Sanity Required.
SPEAKER_00:Welcome to No Sanity Required, from the Ministry of Snowbird Wilderness Outfitters, a podcast about the Bible, culture, and stories from around the globe.
SPEAKER_01:Well, let's take our Bibles and turn to Matthew chapter one, and we'll also be in Isaiah 6. This uh this evening begins our Advent series, which is what we do each December, where we look at different passages that remind us of the coming of Jesus and why we celebrate this season. This morning, uh Kilby and Greg have been to Hardy's, because if you've been out of the country a while, you know. You know, if you know Hardy's breakfast, you know, you know, and so uh had to go get some Hardee's. And uh we were we were laughing because they said some folks pulled in in these little sports cars. Uh y'all see them in groups of cars. They're headed over to ride the dragon. Have y'all seen this? You'll see them on the four-lane, they come through in big waves and they'll be eight or ten or twenty. And uh they're going over there to drive to drive their sports cars on the tail of the dragon. And said they overheard one of those guys say, Man, this is awesome. This is the first time I've ever ate at Hardy's. And I thought he grew up in a completely different family than I did. You grow up in Andrews, going to Hardee's is like a big deal, you know. Like that's going to town, man. You're going out to eat. And so uh I I think about uh the importance of family, and and all of us uh have different stories and backgrounds. I I loved when I was growing up, I loved my on my mom's side, my granddad, he was a bit of a historian. When he retired, he moved uh up into kind of like up into the highlands. And uh it's crazy. He actually moved to Scotland to those highlands um and spent a year over there researching family lines, and then uh, and then he spent a good bit of time like in uh Watauga County and like up around Boone and then Grandfather Mountain up in there uh researching our family line and literally could can trace on both sides my mom and my dad could trace family back into like Blunt County, Tennessee in the late 1600s. That's crazy, isn't it? That's a long time. And I know some of you have done like uh what is it, Ancestry, uh Ancestry.com, or you've done the the saliva test, whatever, and kind of trace your family line. That's a lot of fun. I really I enjoy uh you know learning about that stuff. And we all we all have different uh family backgrounds. Some of us don't really know maybe a lot about our family background. And in our society, our our culture, it's not a real, there's not a big emphasis put on it. You know, it's like uh we're just that's why they call this country a melting pot. You know, we might not even know where where our people came from. And um, but I did I loved my my mom's dad would tell this one story. So he had, I'll tell you this and then we'll move on. I won't bog down with stories, but uh I loved when he would talk about this. He had one granddad, this was in the 20s, 20s and then early 30s, like uh the uh depression. He had one granddad who was a revenuer. If you don't know what that is, a revenuer was a locally commissioned federal agent who was tasked with stopping the illegal sale of moonshine. And moonshine was alcohol that was homemade. Um and there's a y'all, this, y'all know we live in moonshine country right here. Like it's that's our you talk about a legacy. Um, that's history here, you know. And as a matter of fact, the house that we live in, we're on a spring, and at that spring head, there's there's remnants of an old steel. And I talked to the guy that grew up in that holler, and he's like, Oh, yeah, I used to carry corn. Uh, this guy's in his 90s, he's still living. He's like, I used to carry corn up there to the steel that make moonshine. And so my granddad, one of his granddads, so that would have been like my great-great or great-great-great-granddad, was a revenuer. So their job was to stop the moonshiners. Can't have people drinking alcohol. I'm sure they were all Baptists, you know. So they're not gonna have that. And so um, but then my other great-great-great-granddad was a bootlegger. Now, bootlegger is a person that makes moonshine, and their son and daughter married each other. Isn't that fun? That's a good time. So he would tell me all these stories, and I just loved it. I love I and I heard the same stories uh, you know, over and over and over because my granddad was like a little boy and when all this was going on, and I just loved it. And so I, you know, family for us is more entertainment, it's interesting, it's intriguing. But for the Jewish people, your family line was very important. And one of the reasons it was so important was because the line, the lineage of people in the Jewish culture gave credibility to the prophecies that had been made by God through his prophets in ancient Israel. If you go back in history, a lot of us might be familiar with something called the Tower of Babel. And the Tower of Babel, you can read about that in the book of Genesis. Uh, and in the book of Genesis, the Tower of Babel, I believe it's Genesis 11. Does that sound right? The table of nations is what that's referred to. And it's sort of the time in history where the nations or the people groups of the world started to form and move into different parts of the earth. And so if you ever wonder why do we have people in Africa and Asia and North America, and well, there was a point in history where everybody was sort of one speech, one language, one culture, and then there was a separation that occurred, and that's another story altogether. But from that point forward, there were different nations and people groups that were popping up all over the world. So God raised up through this one man, his name was Abraham, and God said to Abraham, I'm going to raise up a new nation of people, and they're going to be my people. And he would refer to that nation as Israel, and he would actually refer to that nation as his firstborn son. He would refer to the nation of Israel as his son. And so what he did with this nation is he gave them certain structure. One of the structures he gave them was he gave them, he divided them into 12 tribes. And each of these tribes was named after one of a dozen brothers that were born as grandsons to this man Abraham. And it's really fascinating to read. And so each of these tribes would have different history and story, but all part of one big story. And in the middle of this uh nation of people, these 12 tribes, there was one tribe called Judah. And Judah was the tribe that was named after, I believe Judah was the fourthborn son. Maybe he's one of the sons. And Judah was the son who would be the head of the tribe that God said, this will be the line of kings. The kings will come out of this tribe. And so one of the kings that would come out of that tribe was a king called David. And so David would be the king that would come in the line of Judah. And so Judah was sort of like the kingly tribe. And then also something that God did with all of these 12 tribes of people that made up this nation called Israel is he gave them a series of covenants. And covenants are promises that God gives to his people that he then fulfills. God makes the promise, then he fulfills the promise. And so through this man Judah, he promised that he would bring a king into the world who would be a different kind of king. And that's what we're going to study tonight. And so the lineage of the people of Israel was important because you could trace it back to the promises that God had made even thousands of years ago. This really strong defense of the faith to go, oh, we have a record that goes all the way back thousands of years that tells us that God made certain promises that different times in history were fulfilled. And the greatest of those promises was that God would send a Savior into the world to save people from their sins. But this Savior would not only be the Savior to the line of Judah or the people of Israel, he would be the savior to all of humanity. Now, that doesn't mean all of humanity will be saved. It means he's the answer to all of humanity for salvation. And so we're going to consider that tonight as we work through Matthew's genealogy. I appreciate Zach doing that song. I'd ask him to do it, and I was like, man, I know some people think this is a silly song. It's not a silly song, it's a beautiful song. It's wonderful. It's fun to sing. And uh and I love singing it, and it's really helped me a lot. And so you might want to memorize that song. I still can't, I've been singing for 20 years, and I still don't have it all memorized. My getting so tongue-tied. Um, but I love that song and I appreciate uh them doing that song. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna work through Matthew's genealogy in Matthew chapter one. We're just gonna take a few pauses and I want to highlight a few things in this genealogy as we as we look to the coming of Jesus, and then we'll jump over to Isaiah 9 to wrap things up. So it says the book of the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Now, first thing in the first verse is that Matthew's genealogy starts with Abraham, which is that's the beginning of the Jewish people or the nation of Israel. If you if you want to go over to Luke and read Luke's genealogy, it goes all the way back to uh to Adam, which shows us that all the people of the earth began at the same place under Adam and God's creation of the first man. But what uh Matthew does, he focuses on the people who descended from Abraham, who was the man that God made the covenant with that he would raise this nation up. And then he goes into the lineage of Abraham or the lineage of Jesus. Abraham was the father of Isaac, and you're gonna recognize some of these names. Isaac, the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, and Judah the father of Perez and Zarah, those were twin boys by Tamar. Now we'll stop right there. And let me just say um one of the things that's uh unique to the Christian faith and to the Bible is that in in all of antiquity, um, women were were sort of suppressed and oppressed and kept under um sort of the authority of men. And so one thing that's unique to the lineage that we'll read tonight is that five women are named in this. No other historical record would have ever included women. So if anyone ever says to you, Christianity is oppressive to women, let me tell you something. Christianity was revolutionary in its day, in that Jesus elevated women to a position of equality in the image of God. That's a powerful defense of the Christian faith. And so these five women, the other thing that's so amazing about these five women is each of these five women is part of the story, the the big story of the line of Jesus, but these little stories that are made up of each of these five women are fascinating in the sense that they're all sort of wrapped in scandal. And so this woman, Tamar, what I'll say about her is that she was a woman who was um abused, she was taken advantage of, she was used and discarded. And yet God used her to bring about a man into the world who would be in the line of Jesus. And then God would name her in the line of Christ. Isn't that powerful? If you're a lady here, that's powerful because even in the ministry of Jesus, we see that it was women who gave testimony and witness to the birth of Jesus. Y'all, the world will try to create a feministic idea that says women are this or women are that. And what we need to know is that the word of God has already declared the value and worth of women based on the fact that they're image-bearers of God. The word of God gives us an amazing validation to the way God has not only used women, but used women even in the midst of scandal. And so Tamar was a woman who was abused, she was used, she was uh discarded, and yet God shows her to be more righteous even than the men in her life. And so then it says uh Perez, the father of Hezron, Hezron the father of Ram, Ram the father of Aminadab, Aminadab the father of Nashan, Nashan the father of Salmon. Now, stop here and I'll tell you, uh, I love the story about Nashan. Now, this is not biblical, this is extra-biblical, or this is what we would call apocryphal. Have you ever heard the word apocrypha? It doesn't just refer to a series of uh uh writings that were included in the Catholic Bible or that were ancient Jewish writings. The word apocrypha or apocryphal means uh sort of like uh folk, like uh like um what's the big guy with the axe and the blue ox, Bunyan? Uh I always want to say John Bunyan, but that was the Pilgrim's Progress guy. Paul Bunyan. Paul Bunyan is an apocryphal story from American history. That's apocryphal. Y'all with me? Okay. And so there's an apocryphal story about Nashan that the that people in Jewish culture will teach their sons and daughters. And the and the story is this: that when the the ancient Israelites came up to the Red Sea and the Egyptian army was coming after them, that they're about to walk into the Red Sea, and that Nashan was such a man of fate that he walked straight out into, he was the leader, he was like the chieftain of the tribe of Judah at that time, and that he walked straight into the Red Sea before Moses could even see the waters parted, and that when the water hit Nashan's nose, the waters parted. Now that's apocryphal, but it tells you how this man was revered in Jewish culture, so much so that the Jews had a saying, and the saying was this that guy's got the nose of Nashon. And it was another way of saying, that guy has courage, that guy's bold, he'll go anywhere, do anything. And so Nashan was a person who we know was a great chief at a time of at the time of the Exodus out of Egypt. And so then it's pretty cool because he had a son named Salmon, and it says Salmon, the father of Boaz by Rahab. Now, if you know Rahab's story, another woman is now grafted into the story, and this is another scandalous story because we know that Rahab's uh uh profession was that she was a prostitute. And so be careful because we we don't have Roy Jr. going on, and so we have all the little people in here, and so we'll be careful how we word that. But um, so I already used that word. Uh so good luck, mom and dad, and you're welcome. And now you have an opportunity to parent your kids and coach them up. Okay, so uh um, but anyway, uh I love the story of Rahab. You can find that story in uh Joshua chapter two, and I love that story because I've always felt like um so if you remember the story, uh Joshua decides to send a uh to send a couple of spies into the city of Jericho. And those spies are gonna go in there and scout the city out, and while they're there, they meet Rahab and she makes three declarations to them. She basically says, I've heard what your God did. He defeated the kings of Sihon, the kings Sihon and Og, which were these kings that led an alliance of pagan kings that were very powerful. And he's like, she says, I know your God defeated these armies. And so she declares the power and the might of Yahweh. And then she says, and I know he's great and he can do anything. And would you ask him to have mercy on me? And so in Rahab, we have this beautiful power conversion, powerful conversion of a person who calls on the name of Yahweh just based on what she's seen and heard about Yahweh. And it gives us a lot of uh hope and courage when it comes to missions. Like the reason we want to take missions that we want to support missions to take the gospel to the ends of the earth is because there are people waiting to be introduced to Jesus because a sovereign God is moving and working before we ever get to a place. Before Joshua and the people ever got to Jericho, God was working and stirring in the heart of a prostitute, a woman of the night, in that city to bring about an openness to the gospel. And then it is through that woman that God would then bring the Messiah into the world. And I love it because uh she's she's brought out of the city, she's saved after that city is uh is taken and conquered, and she's married by uh this guy named Salmon, who his granddad was Nashin. Salmon probably had the nose of Nashan too, you know. He's probably just a bold guy, and he was like, I don't care what people think. So they have a son. That son's name is Boaz. Now I want you to imagine Boaz is raised in the house of a dad who was a fighter warrior when they came into Canaan and a mom who was a pagan uh non-Jewish prostitute. That's interesting. That's like I wonder if they homeschooled. You know, like I wonder if they had game night. You know what I mean? Like I wonder, like what was conversation around the dinner table. But I love it because this guy, Boaz, will go on and eventually marry a Moabite widow named Ruth, who came from Moab, which was the people that had descended from the incestuous relationship between Lot and his daughter. And this woman Ruth, we see that in the next line. It says, Boaz, uh Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth. He married Ruth. You go back and you study the story of Ruth, and I always think, can you imagine this scene where Boaz and Ruth start talking and he starts to court her? And you can read it in the little four-chapter book of Ruth, where he's like, Hey, I want to date you. Hey, I want to court you, hey, I want to marry you. And I wonder if anybody ever said, Hey, Boaz, you know she's a pagan Moabite. And he's like, My mom was a prostitute in Jericho. I'm not scared of that. Like, what a big view of God these people had. And I love the way, and I want to just pause. Let me just say this. At this point, we're halfway through the lineage of Jesus, from Abraham to Jesus, which means we're a quarter of the way through. If you take the big picture. If you're a child of God, you are washed in the blood of Jesus, regardless of where you came from or what you did. The blood of Jesus cleanses us from unrighteousness. If the blood of Jesus can cleanse and wash. The broken life of a pagan prostitute can cleanse and wash the Moabite widow who descended from an incestuous relationship between Lot and his daughter. If he can not only cleanse and wash them in the blood of Calvary's cross, but graft them into the line that Jesus would come into. Don't you ever believe the lie that you come from a background that's so broken that God can't use you, save you, or move you forward? I don't care what your addiction was. I don't care what your promiscuity was. I don't care that I do care that you were abused, but I don't care in the sense that it doesn't define God's purpose for you. God saves broken people. And in fact, we know from the ministry of Jesus, he's most, like the most incendiary moments in the ministry of Jesus was when the pompous, pious, religious people who didn't think they needed us needed a savior would confront Jesus. He's a savior to the broken. And these women, when they came into faith, they were then led by the Spirit of the living God the rest of their days. So that what defined them was the relationship they had with God and the righteousness he had bestowed on them, not their past. It's a powerful word for us when we think of where we've been and what we've done. When you think of where you've been and who you are and what you've done, think of where Jesus has been and who he is and what he's done. Say it again. When you wrestle with who you are and where you've been and what you've done, remember who Jesus, where who Jesus is, where he's been and what he's done. Because that's what defines the child of God. That's what defines us. His righteousness is bestowed on us. It's imputed to us, is the word that we use. And we're given the righteousness of Jesus, not by our own merit. But I love the idea. I love to just imagine somebody saying to Boaz, You sure you want to marry her? He's like, Yeah, man, that'd be awesome. Like that, I think it'd be awesome because he had seen that story played out in his life. Obed the father of Jesse, Jesse the father of David the king. So then we come to David, who was the who was the greatest king in Israelite history. But David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah. Here's something interesting. Uriah's name is mentioned in the line of Jesus, and Uriah was from a pagan nation called the Hittites. Uriah the Hittite. And there's this moment here where we go, oh, wait. Jesus came in the line of Judah, but he was the savior for all people because we've got the prostitute from Jericho and the widow from Moab and Uriah the Hittite, and his wife was, and so you see, even in the line of Jesus, in the lineage of Jesus, he's grafting the peoples of the world into the salvation that he would uh supply. And Solomon, the father of Rehoboam, Rehobam the father of Abijah, Abijah the father of Asaph, Asaph the father of Jehoshaphat, Jehoshaphat the father of Joram, Joram the father of Uzziah, Uzziah the father of Jotham, Jotham the father of Ahaz, Ahaz, the father of Hezekiah, Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, Manasseh the father of Amos, Amos the father of Josiah. Josiah was one of those, if you go back and you study the kings of Judah, I think there were seven righteous kings in Judah and 13 kings that were unrighteous. So even there in this line, we come all the way down to Josiah before we see a king who restored the worship of Yahweh in Israel. And there were, there were other kings who were faithful in their seasons, but more kings were unfaithful. And do you know that in the in the Israelite, when the when the kingdom divided and you had two, basically the nation of Israel became two nations, Israel and Judah, that there were there were 13 kings in Judah that did not serve the Lord. There was not one king in Israel that served the Lord. And yet God remained true to his promise to bring a savior into the world. That's a big theological important uh implication. That means this: when God makes a covenant, and I'm using, I got my pen in my hand and I'm pointing at y'all with it. Um, when God makes a covenant with with his people, when God makes a covenant with anybody and he ratifies that covenant in blood, what that means is him fulfilling that covenant is never dependent on our ability to fulfill our end of it. God does what he does because he has the authority and the sovereignty and the power to do it. And even when Israel as a nation was unfaithful, God was still faithful to provide a way for salvation to all the peoples of the earth, because Jesus was still coming into the world. He was still coming into the world. And so you get down to the very end. The last, the last lady that is mentioned is in verse 16. Jacob, the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born. Even the generation in which Jesus came into the world, he came at a time of scandal because she was she was unwed. And so people, for all of his childhood and all of his life, would have said, oh man, he's an illegitimate child of Mary and Joseph. And there was this thing that sort of hung over Jesus, even in his childhood, no doubt. But God was faithful. And there's uh there's there's something that I thought about in these stories. There's actually um two things that I thought about. One is that in these stories, we're reminded of the sovereignty of God. That just means that God is in his own power, he does whatever he pleases, regardless of how broken the world is. And the other thing that I was reminded of is that um there is significance to understanding the Jewish line. It's important to understand that what we have in the Jewish line is a preserved lineage that shows us like not only when Jesus came into the world, but the promises that were made going back up through his line. See, in Israel, if the kings were to come from Judah, which by the way, they didn't all come from Judah because the people did not follow God's plan always, the kings were to come from Judah. Where were the priests to come from? What tribe? Levi. And then the prophets came from about eight different tribes. And so you had God working at different times throughout history, but by having these lines, these family lines, we can trace through history what God was doing at any point. And then we can see what Paul writes to the Galatians when he says, and when the fullness of time had come, God brought forth his son into the world, born of a woman. And we all know when it happened, where it happened, and to whom it happened. And we know now the repercussions and implications of it. Here's let me give you a quick five thoughts from the lineage of Jesus. The first one is this all people are born and all people die. Seems obvious, doesn't it? Every human is born that that lives and breathes and has life on the earth is born, then they're also gonna die. Everybody that's born is gonna die. All people die who are born. So born, live, die. You can break it down into three steps. Like all of your life can be condensed into three things: born, live, die, right? But for Jesus, the first and last steps were revolutionary and unlike anyone else in history. His birth was unique in that he was born of a virgin. How can that be? Because the Holy Spirit supernaturally put him into the womb of this woman, and then he was born totally human, fully, truly human, born of a woman, but born without an inherited sin nature in the line of Adam. The Bible says he's like the second Adam. So his birth was revolutionary. His death was revolutionary in that he didn't stay dead. Y'all realize that's not normal. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. When people die, they tend to stay dead. Science. And Jesus on the third day did exactly what he said he would do, and he rose from the dead, conquering the grave, conquering sin, conquering what you and I are enslaved to and proven victorious, so that he might do that in our place and lead us into eternal life. So his birth and death were revolutionary. The second thing that we draw from the lineage of Jesus is that it's one lineage from all the peoples of the earth. I did a little research and found that it's estimated, I don't know how they estimate this, 107 billion humans have lived in history. If it's the same people that come up with a Darwinian evolutionary timeline, we can't trust it. But it sounds like probably legit 107 billion. If there's what, there's 8 billion people on the earth right now, about 107 billion in history, we can go back to the beginning of time and trace one bloodline from Adam to Jesus. That's a gift from the Lord to bolster and encourage and strengthen your faith. Young people, when your college professor is saying, you don't really believe that, do you? Actually, I do because I can trace it. With documents that are not only bloodstained by what Jesus did, but are proven through textual criticism that all the way through history we've we've got a preserved um history that traces the line of Jesus. Number three, he's the son of Adam and the Son of God. We're all sons of Adam, and in Adam we all sinned. And thank God that in Jesus we're all made righteous. Those who call on Jesus, the sin of Adam is uninherited in one century. It's removed, and the righteousness of Jesus is given us. Number four, I love the fact that this lineage includes prostitutes, thieves, kings, preachers, adulterers, farmers, businessmen, chieftains, peasants, scholars, slave traders, and warlords. It's a pretty traceable group of people and a pretty broken group of people that ends in Jesus of Nazareth. He was literally born among sinners, but he himself was not a sinner. He's different in his own bloodline. And last, Jesus became fully human. Matthew and Luke's purpose in recording this lineage is to uh illustrate with facts and knowable data the humanity of Jesus, as they will then go into historically show that how we can know he is fully God. That's how we can know he is fully God. This is critical to the identity of Jesus as the Messiah, the God man. Jesus is truly and fully God who became truly and fully human. That is the miracle of the incarnation of Jesus that we celebrate at Christmas. This God become man, became one of us. And I love the fact that Luke, when he records, when he records this, he actually prefaces it with the baptism of Jesus. And I used to always wonder, why did you ever wonder why did Jesus get baptized? He ain't never sinned. He never sinned. Why do you have to get baptized? To identify with sinners and be obedient to the Father's plan and will. Jesus' baptism is the ultimate act of him identifying with us in our sin. And it's an act of obedience to the Father. So for the Jewish people who understood this, the bloodline of Jesus, this was important for this to be recorded. But if you go back to Isaiah 9, and we'll jump over there and finish kind of our conclusion in Isaiah 9, verses 6 and 7, you're going to get a Christmas card. Somebody gonna send you a Christmas card, and it's gonna be the whole family, and it's either gonna be the picture they took last summer on the beach where they're all everybody wearing white shirts, blue jeans, and barefooted, or it's gonna be a more recent picture at a Christmas tree farm where they're all wearing green and red, but it's gonna be a picture of the family, and you're gonna get it, and it's gonna be all and they're gonna say, Merry Christmas. And some of you will get a card that's got these two verses on it. And for us, we look at Isaiah 9, 6 and 7. Let me just read it. It says, For uh, for to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace, there will be no end on the throne of David and over his kingdom to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness. From this time forth and forevermore, the zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this. You're gonna get a ver uh a Christmas card, it's gonna have those verses. And for us, we look back at that and we go, I know what this all means. I know what this all means. This is talking about Jesus, and we get excited about it because I go, hundreds of years before Jesus came into the world, Isaiah prophesied what the Messiah would do and who he would be and how he would come and and fulfill his uh his um uh commission from the Father. But for the Jewish people in Isaiah's day reading this, this is a very, very perplexing passage of scripture. So perplexing that hundreds of years later, when Jesus fulfilled it, for Jews who embraced and accepted Jesus, they go, Oh, Isaiah's prophecy makes sense to me now. Let me show you why it was perplexing and why it didn't make sense to them back then. For starters, it says, for to us a child is born. So for to us means this child is gonna be born to us and for us. And he's gonna be a child, which means the Messiah is not gonna show up on a white horse to defeat the armies of the world. He's gonna come into the world by natural means as a baby. From day one, as a baby, the Messiah is gonna have a purpose. For to us, a child is born. But here's where it gets perplexing. Because this child, there's three things that make sense to us, but would have been mind-blowing and maybe confusing to these people. The child would be called mighty God. Look right there in verse six. For to us a child is given, and then down at the end of that verse six, it says, Mighty God. A child who would be called mighty God. Okay, church, theology quiz. Does God have a beginning? No, he is eternal. We teach this to our children in the children's program. The reason young families come to this church is because they know their children are going to be taught faithful biblical theology. One of those most important things is that God is eternal, he's always been. He is the uncaused cause that spoke everything into creation. So, how can he be a child? Jesus, fully God, truly and fully human. God become man, a little child who is mighty God. The second thing that would have confused them, that makes sense to us, is that the Son, a Son is given, would be called Everlasting Father. How can an everlasting father, by definition, the everlasting father, he's been the father of all things for all time and before time? Before the sun was sitting there and and and our solar system was spinning around it and we were counting hours and minutes and days and weeks. Before all of that, God existed. He's the everlasting father. So how can he be a son? Well, if he's a son, wouldn't his dad actually be the everlasting father? And as a son, he would have had a starting point. Y'all with me? Isn't that perplexing to the Jewish mind? But to us, we go, oh no, no, the everlasting father. God became a son. He entered humanity for us and became one of us. And the third thing that would have been really confusing to them, but makes sense to us, is this child who will be born will have a beginning, but he also is everlasting and eternal. Because it says, of his kingdom there will be no end. It's describing Jesus, who would be truly and fully 100% human, but also truly and fully 200% eternal God. And each of these names that's used combines two words. And each of these words is descriptive. Honestly, you could use this, could be eight names. You could where it says wonderful counselor, that's the first word, the first name. Mighty God, that's the second one. Everlasting Father, that's the third one. Prince of Peace, that's the fourth one. You could actually break that down and you could say, His name shall be called wonderful, counselor, mighty God, everlasting Father, Prince, peace. But we condense these, and I found out this through a phenomenal commentary on Isaiah, where the guy described that there's a Hebrew literary tradition where they would take words and names and combine them to emphasize and strengthen the title. So the wonderful counselor, what's wonderful about Jesus? His ministry, the fact that he healed the blind and he touched the leper, and he and he took the prostitute and he made her whole and he raised the dead. He was wonderful, but he's a counselor because he would say to that person, he saved, go and sin no more. And here's how you can do that, and here's how you can live your life. And let me get, oh, oh, I'm leaving. Let me send my spirit to live inside of you so that you have the good counselor with you at all times. He's wonderful and he's our counselor. He's mighty and he's our God. He's everlasting and he's our father. And why is that last name, the Prince of Peace, so important? We'll end with these four things that are described and revealed about the government because the Prince of Peace is the idea that he's going to rule as the king who comes and sits on the throne of David there in verse 7. It says, There will be no end on the throne of David and over his kingdom to uh and over his kingdom to establish it and to uphold it. See, if you go back to 2 Samuel 7, you can read about this eternal and perpetual kingdom that was going to come into the world. Let me share in closing these four things that are described and revealed about the government that'll be established under this king. Number one, this ruler will establish and expand a kingdom where there is peace. Where there's peace. No one will ever challenge or oppose his authority or undermine the effects of his government. Because Satan's going to be bound and cast into an eternal lake of fire. Y'all, he's going to burn. He's going to burn and fry and roast and scream and anguish, and his teeth are going to grind against the one who has put him there, but he's not going to bother us in the kingdom of peace, where our king sits on a throne, ruling and reigning, where there is no sin, no temptation, no sorrow, no addiction, no abandonment, no adultery, no guilt, no shame, no self-harm. No daddies leave their families. We're whole under a king who is whole, who is ruling and reigning, because the one who has come against him has been bound for eternity. It's already been prepared for him. That's a good kingdom. I'm going to live there. Hope you are too. And if you're not, let's talk tonight before you leave. We'll make sure you get there. It's real simple. It's actually easy because Jesus has done all the lifting. He said, Take my yoke. It's easy. My burden's light. I'll do the work for you because you can't do it for yourself. The second thing that's described about this government is that this king will be the covenant and promise king of uh that God spoke of to King David. If you go back to 2 Samuel chapter 7, you can read it. God said to David, here's what's going to happen. There's going to be a king who comes in your line who's going to be a different kind of king. He's not just going to rule over earthly Israel, he's going to rule over an eternal kingdom that'll never end. And that's Jesus. And number three, his government and rule will be just and righteous. Look there at the end of verse 7 with justice and with righteousness. Y'all realize the best governments on earth don't always get it right. Your candidate will make mistakes. Good judges convict innocent people. System as long as there are imperfect people running it. But in this government, only justice and only righteousness. And if you're a person who's been abused or abandoned, if you've been hurt and you've wondered where is God in all of this, oh, he's building a kingdom where people like you are never going to have to worry about it again. Because he's going to deal with the unrighteous and he's going to put sin to death forevermore. It's a good promise. And last, number four, God Himself is going to see that this is done. You ever hear, there's two sayings I think of. One is, if you want something done right, do it. Yep. Or women, ladies, uh, if you want something done right, get a woman to do it. That's I've I've heard that one too. So, like when it comes to this kind of a task, no people could ever establish something like this. And so I love what it says at the end of verse 7. It says, the zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this. God himself is going to see that this is done. There'll be no question as to whether or not this is going to be accomplished because God Himself is going to establish this kingdom. In fact, we might even say he's already done it through the work that Jesus did when he came into the world. This Advent season, let's remember who Jesus is and what Jesus has done. That's why we celebrate. And let's celebrate. Amen. Gotta pray tonight that you take your word and you'd make it make sense in the most real and tangible way, and that you would shape and change our lives because of it. Lord, if there's anybody here tonight that doesn't know you, doesn't have a relationship with you, I pray that tonight, through the hearing of your word and the promises of scripture and the declarations of truth that we read and the stories of Matthew one, stories of Rahab and Boaz and Tamar and Judah and Mary and Joseph and Josiah, we see you work in different ways in people's lives, and I pray that we'd be encouraged by it. We'd learn to trust you. Thank you for the power of your forgiveness and the way that you graft broken people into your story. But thank you that you don't compromise your plan. Your kingdom will be one of righteousness and justice. And the only way we can be a part of that is through the righteousness and justice that Jesus provides by trusting in the work that He did on the cross for us. If there's anybody here tonight that hasn't put their faith and their trust in that, I pray that they would, even tonight before they leave. Lord, I pray that as we celebrate what Isaiah prophesied looking forward, we celebrate looking back, but also the already not yet aspect of what you're still gonna do. Pray that we'd rejoice over the fact that you came into the world, but we'd rejoice maybe just as much over the fact that you're coming again. And we're gonna be a part of a kingdom that'll never end, with a king that'll never let us down, a rule of peace and righteousness and justice with no evil or wicked opposition. That's what we have to look forward to, and we're grateful. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.
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