The Hope of the Ages—Matthew 1:1-17
Some biographies begin with the birth of their subject. Others begin with his parents, or even his grandparents. But Matthew begins his Gospel, his story of Jesus, with a list of more than forty generations. Many of these names have stories that go with them. Abraham leaving for a foreign land that God promised to give him. Abraham preparing to offer Isaac on an altar on Mount Moriah. Isaac's son Jacob tricking him into giving him his brother's blessing. Jacob wrestling at night with God. Judah's nasty sins. Judah offering himself as a slave so that his brother Benjamin could go free. David killing Goliath. David murdering Uriah. Solomon the wise. Solomon the power-hungry idolotrous polygamist. Manassah's sin, and Manassah's repentence.
All of these people had something they were hoping for, someone they were hoping for, and they died with their hopes not yet fulfilled. But Matthew's point is that all the hopes of God's people — Abraham's hopes, Isaac's hopes, Jacob's hopes, David's hopes, Solomon's hopes, Tamar's hopes, Rahab's hopes, Ruth's hopes, and the hopes of the lesser known men and women who came after the exile — all of the hopes of God's people have come true in Jesus, the Christ.
Now I want you to know that the hopes of these people were special hopes. They were not just personal hopes, like a kid who hopes to be a doctor one day. They were not just national hopes, like a nation that hopes to come out of a depression. They were special hopes, because God had given his people of Israel special promises, promises for salvation from sin and death.
What are you hoping for? Perhaps you are that kid who hopes to be a doctor. Perhaps you hope to own a home, or raise succesful children. Those are good desires. But the hopes of God's people from Abraham to Mary and Joseph were bigger hopes, hopes for salvation from God. And you can enjoy what they could only hope for. You can have Jesus, the Christ, as your King.
I plan to talk in depth about the hopes of Abraham, the hopes of David, and the hopes of God's people in exile. But first, let's think through some of the details of this genealogy, the line of Jesus.
The Line of Jesus
It begins, "The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. This phrase, "The book of the genealogy," takes us right back to the first book of the Bible, the book of Genesis. Genesis uses these words or words like them to introduce the story of Adam and Eve, the story of Adam's descendents, the story of Noah's sons, and so on: in all, about ten different times. Our title for the book, "Genesis," actually comes from the same word translated here as "genealogy." Matthew is telling us that with Jesus Christ comes a new beginning. Genesis tells the creation of the world: The coming of Jesus signals the creation of a brand new world. Genesis introduced the stories of the fathers of the faith with these words, but Jesus is the climactic figure in the long history of salvation.
As we read through this genealogy, certain details should strike us. For instance, there are some curious inclusions. The genealogy is a list of fathers and sons, but Matthew has chosen to mention several women, and they're not the women you or I might have picked. He doesn't mention Sarah or Rebekah or Leah, the wives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But he mentions Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba (but not by name), and, of course, Mary.
Tamar was Judah's Canaanite daughter-in-law. Her husband died and left her childless, but she became pregnant by her father-in-law Judah. Rahab was a prostitute in Jericho who sided with the Lord and his people. Ruth was a Moabite woman who married an Israelite, became a widow, and later married Boaz of Bethlehem. King David committed adultery with Bathsheba and murdered her husband Uriah. Bathsheba may have been an Israelite, but it is her Hittite husband that Matthew mentions.
Why does Matthew include so many scandalous women in the genealogy of Christ? The effect, I think, is threefold. First, Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba's husband Uriah were all Gentiles, non-Israelites. This reminds us that Israel's Messiah will not just be for Israel, but for the nations as well. Second, the scandalous circumstances in which some of these women brought the heirs to the line of promise into the world remind us not to rule out the son of a young unwed woman named Mary. And finally, the guilty backgrounds of many of these women give hope to me, and to you, that our sin will not exclude us from the fellowship of the Christ, who claims Tamar and Rahab as his ancestors.
While the genealogy has some curious inclusions, is has some noteworthy exclusions as well. This is not a list of every father and son between Abraham and Joseph. Matthew narrows it down to three convenient sets of fourteen, excluding, among others, at least four of the less significant kings. I'll talk later about why Matthew chose to narrow the list to three sets of fourteen. For the moment, it's worth noting simply that Matthew had space for four Gentile women in a list from which he cut out four Jewish kings.
The genealogy obviously follows a pattern: A was the father of B, and B the father of C, and C the father of D. But at the end Matthew breaks this pattern and says, "and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ." This ought to pique our curiosity. This is the genealogy of Jesus, and yet, apparently, Joseph is not strickly the father of Jesus. So who is? More on that later in the chapter, of course.
Well, Matthew concludes the genealogy by saying that "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." I've already mentioned that Matthew is skipping plenty of generations to land on this fourteen-fourteen-fourteen number. One easy way to spot this is to compare Matthew's genealogy with Luke's. Luke has a lot more names than Matthew does between Jesus and Abraham. He also has very different names. Some people have thought this means that Luke was really giving Mary's genealogy, even though he says that it's Joseph's. I think a more attractive suggestion is that Luke is recording the biological line of Joseph, whereas Matthew is recording the legal line of royal succession, which didn't always go from father to biological son. But I'm not sure anyone can know for certain.
At any rate, why does Matthew give a condenced list of three sets of fourteen? There are some intriguing possibilities for the significance of this number. Three fourteens is six sevens, which would put Jesus at the start of the seventh seven, obviously an important number in biblical thought. In the law, when seven sets of seven years were up, the year of Jubilee began. This might be a way of saying that the coming of Jesus is the beginning of the end of history. Three fourteens (42) is also halfway to another significant number, seven times twelve (84). This may sound way too complex to be relevant, but the number 42 is significant for this reason in the book of Revelation. This would make Jesus something like the midpoint or hinge of history. Perhaps Matthew chooses the biblically insignificant number fourteen to get us thinking about the possible meanings of the coming of Christ without committing himself to only one way of thinking.
What is much more clear, is that Matthew divides history into three periods: from Abraham to David, from David to the deportation into exile, and from the deportation to the coming of the Messiah. He shows us that Jesus is the fulfillment of the hopes of each of these periods, and that's what I want to focus on from here to the end.
The Hopes of the Ages
First, Jesus is the fulfillment of the hopes of Abraham. God promised to give Abraham a land and a people — land as far as his eyes could see, and descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky. Abraham had only one son by his wife Sarah, and the only land he owned was his burial plot. But he died in hope that God would keep his promises.
God also promised Abraham that in him all the nations of the earth would be blessed. And he promised that from Abraham, kings would come.
To David, the Lord made yet more promises. He said that he would give David peace and an everlasting kingdom, that David's son would build a house for God, that David's son would sit on the throne forever, that he would defeat all his enemies, and that God himself would be a father to David's son.
But by the time of the exile, it was hard for God's people to hold onto these hopes. The temple in Jerusalem has been destroyed. Jerusalem has been taken by Babylon. The heirs to the throne were held captive with the people in exile. But God had still more promises for his people in exile, sweet promises, but strange promises, promises of a victorious king, but a dying victor, a savior, but a suffering savior. Isaiah gave them hope to take into exile. "There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. And the Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD." Through him, everything would be made well: "They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea." But something would happen first: "Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed."
Jesus came to fulfill all these hopes. Jesus came to make Abraham the father of many nations by bringing people from all nations into the people of God, as foreshadowed by Tamar and Rahab and Ruth long ago. He came to give his people a land as far as the eye can see, a permanent promised land, a new heavens and a new earth. He came to be the son of David who would build a house for God, who would be God's Son, who would defeat all his enemies, and make peace, and rule forever. And he came to fulfill the hopes of God's people in exile, to whom God promised that he would take away their sins. He came to be the suffering Savior Isaiah foretold, to die on the cross in the place of his people. And he came to rise again, the firstborn of a new creation. As Matthew foretold, Jesus is the new beginning.
All the hopes of God's people have come true in Jesus Christ. But he is not just the Savior of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, of Tamar and Rahab and Ruth. He is our Savior. He came for them, but he also came for us. He suffered for them, but he also suffered for us. He rose so that Judah and Boaz and Uriah might someday rise, but he also rose so that you and I may someday rise. And if any of you don't know him yet, he calls to you as well: come and trust in the Messiah, God's promised one. Let us rejoice and give God the glory, because he has sent his Son to fulfill the hopes of the ages, and to be the Savior of all who hope in him.
Pastor Nate Jeffries