Father in heaven, help us now as we learn, perhaps for the first time or become reacquainted for the hundredth time, this great, great story of salvation and the birth of our Savior and King, the Lord Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.
Follow along as I read from the Gospel according to Matthew, chapter 1, verses 1 through 17. Matthew 1, beginning at verse 1.
“The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
“Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, and Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Ram, and Ram the father of Amminadab, and Amminadab the father of Nahshon, and Nahshon the father of Salmon, and Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of David the king.”
“And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah, and Solomon the father of Rehoboam, and Rehoboam the father of Abijah, and Abijah the father of Asaph, and Asaph the father of Jehoshaphat, and Jehoshaphat the father of Joram, and Joram the father of Uzziah, and Uzziah the father of Jotham, and Jotham the father of Ahaz, and Ahaz the father of Hezekiah, and Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, and Manasseh the father of Amos, and Amos the father of Josiah, and Josiah the father of Jechoniah and his brothers, at the time of the deportation to Babylon.”
“And after the deportation to Babylon: Jechoniah was the father of Shealtiel, and Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel, and Zerubbabel the father of Abiud, and Abiud the father of Eliakim, and Eliakim the father of Azor, and Azor the father of Zadok, and Zadok the father of Achim, and Achim the father of Eliud, and Eliud the father of Eleazar, and Eleazar the father of Matthan, and Matthan the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ.”
“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.”
Let me start this sermon with a big question. It’s a question that I tried out on my 8-year-old this week and she got the right answer, so I hope you can as well. Who is the most influential person in the history of the world?
Now that is a ridiculously massive question and you might think that then there would be dozens and hundreds of possible right answers, but no. Really for people of any religious persuasion, if you have heard of this person, you are likely to conclude there is really only one satisfactory answer, no matter your own religious persuasion, no one in the history of the entire human race has been more consequential than Jesus of Nazareth. Whether you are a Christian here this morning, you’re investigating what the Bible is about, or someone just brought you here and you think it’s all nonsense, you really have to conclude that no one has been more consequential in the history of the world than Jesus of Nazareth.
The religion centered on His teaching and those religious persons like us who worship Him as Savior and Lord, Christianity we call it, is the largest religion in the world. The best-selling book of all time by a very wide margin is the Bible. When you see New York Times bestseller list, just know they don’t even count the Bible because if you added up all the translations of it, it would always be at the top of that list, somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 billion copies.
Perhaps the greatest empire in the history of the world, the Roman Empire, was conquered by Christianity and that apart from armies. The most advanced, most prosperous, most free peoples in the last 500 years have been those from majority Christian nations. Even today many of us, if the academic fads and fashions have not pushed this out entirely, many of us still mark the epoch of the centuries with B.C., before Christ. A.D., Anno Domini, the year of our Lord. That Jesus is the very lever, the fulcrum point for all of human history.
Even though the holiday has no doubt become secularized in many ways, commercialized, we lament that, yet all around the world throughout this month, people will celebrate Christmas and everyone who says “Merry Christmas,” every song in the mall… Now I don’t know about that song in the grocery that we sang earlier. Nathan goes to some fancier grocery stores that I do. I haven’t heard it at Food Lion, but I will listen for it. It’s a good song. But you will hear it and it will be there in many of the longstanding movies, you will hear “Merry Christmas.” That very word “Christmas” is testifying to the enduring worldwide influence of Jesus.
This passage, which we’ve heard sung and just read, may seem like a rather boring, tedious way to introduce the most important person in the history of the world. But Matthew begins his gospel, his good news in this way for a reason. He wants to announce to his readers, mainly as best as we can figure Jewish readers, but he also by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit wants to announce to all of us, right here at the very beginning, who this person of Jesus is, where He comes from, and more so next week, why He has come into the world. So this is absolutely essential to the story that we celebrate all month long.
Three headings this morning from this passage. One – a revealing title. That’s there in verse 1. Second heading – a theological genealogy. That’s verses 2 through 16. Then finally in verse 17 a curious summary. I hope these three headings will help show to us by the end why this is here and what it teaches us about the most important person who has ever walked on this earth.
So first heading. Look at verse 1. We have a revealing title. Now here’s one occasion where it helps if you might hear the title given in its original Greek. The New Testament written in Greek. You can make out many of these Greek words just by hearing them. Here’s what we have in verse 1: Biblos geneseos Iesou Christou huiou Dauid huiou Abraam. You can hear it. The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
Maybe you heard there in that second Greek word “biblos” Bible, book, scroll, translated here “the book.” And in that second word geneseos, or if you put a different sound on the G, genesis. This is in fact the very Greek word used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament to title the very first book of the Bible, the genesis of Jesus Christ. That’s the Greek word that is used. It’s not having to wax poetic to think that a Jew hearing this read or reading this would have immediately understood that there was an allusion there when the second word is genesis.
It’s familiar to all of us who have grown up with the Bible, would have been familiar to any Jew. If somebody were reading to you a story and it began by marking out the time by saying something like “four score,” now as soon as you marked out “years” with that old word “score,” which means 20 years, you would immediately think of Abraham Lincoln, or you’d at least think “I learned that at some point. Who was that again? Abraham Lincoln.” Or the language “we the people.” Or “in the course of human events.” Or if somebody used as a title “The Declaration of,” anyone who has learned American history, these are very familiar words, phrases, titles.
So no one would have had to wonder where did that come from. It’s right there, the book of the genesis.
In fact, it’s these two words there, biblos geneseos, occur just like that at the very beginning in the book of Genesis. Some of you may remember that Genesis has 50 chapters but those chapters are a later addition to try to make sense, chapters and verses. Originally they didn’t have chapters and verses. Originally, and you can still see this in the Hebrew that the book of Genesis is divided up into 10 sections with the Hebrew word toledoth, which is often translated “generations.” Toledoth is that Hebrew word.
So 10 times in the book of Genesis it says the toledoth, these are the generations, that the book of Genesis is like a long rope with 10 knots along the way telling the story of the patriarchs and it begins, and here it is in the Greek, translated from Hebrew into the Greek in the Septuagint in Genesis 2:4. It says biblos geneseos ouranou kai ges, ouranou heavens, kai and, ges earth.
So in Genesis 2:4 that same phrase is used, biblos geneseos, a book of the generations. A book of the genesis. And the very first time in Genesis we have it, it’s a book of the generations of the heavens and the earth because it’s telling the story of creation.
So it stands to reason that Matthew, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, is doing something quite deliberate here to say this now is the story of a new creation, a new genesis.
The word translated “book” could refer to this opening genealogy, it could refer to the infancy narrative, it could refer to the first four chapters until His public ministry, or it could be all of those and also a way of speaking of the entire Gospel, Bible even though the entire Gospel is not a generation, yet this entire Gospel is a book to tell us about the new world that has been ushered in with Jesus Christ. You think of how Luke, who wrote the book of Acts, and Luke, who wrote the Gospel of Luke, he says in Acts that in his former book he wrote about all that Jesus began to do and teach, so Acts then is the continuation of what Jesus began to do and teach. So if Luke can refer to his gospel as I’m just telling you what Jesus began to do and teach, then surely Matthew can refer to his gospel, the whole thing, as a book of the beginning. A book of the genesis.
We see throughout Matthew that his gospel in particular is a story about the new beginning that is found in Jesus. We see this over and over again and especially in just the first few chapters. Think about it. Matthew deliberately wants to tell us about Jesus, who is a new Moses. Moses, who had to be hidden away by his mother because of a jealous king who was trying to kill the infant sons, just like Mary and Joseph had to hide Jesus away. Moses, who will receive the Law and be the supreme lawgiver from the mountain in the Old Testament; Jesus as a better Moses will in chapter 5 be given the Law and deliver the Sermon on the Mount. He is a new, better Moses. He is fulfilling a new, better Israel: Out of Egypt I have called My Son. So just as Israel came out of Egypt, so now Jesus as fulfilling God’s perfect Son, as a new Israel constituted around His person, He, too, comes out of Egypt.
Just as Israel passed through the waters of the Red Sea, and the New Testament says it was a kind of baptism in the Red Sea, so the Lord Jesus passes through the waters of the Jordan River at His baptism. One could argue that the big idea in this entire Gospel is this new creation. It’s not without accident, and surely the Israelites would have scratched their heads and say what is He doing that He appoints, not randomly, 12 disciples, just as Israel had 12 tribes. All of these in the first chapters of Matthew are telling us what sort of person Jesus is.
We have five explicit fulfillment or quotation passages in this opening section, chapter 1:22, chapter 2 verse 6, verse 15, verse 17, verse 23. There’s another fulfillment passage in chapter 4:14. There’s another Old Testament quotation in 3:3. In chapter 4 Jesus three times quotes Deuteronomy to the devil in the wilderness. And, yes, Jesus, who was led into the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights, and He is going to succeed where the first Israel failed as they wandered in the wilderness for 40 years. We see that Jesus, chapter 3:15, says he must be baptized in order to fulfill all righteousness. Very deliberately this Gospel is structured, especially these opening chapters, with all of these allusions, and these direct quotations, to who that in the story of Jesus Christ we have the story of a new Moses, we have a story of a new Adam, we have a story of a new Israel, we have the story of a new creation.
Look back at verse 1. Three things in particular in this verse, three titles that are ascribed to Jesus. Remember, Jesus was one of the most common Jewish names. It was a rendering of Joshua, and it was one of the probably top three most common. This was an ordinary name, which is why so often you have to say Jesus of Nazareth, which Jesus you’re talking about. Notice what it says about this Jesus.
First, He is the Christ. Not a surname, not a last name, but a title meaning “anointed,” meaning “messiah.”
Many of us are so familiar with this it becomes just a synonym for Jesus, but don’t miss the explosive power, the controversy, the exhilaration that must have leapt off the page with this word, the book of the genesis of Jesus the Messiah. He’s come. He’s arrived.
Then it says He is the son of David. Seventeen times we have this language in Matthew, more than any other gospel, to tell us that He is the fulfillment of the promise that was made in 2 Samuel 7:14, repeated elsewhere, that David would never fail to have a son sit on the throne, that there would be a ruler to come, just like it had been prophesied in Genesis 49, that there would be a lion of the tribe of Judah.
If there was one aspect of the messianic expectation that most people understood, because there was a lot of confusion and we see that lots of things they didn’t understand, if there was one thing they did grasp, it was that the Messiah would come and He would be Messiah ben David, He would be a son of David.
So Jesus here recorded by Matthew is the Christ, He is the son of David, working backward He is also the son of Abraham. The Davidic covenant fulfilled in Christ. The Abrahamic covenant finding its fulfillment in Christ. You could say that the Davidic covenant was to tell the people of Israel here is your long-awaited King, and the Abrahamic covenant fulfilled in Jesus is to tell the whole world here is the One through whom the nations will be blessed. A Jewish focus and a global focus. As God promised in Genesis 12 and then confirms in Genesis 15 and ratifies in Genesis 17 that Abraham, this pagan from Ur of the Chaldees, God comes to him unilaterally and says, “I want to bless you and through you all the nations of the world will be blessed.” They had been waiting for the promised child of Abraham so that through faith in Him all the peoples of the earth could be blessed.
So these are not throw-away designations, but rather filled with explosive power that this Jesus is the Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham, the One we had been waiting for, the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, the promised Deliverer, the long-expected child of Abraham, and the Davidic King. The true Israel, the true Adam, the true Moses, the true Son, the true King as opposed to Herod. It’s amazing. Jesus of Nazareth.
It’s like a rumor circulating among us. Did you guys hear that Mike from Albemarle is the Savior of the world? Now if there happens to be a Mike from Albemarle here, it’s not really you, but that’s just… It’s just Jesus, another name Mike, Jim, not from Charlotte, not from New York City, not from Boston, from Nazareth. The scandal of it. Let it rest on you. Really? Mike? From that little town? From out there? Really? Yeah. I think so. We’ve got a book that makes the case that he’s the one we’ve been waiting for our whole lives, for centuries, for millennia.
So this is a very significant revealing title, not only for this section, but I think in some sense for the whole book, this book of Matthew, is to tell us here’s the genesis, here’s the new beginning that we have in Jesus.
Second heading for this sermon. We have a deliberate or a theological genealogy.
Some of you are into genealogy. Had a relative of mine who passed on to me all of the work that he’s done on the DeYoung name. It’s very interesting, as long as you try to find people that are famous rather than infamous. Some of you may do this for a hobby, but by and large it’s not the sort of thing that we do when we introduce ourselves. Yet it was terribly important to the Jews.
We see in Ezra 2:62 some of the returning exiles could not find their registration in the genealogy and so they were considered unclean for the priesthood. In the first century, Josephus, the historian, the Jew, when he begins his autobiography he does so by tracing his genealogy. Where have you come from? Who’s your father and your grandfather and your great-grandfather? And you throw this in relief with Herod who’s in the background, and we’ll come more to Herod in a couple of weeks. Herod was embarrassed to be only partially Jewish at best. According to some accounts, he ordered that the official royal genealogies be destroyed. He came from a family that had converted to Judaism but was certainly not fully Jewish, this Herod who could be cruel, paranoid, vindictive, often disliked by Pharisees, Sadducees, and most of the Jews. Yet he hailed himself as the great king of the Jews.
So we can understand why someone with a vindictive, paranoid streak like Herod would get very nervous to hear that there might have been One born among his people that others are claiming is the Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
This genealogy does not have every name that stretches back. In fact, Luke’s genealogy goes all the way back to Adam. There are a number of differences between Luke’s genealogy and Matthew’s genealogy. There’s lots of possibilities why we have those differences. Certainly one is that this is deliberately a royal list. This is a royal list tracing the kingly lineage from David through to Joseph. Others have said over the years that one goes through Joseph and one goes through Mary, both are descendants of Judah and of David. Whatever the differences between the two, they can be harmonized.
What we want to notice here is that this is a stylized genealogy. Matthew is not pretending to give every name. This isn’t because he was making a mistake, no one would have thought oh, you’ve missed something. The word “father” simply can be understood to mean an ancestor, a father, a grandfather, or the old language of “he begat.” It just means he is the one from whom this next one came.
So there are a number of kings who are missing, Ahaziah, Joash, Amaziah, because this is theological in purpose. Jesus was a royal Son. Jesus was a son of David. Jesus was a son of Abraham. And certainly part of the reason for the genealogy is simply to show us that Jesus was a real son.
This is not like later Gnostics would have almost some kind of extraterrestrial, strange being who has no resemblance to a real flesh and blood human being. Think of it. By tracing out every one of these names, every Jew understood every one of these names, this was a real flesh and blood person, born of a real mother. Then you come to Jesus. He, too, is a real flesh and blood human being.
I was listening this week to I don’t know how many years old it is, but R. C. Sproul preach on this passage and he told the story of a missionary woman that he knew, a translator who said that she was translating the Gospel of Matthew. Couldn’t do the whole thing at once and didn’t include this genealogy and sent it off to be published and the edition came back and it fell like a thud. No one was that interested among the tribe that she had been laboring. She was very discouraged to see the so much of her life’s work seemed to go unnoticed. Sometime later he says there was a second edition, and this second edition translating Matthew’s Gospel included this first section, Matthew’s genealogy.
As he tells the story, relaying from this woman, she said that the chief of the tribe called her in at once, said I must talk to you. He said what is this? She said, well, what is what? What do you mean? He said I’m reading this through. You mean to tell me that this Jesus you have been telling me about for the last 10 years was a real person? He was a real human being? I thought you were telling us stories, myths, just like we pass down from our own spirit world, but you’re telling us that this Jesus the Christ was a real flesh and blood human being. As Sproul tells the story, he says that chief eventually turned to Christ, so did many people among his tribe.
This is to tell us many deep theological things about Jesus, but don’t miss the most obvious, that this Jesus that we sing about was someone you could have touched, seen. In fact, we know the prophecy that He had no form or appearance that we should be attracted to Him. He wasn’t winning beauty contests, unless perhaps you had the eyes of faith to see the beauty about Him. But He would have gone about looking like any other Jewish man of the day. Scientists estimate that a first century Jew might have been maybe 5 foot 3, 5 foot 4, not very tall. Now it’s really the Lord’s kindness, I think, that we don’t know, otherwise that image would become to us a kind of idolatrous image.
But we must realize that though we don’t have an image of what this Jesus, our Savior, looked like, He could be seen. He could be felt. He could be touched. He was real. He is real.
Notice in this genealogy, perhaps you’ve had this pointed out to you before, you’ve noticed that there are four women leading up to Mary, who is the fifth woman. Five women who are mentioned in this genealogy. Now that’s entirely unheard of. Some of the genealogies in the Old Testament also highlight some women. But to highlight them so prominently, and these in particular. Notice, it’s not as if they’re saying, “And the Abraham with his wife Sarah, and Isaac and Rebekah, and Jacob and Leah.” No, the women highlighted here are not the great matriarchs of the faith.
First mentioned is Tamar. Tamar is the one who seduced her father-in-law Judah. Now the story in Genesis doesn’t actually find fault with her, it finds fault with Judah because he would not give to her his son like he should have, so she dressed up like a prostitute so she could sleep with her father-in-law so that she could have a son and that son will be one of this line of the tribe of Judah.
Rahab. You’ve heard about her in Joshua. She was a Canaanite. She was a prostitute. She’s in this line.
Ruth, a Moabitess, and though she likely didn’t commit sexual sin, there certainly would have been rumors. It’s sort of ambiguous when it says when she laid at Boaz’s feet and she uncovered his feet. Some people think that can be a euphemism for nakedness. I don’t think we have to interpret it that way, but certainly some people would have wondered what happened there when Ruth lay at his feet in the middle of the night and uncovered those feet of Boaz.
Then there’s Bathsheba. She’s not even mentioned by name. She’s called the wife of Uriah. She slept with David. Text in Samuel doesn’t fault her; it certainly faults David. Don’t know what to degree of any she was responsible. But he took her, he lay with her, he committed adultery with her.
You look at each of these women and certainly one of the things we can note about all four is that there, if not sexual scandal, there was at least rumors of impropriety. Certainly Tamar dressing up like a prostitute, having sex with her father-in-law; Rahab was or had been a prostitute; Ruth, some sort of rumors perhaps with what happened there with Boaz; and Bathsheba, even if not her fault, was in an adulteress relationship with David. Suspicion all around of impropriety.
Now as part of the lesson we’re to learn there, that Jesus came for all those who struggle with sin, even sexual sinners, certainly that’s one of the implications we can draw from it, but even more than that this is paving the way to introduce Mary. Mary, as we know and as we’ll see, did not commit any sexual sin. She was conceived, overpowered, overshadowed by the Holy Spirit and gave birth as a virgin. There was no sin in that conception.
So the reason for pointing out these four women, all who had at least rumors of sexual impropriety if not sexual sin itself, is not only to say there’s hope for sexual sinners among us, that’s true, but to say look at these women in Jesus’ genealogy, in some ways these great heroines of the faith. They had rumors, they had scandal attached to their names.
So when we come to Mary and the rumors that fly about her, let’s look deeper and understand what really happened with Mary. In fact, the language is really deliberate. If you notice all throughout the genealogy, the father of, the father of, the father of, and then look at verse 16 – Jacob the father of Joseph, now we switch, the husband of Mary, of whom, again if you look in the Greek, the “of whom” is feminine, that is feminine, we don’t have this in English but the gender of this preposition, of whom, tells us that is explicitly of Mary.
So in two different ways it’s making clear that Jesus did not come from Joseph. Joseph the husband, so there’s one separation, of Mary, from whom, feminine, that is only Mary. It’s making absolutely clear that Jesus did not come from any sexual union between Joseph and Mary. Joseph was a kind of father, earthly father, but he was not a biological father to Jesus. The genealogy makes this crystal clear, what will become even clearer next week with the angelic announcement and the birth of Christ.
So these four women are paving the way to introduce Mary and the miraculous circumstances around her conception.
But also, and just as important, perhaps more important for Matthew’s purposes, is that one can make a very good case that all four of these women leading up to Mary were not Jewish. Certainly Rahab was a Canaanite, Ruth was a Moabite, Bathsheba you could debate whether or not she was Jewish but when she married Uriah the Hittite she would have become considered a Hittite woman, and Tamar it doesn’t say explicitly but most scholars think that she, too, came from among the Canaanite people.
If that’s the case, then all four, the women that Matthew by the Holy Spirit chooses to mention in this genealogy, before he gets to Mary, are four non-Jews, or at the very least they are certainly four foreign women, four outsiders.
All of this is preparing the way for the conclusion. This is just the beginning, in chapter 1. And when you know Matthew 28, you know that already the seeds are being sown, that it will make sense before Jesus ascends into heaven, that He says, “Go and make disciples” what? “Of all nations.” It’s right here in chapter 1. These four women highlighted in his genealogy were all outsiders, strangers at first to the covenants and to the promise.
Even when you look at the men here. Yes, there are some that we consider great heroes, David and Abraham, but even David and Abraham were very flawed – lying, adultering with David, murdering. And that’s the good people in this line. Hezekiah ended his reign blinded by pride, Jehoshaphat was good but mixed, and then you have the scoundrels like Rehoboam, Abijah, Ahaz, the brothers at the time of the exile. This is not an illustrious group of men or women with which to be connected.
So surely you see what Matthew is doing here with his genealogy. It is a deliberate genealogy. It is a theological genealogy. Not only to tell us that He comes from David and from Abraham, but to say look, put together the list of these people, the men, and especially these women, telling us, friends, you may have a bad reputation, you may be a Jew or a Gentile, you may be rich or poor, you may be a king or you may be a vagabond on the side of the road, you may be a man or a woman, you may have people talking ill about you, you may be for all that you feel a great outsider to God and His people and His goodness and His promise, and yet this genealogy tells you God has made a way for you to be a part of His family.
You’ve perhaps heard it before from this text, but you need to hear it again. Jesus invites you to come. There is no one so mighty and important among us that there is not someone in this list mightier than you. You’re not David. There is no one so sinful, so low, so outcast among us that you cannot find a name in this list that is lower than you are, to tell us that Jesus came for the great and the lofty and the high and the exalted. He came for the humble, the poor. He came for all of those who are broken-hearted enough to say I am not right and I need a Savior. I am an outsider and I want to come inside.
Surely some of you will have during this holiday season, as much as you love your family and don’t nudge, don’t do any elbows right now, don’t look, just think to yourself, so many people have some level of embarrassment, some level of shame. Not the people sitting next to you, of course, but you don’t have to go very far in any of our families. There’s sin, there’s rebellion, there’s awkwardness, there’s brokenness, there’s sometimes.
Moms can feel this very, very poignantly, there’s a real sense of embarrassment. Did I do something? What happened? Why isn’t this better? Everyone else when you get the Christmas card, everyone can look good in a Christmas card. Well, actually not our Christmas card, but a lot of people can look good in a Christmas card and can give you a few paragraphs about their life and can put this shining picture in front of the tree on Instagram and there it is. You feel like you’re the only one who’s got everything so messed up. Well, you’re not.
Jesus came from a family with a pretty gnarled, knotted up family tree. That’s the point. He came to save not the righteous but sinners. It is a very deliberate theological, stylized genealogy to show us where He came from and the sort of people for whom He came.
Then here’s the final heading. Verse 17. I thought about changing the order because that last part I felt like really, that part could really preach, but I decided to stay with the order in the text even though it seems a bit odd. Because you have all of this, such a great crescendo of whom Jesus was born who is called Christ, and then you have a rather curious summary. That’s the third heading. A curious summary. Why does Matthew wrap up this section by pointing out somewhat strangely that these three paragraphs, these three sections, each equal 14 generations? Why point that out? Especially, if you read any of the commentaries they’ll tell you this, or if you’ve just counted them up right now by yourself, they don’t exactly add up to 14, or at least not obviously.
Now you could say, well, it’s rounding and that’s well within how we might round with an important number. Or perhaps better is to argue that Matthew understood that some of these names at the front and the end would be counted once and some would be counted twice. So Abraham to David gets you 14 if you count Abraham and David; David to Jechoniah gets you 14 if you don’t count David; and then Jechoniah to Jesus gets you 14 if you do count Jechoniah again.
I don’t think Matthew forgot something. I think he understood certain ones. You can think of different theological reasons perhaps he did it. But in his mind it’s all very clear, there are three sections here and each of them equal 14. So why? Why belabor this point? Why make this stylized list three groups of 14? And then why wrap up the whole genealogy with this summary?
Well, there are few possible reasons. One has to do with this ancient practice called gematria, g-e-m-a-t-r-i-a. Gematria, gematria, Jumanji. There it is. Gematria. It’s very simple and it’s not a hidden code. This was very common. There’s lots of examples of people doing this in the ancient world and among the Jews, that each letter of the alphabet would correspond to a number and so people’s names had numerical values. So D-V-D, David, because the vowel points come later, it would have been just those three consonants, D-V-D. D, as we know it in English, is the fourth letter of the alphabet, conveniently dalet is also the fourth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Then V, later for us, is vav, that’s sixth. So D-V-D is 4+6+4, 14.
It likely wouldn’t have been obscure. Everyone would have, many people at least, would have had some understanding of the numerical equivalent of their name.
Just for fun I looked at K-V-N. K is 11, V is 22, N is 14, which equals 47, which is my age. [sound effect] Wow. This is my golden gematria birthday. None of you got me any presents so far. I have six months left to celebrate.
So it’s not obscure to think that 14 would cement in their mind yes, that’s the David number is 14. That’s likely part of it. But also think about what you know about Bible numbers. Everyone intuitively grasps 7 and 14, of course, is double 7, 7 being that number we say it’s a number of perfection or completion. It all goes back to creation – six days and the seventh day He rested. This is the whole cycle of our lives. It’s also the cycle because of God’s creation and their lives, these 6+1, these 7s. So 7 is the most important number, 14 is double 7.
Also think 14 x 3. So 3 groups of 14, 14 x 3 is 42. This is stretching you a little bit. If you were here for the Revelation series, you may recall that 42 was an important number repenting the Church age in the book of Revelation. Revelation 13:5 for example talks about 42 months in which the Church is both protected and persecuted. 42 months being a way of saying 3-1/2 years, sometimes time, times, and half a time in Revelation, sometimes it’s called 1,260 days because that’s 42 x 30. All of those 42 months are a sign of the Church age.
Now do I think that the original readers were saying I’m going to do 14 x 3 and this equals a book that might not have been written yet 42. No. But I think it is possible that these sort of numerical resonances would have been among the Jewish people to understand that 42 speaks to an age. Just like John later in Revelation will 30-day prescription this Church age as 42 months. So we have 14 + 14 + 14 is an age, which is telling us, here’s the point, that with the coming of Christ we have a new age that has dawned.
They might also understand that three sets of 14 is the same as six sevens. Do the math. Take each one in half, six sevens, and everyone understood that seven was a special number because of creation, completion, perfection. So intuitively if you have a series, three 14s, or understand it as six 7s, every Jew could have, should have felt in their bones, wait, there’s been 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7. That’s six. When’s the seventh 7 coming? Well, here it is with the coming of Christ.
All of these, whether it’s one of these or it’s all of these together to show that Jesus is the son of David, 42 is an age, or these six 7s, which are leading us inexorably to say well, when will the Sabbath come? When will the seventh of the seventh come? The day of deliverance, the day of rest, the day of salvation, the day of comfort.
Matthew ends this genealogy by telling us these 14 generations in these three sections to build what was already there for the faithful Jew, this anticipation, this really is the One who is bringing us into a new world, a new existence.
Friends, whether you realize it or not, whatever your level of faith or no faith at all, the world changed irrevocably changed at the birth of Jesus Christ. There truly was B.C. and A.D. No one has been more consequential in human history than Jesus. People talk about, well, who are the most transformative presidents – Lincoln, FDR, Reagan. Some people say it will be Trump.
All insignificant compared to Jesus of Nazareth. A real human being, but unlike any other human being. A divine man. A promised child. The long-awaited deliverer. The King, the Chosen One.
It’s like hearing your whole life about prophecies that are too good to be true and all of a sudden you hear Mike from Albemarle has arrived. Jesus of Nazareth, and it’s too good not to be true. The world began a new beginning with the genesis of Jesus. He is calling you to come, to repent, to believe, and you, too, can have a new beginning in Jesus.
Let’s pray. Father in heaven, we give thanks for Your Holy, inspired, inerrant Word. Instruct us in it. Give us great joy with these glad tidings to think again or for the first time on this Jesus. May we rejoice with heart and soul and voice. We pray in His name. Amen.