07/11/26 Weekend Grif.Net - Genealogy in Matthew
b...@grif.net
“There is one page at the very front of the New Testament that almost everyone skips. It looks like nothing. Forty-two generations of names. So-and-so was the father of so-and-so. But hidden inside that list is the most scandalous guest list in all of Scripture, and it changes everything about who God lets into His story.
I have taught the Bible for years, and of all the pages people skip, this is the one I most wish they would stop and actually read. Here is what almost no one notices. In the ancient world, genealogies followed one strict rule. You traced the bloodline through the men. Fathers and sons. Women were almost never named. A respectable Jewish genealogy of the Messiah would have been a clean, unbroken chain of honored fathers.
Matthew broke that rule. He included five women. And the five women he chose were not the ones you would expect. He did not include Sarah, the honored mother of the nation. He did not include Rebekah or Leah, the great matriarchs. He chose five women whose stories were scandals.
The first is Tamar.
Her husband died. Then the brother who was supposed to care for her died too. Her father-in-law Judah refused to give her his third son as the law required, leaving her a childless widow with no future and no protection. So she disguised herself as a prostitute, and Judah, not recognizing her, slept with her. She bore twins. One of them sits in the direct bloodline of Jesus.
The second is Rahab.
She was a Canaanite prostitute living in the walls of Jericho. When the Israelite spies came to scout the city, she hid them and was spared when the walls fell. A foreign prostitute from a condemned city. She married into Israel and became the great-great-grandmother of King David.
The third is Ruth.
She was a Moabite. The Moabites were a despised people, an enemy nation, forbidden by law from entering the assembly of the Lord. Ruth was a foreigner and a widow from exactly the kind of nation a respectable Jew was taught to avoid. She became the great-grandmother of King David.
The fourth is named in a strange way.
Matthew does not even write her name. He calls her "the wife of Uriah." This is Bathsheba, the woman King David committed adultery with, before arranging to have her husband Uriah killed in battle to cover up the pregnancy. Matthew deliberately reminds the reader of the scandal by naming the murdered husband. The son of David and Bathsheba was Solomon, in the direct line of Jesus.
The fifth is Mary.
And here the pattern breaks.
The first four carried real shame. Deception. Prostitution. A foreign and hated bloodline. Adultery. Mary carried only the appearance of it. An unwed teenage girl, pregnant before her marriage, in a culture where that could have ended with her being stoned. To everyone in Nazareth she was just one more scandal. But she had done nothing wrong. She was the one woman in the list who was innocent, and she was treated exactly like the ones who were not.
That is the moment the genealogy turns. Because the child she carried was the reason all five names are there. He was born into a bloodline of the guilty and the shamed so that He could carry the guilt and shame of every name that came before Him, and every name that would come after.
Five women. One who played the prostitute to survive. One who was a prostitute. A foreigner from a hated nation. A woman remembered for adultery. And an innocent girl who bore the shame of a scandal she never committed, so that the Savior could be born. That is the bloodline Matthew chose to open the New Testament with.
He could have hidden them. Genealogies hid women by default. He could have written a clean, honorable list of fathers. Instead, he deliberately wrote scandal, foreignness, prostitution, and adultery into the family tree of the Messiah. Because that was the entire point. God did not merely forgive these women. He wove them into the bloodline of His own Son. On purpose. In the very first chapter of the New Testament, where He knew everyone would eventually read it.
The family tree of Jesus was deliberately built out of the exact kind of people the world would have said did not belong. If your past has ever made you feel like you could never really belong, those five names are in that genealogy for you.”
John Ross
~~
Dr Bob Griffin
Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving.
