WWUTT 095 Conclusion To the Genealogy (Matthew 1:12-17)

1 John 3 tells us how great is the love that the Father has lavished upon us that we might be called the sons and daughters of God.

And that is who we are. If we are in Christ Jesus, we are the adopted sons and daughters of God.

And we see how our lineage to this adoption is fulfilled in the genealogy of Christ when we understand the text.

Many of the Bible stories and verses we think we know, we don't. When we understand the text as an online ministry committed to teaching sound doctrine and exposing the faulty, visit our website at www .utt

.com. Now here's our host, Pastor Gabe Hughes. Thank you, Becky. And a Merry Christmas to everyone.

This will be the last episode of the podcast for the year. I'll be taking a couple of weeks off, then a special couple of episodes will be coming up at the start of the year.

And then a few changes to the program after that, which I'll talk about more in the coming weeks.

I don't actually even know all of the changes that are going to be made yet. We're still talking through those things and I've got some people praying for me to decide what

I want to do next and getting some advice from some different people. So you can be praying for me during that period of time as well.

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So catch the weekly sermons, same expositional preaching that I'm committed to doing that you hear me doing on this program, and you can listen there while I'm taking some time off.

Thank you for giving me that time and also for your continued support of this program.

Just listening to the program is a support. The reason why

I'm wanting to reevaluate some things that we're going to do here in the coming year, 2016, is because we have generated a certain listenership, and I feel a certain responsibility.

I want to make sure that we're doing this in the right way, and I'm also being the most faithful with the time that I need to be giving to my family and to my church.

So those are some things that I'm reevaluating before we get into next year, and I thank you for giving me the time to do that and still being a faithful listener to when we understand the text.

Matthew 1, verses 12 through 16 is where we're at, the final third of our study of the genealogy of Christ.

If you want to open up your Bibles and join with me before opening the text, reading the text, let's come to the

Lord in prayer. Our wonderful God, our great Father, we thank you again for an opportunity to read these scriptures.

May we not just brush off something like a genealogy, but understand the significance to it, that Christ is shining even there.

This is showing us how history was fulfilled, how your plan from before the foundation of the world came to be that the

Savior of the world would come and rescue us and give us adoption as sons and daughters into the family of God so that we might be called the children of God and inherit the things that you have given to your son, like eternal life and the very kingdom of God.

We praise you for these things, and we hope that our praise of you is enhanced all the more by learning the scriptures further and knowing something else about this

Savior whom we worship. And it is in his name that we pray, amen.

Matthew 1, verses 12 through 16. And after the deportation to Babylon, Jeconiah was the father of Shelteel, and Shelteel the father of Zerubbabel, and Zerubbabel the father of Abiud, and Abiud the father of Eliakim, and Eliakim the father of Azer, and Azer the father of Zadok, Zadok the father of Akeem, and Akeem the father of Eliud, and Eliud the father of Eleazar, and Eleazar the father of Mathan, and Mathan the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom

Jesus was born, who is called Christ. Now, there are fewer events in the

Old Testament that hold as much significance as the Babylonian exile, or described here in Matthew's genealogy as the deportation to Babylon.

Both the exile from Israel and the restoration of the Jews back to Israel fulfilled

Old Testament prophecy. Both things were predicted. Both events predicted. Now, there's some dispute as to when the

Babylonian exile began. There's different takes on this. The Babylonians invaded

Judah in 605 under King Nebuchadnezzar. We read that in Daniel chapter 1.

So, that's generally when I have described the exile as beginning. Then in 536, King Cyrus of Persia allowed the

Jews to return to Jerusalem, and they began the process of rebuilding the temple. So, that would be 70 years. There's another way that this period is considered.

If we started with the Babylonians capturing Jerusalem in 597, and then the

Jews rebuilt the temple in 516, that would also be a period of 70 years. The reason why

I don't like that version of measurement, of accounting for those 70 years, though, is because the

Jews were not exiled to the Babylonians during that entire period. The Babylonians fell to the

Persians in 539. So, after 539, there was no longer an exile. I don't think that 70 -year period is necessarily measured by the years of the temple.

I think it specifically pertains to the exile. So, that's why it makes more sense to say the exile began in 605.

There are others that will argue for 597 being the beginning of the exile.

That was when Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to Jerusalem, and then the Jews were deported. However, there were several deportations.

The first wave of deportations started in 605, when Nebuchadnezzar invaded Judah. Again, we read that in Daniel 1, and that's when

Daniel, along with Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, otherwise known as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—that's their more popular names,

I suppose—that was when they came into service in the king's court. The next wave of deportations occurred in 597 with the fall of Jerusalem, and the third wave occurred in 586, when

Jerusalem's walls and gates were burned. Now, there's some overlap between 2

Kings and Daniel. 2 Kings—or 2 Chronicles, if you go that route—doesn't end with the first deportation.

It actually ends with the third. Even though King Nebuchadnezzar invaded Judah in 605, there were still kings until Zedekiah, when

Jerusalem's walls were burned down in 586. Jehoiakim was king in 605, and he was the son of Josiah, Judah's last righteous king.

If you'll remember back to our previous lesson, yet we read in 2 Kings 23 .37

that Jehoiakim did what was evil in the sight of the Lord according to all that his fathers had done.

Wait, but Josiah was his father, and he was Judah's righteous king. He tore down every high place to every false god.

He defiled Tophet, the place where child sacrifice was being conducted. He obeyed the law of God and loved the

Lord with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength. And God blessed Josiah and included him in the line of the coming

Savior. We see his name mentioned in that second set of 14 generations in Matthew 1 .11. But in 2

Kings 23, when it says that Jehoiakim did what was evil according to the practices of his fathers, it's meaning not

Josiah, but the wicked kings before him like Ahaz and Manasseh. Here essentially is what the

Bible is telling us. If Jehoiakim truly was Josiah's son, then he would be doing the things that Josiah did.

But even though Jehoiakim was born of Josiah, he instead did what his wicked grandfathers did.

So he was more the son of Ahaz and Manasseh than he was the son of Josiah.

This is a theological principle that we see in both the Old and the New Testaments.

We talked about this earlier in John 8. Jesus said that if Abraham was your father, you would know who

I am and you would do the things that your father did. But because you don't know me and because you seek to kill me, your father is not

Abraham. Rather, your father is the devil who has been a murderer from the very beginning. And here in 2

Kings 23, we have it said that Jehoiakim's biological father, Josiah, was not truly his father, but he followed the footsteps of his wicked fathers,

Ahaz and Manasseh. So folks, if God is your father, you are a follower of Christ and you will do the things that Christ did.

If you are not a follower of Jesus, the Son of God, then you are not a follower of God.

There's some debate going on right now. Really, this debate is going on all the time, but it's resurfaced lately.

The debate about whether or not Christians and Muslims worship the same God. I tell you that a

Muslim cannot worship the same God because they deny that Jesus is his son.

Muslims consider it blasphemy to say that God has a son. And we see this in some denominations even here in America.

Some of the apostolic denominations that say that if you claim that Jesus is the son of God and there is a father, then you're blaspheming

God. There was a guy that was hanging out our church one time, and he would ask people, hey, have you been baptized in the name of the

Father and the Son of the Holy Spirit? Well, if you've been baptized in the name of the Trinity, the Father and Son and Holy Spirit, you've not been baptized in the right way.

You need to be baptized according to Jesus only. We've had people hanging outside our church doing that before.

But we read in 1 John 2, 23, no one who denies the son has the father.

Whoever confessed the son has the father also. This is a very important biblical point that we must come to understand.

We worship one God, but he is one God in three persons, father, son, and Holy Spirit. If we know the son,

Jesus Christ, then we also know the father. So back to the deportation.

After Jehoiakim, who was actually the second son of Josiah to reign in Judah, the first was Jehoaz, but he only reigned for three months.

Then Jehoiakim reigned in his place, and after him was his son Jehoiakim. So there's

Jehoiakim and Jehoiakin. This is the person who in Matthew's genealogy is named

Jeconiah. And Jeconiah, like his uncle Jehoaz, reigned only three months.

And he also did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. In Jeremiah 22, we read a message to the sons of Josiah.

And Jeconiah, who there is called Keniah, is on that list. And it says of Keniah there in Jeremiah 22, 30, thus says the

Lord, write this man down as childless, a man who shall not succeed in his days, for none of his offspring shall succeed in sitting on the throne of David and ruling again in Judah.

And indeed, what happened in Jeconiah's short reign is that he was taken prisoner and carried out of Jerusalem along with his mother and 10 ,000 other captives.

Only the poorest of the land remained. This was in 597 when Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem.

And Nebuchadnezzar placed Jeconiah's uncle, Madaniah, on the throne and changed his name to Zedekiah.

So now there's some debate. If Jeconiah was cursed as childless, how could he be mentioned in the genealogy of Christ?

This is one of those biblical inconsistencies that skeptics just love to harp on. Either Matthew's genealogy is wrong or the

Old Testament is wrong. Well, it's really all much ado about nothing, actually, because the explanation is quite simple.

In Jeremiah 2230, God said, write this man down as childless, a man who shall not succeed in his days.

For none of his offspring shall succeed in sitting on the throne of David and ruling again in Judah. So during Jeconiah's lifetime, none of his sons sat on his throne in his lifetime.

Note that Jeremiah says, write this man down as childless. But First Chronicles 3, 17 through 18 says that Jeconiah had seven sons.

One of them was Shelteel. So again, the context here is one of kingship. Jeconiah would not see any of his sons reign in his lifetime, nor would anyone sit on the throne of David and rule again in Judah.

In Jeremiah 2224, God likens Jeconiah to a signet ring on his hand, which he is going to tear off and give him into the hands of those who sought his life, which

God did do. Then in Haggai 223, God speaks to Zerubbabel, son of Shelteel or the grandson of Jeconiah and says that he will make him

Zerubbabel like a signet ring. For I have chosen you, declares the

Lord of hosts. Now, Zerubbabel is spoken of as a governor in the book of Haggai.

He's never really given the sovereignty of a king. Zerubbabel led the first group back to Israel and is mentioned in four post -exilic prophetic books,

Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai and Zechariah. Nehemiah would later be appointed governor by Atazerses I and his task would be to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.

But it was Zerubbabel who led them there. Now, some have argued that Zerubbabel was not a direct descendant of Shelteel, but rather he was

Shelteel's nephew. He was the son of Padaiah, Shelteel's brother, as it says in First Chronicles 319.

This would make sense since Luke does not credit Shelteel as Zerubbabel's father. Luke was tracing ancestry according to Leverite marriage, while Matthew was tracing rightful heirs.

This is why Luke traces descent from David through Nathan and Matthew does so through Solomon.

But either way, you still end up with Mary and Joseph being descendants of David. So there's there's not an inconsistency there.

That said, Zerubbabel may have only been the son of Shelteel in a rhetorical sense or perhaps adopted, but was not actually the direct offspring of Shelteel.

And the gap around Zerubbabel is kind of mysterious to me, so I'm not sure. But the whole thing surrounding Jeconiah, not as mysterious as the skeptics try to make it out to be.

We know pretty well, according to the context, what's being said there about Jeconiah. The genealogy does get kind of muddled after Zerubbabel, or at least like we don't see it with the same kind of clarity that we've seen every other chapter of the genealogy before that.

We read in First Chronicles 319 that the sons of Zerubbabel are Meshulam and Hananiah, and Shelemeth was their sister, and Hashabah, Ohel, Barakiah, Hasadiah, and Jushab has said.

But we don't see an account of Zerubbabel's heirs other than that. Which one of those sons is Abiud?

I have no idea. The last third of the genealogy is a little fuzzy for me, as it has been for many scholars.

There are multiple theories regarding the names mentioned there and their relationship with Luke's genealogy. So let's stick with Matthew 1.

We're going to look at the last verse here, verse 17. Matthew writes, So all the generations from Abraham to David were fourteen generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to the

Christ, fourteen generations. As you've probably been able to tell as we've been going through the chronology, the span between those three significant events, so from Abraham to David to the deportation to Babylon to the

Christ, the span in there have not been exactly fourteen generations each.

So why does Matthew say that there are fourteen generations? For a couple of reasons.

First of all, the ease of memorization. Keep in mind that during the time that Matthew was writing, people didn't walk around with Bibles under their arms like we can today.

People don't walk around with Bibles under their arms now, I guess. But I think I think it goes without saying that we have more ready access to the scriptures than they would have had in Bible times.

Definitely the completed scriptures. So things were often written and structured in a way that made it easy for people to memorize.

Here's the second reason, and it kind of ties in with the first. Numerology was significant in Hebrew writings.

Now, I'm not talking about numerology the way that you probably often hear the term used where people are searching for secret codes in the numbers in the

Bible or like trying to ascertain the exact day that Christ is going to return. That's not the numerology

I'm talking about. Numbers do have a certain significance in the Bible. For example, six is the number of man.

Seven is the perfect number of God. Eight is the number of new beginnings. Twelve is a prominent number. So as you have three generations of fourteen, you can also read this as six generations of seven, six, the number of man, seven, the number of God.

So this is the genealogical account of God becoming man. The word became flesh and dwelt among us.

I'm not being eisegetical or reading into the text something that isn't there. That is a very meaningful conclusion.

When we see discrepancies between Luke's genealogical account and Matthew's, it's inconceivable for us to think that one or both of them might be wrong.

On the contrary, they can both be right. The error is on our end, not understanding something about how they understood a perfect genealogy.

And the genealogy of Christ is perfect. It is God's perfect plan.

From before the foundation of the world, He placed His love and affection on us, loving us so much that He would send

His Son, Christ, to be our Savior, rescuing us from our sin. And through Him, we have the adoption of sons and daughters into the very family of God.

And I hope you are a follower of Christ. I am pleased to call you a brother and a sister in Christ.

Thank you so much for listening to the genealogy. And we'll talk to you again here in a couple of weeks.