The Royal Bloodline of the King of Kings

up Matthew's gospel by hearing about how

Matthew structured his gospel in such a way that it opens and closes with the authority of Christ.

One in which Matthew did not ease us into this conversation but literally brings us in with an announcement of a king.

You may recall that in the very first verse here as he identifies

Jesus Christ he is giving both his personal name and his title in the name

Christ. And then he goes on with the royal credentials of the son of David and tying back even further to the son of Abraham.

And then he closes the book of Matthew with the royal dominion that has been given as he now is enthroned on high waiting to step forward and call us.

Each of us should recall the words of Christ himself where he says all authority has been given to me on heaven and on earth.

And as we looked at that proclamation we saw that Matthew had carefully constructed the entire gospel around this king who is coming, has come, has spoken, was rejected, was crucified, who raised from the dead and now reigns on high and sends his people to the nations.

So with these things in mind we move forward now into our study of the gospel of Matthew proper.

And we begin with taking this opening claim and moving into the evidence that rests behind the claim.

The proof that's needed. The reality that if as Matthew professes in this first verse

Jesus truly is the Christ, if he truly is the king of kings, if he truly is the fulfillment of all the scripture has proclaimed, then he must be the son of David, he must be the son of Abraham.

But yet we need to see that fleshed out so that we begin to understand it.

But along the way as that is fleshed out we need to also understand the implications of why include this genealogy at all.

This is why Matthew begins the way Matthew begins. Now many people opening the book of Matthew may be tempted to read the first verse and then notice that verses 2 down through 16 just give us a list of names and decide well we can just skip over all of that.

I really don't need to know all of these things to believe. I don't need to know how we get from Abraham to Christ in order to believe.

But you need to recall first of all that Matthew, a Jew, a tax collector, writing to other

Jews about the king of Jews needed to establish exactly who

Christ is. But beyond that there is something deeply theological and highly pastoral that is occurring in this passage.

You see Matthew is not just giving us this list of names that we may feel like is a speed bump.

Matthew is teaching us that the coming of Christ was not an isolated event.

It was not a secondary plan but one that surpasses all of time.

That this coming King was the climax of a covenantal storyline traced generation by generation by generation, traced through promise and judgment, traced through faith and failure, traced through promise through glory and even into exile and obscurity until at last the promised

King appears. So the truth that is central to this passage that we are going to deal with today is that through all of time, regardless of what was going on in that period of time, regardless of the external situations and circumstances and happenings,

God sustained sovereignly this lineage and in doing so we not only have this demonstration of God's sovereignty sustaining this lineage, we also have a demonstration of the grace of God, the faithfulness of God, and the desire of God to bring about the ultimate salvation of his people.

And so we have this record of divine faithfulness, this bloodline of the

King of Kings that's set before us. And because it's there, because we have this dedicated record of the faithfulness of God, we were given the assurance that God didn't just drop into history, just drop the promises because things didn't go right.

Just a few weeks ago we talked about how God delivered the word to the people of Israel and as he and Moses were meeting on the

Mount Sinai, just weeks after this very covenant was made, they break the covenant.

God didn't just say, forget it. If you go backwards, although he destroyed the earth in the flood, he also held this remnant to repopulate.

And if you go all the way back, you see very quickly that rather than eliminate

Adam and Eve, grace and mercy is demonstrated.

And so we see that God does not forget his covenant when sin multiplies. We see that he does not lose his

King when nations rage. He does not misplace the line when the people are scattered into exile.

Through all of these things he sustains it, he guards it, and he ultimately brings it to the appointed end.

Which brings us to our text for today, where we find ourselves in the first chapter of the

Gospel of Matthew, reading again this morning from verses 1 through 17.

And our focus will be verses 2 through 17. So I would invite you, having found your place, to please stand in reverence for the reading of God's holy, inerrant, infallible, authoritative, sufficient, complete, and certain word.

Reading from the Gospel of Matthew, the second verse of the first chapter and following, we find these words.

Abraham was the father of Isaac. And Isaac, I'm sorry,

I meant to start at verse 1. Let's back up. This is church, we're not perfect. The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

Abraham was the father of Isaac. And Isaac was the father of Judah. And Isaac was the father of Jacob.

And Jacob was the father of Judah and his brothers. And Judah was the father of Perez and Sarah by Tamar.

And Perez was the father of Hezron. And Hezron was the father of Ram. And Ram was the father of Amminadab.

And Amminadab was the father of Nahashon. And Nahashon was the father of Salmon. And Salmon was the father of Boaz by Ruth, by Rahab.

And Boaz was the father of Obed by Ruth. And Obed was the father of Jesse.

And Jesse was the father of David the king. And David was the father of Salmon by the wife of Uriah.

And Salmon was the father of Reboahim. And Reboahim was the father of Abijah.

And Abijah was the father of Asa. And Asa was the father of Jehoshaphat.

And Jehoshaphat was the father of Joram. And Joram was the father of Uzziah. And Uzziah was the father of Jotham.

And Jotham was the father of Ahaz. And Ahaz was the father of Hezekiah.

And Hezekiah was the father of Manasseh. And Manasseh was the father of Ammon.

And Ammon was the father of Josiah. And Josiah was the father of Jeconiah and his brothers at the time of the deportation to Babylon.

And after the deportation to Babylon, Jeconiah was the father of Shealtel.

And Shealtel was the father of Zerubbabel. And Zerubbabel was the father of Abiud.

And Abiud was the father of Eliakim. And Eliakim was the father of Azor.

And Azor was the father of Zadok. And Zadok was the father of Achim.

And Achim was the father of Eliud. And Eliud was the father of Eleazar.

and Eleazar, and Eleazar was the father of Mathan, and Mathan was the father of Jacob, and Jacob was the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, by whom

Jesus was born, who is called Christ. Therefore, all the generations from Abraham to David are 14 generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon, 14 generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to Christ, 14 generations.

Our prayer this morning is adapted from the prayer in the beauty of Jesus by Robert Hawker as recorded in Piercing Heaven, Prayers of the

Puritans. Blessed Lord, in your beauty we behold a fullness of grace, truth, and righteousness, perfectly suited to the needs of poor sinners such as us, your blood to cleanse, your grace to comfort, your fullness to supply.

Lord, as we have heard from your word, the generations of your son, we see your faithful hand in preserving that royal line through which our king would come.

Through Abraham and David, through promise, through exile, you brought forth the one in whom there is everything we could ever need, life and light, pardon and mercy, peace here, now, and peace eternally, and glory hereafter.

Lord, do we not see in our king his beauty even here as we behold him coming for sinners such as us?

Lord, we love you because you first loved us, and that love that you have lavished upon us has opened our eyes to look upon Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham, the promised king who gave himself for his people.

We pray then, blessed

Lord Jesus, that you would come, that you would draw near to us now, that as your word is proclaimed, the eyes of our hearts would be fixed upon you, that every glimpse we have of Christ would make him more gracious and more lovely to our souls.

Until that day when faith gives way to sight and we behold our king in the full beams of his glory forever, we ask all of these things in the precious name of King Jesus.

Amen. You may be seated. As I stated in the introduction, one of the things that Matthew is doing here is proving.

He is proving a title. Matthew Henry goes on to say that this genealogy is like a pedigree given in evidence to prove a title, to make out a claim.

In other words, the verses that you have before us were not fodder for Christian trivia.

We're not here just so we would have things to ask in a fun event to try and see just how much of the

Bible could be learned by an individual. This is literally documentation from a legal standpoint of who

Christ is. From the very beginning, a few weeks back, a couple of months ago, we walked through how from the very beginning, from the start in Genesis, we see that God is calling a nation of people to himself and that is a nation of people that is made up of all the peoples of the earth.

We see this demonstrated to us and that in that promise, the

Messiah is proclaimed to us, the earliest of which we see in Genesis chapter three when the fall occurs, we get the

Proto -Evangelion, the first good news, the first gospel.

But particularly as we get to Abraham in Genesis chapter 12 verse three, we have the words that I will bless those who bless you and the one who curses you

I will curse and in you, you being Abraham, all the families of the earth will be blessed.

And then later in Genesis, God takes that promise given to Abraham and he narrows it down and specifically places it on the seed of Abraham.

Now one of the things that happens when we read this verse too often is we read the word seed as plural, the word seed is not plural, it is singular.

Genesis chapter 22 verse 18, in your seed, all the nations of the earth shall be blessed because you have listened to my voice.

What this means is that the seed is not all of the peoples of Israel, the seed is one individual, one individual, the proclaimed

Messiah, the Messiah who would come. Later as we get to David, the verses that we actually read last week, 2

Samuel chapter seven verses 12 through 16, when your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers,

I will raise up one of your seed after you who will come forth from your own body and I will establish his kingdom.

One person, he shall build a house for my name and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.

I will be a father to him and he will be a son to me. When he commits iniquity,

I will reprove him with the rod of men and strikes from the sons of men. But my loving kindness shall not be removed from him as I removed it from Saul.

And so we switch there midstream of that from talking about the one Messiah to talking about the following king.

But then we have Psalm 132 verse 11, Yahweh has sworn to David a truth from which he will not turn back of the fruit of your body,

I will set upon your throne. One individual, one seed, one

Messiah. And so as Matthew begins the gospel with the proclamation that Jesus is the

Christ, the only way that Jesus could literally be what scripture proclaims him to be is he must be the fulfillment of those scriptures.

And so in order to identify him as the fulfillment of those scriptures, in order to give the evidence of him as being who scripture proclaims him to be,

Matthew begins his gospel demonstrating that he is exactly who scripture proclaims it to be.

But you need to notice something about this particular genealogy. Typically, when we look at the genealogy of an aristocratic family, what you actually see is the genealogy that they want you to see.

You see, they work through and they weed out all of the scoundrels and those who have disgraced their throne, who don't fit the mold.

However, if you read closely through Matthew's genealogy, you see that this is not what

Matthew did. This lineage is not clean in the sense of without sin and without fault.

This lineage is not flattering. It is filled with scandal, with weakness, with judgment, with obscurity.

But there is something essential in that truth that talks to us about who

Christ is. As Spurgeon reads these words, he marveled that the unclean blood entered the stream and he cries out,

O Lord, thou art the sinner's friend. That's the point.

Matthew doesn't hide the darkness in the line because the darkness in the line magnifies the light of the king.

Christ didn't come through a spotless human chain.

Christ came to save sinful people.

And so while the genealogy establishes Jesus's right to the throne, it also displays the grace of God towards the sinner.

And so it's necessary that we see both of these things or we miss the point of Matthew.

Secondly, not only is it imperative that we see and understand that this is being done in that way, we also need to recognize that through this genealogy that is laid out for us,

God's sovereignty is being clearly demonstrated as he sustains the line by that sovereignty and not by human strength.

Look at how it begins. Abraham was the father of Isaac. Well, hopefully, if you know anything about biblical history and the story of Abraham, the first thing that should pop through your mind is, well, wait a minute, why begin with Isaac?

Now, here's the problem. When we read this in our modern day world, we've gone through, if you were raised in church of pretty much any kind, and you've gone through Sunday school classes, you've been given the stories, you know the reasons that are listed regarding Ishmael and Isaac and why

Isaac versus Ishmael and all of these things. Well, what you need to consider is that maybe for just a minute, you take a step back from what you think you know, and you think about this in the way that a first century

Jew would have thought about it. You see, in first century Judaism, the person who had the right, in fact, even all the way back to Abraham, the person who had the right to inherit was the firstborn.

Yet we don't begin here with the firstborn. We begin here with Isaac.

But the covenant line did not run through the offspring of the flesh.

The covenant line runs through the child of promise. And then we see

Isaac was the father of Jacob. Well, bells should still be going off because what, we have the same issue, right?

We have Isaac, we have Esau, and we have Jacob. Now we know from our good study of Scripture that when we get into the book of Romans, Paul uses the example of Esau and Jacob to describe for us

God's election that is predestined before anything that you do or think or be or anything else.

When he tells us that Jacob he loved, but Esau he hated. But if you'll remember again, back to your biblical history, the story of Jacob and Esau and the birthright, you have two things that occur there.

One, you have Esau selling his birthright to his brother for soup. But secondly, you have the trick done, played by Rebekah and Jacob on Isaac to guarantee that Jacob receives the birthright.

Again, not the firstborn, the younger. The younger was chosen.

And then we go again, Jacob was the father of Judah and his brothers, but Judah wasn't the firstborn.

Reuben was the firstborn. And if we look at Judah's story, it's not even a morally impressive story.

It's not as if we would look back in time and go, okay, Judah's the one. Matthew Henry points out this repeated pattern that Christ often descends from a younger brother to show that his preeminence comes from the will of God.

You see, there's a legal term, primogeniture, which is a system of inheritance based on the order of birth.

But this is not what's being employed. What's being employed here is the will of God, not the will of man, not human custom, not human strength.

You remember the story of David, right? Samuel goes to anoint the new king and he goes to Jesse, Jesse, let me see all your sons.

And Jesse brings his oldest to him. Samuel looks at him and goes, nope, that ain't him.

And one after one after another, the sons of Jesse are brought before Samuel until at last there are none standing, no others standing before him.

Samuel hasn't seen the one and he looks at Jesse and goes, is this all? And Jesse's like, oh yeah, you know what?

There's that runt that I forgot about. He's out in the field tending flock, not the one that you would have chosen, but the one that God chose.

Why does all this matter? Well, it matters because too often times we are tempted to believe that God's promises rise and fall on the strength of us.

That the only way that we can do what God needs to have done is to be great, to be strong, to be perfect, to be wise, to be stable, to be well -ordered.

But listen, look at the line. If that's what

God needs, if he truly needs the strong, the clean, the wise, the stable, the well -ordered, then we may as well dismiss the whole thing because that's not what this background proclaims.

In fact, this background says that he is anything but these things, that this is not the bloodline of a human king, much less the king of kings.

But God sustains the lineage of Christ through election, through providence, through covenant faithfulness.

And he does so so that when Christ comes, no man can boast as though the king were produced by a human accomplishment.

Look at how far the line has fallen. Joseph, a carpenter from the backwater town of Galilee, a town that we later get remarked about in scripture, can anything good come out of Galilee?

The very beginning of this genealogy and through this genealogy is a declaration of the sovereignty of God.

Spurgeon remarks, let us observe and admire the sovereignty of God.

It's something that people today don't want to observe and admire. But brothers and sisters, what this demonstrates for us is that the promises of God don't depend on anything but God.

That God himself is the one who sustains, that God himself is the one who brings to fulfillment, that God himself through famine, through feast, through war, through peace, through righteousness, through sin, through collapse, through rebuilding, through exile, through bringing back,

God is God and he will sustain his promises.

The Messiah was promised, the Messiah is brought to fruition.

But as we look at this thing, we even see that even in the midst of human sin,

God continued to move. And there's a very interesting thing that happens in Matthew's genealogy, something that is very uncharacteristic of a

Jewish genealogy. Jewish genealogies never include the females.

However, if you'll notice in this passage, in this genealogy, there are four women named before we get to Mary.

Now, not only is this an unusual practice, it's also being done to make a point.

We begin with Tamar. She's the first woman mentioned in verse three, in Judah was the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar.

Now, if you go back, and we're not gonna do this this morning because we don't have time to unpack each one of these, but if you go back and you study

Tamar, what you'll find is that her story is not a story you tell to impress a crowd.

This situation is not one that you would brag about. It's not one that you will boast about.

It's one that is tangled in deception and sexual sin. Yet Matthew openly names her.

Listen, if you're naming people in the lineage of a king, that's the people that you don't name in a human way of thinking.

But why? Because again, God is telling us something about the king that's coming.

He's not embarrassed to be associated with sinners. He's not ashamed to step in to a broken line because the savior, the king that is coming is coming as the savior of the guilty.

Secondly, we see Rahab. Now, there is an argument out there that this is not the

Rahab that we can go back and find very prominently in scripture. However, that's a little bit far -fetched if you ask me.

And so what we have is this particular person, Rahab, who was first a

Canaanite. That was bad enough. Secondly, she was a prostitute.

Again, we have a person in the lineage that you would not normally consider being a person in the lineage, yet she believed the

God of Israel. And because of what she did, because of her faith, God spared her.

And then she was brought into and appears here in the lineage. Spurgeon took note to point out that the blood of a harlot is in the line and drew comfort that Jesus is akin to the fallen and to the lonely.

That's not sentimentality, right? That's not saying, aww. That's the gospel.

The gospel is that he came to save the weak, the lowly, the sinners, the poor, the needy.

Listen, if you think you are too stained, too compromised, too far gone, in five verses in Matthew's gospel, he demonstrates for you that you're not.

That the king who came to save didn't come because the line was pure.

God didn't choose Mary and Joseph, Joseph to be the earthly father of King Jesus because they had the best lineage.

He chose them because it was his choice and Christ came because sinners needed salvation.

Then we come to the third woman that's mentioned, the person of Ruth.

Now, if you've never read the book of Ruth or you've never spent a lot of time studying the book of Ruth, it's one that I would encourage you to spend some time reading.

It's not a long book, doesn't take you very long at all to work through it. The message is such a profound thing.

Ruth was a Moabitess, she was not a

Jew. Now, do you notice something that's kind of interesting here about three out of the four women we've already mentioned?

Two of them aren't Israelites, they aren't Jewish people. They're outsiders.

Yet when the world fell apart around Ruth, she clung to her mother -in -law,

Naomi. She went where she went. She confessed

Naomi's God as her God. She was grafted into Israel and ultimately even into the royal lineage.

I want you to think about that for a minute. One of the things that we have talked about much in recent weeks is the truth that the kingdom is a kingdom of not one nation, but all nations and the kingdom is called out from those nations.

And again, what we see is preparation by Matthew, even as he speaks to the

Jewish people, that the Gentiles are not an afterthought, that the promise of Abraham, the king being the son of Abraham, was that all the families of the earth would be blessed.

That this covenant promise would be fulfilled. And then the fourth we see is not even named, although we know who she is, or you should.

If you don't know who she is, it's Bathsheba. If you didn't know that, you didn't read any of your

Bible very much, go back and read. But notice how she's named.

The verse says, and David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah.

Now, the wound is kept open.

Again, hopefully you know the history. But not only did

David covet Bathsheba, not only did he seduce

Bathsheba, not only did he end up getting

Bathsheba pregnant, he also ended up killing Uriah to make it all better.

And David paid a price with the loss of the first child between him and Bathsheba.

And after Uriah died, David marries Bathsheba, and then

Solomon is born. But notice here the words that Matthew chose to use, the wife of Uriah.

Talk about picking at a scab and opening an old wound. There's not a

Jewish person in their right mind who wants to be reminded of that. When Matthew's gospel was proclaimed and Jewish people would read it, this is not something they wanted to see.

Because what it does is it proclaims that their beloved King David was also a sinner.

This line included adultery, it concluded betrayal, it concluded bloodshed, and yet God sustained the line.

He disciplined, he judged, he forgave, and he kept his promise.

Even David's crime being repented of didn't change anything as far as the promise went.

Whether David had repented or not repented, God was moving. God used that very woman, the woman that this sin was circled around to fulfill the promise.

The message isn't that the sin is light, the message is grace is greater. The message is not sin is good, the message is

God is good and his grace overcomes all things. Listen, the genealogy is not excusing sin, but it's also not turning a blind eye to sin.

So often in this world, people want to excuse and or turn a blind eye to sin versus calling it out, versus speaking up about it in truth, in love.

It exposed the sin, it exposed the world that the king entered, and it even shows the kind of people that the king came to save, all while demonstrating that God's faithfulness is not fragile.

Listen, he promised David an everlasting throne. He didn't promise that because David was spotless, it was promised because God is faithful.

And as we look through this list, we see evidence over and over and over and over again of that faithfulness.

We see it even as it moves into exile. So Matthew takes us from Abraham to David, from David to the kings, from the kings to the exile.

And as you begin to look through the kings and you begin to go back and forth in scripture, which

I would invite you to do, take some time and study this genealogy, the people that are listed in this genealogy, look at each one of them, the ones you can find, by the way.

You'll see that there are some that are associated with great reform and great revival.

Two of the most notable are Hezekiah and Josiah, both of whom made tremendous steps.

But then we also have those that were associated with doing evil in the sight of God and living as their fathers had lived in evil in the sight of God, such as Ahaz and Manasseh.

You see kings leading the people toward God and you see kings leading the people to idolatry and to bloodshed.

Matthew Henry observed that the mixture of good and bad makes a sober point that grace does not run in the blood, but neither does reigning sin in the sense that you inherited from your father or your mother.

It's a result of the nature of who you are as an individual, just as grace doesn't pass from father and mother to child.

You're not saved because of who your parents were. You're not saved because of how you were raised.

You're not saved because of what part of the country you grew up in. You're not saved because you always attended this church.

You're not saved by any of those things. You're saved by the King of kings and Lord of lords, by the very king that Matthew's gospel is proclaiming.

And then we get verse 11, that all of these things occurred, specifically verse 11, and Josiah was the father of Jeconiah and his brothers at the time of the deportation to Babylon.

Now to understand that, you really need to understand what happened to the nations at this point.

By this time, we had two nations. We had the nation of Judah and we had the nation of Israel, both of which are

Judea and Israel, but they were both falling apart. And ultimately it results in Babylon coming in and as a judgment of God, removing the people, destroying

Jerusalem and taking the people back. This is a moment in Jewish history where everything seemed to fall apart.

The temple was destroyed. That in and of itself was a magnificent feat.

You never really read up on Solomon's temple, you should, but that's what was destroyed.

It was leveled, but not only was the temple itself leveled, all of Jerusalem was leveled.

The throne of the kingdom was toppled. The people were scattered.

The songs were silenced. The scriptures were lost. And you can almost imagine this question.

How can we have a king in an everlasting throne?

Now, how can God's promise survive this destruction?

How can this throne endure when the city that houses the throne is gone?

The answer that we see here in Matthew is that God sustained the line even through the exile.

Notice here, there are some people mentioned, some of these people we have no other records of. Many of them we know who they are.

Jeconiah is mentioned. Then we see after the deportation and he moves to Shillatil and Zerubbabel.

And then that long list of people that we don't really see anywhere else in scripture. Many theologians note that these people, these names are of little or no note, they're obscure, they're insignificant.

Yet even in this, we see glory. The reason that we see glory is that even in this, we see as the lineage falls,

Christ still comes. The king didn't come in this manner of being born into the palace, being born with the servants, being born at that level.

We see, as we know going forth into the birth of Christ, the Messiah is born in obscurity to a family of low estate.

But this should be something that strengthens believers and the church versus having the opposite effect.

This should be something that we look at and go, if God moves and continues to do through all of these things, even in the darkest of times, we look back over church history, modern church history, if you want to call it that.

We've had 2000 years roughly of church history. And if you look back in just the last 600 years, we've seen a drastic shift.

In fact, there is a mantra that exists. Post tenenbros lux, it's

Latin. And it means after the darkness, light. And it was used by the reformers to talk about that dark period.

We talked about it a little bit in Sunday school this morning where we had this period of time where the word of God was not accessible.

People couldn't read. The church held it close. The priests were the only ones allowed to interpret it.

They used the high language of Latin versus the guttural and obscene languages of the time, the normal everyday language that people could understand.

And there was darkness in the soul because the light of the gospel was being smothered.

And yet through a magnificent working, and I believe wholeheartedly if Martin Luther were here today, he would renounce getting primary credit for all of this because he saw firsthand the people that came before him, the events that occurred around him that made it all possible to make it fall into place the way it did.

It was God moving, not Martin Luther, not John Calvin, not any of these people, not

Wycliffe, not Huss, none of those guys. It was

God moving again to bring us through a period of darkness into a period of light.

That's what happens. That's what Matthew's proclaiming here after the deportation to Babylon, that we move through this period of darkness.

Think about the way the Old Testament ends and the New Testament begins. At the end of the

Old Testament, we have the last prophet proclaiming the word of God. And after his lips are silenced, nothing for 400 years, the intertestinal period, zip from God, from heaven.

And then the very next thing that we have is the proclamation of the arrival of the king.

Listen, God sustained these promises, not just in the bright chapter, not just in David's triumphs, but also in Babylon's change, not just in Solomon's glory, but Israel's shame.

Not only when it was a mighty tree, but listen, he even told us ahead of time that it wasn't going to be from a mighty tree.

You just sang about it. We just heard it in the psalm, the stem of the tree, the root of the tree from Jesse.

Not this big, gigantic, magnificent oak, but this shoot off of the root, off the tiniest of things.

The line dwindles into the home of a carpenter. And from that withered stump, the true king arrives.

There's times in your life where you feel like you're in exile, you feel dark, you feel distant. We've given them a name in our

Christianese called wilderness experiences, right? Oh, in my wilderness experience, listen, God doesn't desert you.

If you are his, he is with you to the ends of the earth. All authority has been given unto me.

And lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age. Christ is always with us, even in exile, even in difficulty, even in challenges.

But the sustenance, the sustaining of the line to bless the nation, not only came through all of this genealogically, but it also pierces forward through the cross.

The gospel message deals with the truth of Christ.

That Christ did not merely inherit a throne. He also bore our curse.

Paul, writing in his letter to the church at Galatia, wrote these words, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us.

Where it is written, cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree. In order that Christ Jesus, the blessing of Abraham, might come to the

Gentiles, so that we, the Gentiles, we, the believers, we, the chosen people, may receive the word, may receive the promise of the spirit through faith,

Christ became that curse. Matthew began with Abraham, because Abraham's covenant is always bigger than Israel's borders.

We see a fight going on and have all of my life in the Middle East about the borders of Israel, the physical nation of Israel.

Brothers and sisters, the battle is not actually over the physical borders of the nation of Israel, the battle is over the borders of the kingdom of God, and they're not physical, they're spiritual.

The covenant with Abraham always was greater than the size of the land. It was the promise of salvation expanding to all peoples.

But a blessing, that blessing, only comes through redemption.

Paul, further, as he continues that same line, beginning in verse 15, he said, "'Brother,

I speak in human terms. "'Even though it is only a man's covenant, "'yet it has been ratified, no one sets it aside "'or adds conditions to it.'"

In other words, if you have a contract, a legally binding document, also known as a covenant, we just don't use covenant as the word anymore, but if you have a contract, a legally binding document between you and another individual, people don't just arbitrarily set it aside or arbitrarily add things to it.

Things have to go through a certain process. That's what he's meaning in verse 15.

Verse 16, now the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. He does not say and to seeds as referring to many, but rather to one and to your seed, that is

Christ. And what I am saying is this, the law which came 430 years later does not invalidate a covenant previously ratified by God so as to abolish the promise, for if the inheritance is by law, it is no longer by promise, but God has granted it to Abraham through promise.

Covenant ratified by God cannot be annulled, cannot be modified, cannot be changed.

Promise is to Christ. Through all of these things,

God was guarding the path through which the redeemer would come and take the curse and give the blessing.

And because of that, the line must be preserved. The promise could not fall.

The genealogy mattered. This is why it's important to study even something that seems to be just a bunch of stuff that doesn't matter to anybody because it truly has a sharp edge.

Listen, if Christ is the promised seed, if Christ is the promised seed given to Abraham, then the blessing only comes from Him.

Go all the way back to Genesis. Through your seed, I will bless all the nations.

That's the first of the edges. Secondly, if Christ is the son of David, then the throne belongs to Him.

Not just a throne, not just one of many thrones, but the throne.

Finally, if Christ became a curse to redeem us, this is the one that hurts.

Neutrality is not possible. In this spiritual battle for the borders of the kingdom, you cannot be

Switzerland. You cannot be neutral. You cannot sit back and say, my hands are out of this.

I don't, it doesn't matter. Either way, I'm good. By doing that, you're aligning yourself against Christ.

You're either for Him or you're against Him. In this world today, we see that there are so many other alternatives, but it's really simple.

Scripture is black and white and clear. This genealogy is not just asking us if we find

Jesus interesting. It's not just saying, hey, look at all of these names, do some research, find out all the cool stuff you can.

Notice all of this. It's odd how everything lines up like it does. That's great, it's wonderful. That's a very interesting fact.

It's wonderful to know, acknowledge these things intellectually. What it's doing is confronting you with a truth, pressing in to ask whether you are in Christ, whether you have received the blessing given to Abraham for the seed that is available to us only through the seed, and then by faith alone, if you've been redeemed by the king who hung on a tree.

And then we close with verse 17. Verse 17 is a very interesting verse.

And if you are any manner of biblical scholar, you could take a few moments and you see some things in this genealogy that may give you pause, like the missing names.

It befuddles people. Well, if the Bible is inerrant and it left out names, how in the world can it be true?

Because lineage is still lineage. Blood is still blood. My grandfather may not have been my father in that he was part of the action that conceived me, but he still is my blood.

And we call him grand what? Father. Or in the

South, we say daddy, but you know what I mean. The truth is, is that when we look at verse 17,

Matthew uses a method here. He says there were 14 generations from Abraham to David, 14 generations from David to the exile, 14 generations from the exile to the

Christ. Well, if you go back and you study biblical history, you'll find out that's not accurate. Then why did

David do it? Or why did Matthew do it? Matthew did it to help you recall something.

You see, it wasn't really about the number of generations. That's where we get all tied up sometimes as people.

We get focused on the wrong thing. We go, oh, well, there's a number of generations here, but it's about God and his faithfulness.

It's about God sustaining through a period of time. There's an intentionality here.

He's using a rough and simple method to help weak memories.

These points that Matthew is pointing out to us are major events.

Abraham, David, the exile, the birth of Christ.

And as you look at them, what you should see is that we see from Abraham to David, we see the promise rising toward royalty.

No royalty in Abraham. He was a leader, but he was not a king. In fact, we see nothing of a king until David in that line.

And so from Abraham to David, we have the promise given to Abraham.

It rises forward till we get to David where it's in royalty. Then we see from David to exile, we see the royalty collapsing under sin and judgment.

And then we see from the exile to Christ, we see the line humbled, waiting, darkened, until at last the king appears.

This last verse is theologically demonstrating to you that God isn't reacting.

And it's not necessary to have every single person in the genealogy to demonstrate that.

God's not improvising. What he's doing is fulfilling. He's fulfilling the promise.

When kings sin, he still fulfills. When nations invade, he still fulfills.

When temples fall, he still fulfills this promise. When genealogy seemed to vanish into obscurity,

God sustained the line because God sustains the promise. If we wanna get very technical about it, we can't verify verses 14, 15, 16, because most of these people we can't find in scripture.

But the reality is is there's a point there. The line has dwindled into obscurity, but Christ is the king who arrives.

Christ is the one who speaks at the end. And God is the one who sovereignly makes these things happen.

And so we see through this genealogy that God's sovereign choice, the line of Christ ran where God wills, not where humanity wills.

We see through God's gracious mercy, sinners and outsiders are brought into this lineage.

We see faithful preservation. Even exile couldn't erase the promise.

Even the destruction of the nation couldn't erase the promise. And we see the line being sustained to demonstrate the saving purpose of God so that the

Redeemer may come to his people. The genealogy points us forward to the cross.

The seed of Abraham became the curse so blessings could come to the nations.

And now we must, in allegiance, come to the place that scripture is leading us.

The knowledge of who Jesus is. We've identified him in four ways over the last two weeks.

First of all, we identified him as the Christ, the Messiah, the anointed one, the one who was promised.

Secondly, we identified him as the son of David, heir to the throne.

Thirdly, we have identified him as the seed, that promised seed given to Abraham.

Fourthly, we have identified him as the king of all kings.

God sustained this lineage through the centuries through the decades to bring

Christ into the world so that he may live, may suffer, to reconcile

God's people to himself. And so the question here that demands an answer is, if God was faithful to keep this promise across the generations, across the circumstances, across all of these things to give us this king, what will we do with him now, this king?

Will you read his name, the names in this lineage, move on about your life?

Will you treat it as religious background noise or will you bow, repenting of your sin, in faith, receiving the blessing, and then in allegiance, yielding your life to his rightful authority?

How is it rightful authority? Because this genealogy proves that God will not fail to bring his king, did not fail to bring his king, and the gospel demands that we cannot ignore that king without consequence.

Let us pray. Blessed Lord Jesus, Lord, in your beauty, we behold the fullness of grace, truth, righteousness, perfectly suited to the needs of us.

We thank you that the Father sustained your royal lineage through promise, peril, sin, sorrow, exile, obscurity, until the fullness of time came and the

Savior was born, and that as a

Savior born, Father, that we give thanks for King Jesus.

We give thanks for his life. Father, we thank you for the reconciliation that occurs by faith and faith in him alone.

Lord, we ask now that you would guide and direct our hearts in all things. Father, we love you, we thank you, we praise you, we give you the honor, we give you all of the glory.