Read: Matthew 1:18-21 And her husband Joseph, being a just man . . . (v. 19) All along it had been about righteousness, about being right with God. Adam and Eve had righteousness but threw it away. So God had to find a way to bring righteousness back. He started with Abraham who, despite huge reasons to believe otherwise, accepted God’s promise that he and his wife would have a baby in their old age. Abraham believed and it was …
A Holy Irregularity
Read: Matthew 1:1, 12-16 . . . and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ. (v. 16) You are perhaps ready to move on from this family tree. Hopefully, we have come to see some surprising theological nuggets hidden in this genealogy. Even so, six days in one long list of names is enough. It’s so repetitive. It’s one sentence after the next of “was the father of . …
Grace All Around
Read: Matthew 1:1-6 . . . and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth. (v. 5) We’ve been noting Matthew’s inclusion of four foreign women in Jesus’ family tree and how most of them had stories that included some R-rated elements. We said yesterday it was a reminder of why our world—even Jesus’ own family—needed a Messiah to come and save it. The least controversial relative of Jesus in this list is Ruth, the loyal Moabite widow who refused to …
Skeletons
Read: Matthew 1:2-11 . . . And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah. (v. 6) You see it sometimes in a movie. In the course of the story one of the characters learns about an uncle—a brother of his father—he had never heard about. “Why didn’t you ever mention Uncle Winston?” he asks his father. “Because we don’t talk about him” is the stern reply. Turns out Uncle Winston had been a bad man, jailed …
Everybody!
Read: Matthew 1:2-6 . . . and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth. (v. 5) If you use websites like Ancestry.com to sketch your family tree, then you are accustomed to seeing women’s names. Great-grandmothers, aunts, nieces, sisters: they’re all there. But that was not true for Jewish family trees. Those lists included only men. Once in a great while you might see one that listed the four matriarchs of Israel (Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah), but that was rare. …