Transcript
We are starting the book of Matthew Over this last year, I was looking at about a year ago, we were in looking at the seven letters to the seven churches out of Revelation two and three. Then we finished that and we did a series called Promise Believers where we were looking at basing our lives on the promises of God and emphasize the fact that God is not looking for us to make promises to him. He's looking for us to respond to his promises in faith. And then we went into the book of Hebrews, and Hebrews is all about how Jesus is so much better than the shadow of Judaism and the Levitical order. And the writer, the pastor of Hebrews is saying, look, don't leave Jesus. Don't leave Jesus. He's the one that came and died and is your high priest and he's advocating for you and he wants you to be close to the Father.
And as we've gone through this journey, I've personally been like, this is awesome. I love this. But I'm at a place where I'm like, okay, I'm ready to go back. Let's just study Jesus. Let's go to the source. Let's talk about Jesus for a few months together. So we're going to be in Matthew and we're going to see the teachings of Jesus. We're going to see the sermon on the Mount, the infancy and the birth of Christ. There's five times where Jesus teaches at length. We're going to see the parables. There's a bunch of different things that we'll encounter as we go through Matthew. And I'm really excited. I don't know about you, but life is sometimes confusing and especially right now having come out of Covid, a lot of things feel like they've been turned on its head. And there's a lot of pieces where you're just like, what is up?
What's true north? And I think people are still trying to figure that out. There's a lot of distrust around leadership, whether it's in the church or with political leaders and there's scandals that exist. And I think, yeah, for me there's this sense of, you know what, just give me Jesus. I know that that really is the true north that we need in the midst of all what's going to happen with the economy. Some people are like, we're going to go into a recession. And some people are like, oh, we're going to have a soft landing. And then other people are going to have, there's no landing and the economy's fine and unemployment is record breaking. And who knows? We have no idea, right? It's kind of confusing to know what's going to happen next, but in the midst of all of that, we just can sink our teeth in the person of Jesus.
And so that's what I'm excited about. As many of you know, this church plant, this church is a very personal expression of my own spirituality. Why do we feed poor people or people in need or people suffering and on a fixed income? Because that's something I was passionate about and God opened up the door for us to do it right. Why are we going into Matthew? Because I wanted to do it. So that's my leadership style. That is how I do things. So let's read this together. Now I know if you're here for the first time and if you're new to the church, you're going to be like, what is going on here? But this is Matthew chapter one, verses one through 17. It says this, an account of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham, Abraham fathered Isaac, Isaac, father Jacob, Jacob, father Judah and his brothers, Judah fathered Perez and Zara by Tamar Perez, fathered Heran heran fathered Ara arum fathered aab aab fathered na hasan Han fathered Salman Salman fathered Boaz by Rahab Boaz fathered Obed by Ruth Obed fathered Jesse and Jesse fathered King David.
David fathered Solomon by Uriah's wife Solomon fathered em. Boem fathered Aja Aja fathered Asa aa father Jehoshaphat Jehoshaphat father Jora Jem fathered Siah Siah fathered Jotham Jo Joseph fathered ahaz. Ah fathered Hezekiah. Hezekiah fathered manasses, manasses fathered. Amen. Amen. Father Josiah, Josiah fathered kinaya and his brothers at the time of the exile to Babylon after the exile to Babylon, Kinaya fathered shield. Teel and shield till fathered, Zaza fathered abada or abad fathered eliakim, Eliakim fathered azo, Azer fathered Zac, Zac fathered Aki, AKI fathered Eli, ID fathered Azar, fathered Matton. Matton father Jacob, Jacob Father Joseph, the husband of Mary who gave birth to Jesus, who is called the Messiah. So all the generations from Abraham to David were 14 generations. And from David until the exile to the exile to Babylon, 14 generations and from the exile to Babylon until the Messiah, 14 generations. Welcome to church.
Let's pray. Lord, we pray that you would just speak to us. It says in the book of Timothy that the scriptures are profitable for teaching, for instruction, for correction, reproof. And somehow this genealogy can intersect with our week in the middle of August, 2023 and our story and the things that we've experienced and the wounds that we've felt and the wins and the losses that we have and the relationships that we have. All this scripture, it can just speak wisdom into us, but we need the spirit of God to meet with us this morning and to teach us. And we want to have ears to hear what you have to say. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. So yes, let's jump into Matthew. Let me give you just a little bit of material here just in terms of introducing this book. If you're brand new to the Bible, you need to know that there's two major sections to the Christian Bible.
There's the Old Testament and there's the New Testament. The Old Testament can also be called the Hebrew scriptures. If you go to a Jewish person and you ask them about their Bible and you talk about the Old Testament, they're going to say, well, that's my Bible. My Bible is the Old Testament Bible. They don't use the New Testament because if they're not a follower of Jesus, they reject the New Testament. So you have the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament tells the story of creation on through Israel and how God is trying to redeem the world through his people Israel. He's starting a journey, right? We're going to talk a little bit more about that this morning. And then you get to the New Testament, and the first book in the New Testament is Matthew. Matthew. We have no idea when it was written, whether it's written as early as 50 ad or as late as in the eighties, maybe the nineties 80.
There's a bunch of different ideas of how early it was or how late it was written, but it's very clear that it was written by Matthew, one of the disciples of Jesus. The early church fathers clearly attributed it to Matthew. There was no question about that. And it was written, it was believed by the urge of the church fathers that Matthew was written in possibly Hebrew or written in Greek. But for a Jewish audience, it's really, really occupied with the idea of explaining the person of Jesus to a Jewish audience. There are five considerable sections of teaching that we're going to come across. Do you know what chapters five through seven are called?
Chapters five through seven is oftentimes called the Sermon on the Mount. In fact, if you go and listen to the podcast, our podcast starting with this sermon moving forward, I'm going to be including little clips of audio at the beginning before you hear this teaching of people that I'm talking to from the Compassion Center about Matthew. I'm having kind of on the street conversations about Matthew and I did it this last week. One of the things I did was I said, Hey, what do you know about Matthew? And a number of people said, oh, that's where the sermon on the Mount is, and that's where we're going to cover. That's chapters five through seven, chapters 10, 13, 18. We're going to hit some parables and then we're going to get a lengthy teaching about just the end times in the second coming of Christ and a final judgment.
So there's these big sections of teaching. Now, some commentators say that Matthew's kind of giving a new Torah. So if you go to the Old Testament, you have Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, numbers in Deuteronomy, the first five books of the Bible Moses is writing. And that Matthew here is kind of imitating that. There's some definitely mapping on New Testament to Old Testament, but that's just an idea. Some other people disagree with that opinion. There is this real Jewishness about the book. This comes from Craig Keener. He says, the writer seems concerned throughout to show that Christianity is the true continuation of the Old Testament, the true Judaism. So if you're familiar with the Old Testament, you see how God shapes a nation. He gives that there are common people that come from Abraham, they're given a common land in Israel, and then they have a common constitution with the law and their religious practices.
And that forming of culture and a people leads into, and there's these holidays that they're celebrating. It all leads up to Jesus. It's fulfilled in Jesus. And Matthew really works hard to show how Jesus is the fulfillment of Judaism. It is true Judaism, Jesus is the fulfillment of Jewish scriptures. I want to show you this pattern throughout the first time we come across this and we'll look at this text next week, but this is found, I believe this. This formula is found 61 times in the book of Matthew. Now all of this, this is Matthew writing, he says, now all of this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet. And then you go to 23, it's going to quote the Old Testament passage. So the Greek New Testament lists 61 quotations from the Old Testament in the gospel of Matthew compared to 31 in Mark, 26 in Luke and 16 in John.
So again, here's Matthew writing to a Jewish audience saying here is what's happened in the story of Jesus, and here's how it connects to the Old Testament. Now kids, you guys remember we were in Matthew three, we were talking about John the Baptist, and it took us weeks to just kind of get through those first verses because Matthew is saying about John the Baptist, Hey, this is what Isaiah 40 was talking about. And there's this really trying to help this new audience of Christians, these new followers of Jesus that may not have witnessed the crucifixion, the resurrection to understand the story of Jesus, but to understand that it was a fulfillment of the Jewish scriptures. It's more so in the book of Matthew than any other gospel. Now, this isn't in my notes, but I'll mention it to you.
There is a lot of correlation between Mark, Matthew and Luke. And then John is also a gospel telling the story of Jesus. But it's very, so the three gospels, Matthew, mark, and Luke are called synoptic gospel. Can you say synoptic synoptic gospels? And they probably are based on mark or what we call a Q document. There might've been some missing document that we don't have but is kind of a written, or maybe it's a messy document of just what Jesus did and what he taught. Scholars call it the Q. But mark was probably the first synoptic gospel that was written. And then we have Matthew and Luke and there's some differences there, but it's very clear that Matthew is really emphasizing some Jewish points. Now, I want to show you a couple of things from the actual text. We'll kind of walk through this text together, the opening line, just go to Matthew one one.
In the c s b version, it says, an account of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. I want to show I never do this, but just give me a second, okay? I want to show you this in Greek. Okay? It says, and then I don't know how to say that last word, at least not in the moment because my Greek is a little bit rough. But here's what I want you to see, okay? Because in our version it says an account of the genealogy, but some of these words, what does that sound like? Bible and Genesis, right? This is not the normal word for genealogy. If you were a Jew at the time of this writing, and you receive this, you receive the book of Matthew, you would see language here. That was the title for the first book of the Old Testament, genesis, the book of Genesis.
So what Matthew here is doing is he's starting his letter by essentially saying that the book of the new Genesis brought by Jesus, or in other words, Matthew is saying, this story you're about to read is about the recreation of the whole world. So there's this Jewish nature right from the very beginning, borrowing language from the Book of Genesis, the book, it literally says the book Genesis, but of Jesus. Isn't that interesting? So it opens up, but it doesn't just say the opening. But do you see that we have some names of Jesus? Jesus. This is not his last name, by the way. He was not Mr. Christ. This is Latin for Messiah, the anointed one. Okay? So Jesus is the name that Mary and Joseph gave to him, and then Christ is the term Messiah. So the Jews were told all the way back in Deuteronomy, my Moses, to wait for another character like Moses who would be anointed, that there would be an anointed one who would serve the purpose of a Messiah.
Now, Matthew also calls him the son of David. And again, if you're Jewish, you've been waiting for about 1400 years for the person who's going to sit on David's throne, but be a better king than David. David had been promised that his reign would not end, but there was these promises that were yet unfulfilled to David with this flourish and that you go into the prophets, it's just flourishing of the kingdom, and yet the nation had been in decline. So Jews at this time, we were living in anticipation. Where's the son of David? Where's the one that's going to fulfill these prophetic words? It hasn't happened yet. So Matthew says, this is Jesus Christ, the son of David. Oh, the son of Abraham. The son of Abraham. So he's tying it in all the way back with this goes back to Genesis 12 when Abraham was told, Hey, leave earth of Cies.
Go to a land that I'm going to promise you and I'm going to turn you into a nation that's going to bring a blessing to the whole world that's given to a barren man and his wife, that promise. And yet here we have the story of Jesus starting off just showing us this is the fulfillment of the Jewish story. Like you got to love what God did through the people, the Hebrew people, going back to Abraham to love who Jesus is. It just shows design in this amazing, amazing way. The next thing I want to show you is just the long story of redemption. Let's look at verse two and just to kind of take away any fears that you have. We're not going to go through every one of those verses we could, but not on a Sunday morning. So here he says, Abraham fathered Isaac.
So he's telling the story of Jesus, giving his genealogy, and he says that Abraham fathered Isaac and Isaac fathered Jacob, father Judah and his brothers the work that God did starting early on in Genesis, after the flood, after the Tower of Babel, God designates this man Abraham, and the world is basically lost and broken in sin from basically Genesis three on there is this search for a repair, and there's this thought, well, maybe it's Noah, right? Maybe it's Noah. But Noah, after the flood fails, basically there's something occurs with his sons that shows like, man, he's not going to be the anointed one. So then you fast forward and you get to the story of Abraham and God's promising it's through you that I'm going to bring this anointed one, this seed, and there's this anticipation, in fact, the whole Old Testament, it's just written with this anticipation. If you finish the Old Testament, Malachi, you see that the Hebrew scriptures do not have a resolution. If you read through with just faithful interpretation, you are left waiting for the story to be wrapped up.
There is not a happy ending. There is just this vacuum waiting to be filled by a messiah. So we have the long story. You look at I Abraham, and if you're not familiar with these characters, it's worth reading. I know that sometimes the Bible, the Old Testament is intimidating. You get into Genesis and you're like, how does this connect to God's plan for my life? You start reading Abraham's story, you start reading Isaac's story. It's just like, man, this is just a really, really old story. But here's what you got to understand is it should be priming your hearts for the Messiah. And it is, it's a long story, but it's getting you ready for Jesus to show up.
One more thing that I want to show you from this story, and that is the women. Did you see them in there? Did you see the women that were in this genealogy? Now, if you know the Old Testament story, what women would you expect to be in this genealogy? Sarah. That's right. Who else? Mary Ruth. No, you wouldn't expect Ruth. She's a Moabite Mary. Yes, she's in there, right? Yeah. Who would you expect if you know the Old Testament? Who are the women that are famous? Deborah, okay, yeah, we got who's after we got Rebecca, Rachel, Leah. Yep. You got Rahab in here. But this is the point. You wouldn't expect to find Rahab in this store. You'd expect to find Sarah. Is she in here? She's not. She's not listed in here. In fact, we have five women that are listed that are surprising characters. Tamar, we have a mixed audience with young people here. So I'm not going to explain the story of Tamar here, but you can go back and you can read about Tamar. Just look in your Bible and it'll give you the scripture reference of where in Genesis you can see everything that happened with Tamar. I think it's Genesis 38 or thereabouts.
It was a scandal, right? It was a scandal. And yet she's included in the genealogy of Jesus Rahab. This is early on in the book of Joshua. Again, somebody who's in an industry that is illicit, she would have not been a character that you would've expected to be in the story or the lineage of the Messiah, and yet here she is, Rahab who hid the spies on a roof is included in the story. Then we get Ruth, who's a Moabite. Do you remember the story of the Moabites is that they're just the arch enemies of the Jews. They mistreat the Jews as they come into the land. There's just animosity against the Moabites. There's curses against the Moabites. The Moabites are not a good character, and yet here's a Moabite woman who's included into this story. That's in verse five. And then in verse six, we get the story of, or we get the reference to Uriah's wife, who is who?
Bath Bathsheba. Yes. And so David took Uriah's wife in an illicit way, and she's pregnant with Solomon, and that's included in the story of Jesus. And then we have Mary also in verse 16. So these characters, there's a couple of things that happen by including these women. Let me actually just read this quote to you. Tamar bore children by her father-in-law. Judah Rahab was the Harlett who hid the spies and became the mother of Boaz. Ruth was the Moabite widow who married Boas and became the mother of Obed. Finally, Bathsheba, who's not named in the Mathian genealogy, was the wife of Uriah, whom King David had murdered in a desperate grid to cover up his adultery.
There's two things here that this tells us by including these women in the story. One, that the Gentiles are a part of God's plan. So if you look at the work of Jesus and you interpret Jesus as something just for Jewish people, then you've made a mistake. It should be showing, it should be indicating to the Jewish reader that Jesus is, and God's plan is for more than just the Jews. The second thing that it indicates is that God has this redemptive ability to work through broken lives, people that are finite and have messed up to accomplish his purposes and his plans.
As we journey through the lineage of Jesus, we will witness a tapestry that reflects our shared human experience. When you look at just some random character, maybe that's not well known, or maybe they have just a chapter out of the Bible dedicated to them in the Book of Kings or something like that, it's amazing that that character did their life. Just like you eat, sleep, have family, have relationships, laugh, cry, just the gamut of human experiences they had, and yet God's purposes were accomplished through those characters. We see in this the same seasons, in situations that we all face from our connection to heritage, to navigating life's transitions, and from our imperfections to our deepest aspirations. There is just a normalness about this genealogy, people that worked. I mean, just think about even Abraham, who's this hero of the faith we know of just a few incidents from the life.
Can you imagine how normal Abraham's life was? And yet he's this hero of the faith. I hope that encourages you this week as you're thinking and desiring with me. God, I want to live a life that's pleasing to you, and yet my life seems so normal. Well, just look at this genealogy. How normal were the lives of these characters? But more profoundly, we find in this lineage and echo of the garden, an echo of the garden of Eden, a reminder of our original design and the nobility as bearers of God's image. You see, as these characters are playing out, God's reflecting in his purposes like, look, I'm going to use you for more than just your menial task, but you bear my image and literally you are going to be a bearer. You're going to participate in bringing forth the Messiah. Do you see that? In Genesis chapter one, he says, let's make man in our own image so that they can reflect, they can bear the image of God. And yet here these individual are having families and women are having babies that then lead to they're bearing out the image of God, who's going to come from them is going to come. Jesus.
A reminder of our original design and nobility as bears of God's image, each name in Christ's genealogy serves as a testament to God's relentless love, his merciful grace, sovereign knowledge, and unwavering justice. You were not merely a product of your past. You're not a product of your failures or your triumphs. All of us are a part of a grand design woven by the master's hand, from Abraham to David, from David to the exile, from the exile to Christ, we see a story that is both ours and God's. And now, as followers of Christ, we are invited to partake in this divine legacy. We're called back to our garden beginnings, to our original purpose of worship, community, vocation, and character. Were summoned to realign ourselves with our inherent nobility, recognizing that we are not merely lost sinners, but also cherished children, beloved by our creator.
When we leave here today, we want to lift our heads up high, not in arrogance, but in assurance of our worth and our calling. We want to embrace our place in God's family, knowing that our story is interwoven into his, that our story that began in the garden leads us to the eternal embrace of our heavenly Father. May we live with hope, joy, purpose as those who recognize their roots in the garden. And may we extend that same love, mercy, knowledge, and justice to the others, reflecting the very attributes of God. This genealogy should shout in our face that God has a good plan. And if you're a follower of Jesus, like it says in Romans, you're grafted into the tree of God. You're a part of that plan, and there needs to be in us, a recognition that work, community, vocation, family, location, body.
All of those things are a part of God fulfilling his purpose through your life. I love looking at your smile. So I was talking to Maria when we were coming in. She's got a great smile. Have you guys seen Maria smile? She's got this great smile. We're going to try to recruit her for our welcome team. God made that smile, right? It's a part of God's design. Some of you have faced tragedy in your life. You've had things that are just so disappointing, and yet God is able to take, just like he took Ruth, a Ruth who lost her husband's right, lost her husband, God's able to take a foreign woman and just bring up forth a beautiful story for her, right? You read Ruth, and it's just like, what a fairytale story that happens to Ruth. But by the way, there's the long story of God's redemption that's being accomplished through her.
So let's afresh. Let's give ourselves to the Lord and tell the Lord God, we want to turn fully to you and give our lives to you. Lord, we bow our heads before you and surrender. We thank you for being the one who designs along long, long story, long before we came on the scene, and were born and long after we die. You have a good plan and you've invited us to be a part of it, and we are so grateful for that invitation, the purpose, the meaning, the identity, the love that comes with that grafting in what I pray for my brothers and sisters that they would glean fully, they would grab a hold of these truths this morning, and I pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.