Read
Matthew
1
The Hebrew people, mostly called Jews
after the Babylonian Exile, placed great importance on their lineage. Who’s your daddy? That was the question of the day if you met
someone new.
Think of Peter. He was Simon bar Jonah. He was the son of Jonah or John, but these
people kept up with more than one generation.
OK then, who was his father, and his father?
It was the strength of their culture
and also their stumbling block. We
are children of Abraham often was their excuse for not knowing God as he
desired to be known. John the Baptizer
rebuked the very religious noting that God could make
children of Abraham from the stones around them.
John was not the Messiah and he told
anyone who asked. He said one who is
much greater was coming. Now was the time
for repentance. We will get to that part in a couple more chapters.
Matthew begins his gospel with a
genealogy from Abraham to Jesus. If you
want to go from Jesus all the way back to Adam, you must venture into Luke’s
gospel. There are a couple of name
variations, but the trip is the same.
This was important to God’s Chosen
People. They were directions to who the
person was. He was known by his father
and his father before him. Sometimes,
some landmarks along the way help.
Here is how we use landmarks in giving
directions in Oklahoma. Let’s say you
were telling a stranger how to get to the Jones’s house out in the country.
Go north along
the county road until you get to where the Jackson’s barn used to be and turn
east. It burned down 20 years ago and
the weeds have overgrown that patch now, but that’s where you turn. Go a quarter mile after the road goes from
blacktop to dirt, they may have graveled that by now, but after a quarter mile
from where the road turns to dirt or gravel, slow down because the makeshift
bridge over the tin horn sometimes washes out there, plus sometimes the sand
plums along the road are ripe, then keep going another few miles until you can
see the flattop mountains on the horizon.
You know you are getting close.
Turn right at the next chance you get.
Go a couple more miles. The house
will be on the right. Go to the back
door. Nobody ever answers the front
door.
You can’t miss
it.
How did Matthew put landmarks in the
genealogy of Jesus?
There are the obvious landmarks: Abraham, David, the Babylonian Captivity, and
Christ. There were 14 generations between each.
We can do all sorts of math to try and define this as what is to come,
but in Matthew’s time to the believing Hebrew, now often called a Jew, it spoke
to three periods.
The first is from Abraham to
David. David was not the first king, but
the one after God’s own heart and in whose line the Savior would be born.
The second period takes us from the
building of a Temple for God to its destruction.
The third from the captivity to the
Christ, a time in which a second temple would be built and we would be told of
another temple in which God would dwell.
Are there other landmarks?
How about the women? Did you notice the women? In the age where everything was defined by who your
father was, there are 4 women who define this lineage that lead up to Mary.
Let’s start with
Tamar. Remember that Jesus is of the
tribe of Judah. He is the Lion of the
tribe of Judah. For that reason, Judah
had to be upright in all regards. He was
as close to sinless as a man can get. Not!
Judah had three sons. The first was Er. He found a wife for him named Tamar. Er wasn’t much of a son. In fact the scripture said he was
wicked. He died without giving his wife
a child.
Realize this is before the Law of
Moses had been given. It’s over 400
years before but Judah told his second son to lie with Tamar and give her a child
in her brother’s name. He had
intercourse with her but used his own
form of birth control and did not give her a child. This was wicked in the sight of the Lord and
he was not around much longer either.
So Judah told Tamar to live as a widow
in his household until his third son was old enough to take a wife or at least
give her a child in the name of her deceased husband. In the meantime, Judah’s wife died. To help him get over his grief, he slept with
a prostitute, or at least he thought the woman was a prostitute.
It was in fact, Tamar, who had heard that
her father-in-law was headed to Timnah to sheer his sheep, took off her widow’s clothing and dressed in
different attire with a veil to hide her face and went ahead of him.
At this point I will add, if Hollywood
never produces another movie or soap opera, that’s just fine. The stories in the Bible have more intricacy
and intimacy that those west coast yahoos produce in a lifetime.
Tamar was camped out near Enaim and
presented herself as a sacred prostitute or a shrine prostitute. These were common in pagan culture and
obviously acceptable to Judah. These
prostitutes offered their services as a sacrifice to some god to produce
fertile crops. Some may have raised
money for their respective temples—not the temple that was yet to come through
Solomon.
Yes, you can’t get away from fundraisers,
even in the Old Testament. As I
mentioned, this was before the Law of Moses.
But once God began speaking to the people through Moses, he commanded that
dog don’t hunt. It came out a little
differently in Hebrew. Spend some time
in Deuteronomy
23.
Back to Judah heading out to sheer
sheep. He slept with Tamar not knowing
she was Tamar and promised her a young goat, but she wanted something to hold
until the goat was delivered. At least
that was what she said. Judah gave her
his seal and the cord attached to it as well as his staff as a deposit on the
promised livestock.
When Judah returned home he sent the
goat but there was no shrine prostitute.
In fact, his messenger was told that position had not been filled for
some time.
Meanwhile on the Homefront, someone
noticed that Tamar was pregnant. She was
condemned as a prostitute and was to be put to death. She was to be burned to death.
She was brought before Judah and had
the seal, cord, and staff sent to him. I
am pregnant by the man who owns these she said.
OMG!
Judah had been played and he knew it but he knew he deserved it because
he had not followed through with giving her to his third son. Tamar was not a prostitute but she knew how
to turn a trick.
The result of this was two sons, Perez
and Zerah, which brings us back to the genealogy. The rest of which will occur
after the exodus from slavery in Egypt, at least as far as the women go.
The next is Rahab. Yes, Rahab the prostitute—not a pretend
prostitute but most likely the real deal—helped define the lineage of
Jesus. God’s Chosen People were entering
the promised land and she was their ally.
She was not one who endured over 400 years of slavery in Egypt. She likely did not worship the God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but she knew the Lord was with these people who were
coming to claim the land promised to them.
The next was Ruth. She was a God-fearing Hebrew girl who always
kept the law and never worked on the Sabbath.
Wait! That’s not exactly correct. She was from Moab and there was a lot of
pagan worship there. Ruth married one of
Naomi’s sons. Both of her sons died and Naomi
was heading back to Bethlehem. She told
her daughters that their odds
of finding another husband were better in Moab than in Judah. That brings us to words that resonate.
But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to
leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay
I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.
It also leads us back to the genealogy
and Boaz the father of Obed whose mother was Ruth.
You have heard of those television
shows called the Real Wives of Somewhere in California or Omaha or Army
Wives or maybe the next one will be the Wives of the Pandemic. I’m going to tell you they have nothing on Old
Testament Wives. Forget
Hollywood. The good stuff is already
written.
Which brings us to Bathsheba.
She was the wife of Uriah the
Hittite, who apparently was an exceptional warrior. Bathsheba on the other hand had her own
attributes and they were on display for King David as she bathed on her roof.
You know the story. Bathsheba comes to see the king. There is a little fling and Bathsheba is
pregnant. That brings us to the problem
of her belonging to another man, Uriah.
David called Uriah back from the front of the current war and asked for
a report. Surely, he is honored that the
king has called for him personally.
David doesn’t want a report. He wants an excuse to send Uriah home to his
wife so he thinks the child that is coming will be his. Uriah won’t go see her while his fellow
warriors are still in the field. That
shot a hole through that plan.
On a side note, these are not warrior
codes. Had Uriah gone back to a modern-day
unit they would have laughed him off the battlefield. They called you home and you didn’t spend the
night with your wife. Are you
crazy? You could die tomorrow.
Which is in fact close to what
happened. David sent orders to the field
commander to put Uriah in the toughest area.
It accomplished what David wanted.
Uriah was killed.
This story has everything to make it a
best seller in our times—sex and violence.
David took Bathsheba as his wife. The kid conceived out of wedlock died but
their next child was perhaps the wisest man ever. His name was Solomon and Solomon would build
the first Temple.
It’s men all the way up to Mary. Mary found favor with the Lord, yet what she
was asked to do would make her look unfaithful.
She would have a child who would be the Savior of the world, not by her
betrothed husband, but by the Holy Spirit.
Joseph had a problem with this story,
but an angel of the Lord came to him at night and told him to take Mary as his
wife. What was conceived in her was of
the Lord.
Thus there were fourteen generations
in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and
fourteen from the exile to the Messiah.
I recently came across this posting
online (original source unknown) about how many people it took over 12 generations to produce you. The number was 4,094 over about 400
years. If we extended the same model to
14 generations, it would be over 16,00.
It’s sort of an inverted pyramid scheme to get to you.
There are two points that I want you
to take away from this. The first deals
with Matthew’s gospel. For all of the
human contributors to the line of Jesus, only these few were the direct line to
him. Of over 8,000 people who might have
contributed to the gene pool (remember that Joseph didn’t make a contribution),
only these few define the lineage and it leads to Joseph.
You would think out of that many, God
could have selected a little better breeding stock than characters from ancient
soap operas. But consider that Jesus was
not only God
with us, but fully human as well. He
resisted temptation, but in the human flesh which he lived for over 30 years,
temptation was there.
Jump ahead to Hebrews
for just a moment.
For we do not have a high priest who
is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been
tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.
Matthew gives us a human lineage to
our Savior though there are no genes passed on to Jesus by this genealogy. But this is the human lineage to which he
belonged. The Son of David would
minister to the Children of Abraham. The
Lion of the Tribe of Judah would know the same temptations of his ancestors but
would not sin.
Most of those who doubted Jesus never
took the time to consider his human lineage.
It might have been an eye opener, but perhaps with their eyes fully
opened the religious leaders would have never sought to kill Jesus, who gave
himself willingly to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
This lineage is important, but not
exclusive of one that is greater. Jesus
was the only
begotten Son of God. That’s a very
succinct lineage.
I said that I had two points from the
Ancestral Math posting. Here is the
second. Whether you look back to your
great grandparents or back 14 generations and consider all the people it took
to make you, ask yourself this question.
What am I going to do with all of
these contributions?
We will get to a similar
question in 24 more chapters, but for now, ask: What am I going to do
with what I have?
Read Matthew
2 every day this week. The journey
has begun.
Amen.
