Come Behold the Wondrous Mystery Matthew 1:18-25

The Dark World and the Hope of Rescue

As many of you know, I help out with the cross-country team at St. Croix Falls, and in fact, yesterday we just had the state meet. One of our runners ran in it, and we were in Wisconsin Rapids yesterday.

About a month ago, we had a meet in Rice Lake, and there was one runner from Barron who stood out above the rest because of what she had gone through over the previous year. On October 16th, 2018, Jamie Closs' parents were murdered, and she was abducted from her.

Home.

And many of you remember this story well. It was all over the news, not just the local news, but the national news also. Over a period of months, police and rescue teams searched and searched to see if there was any trace of her.

They found none and wondered if they would ever find her. We know from the news that abduction cases do not typically end well. The longer a child is missing, the fear is that this child will never return home.

But with Jamie, people held out hope that they would find her, that she would be rescued from her abductor and brought back home. This hope turned into joy when on January 11th, 2019, she was found. A woman was out walking her dog when she noticed a young girl approach her.

This young girl was Jamie, who had escaped from the evil man who was holding her. The hope that she could be found was not a false hope, but a true hope. And so many people held on to that. And people saw that it was worth not giving up.

She was rescued from a very dark place and brought to safety. And as I mentioned earlier, she had gotten back to normal life, even running cross-country for Barron High School. Now, I bring this story up because from a spiritual standpoint, our world is in a very dark place.

This world has been this way since the fall in the Garden of Eden, as Genesis 3 describes. But throughout Scripture, people have been given hope that darkness will be defeated and those in darkness will be rescued.

This hope is not wishful thinking, but a certain hope built on the promises of God. Throughout the Old Testament, people were told that a king from the line of David would come into the world to rescue people from their bondage to sin, from their slavery to.

Sin.

As the Lord says through the prophet Isaiah, in Isaiah 53 11, after he had suffered, he will see the light of life and be satisfied. By his knowledge, many righteous will be justified by him, and he will bear their iniquities.

One would come who would deliver his people from darkness to light, and he has come. Two thousand years ago, he came, and this morning, we are going to see his arrival to this earth. And we are going to see the prophecy that he would rescue his people from their dark position to bring them into his light.

Matthew’s Genealogy and the Promised King

So this morning, we are going to look at Matthew chapter 1 verses 18 through 25. As always, I encourage you to turn there with me. If you're using the Red Bible in the pews, it's on page 8807. This sermon is titled, The Rescuing King, and our big idea is this.

As promised from the Old Testament, the Messiah has arrived on a rescue mission to save sinners. And we're going to see one reason why, and that reason is this. His people have a bondage from which only he can free them.

His people have a bondage from which only he can free them. Now before we jump into our text this morning, I want to give you a little recap of last week. We looked at the genealogy of Jesus Christ. What we noticed is that Matthew is targeting mostly a Jewish audience.

What he does is he starts his genealogy in verse 1 by saying that Jesus is the son of David and the son of Abraham. By using these titles and applying them to Christ, he is telling his mostly Jewish audience that Jesus is the key piece in the fulfillment of the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants.

God promised Abraham in Genesis 12 .3 that all the nations of the earth would be blessed through Abraham's offspring. This blessing would come through the most important offspring, Jesus Christ, who saves people from all the nations of the earth.

Jesus is also the key piece of the fulfillment of the Davidic covenant. In 2 Samuel 7, 12 -16, the Lord promises David that his offspring would sit on the throne of David forever. What Matthew's readers would have known is that the Davidic line stopped in the 6th century B .C. when the Babylonians came in to Judah and took them into captivity.

But the promise is that one of David's sons would sit on the throne forever. So they had all these kings, one after another, and then it just stopped. 500 years go by, no king, and then he comes. So the fulfillment of the Davidic covenant is found in the final son of David, Jesus the Messiah, who has a forever reign.

What we also saw last Sunday is Matthew's emphasis that Jesus descended from the royal line of David. This is different from Luke's genealogy, who wanted his readers to see Jesus' actual physical.

Ancestry.

Matthew starts with Abraham and then makes his way to David, then he mentions the kings of Israel that lead to Christ. On the other hand, Luke traces Jesus' ancestry down to the first man who ever lived, Adam.

What we saw last Sunday is that Matthew emphasized the number 14. The consonants that make up David's name add up to 14. This once again showed that Matthew wanted his readers to see that Jesus is the Messiah, the rightful heir to the throne of David.

As we look at this line, my call for us is that we would worship the Lord for his faithfulness in weaving this line together. What we see is his awesome plan that he providentially brings together as he eventually brings the Messiah through this royal line.

The Virgin Birth and Joseph’s Dilemma

Now this morning, we are going to see the arrival of the Messiah, the Christ, into the.

World.

And I'm going to read our entire text this morning as we start, and then we're going to take it apart verse by verse, and we'll pull out what we need to see here. So please follow along with me as I read verses 18 through 25.

Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph before they came together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly.

But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream saying, Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.

She will bear a son and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. All this took place to fulfill what the Lord has spoken by the prophet. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God with us.

When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him. He took his wife, but knew her not until she had given birth to a son and he called his name Jesus. So we read in verse 18 is that Jesus was betrothed to Joseph when she became pregnant.

In a little bit, I'm going to explain to you what betrothal meant in the first century. But right now, I want to tie it in our account in Matthew with Luke's account. Last week, we saw that Luke was the other gospel that had a genealogy for Jesus.

The gospel of Luke also has an account that tells the birth of Christ. Since the gospel of Luke gives us much more background on this important event, I want to read this account as well. So this is how Mary found out about her pregnancy, a pregnancy that did not happen.

This was not the normal way things came about. So Luke really helps fill us in on this. This is what took place in Luke 1, 26 -35. And Mary said to the angel, how will this be since I am a virgin? And the angel answered her, the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.

Therefore, the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God. So Luke helps us see the background. Mary finds out from the angel Gabriel that she will bear a son. This would have been the shock of a lifetime.

You can imagine this. We don't know exactly how old Mary was when she heard this news, but many have believed that she was a teenager since that was the age when a woman would be asked for her hand in marriage from a man.

And as you might imagine, this would have turned her world upside down. At this point, she might have been thinking about what she was going to do and things.

Like that.

But all of a sudden she finds out, I'm pregnant. And it's from a means by which none of my friends have experienced and no one I ever know has experienced. Now, the danger of this, of course, is that people are going to believe all the wrong.

Things.

In fact, during Jesus' ministry, the Pharisees were no fans of him. And this is what they said to him in John 8, 41. They said that he was born in sexual immorality. And this accusation went with Mary and the family through their whole lives.

But she needed to keep in mind what the angel told her in the passage from Luke we just.

Read.

He told her, O favored one, the Lord is with you. It doesn't matter what they say.

I'm with you.

And this reminded me of what we saw in Genesis with Joseph and Potiphar when Potiphar's wife accused him of making advances on her when Joseph did nothing wrong. And what the text said when he was thrown into prison by Potiphar, it says the Lord was with him.

Didn't matter what people thought. He was in the right. And this is a good application for us. If you suffer and do no wrong, but people either falsely accuse you or raise all these opinions against you, you are blessed.

That's what 1 Peter 3, 14 tells us. So for Mary, she is blessed, even though some will accuse her of having a child before marriage. Now, back to what betrothal means in verse 18. Betrothal was a custom that took place before marriage between a man and a woman.

In our society, we have a custom that takes place before marriage. And that, of course, is called engagement. Now, betrothal is a little different from engagement in the betrothal custom. The young man's parents chose a young woman for him to marry.

So whatever they chose, you were stuck with.

Right.

And it makes you grateful that we don't have to deal with that in our day. We're actually able to choose who our spouse is. Back then, the parents decided this is who you're going to marry. Now, secondly, there was a legal agreement that needed to be reached between the two parties.

If the betrothal was broken off, there would be a formal process known as a divorce that would end the betrothal and call off the future marriage. OK, so we see here, right, the word divorce is not only used for two in a marriage breaking off, but two in a betrothal stage breaking off.

And this is why in verse 19, when Joseph found out that Mary was pregnant, he wanted to divorce her, or in other words, end the betrothal. During the betrothal stage, sexual relations were considered immoral.

And if sexual relations were committed with another person, this was considered adultery. So we see here the term divorce is applied to both stages, the premarital and in marriage. And Joseph planned on divorcing because he wanted to protect Mary from public disgrace.

It's fitting that the parents God chose for the Messiah would be righteous, would be very godly people. And they were, Joseph and Mary. Luke says concerning Mary in 130 that she found favor with God. So God, of all the young women, chose Mary to deliver this baby and to mother him.

And in verse 19 of our text, we read that Joseph was a just man. So he was the father the Lord selected to raise Jesus. Can you imagine the responsibility to raise the most important human who ever lived?

These were two righteous people who were going to raise a child who never sinned. Think about that. That's something I can't relate to. I know that you can't either. We can imagine Mary talking to the other mothers about Jesus.

He never misbehaves and he always does what we tell him to do. Now, if only our parenting were that easy as we try to raise our children who are born sinners.

Right.

And we need to put ourselves in Joseph's shoes here as he's facing this dilemma. He has two problems with this news that Mary is pregnant. First, he is a righteous man. And if Mary were unfaithful to him, he knew that he could not marry her.

This was not a woman he wanted to be with. And the right thing to do would be to end it. Secondly, because he still cared for Mary, he did not want her to experience public shame. So the text tells us he resolved to divorce her quietly.

In the Mosaic law, one who committed adultery would be put to death by stoning, according to Deuteronomy 22, 23 and 24. Now, in the first century, the Jews did not have the authority to murder. Remember, we've seen this with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

The reason the Romans had to put him to death is because the Sanhedrin didn't have that authority, right? The Romans had power over the Jews at this point in history. And so there wasn't a way for them to put an adulterer to death.

But Mary would have been looked down upon, no question about it. And there would have also been fear that a Jewish mob who were zealous, maybe, would have taken her away and could harm her. Joseph wanted to delay what might be coming to her by not letting this news get out right away.

He was saying, okay, I'm not going to make this public right now. It's probably going to be public, but I'm going to protect you. So he divorces her quietly. So he's really loving her by doing this. And it's neat seeing Joseph's character.

He's showing compassion, even though he believes Mary betrayed him through unfaithfulness. How often do we see that in this world, right? He treats her with grace, even though he believes that she sinned against him.

And may we be gracious like this when others sin against us. But before he could divorce Mary, an angel of the Lord appeared to him. What the angel of the Lord tells him in verse 20 is, Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived is from the Holy Spirit.

So we already saw in Luke's account that an angel appeared to Mary, telling her that she would conceive through the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit. Now an angel, probably the same angel, the angel Gabriel, appears to Joseph and tells him the same thing.

Your wife will bear a child and it will be through a virgin birth as the Holy Spirit comes upon her. This would have been quite an experience. Both Mary and Joseph were faithful Jews. They knew of stories in the Old Testament when an angel appeared to someone.

And in fact, as we went through Genesis, we saw several occasions where an angel appeared to Abraham. An angel appeared to Jacob and so on and so forth. And when an angel appears, God's doing a special work in the world, a very special work in the world.

And sometimes when we look at the biblical story and we look at our own lives, we can come to the conclusion that nothing exciting happens in our time, right? We don't typically see an angel appearing to us and delivering us a message.

And when we see the virgin birth, we need to understand something. Why don't we see all these miracles that the Bible wrote about? And my answer to that is this, that the visible miracles, okay, when something happens and no one can question what they see, they see something that's out of the ordinary.

When visible miracles happen, you know, everybody notices it. And what God is doing is He's showing, He's doing a special work in the world at that specific point in history. And what I'm telling you here is that this only happens in small pockets of history.

So in other words, 98 of the time, things like this don't happen. So if you go through your whole life without ever seeing an angel or anything like that, you're in the norm. It's the people who have experienced that throughout history who are in a unique time.

Now, some miracles are always happening. When we pray and God answers, that's a miracle. When someone experiences the new birth, that's a miracle. When we grow spiritually, that's a miracle. When we use the spirits gifting in our lives to serve the body of Christ, that's a miracle.

However, something like seeing someone raised from the dead, like Jesus did to Lazarus, that's not happening today.

Lazarus was dead.

He was in the tomb.

It wasn't, oh, he might have been, you know, it was a near-death experience. No, he was already buried and Jesus raised him up. Things like that do not happen in our world today because it's not that specific time when God is doing something extra special like we see right here 2 ,000 years ago.

When God causes this virgin birth, He is showing the world that He's doing a very special work. The virgin birth would be considered a visible miracle. Things like these are way out of the ordinary. God wanted to show His people that something extraordinary was happening.

The Messiah, the God-man was coming into the world and God does the miracle of the virgin birth. Now, there's another reason why God performed a virgin birth for the arrival of the Christ coming into the world.

An important doctrine of Scripture to understand, it plays right into what we see in this text and that's the doctrine of original sin. Now, the doctrine of original sin teaches that Adam sinned and therefore every human after him is born a sinner.

We are sinners both by nature and by choice. The spiritual seed that comes from a man and woman is sinful and it's passed down to the child. So when a baby is conceived, the baby's soul is conceived in sin.

King David said in Psalm 51 5 that in sin his mother conceived him. I'm sorry, conceived him. Now, it's interesting that Scripture teaches something very interesting in Hebrews. What it teaches is that the Levites who came after Abraham were in the loins of Abraham.

Okay, so in other words, in some way the later Jewish people like the Levites were in Abraham and in some way every person in human history was in Adam when he sinned. Okay, so in the sense that we come from his seed, we were present when he sinned and therefore the human race sinned when he sinned and it's passed down to us.

Okay, now this is a great mystery but this is what the Bible teaches and so we accept it. In fact, Paul explains it very clearly in Romans 5 12 through 21. If you want to read it when he talks about how it is that we become sinners because of Adam's sin.

But as we look at the virgin birth, what we see is that Jesus is not conceived from the spiritual seed of Adam and Mary but rather the Holy Spirit formed a spiritual seed that is holy in Mary's womb. So every person on earth is born a sinner by nature except for one, Jesus.

And this is so important because verse 21 cannot happen without verse 20. Verse 21 is the most important verse in our text this morning. Okay, so if you have your Bibles with you, which I hope you do, you can underline verse 21.

That's the key verse of our passage. The angel says to Joseph in verse 21,. Do you see what I see here? Jesus is protected from inheriting a sinful nature by the Holy Spirit. And verse 21 says that he will save his people from their sins.

Why is Jesus being protected from sin at conception so important? Right, you see it. He can't sin to be our sin bearer. He needs to be perfect. In the Old Testament, when a Jew would offer up a sacrifice, a lamb, it would have to be one without blemish.

In the same way, Jesus is, as the New Testament says, he's the lamb without blemish or defect. He is perfect. He is sinless. And if Jesus ever sinned, he could not bear our sins. And we would all be hopelessly left in our transgressions only to await punishment.

Hebrews 7, 26 and 28 says this concerning Jesus. For it was indeed fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners and exalted above the heavens. He has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily.

First for his own sins and then for the sins of the people. Since he did this once for all when he offered up himself. For the law appointed men in their weakness as high priests. But the word of the oath, which came later than law, appoints a son who has been made perfect forever.

Jesus is able to bear our sins because of his perfection. He is given the name Jesus for a reason. You know what the name Jesus means? It means Yahweh saves, right? The name Yahweh is the name of God.

If you see the capital letters in the Old Testament, that's the name Yahweh. Yahweh saves. And before you come to faith in Christ, what position you are in is that you are in a position of bondage. And what scripture teaches here is that Jesus saves his people from their spiritual bondage.

When you weren't saved, you were a slave to sin. But when you come to faith in Christ, you become a slave to righteousness. So everybody has a master. It just depends who is your master. The Apostle Paul explains that in Romans 6, 17 and 18.

People think that they can run from God and do anything they want. They believe the lie from Satan that they are free. We talked about that in Sunday school today. How we take the gifts of God and make them sinful to say, well, we can make this more fun than what God designed these things to be.

And so people think they're free. They can go do what they want. But this could not be farther from the truth. When you don't have Christ, you are not free, but entirely in bondage. Now, what Matthew is teaching his readers is that Jesus is not only the Messiah, but Savior.

He made it abundantly clear last week that Jesus is the Messiah, the Davidic King. From whom, you know, he comes from the whole line of David. He's the key. He's the royal lineage. He's the one that it all points to.

And now in verse 21, we read that he will save his people from their sins. This would have been something that his Jewish readers needed to hear. In their mind, the Messiah was going to come and he was going to drive out all of their political enemies.

The Romans were going to be gone. Israel was going to be a superpower. They were going to reign over the earth. And that's not how he came the first time. As I mentioned two weeks ago in the introduction to Matthew, this was quite a revelation to the Jews that he was going to suffer.

He was going to be a suffering Messiah. Isaiah 53 told them that he would suffer for the sins of the people, but many refused to believe this because they had no concept from their sinful understanding of a king who would be brutally murdered.

But he was. Matthew makes it clear he is going to save his people from their sins and the means by which he's going to do it is bloody. Jesus will later tell his disciples that salvation is going to be accomplished through crucifixion, which is the most brutal form of death that man has ever invented.

Emmanuel, God With Us

Now, Matthew wants to make it abundantly clear to his readers that all of this is in fulfillment of the scriptures, specifically the Old Testament. So he writes in verse 23, Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God with us.

And so we have to find out where in the Old Testament is this quotation. And it comes from Isaiah 7 14. This is a direct fulfillment of that prophecy. And so even the virgin birth is predicted in the Old Testament.

What we see here is a name is attached to him. That name is Emmanuel. We don't have to wonder what it means because the text tells us what it means. It means God is with us. This title would tell the readers and it tells us that the Lord was doing a special work in the world.

The name God with us shows that God is faithful to fulfill his promises. In Isaiah's day, King Ahaz was looking for a sign that the Lord would not forsake Judah and the royal lineage from David. And the Lord's sign was that far off in the future, the Messiah would come from a virgin.

And he has told beforehand that God is with this lion. And he will bring it to pass this ultimate fulfillment of this Messiah born of a virgin. And when the angel visited Mary, the time of fulfillment has arrived.

The people of Matthew's day, both Jews and Gentiles reading this would say that God is with us. He has brought hope to the world. And that hope is that he sent the son of David, the son of God to save them from their sins, to save his people from their sins.

God does not leave sinners hopeless. In the Garden of Eden, when Adam sinned, the Lord gives humanity a glimmer of hope by saying that the seed of the woman will come and he will crush the head of the serpent.

The serpent is Satan. And of course, the seed of the woman is Jesus. Then throughout the Old Testament, this light shined and the prophecies giving hope to a fallen world that he was coming. And now as we see in the text today, he came and came to reign as the Old Testament foretold.

But the title Messiah or Christ, even though it does carry with it a royal connotation, before he could reign, he had to suffer. That's why in Hebrews 9 .28, the author of Hebrews says that Christ having been offered once to bear the sins of many will appear a second time, not to deal with sin like he did the first time.

But when he comes the second time, he's going to save those who are eagerly waiting for him. So in other words, Jesus first time here on Earth, he was on a mission and that mission was to rescue people from their bondage to sin, from their bondage to the world, from their bondage to the devil.

Ephesians 2 .1 -3 describes that anybody who doesn't know Christ is a bondage to Satan, the world, the sinfulness of the world and your own sinful nature. And this light, the light of Christ shines so bright.

It shined bright 2000 years ago and it shines bright today. In this dark and fallen world, Jesus is the only hope we have to be brought into the light, to remain with him in the light forever. And you might say, well, this sounds so exclusive.

It is. Jesus doesn't leave a room for any other way. He says, I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. We take him at his word. Jesus knows he's the only hope for humanity.

And that's why he came to die for sinners. I was explaining this to one of my friends yesterday who doesn't know the Lord. And I pray that he will believe in Christ and see how much he needs him. And what we have seen in this text today, our big idea is this.

As promised, the Messiah has arrived on a rescue mission to save sinners. And we've seen one reason why. His people have a bondage from which only he can free them. And if you are here today and you know the Lord, you've been freed.

That's why Jesus says in John 8, the truth sets you free and you will be free indeed. And when Jesus says the truth, he's referring to himself. He sets you free and you have a freedom that you never had before.

So Emmanuel is with us. God is with us. And he showed us this by sending his son. And he is working in the world. And he's calling people to join him, to leave their bondage to sin and be set free. Whenever you share the gospel with someone, that's what you're doing.

You're calling them to leave this bondage and to have this freedom in Christ. And maybe you're here today and you don't know the Lord. And I'm calling you right now through the word of God to embrace Jesus Christ, to be set free, to believe in him.

And I say this realizing that we're on, our days are numbered. We don't have unlimited time. There was a 19th century preacher named E .M. Bounds, who said that when he preached, he was a dying man preaching to dying people.

All right. And you can listen to old preachers who are long dead and you hear them share the gospel. And it's true, they're dead. And the people they were preaching to are now dead. And the question is, what did they do with those words that they heard?

And here we are now, though, we're not dead. We're alive. And so the question is, what do we do with the call? You know, I'm a dying man preaching to dying people. And as humans, as we look at our lives, it feels so permanent, right?

And then it passes and you wonder, where did it go? And we always like to plan ahead, which is good. We should plan ahead. But my concern is that people plan so much for this life, and they don't plan for eternity, which is forever.

I remember I saw a pastor. He gave an illustration one time and he brought it up on the stage and he had a rope, this long rope. And there was this little red tape at the end of this rope. And the rope just kept going and going and going.

And what was that little red tape in this illustration he gave? It's our life. So our life is this little red tape on this long piece of rope. And of course, the analogy falls apart because that rope goes forever, according to scripture, right?

Of course, ropes don't only go so long. But in the illustration, eternity is forever. It doesn't end. And our life is this little piece of time. And so the question is, what do we do with it? Do we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ?

Do we call others to believe in Him as well? And so it's so important that we don't squander the one life that God has given us and be lost forever. I mean, yes, plan for retirement. But a gazillion times more plan for eternity.

And that's where people make a huge mistake, focusing on that last 20 years of life instead of forever. You can't compare the two. So we see here today, Emmanuel is with us. He is the light shining in the dark place.

And He has died so that you might live if you will believe in Him. So are you with the light or with the darkness? Once God brings you to the light, He will never let you go. As Jesus said in John 8, 12, I am the light of the world.

Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life. And what concerns me, and Barb and I were talking about this this morning, what concerns me is that when you ask people, do you want to be on the side of good?

Pretty much everyone will say yes, right? It's hard to find someone who says, no, I want to be the bad guy. Most people will say, right? I want to be on the good side. But if you're not with Christ, you are not on the good side.

And this is quite a shocker to people who think they are good. Remember when the rich young ruler in the gospels, he comes to Jesus and he calls him, he says, good teacher. And of course, the rich young ruler didn't know that Jesus was God incarnate.

He just thought he was a good moral teacher. And what Jesus says to him is, no one's good except God alone. That's what Paul says, right? Romans 3, no one is righteous, not even one. Before you can join the good side, you need to realize that you are bad.

You need to realize that if God is not ruling your life, then Satan is. And I mentioned that the three bondages that we have, sin, Satan, and the world. But when God saves you, what happens is what the Apostle Paul describes in Colossians 1, 12 through 14.

This is such a wonderful passage here. He says, he has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.