Matthew 1:1-17
Jesus Christ the King!
Open your Bible to…
Matt. 1:1 The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham:
Pray
Intro
√ The Gospel of Matthew
The word “gospel” literally means…
“Good News”
…and that is certainly what Matthew, Mark, Luke and John communicate in their writings. At the center of that good news is the Person of Jesus Christ!
Thus, Matthew begins his gospel by presenting Jesus to us in the first sentence…
“The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ…”
For without Jesus…
Who He is
What He taught
What He did
…there is no good news for sinners!
√ Why four gospels?
Some of you have no doubt wondered why the Holy Spirit chose to record the life and ministry of Jesus in four separate…
…and different accounts?
Get that guy a good editor and put it together in one book!
The answer in part is that in order to present a complete picture of Jesus we need to see Him from different perspectives.
Ex. A good biography – “Pure Gold”
To get the whole picture of a man (in this case Eric Liddle) you want to hear from his wife, kids, friends, even his enemies…
What he was like
What he did and said
How he looked at the world
…so that you are sure that you have an accurate portrait of the man.
In a similar way I believe that the Holy Spirit has divinely left for us four perspectives of our Lord…
…so that we might have an accurate and complete picture of Jesus and His ministry on earth.
Ex. The biography of Jesus’ ministry on earth
The four Gospels present a complete picture of Jesus’ character and mission.
Mark = wrote with a Roman audience in mind
and presents Jesus as a servant who
came to do His Father’s will.
Luke = wrote with a Greek audience in mind
and
presents Jesus as the perfect
John = wrote to all the World and presents
Jesus to us as God in human flesh.
Matthew = wrote with a Jewish audience in mind
and presents Jesus as the promised
Messiah,
the King of
Some have also suggested that this four-fold presentation of Jesus is pictured, and predicted, all through the scripture!
The layout of the Israelite encampment in the wilderness.
The four faces of the Cherubim around the throne of God.
Check out the handout…
Ever wonder what the purpose of counting all the people in the book of Numbers was for? Note the layout of the camp – a Cross as seen from Heaven! (Numbers 2)
With the “throne of God” (
Note that the faces of the Cherubim match the 4 standards (flags) of the Tribes at the outer ends of the 4 encampments!
Probably not a coincidence then that there are also four gospels that present Jesus as…
Gospel Trait Type
Matthew King = lion
Mark Servant = ox
Luke Human = man
John God = eagle
Another example of God’s “finger prints” on the writing of the Bible!
√ Matthew’s purpose
Matthew was concerned with winning his Jewish brethren to faith in Jesus so he…
1) To present Jesus as the promised Messiah - King
129 direct quotations, and allusions, from the Old Testament to prove that Jesus is in fact the Messiah.
2) Explain God’s Kingdom program
The Jewish person would want to know (and still wonders)….
“If Jesus is the Messiah…
…what happened to the promised kingdom?”
Matthew answers that question by demonstrating that
God’s plan was to first redeem Mankind from their sin,
establishing God’s Kingdom in our hearts…
…then, to return at the end of Human history to
redeem the earth and establish His Kingdom on earth
with those who have been redeemed.
Yet, while Matthew is primarily concerned with a Jewish audience…
Beginning by telling us a story about a Jewish King
…none the less his Gospel has a universal appeal because Matthew ends his gospel with a command from that King to take the message of salvation into all the world!
He begins by presenting Jesus’ pedigree as evidence that He is the Messiah because He is…
The Son of Abraham
The Son of David
The Son of God
…convincing evidence to the Jewish person!
The son of Abraham (vs. 1-6)
Matt. 1:1 The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David,
the Son of Abraham:
Matt. 1:2 Abraham begot Isaac, Isaac begot Jacob, and Jacob begot Judah
and his brothers.
Matt. 1:3
Matt. 1:4 Ram begot Amminadab, Amminadab begot Nahshon, and Nahshon begot
Salmon.
Matt. 1:5 Salmon begot Boaz by Rahab,
Boaz begot Obed by Ruth, Obed
begot Jesse,
Matt. 1:6 and Jesse begot David the king. David the king begot Solomon by
her who had been the wife of Uriah.
√ The Son of Abraham
You might be thinking…
“Oh no! Here we go with the ‘begots”
…great cure for insomnia!
But, before you drift off to sleep remember that God inspired Matthew by the Holy Spirit to write this stuff down…
…so it’s got to be important!
The first thing that Matthew sets out to do is to establish that Jesus is a descendant of Abraham, the “father” of the Jewish faith.
Remember, it was Abraham that God set apart to Himself and to whom He made a covenant to give the Promised Land to his descendants.
It was also Abraham to whom God promised that a King would rise would bless the whole world.
So, if Matthew was going to convince a skeptical Jewish people that Jesus was in fact the promised Messiah…
…he first had to prove that He was the Son of Abraham.
√ A different king of genealogy
The second thing that we notice is that Matthew includes the names of women in the family line of Jesus!
That’s highly unusual in a Jewish genealogy because the family line is traced through the father.
Ex. Check out the genealogies in Genesis, Numbers, Ruth, etc.
What’s more interesting are the woman that Matthew, inspired by the Holy Spirit, chooses to include in Jesus’ genealogy…
Tamar – vs. 3
Rahab – vs. 5
Ruth – vs. 5
Bathsheba – vs. 6
Let’s see, that’s two prostitutes, a foreigner (Moabites, who weren’t allowed into the assembly of God’s people according to Deut. 23:3), and an adulterer!
Not exactly the kind of sterling lineage that someone would want to put on display for all the world to see!
Kind of embarrassing if you’re trying to start a new religion.
Ex. The Lester family
A number of years ago it was all the rage to trace one’s family lineage. Many did so in the hope that they would find tucked away in the unexplored history of their family some link to royal blood.
We Lesters knew that our family name was originally spelled…
We also knew that there is a city in
…a good chance we had British royal blood flowing in our veins!
So my grandparents paid someone to begin the search of our ancestral roots with the hope of proving what we were all sure was true…
…that we were special!
But it came to a screeching halt when we discovered some skeletons in our ancestral closet instead of jewels.
Turns out we had couple of horse thieves in the family who met an unceremonious death at the end of a rope!
So we didn’t find any link back to the throne of
So why would Matthew break with Jewish tradition and common sense, and include in Jesus’ linage some gals with a checked past?
√ The Gospel of Grace
May I suggest that the answer is found at the very foundation upon which the Good News is built…
God’s grace!
That is, the Gospel that Matthew is going to present to us is not the “Gospel of Works” (that the Jewish person would expect)...
Rather, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the Good News that God knows that we can never be good enough to save ourselves…
…therefore, He sent His Son, born of sinful men and woman to fulfill all the righteous commandments of the Law so that anyone, Jew, Gentile, male, female, could be saved by simply trusting in Jesus Christ the King!
Because the truth is that it doesn’t matter who you are, or who your great grandparents were, or what they did…
…the only thing that matters is what Jesus Christ has done for us – that’s the Gospel – the Good News!
The son of David (vs. 7-11)
Matt. 1:7 Solomon begot Rehoboam, Rehoboam begot Abijah, and Abijah begot
Asa.
Matt. 1:8 Asa begot Jehoshaphat, Jehoshaphat begot Joram, and Joram begot
Uzziah.
Matt. 1:9 Uzziah begot Jotham, Jotham begot Ahaz, and Ahaz begot
Hezekiah.
Matt.
Matt.
√ The son of David
Matthew also had to establish that Jesus was an heir of King David. That is because the Jewish people understood that God had ordained David’s descendants as the only ones with the legal right to the throne (2 Sam. 7).
But, we have a problem with Jesus’ lineage again…
…this time its with a guy!
“Josiah begot Jeconiah and his brothers about the time
they were carried away to
Jeconiah (aka “Jehoiachin”, “Coniah”) had the unique distinction of really making the Lord angry!
And so, God spoke a curse against him through Jeremiah that
none of his descendants would ever sit on the throne of
Jer.
So, while the legal right to the throne could be traced through Jeconiah, had Jesus been a physical descendant of his He would not be able to occupy the throne.
Thus, Luke’s genealogy traces Jesus’ physical lineage through Mary…
…who was related to another son of king David (Nathan)!
The Son of God (vs. 12-17)
Matt.
Matt.
Matt.
Matt.
Matt.
Matt. 1:17 So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen
generations, from David until the captivity in Babylon are fourteen
generations, and from the captivity in Babylon until the Christ are fourteen
generations.
√ The Son of God
Notice that all through the genealogy that Matthew tells who the father was and that he…
“begot”
…a son.
Until, we get to Jesus’ birth! Note vs. 17…
“And Jacob begot Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus who is called Christ.”
Matthew doesn’t say that Joseph “begot Jesus”, rather that Jesus was “born of Mary.” In the Greek text its even more interesting because the phrase…
“of whom”
…is a feminine relative pronoun (ex hes) indicating that Jesus was the physical child of Mary, but not of Joseph!
That of course is because Jesus is the Son of God!
Why is that so important for us to know? Because only the Son of God could offer Himself as a substitute for our sins!
Eze 18:20 “The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.
If Jesus was just a perfect man He could not satisfy the debt of our sin, he could only die for Himself. But, because He is the infinite God in human flesh…
…He could provide an infinite substitute for every sin of every person.
Close
√ He must be the King!
Matthew’s presentation of King Jesus to his Jewish audience is pretty convincing! He’s shown us by tracing Jesus’ genealogy that Jesus is…
The Son of Abraham
The Son of David
The Son of God
And, here’s another little piece of information that I find interesting and I think proves that Jesus must be the Jewish Messiah.
All those records that Matthew provided for his skeptical Jewish friends are all gone now!
They were all destroyed when the Roman legions burnt the Temple in Jerusalem.
All the birth records gone!
The point, that Messiah had to come to Israel before 70 A.D while the records were still available to provide the evidence that He was in fact the…
The Son of Abraham
The Son of David
So, as we head into our study of Matthew’s Gospel we do so with a firm foundation that this Jesus has all of the pedigree required of the King…
…and that He has extended to us citizenship in His kingdom through the Grace of the Gospel.