02 Stop Skipping Matthew's Genealogy, You're Missing the Point (Matthew 1:1-17)

Krisan Marotta: Welcome back to the Wednesday in the Word podcast. I'm Krisan Marotta, and this is my podcast about what the Bible means and how we know. This is the second talk in my series on the Gospel of Matthew. Today we're gonna study Matthew chapter 1 verses 1 through 17. You'll find lecture notes with links to everything mentioned in today's talk and an outline on the website. You can click on the link below this podcast or go to wednesdayintheword.com slash Matthew 2. Thanks so much for listening. Today we begin our study of the Gospel of Matthew. In the last podcast, I covered introductory and background material that are relevant to this gospel, but today we get to start studying the text itself. Writers are usually told to start their books with a hook. They're taught to write a really great first sentence that will immediately engage their readers. Charles Dickens famously began A Tale of Two Cities. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. George Orwell started 1984 this way. And Jane Austen also very famously begins Pride and Prejudice. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. Matthew begins his gospel like this the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham, and then he gives us a very long list of names. It might look like Matthew didn't get the memo that writers should start their books with a hook. He starts his gospel with the genealogy of Jesus, that is a list of the ancestors of Jesus. And could he have chosen anything more boring to start with? I suspect most modern readers skim through this list of names when they open Matthew's gospel. And yet I want to argue that Matthew did start his gospel with a bang. I believe that Matthew thinks this list is really important stuff and that it is relevant to every human being who ever lived. But in order for us to understand what's so important about this genealogy, we have to know some things from the Old Testament. Actually, that's true for all of Matthew's gospel, because Matthew wrote to a primarily Jewish audience. He expects his audience to be familiar with the Old Testament, and that's particularly true with the genealogy. So Matthew 1.1 begins, the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham. This is a powerful statement. Matthew identifies Jesus as the Christ, the Son of David, and the Son of Abraham. So we need to know what the Old Testament scriptures tell us about the Christ, about David, and about Abraham. And it turns out that Abraham and David are the two most important people for Jesus to be related to. We're going to start with Abraham. Abraham was a man chosen by God for extraordinary things. His original name was Abram, and later on God renames him to Abraham. So in the passage I'm about to read, he's referred to as Abram. And Genesis twelve verses one through three we read Now the Lord said to Abram, Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. So here God is promising to bless Abraham, and through Abraham to bless all the families of the earth. God's promise concerns Abraham's descendants. It is through Abraham's children or his descendants that God will bless the world. But not all of his children, it becomes clear as we keep reading in Scripture that the promise is to Abraham's son Isaac and Isaac's descendants. In Genesis twenty six verses one through five, God makes the same promise to Isaac, Abraham's son, that he earlier had made to Abraham. So this is Genesis twenty six verses one through five. Now there was a famine in the land besides the former famine that was in the days of Abraham, and Isaac went to Gerar to Abimelech, King of the Philistines, and the Lord appeared to him and said, Do not go down to Egypt, dwell in the land of which I shall tell you. Sojourn in this land, and I will be with you, and will bless you, for to you and to your offspring I will give all these lands, and I will establish the oath that I swore to Abraham your father. I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven, and will give to your offspring all these lands, and in your offspring all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws. Here God repeats his promise to Isaac, the same promise he had made to Abraham, and then the promise passes down to Isaac's son Jacob, who is renamed Israel. The promise does not go to all of Isaac's sons, it goes to Jacob. And in Genesis twenty eight ten fifteen, God says this to Jacob. Jacob left Bersheba and went to Haran, and he came to a certain place and stayed there that night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place he put it under his head and lay down in that place to sleep, and he dreamed, and behold there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven, and behold the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And behold the Lord stood above it and said, I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father, and the God of Isaac, the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring. Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land, for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you. So here we see the promise goes first to Abraham, then to Abraham's son Isaac, and then to Isaac's son Jacob. And Jacob had twelve sons who were the patriarchs of the twelve tribes of Israel. What does it mean that God is going to bless all the families, all the nations of the earth through the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Bless is a very religious sounding word. God is saying that He will do something great, something wonderful, something desirable for all the nations of the earth through the descendants of Abraham. Now the word nations is the source of our word Gentiles. In the Old Testament we see a distinction between peoples. There are the Jews, those are the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and then there are the nations, those who are not Jews. So the Jews were the physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the nations or the Gentiles are not physically descended from those three. The promise to Abraham is one of the first statements of God's intention to work not just with the Jews, the nation of Israel, but with the Gentiles as well. As the book of Genesis ends, God has promised this great and wonderful blessing to all the nations of the earth, and this blessing will come through the Jewish people, the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and as Matthew tells us, Jesus is a son of Abraham. Jesus is one of those descendants through whom the nations of the earth will be blessed. Matthew also tells us that Jesus is a son of David, and that brings us to the next phase of God's promises. Eventually, God settled the descendants of Jacob's twelve sons into the land of Israel, and they became their own nation. God gave Jacob the name Israel, he renamed Jacob Israel, and the nation is then named after Israel or after Jacob. After some time in the land as their own nation, God chose David to be king over the children of Israel. But David's importance extends far beyond the fact that he was king of the nation of Israel. God made a great promise to David as well, as great as the promise he had earlier made to Abraham. And we find the entire promise spelled out in 2 Samuel chapter seven, but I think this verse, 2 Samuel seven sixteen sums it up. That reads and your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me, your throne shall be established forever. That idea of made sure means endure. Your house, your kingdom will endure forever before me. So God tells David that his descendants will sit on the throne of Israel forever. But again, the significance of this promise goes much farther than the nation of Israel, and David understands that ultimately his throne is going to rule over all the earth. God intends to bless the world through the throne of David. In fact, I would argue that David, as a descendant of Abraham, is a crucial part of how Abraham's descendants are going to bless the world. David and his sons are helping to bring the promised blessing of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to the world through the throne of David. So who is qualified to sit on the throne of David? Well, a descendant of David is. A son of David is qualified to sit on his throne. And as Matthew tells us, Jesus is a son of David. Now, unfortunately, at first this promise to David didn't seem to work out so well. Various of David's descendants did sit on his throne. David was followed by his son Solomon, but after that things quickly went south. Some of the descendants of David were very bad kings, and many did not do a very good job. After the death of Solomon, two of his sons fought for the throne, and that ended in a civil war that split the kingdom. The northern part of Israel split away from David's kingdom and formed a new nation with a new king who was one of David's sons, and the southern part formed a nation with a different son of David on the throne. Ultimately, both the northern and the southern nations fell into rebellion and godlessness, and God judged them by destroying the throne of David and sending the children of Israel into captivity in Babylon. Now at this point things were looking very bad indeed. What happened to God's promise to David that his throne would last forever? Well God sent prophets to answer that question, and the prophets tell us that God was still going to keep his promise to David that his throne would last forever. The prophets tell us that David's throne will last forever because one day a king will come, a descendant of David will come, who will sit on that throne forever. And this coming king would abolish evil, establish justice, bring peace, and conquer death. And this one king, this future king, a son of David, would come, and through him the entire world would be blessed. Now over time people started calling this coming king the anointed one. And the word Messiah comes from the Hebrew word for anointed one. And the word Christ comes from the Greek word for anointed one. So the Messiah is the Christ. The Messiah is that one son of David for whom all of Israel is waiting. So the Messiah, the Christ, is the coming king who will reestablish David's throne and rule over all the earth, bringing about God's promised blessing to all the nations. And Matthew tells us Jesus is the Christ. He is that anointed one, the Messiah, the one Israel has been waiting for. Everything we've just been talking about provides background for this first verse of Matthew's gospel. God promised Abraham that his descendants would bring blessing to all the nations. God promised David that one of his descendants would rule over all the nations in peace, and that descendant is known as the Christ. And Matthew announces in his first verse that those promises are fulfilled in Jesus. He is that one descendant of Abraham who will completely fulfill God's promise to bring blessing to the world. He is that one descendant of David who will bless the world by ruling over it in peace. Jesus is the promised king, the anointed one, the Messiah, the Christ. This is what Matthew means when he says that he is giving the record of the genealogy of Jesus, the Christ, son of David, son of Abraham. This story I just told about Abraham, David, and Christ is further reflected in the structure of the genealogy itself. Jump ahead to Matthew chapter one verse seventeen. So all the generations from Abraham to David were fourteen generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ fourteen generations. This genealogy which records the ancestry of Jesus is divided into three parts. God promises Abraham the world will be blessed through his descendants, and the first part or the first section of the list gives us Abraham's descendants culminating in David. The second part of the genealogy is a list of the kings of Israel when God's promises are focused on David, who is promised that one of his descendants will sit on his throne forever and will bless the entire world through his rule. Then the third part of the genealogy deals with the time after the exile. The line of kings comes to an end at the hands of the Babylonians. All hope seems lost during the years when the throne of David is destroyed, and people are waiting for the true king to come. And so the third list records David's descendants who were not kings, but who were waiting for the true king to come, and that hope is realized with the birth of Jesus the Christ. Now I'm not going to go through and read all the names on the list, I can't pronounce most of them anyway, but what I want you to see is that this genealogy is divided in three parts, and these three parts are a record and miniature of God's redemptive work in history. God promises Abraham the world will be blessed through his descendants, so the first section of the list records Abraham's descendants culminating in David. God promises David that the world will be blessed through one of his sons who will sit on his throne forever. So the second list follows David's sons as kings of Israel, ending in the captivity when all hope seems lost. Then the third list picks up from the captivity and is a list of David's descendants who are not kings, but are part of the people hoping and waiting for the one true king who will come and sit on David's throne forever. And that hope is realized in the birth of Jesus, the Christ, son of Abraham, son of David. And this, I believe, is the fundamental message of the genealogy in Matthew's gospel. This man Jesus is the Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Now many questions remain about the specifics of this genealogy. How does it compare with Luke's? Why are some of the names missing? When you start looking at the details, it can get really complicated, and many scholarly kinds of issues are raised. I'm not going to go into all those questions and issues. They're debated in most of the commentaries, and many of them do a good job of addressing the questions. Names, dates, and numbers just get too confusing to try to go over in a podcast. But no matter how you handle the scholarly questions, I believe the picture I've just painted is the overall point and the way we should approach the genealogy in Matthew 1. Having said that then, there are two questions I would like to address. The first is about Matthew's numbers. Matthew says that the genealogy can be broken into three parts with 14 names in each. Well, three times fourteen is forty two, and if you count, you'll find there are only forty-one names in the genealogy. Well, how does that work? Critics of Matthew's gospel like to claim that Matthew made a mistake, that Matthew thought he was giving us forty two names, but he accidentally left one out. Well there are numerous explanations for what Matthew was doing, and none of them mean he made a mistake. The one that persuades me is the simplest, and that is that Matthew explains what he's doing in verse 17. He says that all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations, and we go to that list and we count, and if we start with Abraham and end with David, there are fourteen names on the list. Then he says there are fourteen generations from David to the deportation to Babylon. In other words, starting with David and going to the deportation, there are fourteen names. So he has intentionally used David twice. David is the last person in the first group of fourteen, and David is the first person in the second group of fourteen. And there are forty-one names because Matthew used David twice and he intended to use David twice. Well that makes sense to me. If David starts the second list, then everyone on the second list was a full fledged Davidic king. That list ends with Josiah, who was the last person to be a full fledged independent king of Judah. And the final list starts with Josiah's son Yeconiah, who is also known as Jehoiakim, and he was conquered by the Babylonians and taken into captivity. In fact, Chronicles calls him Yeconiah the prisoner. So the last list contains descendants of David who lost the opportunity to sit on David's throne until we get to the last name on the list, which is Jesus. That suggests that Matthew was not claiming that historically there were only fourteen generations between Abraham and David, and then only fourteen generations between David and the captivity. He was creating this list for mnemonic purposes, so it would be easy to remember. He's not doing math. He's creating an organizing principle by which to remember the concept. Matthew's first two lists are derived from the Old Testament book of First Chronicles, which I believe is chapters two and three, and anyone who looks at 1 Chronicles will immediately notice that Matthew left several names off the second list. There are kings that he did not mention. I find it very difficult to believe that this was a random mistake on Matthew's part. As he was writing, he was probably looking at a scroll of chronicles and choosing to intentionally leave some names out. He wants to have 14 names in each section, probably to make it easy to remember or something like that, because his point is not to list every single name between Abraham and Jesus. His point is that Jesus is the Christ. He is a son of David and a son of Abraham. Jesus is the one who inherits the promises given to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and to David. Jesus is the one who will bring those promises to fulfillment. From my research, skipping names was a very common practice in genealogies, both in the Gospels and in the secular records we have of ancient kings. They can jump from grandfather to grandson and it still preserves the line of descent. Matthew left names off so that each list would have fourteen names. He knows he's leaving names out and he's doing it on purpose. He wanted each section to have fourteen names, even if it meant leaving some off. Now we don't know where he got the names on the third list. We don't know who these people are or how Matthew knows who they are. Therefore, we don't know if he left names off the third list as well, but it seems likely that he did. I don't think the fact that today we don't know where Matthew got the names is a problem because Matthew had access to information we don't have because he had access to information that was not written down for history. Most importantly, he spent three years in the physical presence of Jesus. Jesus could have told him the names at some point. Joseph or Mary could have told him the names as they were handed down to them and their family. Or the Holy Spirit could have divinely revealed the names to him at some point. Matthew had many ways to learn those names that we just don't have today, so it's not a problem to me that he knows them and we don't, except from his list. The second question I want to touch on is how Matthew's genealogy compares to the genealogy that Luke gives in his gospel in chapter three. And again, this can get really complicated. The two lists are not the same, and I am only going to give the briefest of explanations here. Again, I'd refer you to the commentaries because quite a few of them do a very thorough discussion on comparing these genealogies. But read more than one commentary because you will find they don't all answer the questions the same way. Most of Luke's list is different than Matthew's. From Abraham to David, it's pretty much the same, but Luke does not list the king's descendant from David. Matthew's list goes from David to Solomon, who is a son of David who was the next king. Luke's goes from David to Nathan, one of David's sons who was not a king. The line of names that follows in Luke's list are all descendants of David, but none of them were ever kings of Israel or Judah. And from there on the names are almost completely different. Again, there are lots of suggestions for what's going on here. I'm going to give you the one that persuades me, which is again the simplest explanation, but this doesn't persuade everyone. I think that Matthew is giving the line that results in Joseph, and Luke is giving the line that results in Mary. Why? Because Jesus is not a blood relative of Joseph. Both Matthew and Luke know that Jesus resulted from a virgin birth. Look how Matthew puts it in his genealogy. This is Matthew one sixteen. And Jacob, the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ. In Matthew's list, every name is so and so the father of this person, so and so the father of this person, until we get to Joseph. And Joseph is not described as the father of Jesus. Matthew describes him as the husband of Mary, who is the mother of Jesus. Jesus is the son of Joseph, not biologically, but because Joseph married his mother. He is a son of Joseph not because of a union between Joseph and Mary, but because Joseph adopted him by marrying his mother. So he is Joseph's legal heir, but not his blood relative. Jesus is physically related to David through Mary, and that's the line that we see in Luke. Jesus is legally related to the line of Davidic Kings through Joseph, and that's the line we see in Matthew. It's very clear that Luke's gospel includes a lot of information he could only have gotten from Mary. And a lot of what we know of Jesus' early years is in Luke, and it's told from Mary's perspective. Luke had to have interviewed Mary before writing his gospel. So it makes sense that Luke would have included Mary's genealogy. Now it is true that Luke does not explicitly claim that his genealogy is Mary's, and there are a lot of competing explanations for why it may he may be doing something else, but they're just too complicated to go into in this podcast. Again, you can find them in the commentaries. One other note about the names on Matthew's list, including Mary, Matthew mentions four women. And it's debated how unusual this is, because of the four women, two of them are also mentioned in Chronicles. We just don't know how typical it was or how atypical it was to mention a mother. The first woman mentioned is Tamar, this is in Matthew 1.3, and Judah, the father of Peres and Zerab by Tamar, and Peres the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Ram. Now Tamar's story is very interesting and colorful. She was the wife of Judah's oldest son, but he died before they had children. By Jewish custom, in order to preserve the family line, she should have married her dead husband's brother and bear sons in the first husband's name. But to make a long story short, that doesn't happen. So she basically takes matters into her own hands and tricks her father-in-law Judah into sleeping with her and bearing him sons. The next two women in the list are Rahab and Ruth, and they're found in Matthew 1.5. And Salmon, the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed, the father of Jesse. Now we don't know for certain that this is the Rahab from the book of Joshua. That Rahab was a Canaanite woman who helped the spies enter the promised land. Nothing in Scripture confirms that this Rahab in the list is the same Rahab in the book of Joshua, but it seems very likely to me that it is. Ruth was also a non Jew. She was a Moabitus who followed her mother-in-law back to Israel after they were both widowed, and her story is recorded in the book of Ruth. And then the last woman we see on the list is Bathsheba, who is called the wife of Uriah. This is in Matthew 1.6, and Jesse, the father of David, the king, and David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah. If you've studied the books of Samuel, you know there's quite a story there. Bathsheba is frequently referred to as the wife of Uriah. David had an affair with her when she was Uriah's wife, and then sent Uriah off to the battlefield so that David could marry her since she was now pregnant. So David, one of the most important names on the list, is not put on a pedestal. His mistakes and his problems are memorialized even in this list. It's interesting to me that the Bible makes no apologies or excuses for the sometimes colorful and interesting history of our patriarchs. So my main point here is this. It seems clear to me that Matthew did not make a mistake with his numbers. He wanted to have 14 names on each section of the list, even if that meant leaving some off. He repeats David's name because David is one of the most important names on the list. And this gives him three sections of fourteen names each. The first section is the lineage from Abraham to David. The second section is the list of the Davidic kings. And the third section is the list of the descendants of David who lost the opportunity to be king until the true king, Jesus, arrives. Although the specific reasons Matthew had for wanting 14 names or for making some of his other decisions, they're not precisely clear. Matthew's general purpose in this section does seem very clear to me. He started with a genealogy because God made great promises that are tied to a specific line of people. First, God is going to do great things for the entire world through the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And Jesus is that one descendant of Abraham who is the most important in bringing those promises about. And we find this point elsewhere in the New Testament. The Apostle Paul says the same thing in Galatians 3. In Galatians 3.8, he says, and the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, In you shall all the nations be blessed. And then he goes into some complicated stuff, and he goes on to say that Jesus died on the cross so that, in Galatians 3.14, so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith. That's the promise made to Abraham, and Paul tells us that blessing, that promise made to Abraham, is going to come into the world through Jesus Christ. So Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the one who fully accomplishes what God promised to Abraham, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed through Abraham and his descendants through Jesus. Likewise, God is going to do great things for the world through David and his descendants. And Jesus is that one descendant of David who will sit on the throne and fulfill the promises made to David. He will rule over all the earth in righteousness and peace. And the New Testament is full of this theme. In Matthew, Jesus is called the Son of David multiple times. Toward the end of his life, Paul writes to Timothy, and he sums up the gospel this way. He says in 2 Timothy 2 8, remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David, as preached in my gospel. So there is Paul summing up his gospel in this really simple way. Jesus, who is the Christ, the promised descendant of David, rose from the dead. In other words, Jesus is the king who will sit on David's throne and rule forever. This is what Matthew sees as the significance of his genealogy. It takes a son of Abraham and a son of David to fulfill God's promises to the world, and that is who this man Jesus is. Matthew seems to think this is a very big deal. His readers who knew the Old Testament would understand why. God's promises were all about a complete restoration of all creation. The world is full of sin and death and injustice and corruption and futility, and God has promised to transform it into a place of righteousness, life, and justice, and he fulfills that promise through the descendants of Abraham and David. In fact, through one particular descendant of Abraham and David. God intends to fulfill his promise through Jesus, the Christ, the Son of David, Son of Abraham, whose story Matthew is about to tell us in his gospel. You've been listening to the Wednesday in the Word podcast. My mission is to explain not only what a passage means, but how we figure it out. If you haven't visited my website, I encourage you to go by and take a look. You'll find lots of previous episodes and other Bible studies there. And no advertisements. Rather than being covered in ads, my website has a wealth of Bible study materials that are free for you to use and to learn and improve your skills. I don't take advertising, I don't accept donations, but if you want to thank me, please join the mailing list, subscribe to the podcast, and if you can, leave a positive rating or review wherever you listen to your podcast. And most importantly, tell a friend what you learned and where you learned it. Our theme music is graciously provided by Reggie Coates. He is my favorite musician, and you can find more of his music on heartfeltmusic.org. If you go and listen, you'll be glad you did. Thank you for joining me today. I'm Krisan Marotta, and I'll see you next week at Wednesday in the Word.