Lessons from a Genealogy

Matthew 1: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+1&version=NIV

            Matthew starts his Gospel with a genealogy, because who doesn’t love a list of names that are hard to pronounce and that no one has ever heard of?

            Actually, though, there is a lot going on in this seemingly obscure list of names. There are two lessons here that are common to all genealogies in the Bible. First, there’s a lesson that the God of Israel keeps His promises. I’ve observed in my sermons the last couple of weeks that the Lord has His own sense of timing, sometimes taking decades, other times centuries, sometimes even millennia to reveal what He has been up to. A genealogy makes the same point: from Abraham to David—about a thousand years; from David to the Exile, another 400 or so years; from the Exile to Jesus—again 600 years. But He keeps His promises because in Jesus we have the descendant of Abraham through whom all the people of the earth will be blessed (Gen. 12:3).

            The second lesson here is that the Lord keeps His promises in anonymous ways. I make a point of this every year with our confirmation classes: God most often works in a hidden way through what otherwise look like normal processes. For example, He says that He gives us life. All we see is the ordinary process of childbearing, but in faith we understand that God is hidden in the process, giving each of us life as surely as He breathed the breath of life into Adam (Gen. 2: 7). The same lesson can be applied today: we see doctors and nurses scrambling to bring healing, and in faith we see that they are the hands through which God brings healing. The names of people we have never heard of in genealogies—Azor, Zadok, Akim, Elihud, Eleazar, Matthan,and Jacob (Matt 1:14-15)—make the point.

            Matthew wants to make a third point, too. He wants to make a point about order. His account of Jesus’ genealogy is explicitly structured: 14 generations, 14 generation, 14 generations. Any Jew of Matthew’s era would see the point immediately. (Matthew seems to have written to a predominantly Jewish audience; certainly of the four Gospels he is most concerned to show Jesus as the fulfillment of God’s ancient promises to Israel.) The point is this: 14=2 x 7, so Jesus’ ancestors form 6 sets of 7; 7 is, in Jewish numerology, the number of God’s completeness; and Jesus begins the 7^th and final sequence in the pattern. Matthew’s point is clear: the God of Israel has always known what He was doing, and what He was doing was leading to the coming of Jesus.

            As always, there’s more to say. There’s more to say about this genealogy, and I haven’t even mentioned the second half of the chapter! But this is enough to ponder for today: the God whom we worship is the God that keeps His promises, often in hidden ways, even when the world seems to be spinning out of control.