The Genealogy of Jesus
Today’s Passage: Matthew 1:1–17
Focus Verse: This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham. (Matthew 1:1)
We’ve already talked about how John, Mark, and Luke open their biographies of Jesus. Now we’ll look at Matthew’s approach. Though it may seem strange to us today, Matthew begins with a tedious list of Jesus’s ancestors.
It’s important to Matthew, as well as to his Jewish audience, that we know Jesus’s ancestry—his pedigree. Especially significant is that we know Jesus is a descendant of David, as well as of Abraham.
Both men received promises from God about their offspring, specifically Jesus.
This list of Jesus’s genealogy includes many names we aren’t familiar with and others that appear nowhere else in Scripture. Yet a few people stand out. Scanning the list, let’s remember what these people did and how they connect with Jesus.
We begin with some familiar names.
There’s Abraham and (implicitly) his wife Sarah. Next is their son Isaac and grandson Jacob. Jacob has twelve boys; one of them is Judah. There’s the sordid story of Judah and his daughter-in-law Tamar, which produces Perez.
Jumping down a few verses we see Salmon, whose name means nothing to us. Yet he marries Rahab, the former prostitute who was instrumental in God’s people conquering Jericho.
They have Boaz, who marries the Moabite widow, Ruth. Ruth and Boaz are the great-grandparents of David, who will become Israel’s second king and is a man after God’s own heart.
David and Bathsheba have Solomon. Interestingly, Bathsheba isn’t mentioned by name, yet her first husband, Uriah, is. Recall that after David has his adulterous affair with Bathsheba, his attempted cover-up results in Uriah’s death.
Though Uriah is not a biological ancestor of Jesus, Matthew honors Uriah by listing him in Jesus’s family tree.
Next is Rehoboam. His arrogant rule results in the nation of Israel being split in two, with Rehoboam—David’s royal line—ruling over the tribe of Judah. What follows is a list of kings. A few follow God, but most don’t.
Of this list, we know the most about Hezekiah, a king who does much good for God but whose pride results in punishment.
We may not, however, be familiar with Hezekiah’s father, Ahaz. As we’ll read in a couple of days, a trivial story about Ahaz results in a key prophecy about Jesus.
A few generations later, the nation of Judah is exiled into Babylon. (The nation of Israel had already been conquered by the Assyrians.)
The rest of the names that follow are unfamiliar. Though they are descendants of King David, they don’t serve as kings since there is no nation to rule. We know nothing else about these men through Scripture.
As we continue to scan the list of unfamiliar names, eventually we come across Joseph, the husband of Mary, who is the mother of Jesus, the Messiah.
The key point of this list is to confirm that Jesus is a descendant of Abraham, with some of God’s promises to Abraham, as well as to David, being fulfilled through Jesus.
We also see that many of Jesus’s ancestors are flawed people who make serious mistakes. God blesses them anyway and uses each one, in their own time, to bring about Jesus’s birth—and ultimately our salvation.
Questions:
Which of these people in Jesus’s family tree do you most identify with?
Whose inclusion on this list seems surprising or even shocking?
Prayer: Lord God, thank you for your amazing plan to send Jesus to earth. Lord Jesus, thank you for dying in our place and saving us.
[This devotional is taken from the December 3 reading from The Advent of Jesus.]
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Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront a status quo faith and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.
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