Alden Ho/Wheel Salt Ministries
If you’ve attempted or have done your own family tree, to establish your lineage, it is always interesting to see who’s there and what they have done. The opening to the New Testament in Matthew and the third chapter of Luke Chronicles Jesus’ lineage has a ton of begats.
If you were to author a biography, you would probably never dream of starting it out with “so-and-so was the father of so-and-so…” And on and on right up to the person the book was about. However, since Jesus was a Jew, beginning the story of the person’s life with a genealogy was really the most natural thing to do, and the reason that racial pedigree is so interesting to them is that Jews place such great importance on the purity of one’s lineage.
A priest, for example, needed to produce an unbroken record of his pedigree back to Aaron. After the Babylonian captivity, certain families could not serve as priests Ezra 2:62, tells us, “they searched for their family records, but they could not find them and so they were excluded from the priesthood.”
In fact, Herod the Great was so embarrassed that his name was not in the official genealogies that he ordered their destruction.
Matthew makes this claim in the first sentence of his book, “The book of the generation or genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” In fact, if Matthew could not have proven the purity of Jesus’ ancestry, he probably wouldn’t have written the rest of his Gospel, because no Jew would have read it. Matthew interestingly takes the task of not just demonstrating Jesus’ racial purity, but also to show that Jesus had particular ancestors.
Matthew traces Jesus’ lineage back to Abraham and, Luke goes all the way back to Adam. Why the difference? Matthew is writing for Jewish readers, while Luke on the other hand is the only Gentile writer and is writing for a non-Jewish audience. Both authors writing with differing focuses. Matthew repeatedly sets forth Jesus as the fulfillment of the OT prophecy, which is lacking in Luke. He also presents Jesus as a great teacher and interpreter of divine Truth. Luke on the other hand writes such stories as the Good Samaritan, a Jewish oxymoron. He presents Jesus as close to humans needs, showing His human nature and a friend of humanity.
The whole point is that Matthew’s primary emphasis is Jesus as the promised Messiah-Saviour of the Jews, While Luke’s primary focus is Jesus as the Saviour of all the peoples of the world.
Jews would NOT find it strange to begin a book with a genealogy, however they would be shocked to read a book that had a genealogy containing women! It was very odd to find women in Jewish genealogies, because a women had no legal rights.
Even at that, Matthew’s Jewish Genealogy was provided to reflect purity of a person’s heritage, so it would not have been too shocking to find that Jesus had female ancestors as Sarah. Rebekah, or Rachel. But it seems that Matthew researched the OT records until he found four of the most questionable ancestors of Jesus.
The first one we find in Matthew’s genealogy is Tamar. You can read her story in Genesis 38, which would fit right into a Hollywood movie. The second one is Rahab, a prostitute, whose story is found in Joshua 2. She hid the Israelite spies and lied about, yet made it into the Faith Hall of Fame in Hebrews 11. The third is Ruth, although virtuous, we was a descendant of the despised Moabite race who were the product of incestuous relations of Lot and his oldest unmarried daughter, whose story is found in Ruth 1. The fourth female was so bad that Matthew didn’t even want to mention Bathsheba’s name for fear of bring up that adulterous affairs between her and King David found in 2 Samuel 11, yet she too is listed in the family line of Jesus.
Here we have 3 of the 4 women involved in gross sexual sin, and three were definitely despised Gentiles, with the fourth probably regarded as the same.
Why then, did Matthew who was writing for the Jewish readers, deliberately add these women to his genealogy? Matthew writes about Mary saying ; “She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because HE WILL SAVE HIS PEOPLE FROM THEIR SINS.”
What kind of people can God save through the One born of Mary? The answer flashes through the genealogy: Jesus can save people like Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba and David. He can save Gentiles, prostitutes, adulterers, deceivers and murderers. He can save anyone, even you!
Jesus didn’t come to save people IN their sins, but FROM their sins.
Jesus came to enable us to conquer sin in our lives that takes place on 3 levels.
1 – Through His sinless life and death on the cross, He saves His people from the penalty of sins.
2 – Jesus saves His people from the Power of sin
3 – Jesus will save his people from the Presence of sin, when He returns in the clouds of heaven to give them their eternal reward.
Ask Jesus into your heart right now.
Pastor Alden Ho, Wheel Salt Ministries, Jefferson, TX 75657, 903-600-1406