Matthew 1:1-17 The King Is Here

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Many Christians, upon opening the pages of Matthew's Gospel and reading through what I just laboured through—all these lists of names—read rather hurriedly and carelessly. People often assume that a list of names is simply a list of names, and it can be safely set aside so we can move on to the substance. However, you should know that rushing through these verses without taking time to process what the scripture is conveying by their overall whole is akin to carelessly disregarding something you will later realise is of extraordinary value.

Matthew 1:1–17 holds significant importance for us because it is a genealogy not only for the Christ, but it is a genealogy with a difference. Its primary focus is not to give us an all-inclusive timeline of Jesus' origins; rather, it is to show us the Lord Jesus' rightful lineage, qualifying him as Israel's awaited King and Messiah prophesied since ancient times.

Noticeably, this genealogy omits certain names that might have been included. After all, some two thousand years have elapsed since the time of Abraham, where it begins. There are many names that could have been included in this genealogy. The genealogy includes and highlights four women, all of whom are considered Gentiles, which is a unique and unusual feature for a Jewish genealogy. Further, Matthew gathers his names in the genealogy under three epochs: Abraham to King David; King David to the exile to Babylon; and from the end of the deportation through to the birth of Jesus, who is the Christ.

Matthew is authenticating the central Christian claim, as recorded by the eyewitnesses, that Jesus was indeed the expected Jewish Messiah, the divine man who comes into this world out of God's love to seek and to save the lost. To do so, Matthew forcibly refers to Jesus firstly as the son of David, there in verse one, and secondly as the son of Abraham. That will be Matthew's central focus. And why these two figures in particular, David and Abraham? Well, aside from Moses, David, the king of Israel, and Abraham, the Jewish patriarch, stand out as key men in the Old Testament narrative.

This is because, through them, God created those two primary great covenantal promises: the Davidic covenant and the Abrahamic covenant. Because Matthew's desire is to introduce the Jewish people to their awaited Messiah, he will specifically highlight David the king in this genealogy. This is evident not only in the fact that he immediately introduces Jesus Christ as the son of David, but also in the symbolic use of these three epochs of fourteen names. These epochs communicate through what is called Hebrew gematria. You see, Hebrew letters have a numerical value; so each letter in the Hebrew alphabet is also their numbering system, and when you add up the consonants in David's name, you arrive at the number fourteen.

Matthew is using all of this to drive us to the fact that the identity of the Christ is one who is the son of David, making him the one who is the fulfilment of those covenant promises. So the big idea—we understand, I think now, the essential point of this passage of what Matthew is trying to do. In the opening of his gospel, he establishes this simple fact: the expected messianic king is here, and he says, "Here are the receipts; here's the proof".

We must understand that the bloodline culminating in Jesus' birth was a line that God consecrated for his covenantal purposes. Humanity's hope of redemption passed through in history from generation to generation until the king would come in the fullness of time. The line of Abraham, the line of David, was that of divine ordination and governance. Christ's humanity, his flesh and blood, after all, did not originate in heaven; it was through this line of Adam's race in accordance with God's gracious covenant promises through David, through Abraham, and even back to creation's garden in the Garden of Eden.

You remember back in the Garden of Eden that the Lord had said to the serpent who deceived Eve, "I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise you on the head and you shall bruise him on the heel". So God promised at that time that a singular figure would come who would crush Satan, the deceiver, under his feet; even death itself, the curse of sin. And so the road to the cross of Calvary was paved from the beginning. The royal divine king would come to render justice and salvation.

And so Matthew was emphatically presenting Jesus as the fulfilment of Israel's prophetic hope, which is to say the one who brings the good news of God's salvation even into the world. So Matthew's gospel marks the start of a new era in world history. Here is the one of whom the Lord said in the Psalms, Psalm 2, "Ask of me; I will surely give you the nations as your inheritance and the ends of the earth as your possession". Here he is; the king is here.

And so what is the key application that I want us to go away with? Well, it should be apparent to us. May we not be careless with this declaration that God proclaims to each one of us that the king is here and he has come just as God has promised. In fact, if you look at that Psalm of enthronement in Psalm 2, you will also find these words. The psalmist writes, "Do homage to the son," or "kiss the son," it says, "that he not become angry and you perish in the way, for his wrath may soon be kindled. How blessed are all who take refuge in him". May you find refuge in our great king.

Keep this following thought in mind as we consider the significance of this key thrust of the genealogy and this link to David and Abraham. That is all we really want to look at: this link to David and Abraham; then we will make some application. So keep this in your mind: Jesus Christ fulfils the expectation of the Old Testament promise. Have that in your minds. In other words, with Jesus' arrival, we can now turn over from Malachi 4; we can flip open the next page to Matthew 1:1 and rejoice in the realisation that everything that the righteous, that God's people, have eagerly awaited is finally beginning to come to pass.

What was anticipated in the old is now answered in the new. So let us confess Christ is the son of Abraham, the son of Abraham.

Jesus Is The Son Of Abraham

Matthew is taking us back to what is called the Abrahamic covenant. God, in his sovereign grace, takes a man named Abram, a pagan moon worshipper, and in him begins a new redemptive epoch. From Abraham will come the nation of the Jews. We read of this covenant first in Genesis 12:1–3: "And Yahweh said to Abram, 'Go forth from your land and from your kin and from your father's house to the land which I will show you, and I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great, and so you shall be a blessing. And I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.'"

The covenant is later ratified and confirmed in subsequent chapters in Genesis; further on in Genesis 22, emphasis is made on the blessing that would come to the world. Genesis 22:18: "In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed because you have listened to my voice." It is a basic Christian fact that the seed spoken of in God's covenantal promise to Abraham referred to the Messiah himself, namely Jesus. In Christ, all the nations of the earth are blessed through the preaching of the gospel for forgiveness of sins; no longer confined to a small territory of land in the Middle East, the land of Israel. God's revelation is spread far and wide into all the nations as he promised.

As we move into the New Testament, Paul in Galatians 3 helps us with this point. In Galatians 3:16, he says, "Now the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. He does not say, 'and to seeds,' referring to many, but rather to one, and to your seed, that is Christ," Paul says. So you ask the question: how is Christ, how is the seed bringing blessing to the nations? He is blessing the nations because he offers redemption for the forgiveness of sins. Christ's perfect life under God's law is the righteousness we require to be reconciled to God. Christ's atonement, obtained through sacrificing his life, removes all the inequity we have committed.

Abraham's blessing has come to the Jews first, but also to the Gentiles, also to the Greek. Perhaps Matthew is anticipating our consideration of Christ in light of Abraham's words later in the account. So you think of that Abrahamic promise: "In your seed all the nations of the earth will be blessed." Then we look at the end of Matthew's gospel, and we find in the Great Commission, or rather before that in Matthew 24:14, we find these words: "This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come." Promise, fulfilment, Jesus Christ, the son of Abraham. This is what Matthew is doing; he is drawing us to consider this background.

Jesus Is The Son Of David

Secondly, Matthew tells us that Jesus is the son of David, which is his particular focus in this genealogy. He gets to David in verse six: "Jesse was the father of David the king," and so on. For the Davidic significance to Jesus, we read from 2 Samuel 7 the formation of the Davidic covenant. This covenantal promise is not only speaking of God's faithfulness to raise up a particular king; it also covers the kings who would follow David, and they would be those who would commit iniquity, as the text says in 2 Samuel 7. But implied here is that for it to be properly fulfilled, there had to be one who came over whom death would have no claim.

How could this be a kingdom that would endure before God forever? A throne established forever if, after sequential generations, kings just kept on dying? It could not go on that way. There had to be one who could reign eternally on God's behalf. God says to David, "I will raise up one of your seed." The prophet Isaiah also saw a glimpse of the eternal, everlasting rule that God would bring through the Messiah. Isaiah 9:6-7; we read it at Christmas time, do we not? "For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us, and the government will rest on his shoulders, and his name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. There will be no end to the increase of his government or of peace on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness from then on and forevermore. The zeal of the Lord of Hosts will accomplish this."

And so the king has come, and mysteriously he has come to die for those who were subject to him. Have you ever considered that? When we look in Acts 2 in Peter's sermon, he tells us that Christ's reign and rule begin from the time of his resurrection. He says that David looked forward and spoke as a prophet, as one who looked forward to the time when Christ would rise and his heavenly reign would begin; it would be consummated at the end of the ages. In a future day, the nations will stand before Christ in judgment, this king, and he will separate the sheep from the goats, the tares from the wheat, the true believer from the false, the righteous from the ungodly; then the nations shall all know that all things are from him, all things are to him, all things are for our king.

And so Paul writes of King Jesus in 1 Timothy 6:15: "He who is the blessed and only sovereign, the King of kings and the Lord of lords, who alone possesses immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see, to him be honour and eternal dominion. Amen." In his second advent, King Jesus will usher us from this age of temporal things to the age of eternal things. Paul, preaching in Athens in Acts 17, said, "Therefore, having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, because he has fixed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness through a man whom he has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising him from the dead." This is the Messiah, the son of David.

And so I think now we are understanding the force with which Matthew is communicating to us about who the Lord Jesus Christ is.

#1 God's Promises Are Unbreakable

Now I want to make three applications from the text: let us bring it to bear on our lives. The first application I want you to be comforted with is this: God's promises are unbreakable. God's promises are unbreakable. Jeremiah said, "Our God, it is he who made the earth by his power, who established the world by his wisdom, and by his understanding he has stretched out the heavens." Now God does not fail in that which he promises. He cannot fail to bring to pass that which he gives as certainty and promise in history. He is the God who stretched out the heavens.

Of course, Matthew 1:1 was always on its way in times past because God himself had promised it. Through God's sovereign providence, the messianic line of promise that gave Christ entry into this world was secure. When we reflect on the vast span of time that passed while God patiently established the groundwork for the arrival of Jesus Christ, it serves as a reminder that we often find ourselves questioning why things are this way far too frequently. We say that in our lives, do we not? We say, "Why are things the way that they are? Why can't they be different?"

Remind yourself time and time again: think about all that God directed and sovereignly controlled to bring Christ into this world. We often think that the way we see things unfolding before us is the same as God's perspective, and we fail to distinguish between God's mind and our own thinking. God perceives history from an outside perspective, seeing the end from the beginning. In the Old Testament, God's promises frequently seemed precarious. I mean, you just go back and read from Genesis 12 and the account of Abraham, and for all of us, from the beginning, it feels like the whole thing is going to fail.

But God's ways are hidden to man, and that is exactly how he works. He accomplishes his will through us in such a way that the wise in their own eyes are confounded; in such a way that those who think they have strength would realise that they are weak, so that no praise would ever be taken from God. In the midst of what often appears to be chaos and confusion in the Old Testament, the word sovereign in capital letters is stamped in bold over the people, the time, the context into which the child Christ was born in the manger of Bethlehem. God's hand, you see, cannot be stopped. Even man's sin cannot hinder the progress of God's purposes and plans.

You think of Joseph when he said to his brothers down in Egypt, "As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good." God's sovereignty still rules through the sinful actions of man. So you see then this first comforting fact to the believer: God's promises are unbreakable, and we are to take refuge in that.

#2 Jesus Always Take Center Stage

The second application is this: Jesus Christ must always take centre stage. He must always take centre stage. You know, there are a number of lives in this genealogy. If you really became familiar with the names in this genealogy, you might want to take a black pen and start smudging through a few of them. In fact, one name you may want to cross out from this genealogy is David's name. Did you notice that Matthew highlights one of David's darkest moments? He did not have to include it, but he did.

Look at verse 6: "David was the father of Solomon by who?" He did not have to say who: Bathsheba. And then he even says this: "Who had been the wife of Uriah." Matthew is focusing us on David's worst moment of sin and shame. I should not say greatest moment; his worst moment of sin and shame. Why? Why does Matthew remind us that Solomon was David's son to the wife of another man? You know the story well. This refers to David's egregious act of adultery, where he coveted another man's wife, took her for himself, and sent Uriah, her husband, into battle in such a way he would die: effectively, an indirect murder.

It is a little bit embarrassing, is it not? We do not want to bring that up. We do not want to include this in the genealogy, but Matthew does. This is akin to comparing the brilliance of a bright shining diamond against a black backdrop as compared to a lighter backdrop. If you take a diamond and put it onto a white backdrop, it still looks good; but not nearly as brilliant as when it is placed against a dark backdrop so the brilliance of the diamond can shine through. The failings and sins of David only make Christ shine all the more.

The true and greater David, the King who is himself without iniquity, has none to compete with Christ. It reminds us that the coming of this King Jesus is distinguished from all before him. For this is the spotless Lamb of God, the Divine King. Against the dark backdrop of a cruel and wicked world, sinful people such as we, the perfections of Christ shine brightly. John the Baptist said of Jesus, "He must increase, I must decrease." John 3:30.

You know, sometimes when you are taking a group photo—this might be your experience; it has not been my problem—when you are taking a group photo, you are all together, family's there, Christmas time, camera's been set up, tall people down the back, medium people in the middle, short people down the front; you know how it goes. Sometimes the shorter people up on their tippy toes like this will weave it, trying to get a little bit of extra height, weaving it jealous of those in the family with the tall genes, trying to appear taller and more impressive.

When people give you the opportunity to point glory to Christ, do not stand on your tippy toes to make yourself look taller. Say these words every once in a while: "Only by the grace of God I am what I am." Do not make yourself that shining diamond; that is Christ, that is him, he is the one; the glory is due. Do not stand on your tippy toes with the Lord Jesus Christ; he must take centre stage at all times.

#3 No Amount Of Obscurity Or Brokenness Can Ever Separate a Person From God's Work

My final application, and we close on this one: no amount of obscurity or brokenness can ever separate a person from God's work. Consider these four women included by God in the line of promise. Of course, there are women in any genealogy, but it was very unusual for a Jewish genealogy to record the mothers. It would usually be a list of the fathers' names and generations. There are a few exceptions, but it was uncommon to include women in a genealogy.

And so, because there are women here, we are paying attention: what is going on? We have Tamar in verse three. We have Rahab in verse five. We have Ruth in verse five. We have Bathsheba. Some translations insert her name; in others, she is recalled simply as the wife of Uriah. Why are they mentioned when they are not essential to communicating the central link between David and Christ, and Christ and Abraham? Why are they mentioned?

Well, perhaps they are essential. I think they are. Firstly, it is important to note that there is no need to include women in the line of promise. Well, perhaps they are essential. I think they are. Firstly, it is important to note that these women were Gentiles, while Bathsheba may have been an Israelite daughter herself, but she was married to Uriah the Hittite. This illustrates the fundamental point, does it not? Gentile women included by God in the Messianic line: he is saying something to us.

Redemption and salvation from sins was never about biology or one's lineage but rather about grace through faith, and the promise was coming into all the nations. How better could God illustrate this than by including Gentile women in the promised line of the Messiah? Women from the nations entered the Messiah's lineage as a foreshadow of the Gentiles' gospel blessing. So that is worthwhile pointing out; that links us to the Abrahamic promise, of course, that all the nations will be blessed.

But we further note that some of these women were involved in gross sexual sin, and so again, there are more names here that we may want to blot out. You can go and do the reading in your own time, but you read in Genesis 38 about Tamar; Rahab the prostitute, Joshua 2:1 you can read there; Ruth, who descended from an ancestral relationship as a Moabite woman; and then Bathsheba, who committed adultery with the king, 2 Samuel 11. The question is, why are we taking, as one author has said, a backward glance into all this rotten history that people just get confused about? Why this backward glance?

Well, I think it is this backward glance of Matthew; it is a looking forward, in fact, to what Matthew will soon tell us about the Messiah King Jesus. And so you look at verse 21 of Matthew 1. This is what the angel of the Lord said in a dream to Joseph: "She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." This is why the King has arrived: the Messiah is a Saviour for sinners. He did not arrive wielding a sword, but rather he came as a servant girded with a towel, meek and lowly.

He came to release his people from the bondage and the curse of death, the wages for our sin, and he did so by dying for us upon a cross and imputing to us his perfect righteousness and removing our guilt and our shame. Not one of us is without sin, and this is why he came: that through God's grace he might redeem from sin those like Tamar, those like Rahab, those like Ruth, those like Bathsheba, and insert your own name at the end of that list. This is why the King has come. No amount of obscurity, no amount of brokenness can ever separate you from God's work. Be assured of that fact. Just look at the genealogy of Matthew 1:1-17, and you shall see.