Chapter 28: The Secret in Jesus' Bloodline
How Matthew Arranges Jesus' Genealogy
Jesus is the Promised Davidic King
In the Jewish ordering of the books of the Bible, the Old Testament closes with the book of 1 and 2 Chronicles. As we saw last time, this makes a lot of sense, and in fact, if I had great sway in the world, I would reorder our Bibles to print them with Chronicles at the end of the Old Testament! The book of Chronicles is a theological reflection on why Israel has failed as the means by which God would bring about His promises to one day do something about the curse of sin. The book Chronicles how all the kings of Israel had failed to fulfill the promise of a Messianic King, who would come to fulfill God’s promises to Adam, Abraham, and David.
God had promised to Adam that one day a snake stomper would come to undo the curse of sin. He had promised Abraham that all the nations would be blessed through his offspring. He had promised David that one of his descendants would reign on the throne forever. As the Old Testament closes, these promises are unfulfilled. The Messianic King, from David’s line, who would bless the world by undoing the curse of sin had not appeared. The Old Testament ends as a story without an end.
That is where Matthew’s Gospel begins.
When you flip over the page from the Old Testament, into the first page of the New Testament, the first thing you are confronted with is the Genealogy of Jesus. We have finally reached the point in our story where we actually meet Jesus. As Matthew opens his Gospel, he starts by establishing the fact that Jesus is the promised Messiah, the promised Davidic King, the promised one who would undo the curse of sin. So, the first thing Matthew does is to outline Jesus’ genealogy so that his readers can see how Jesus fits into the story of Israel.
He arranges a selection of Jesus’ ancestry into this list of three sets of 14 people. There are 14 generations between Abraham and David, 14 between David and Jeconiah (the descendant around at the time of the exile), and 14 generations between Jeconiah and when Jesus was born. This seems very convenient and clean-cut: I mean it is possible that God could have arranged things that there would be exactly 14 people between Abraham and David, but in fact he didn’t. If you read Luke’s genealogy you will see that it is different from Matthew’s. That’s not because either of them was wrong - it is because they were writing with different purposes in mind. Luke is writing from more of a Greek world-view, a historical account of Jesus’ life. Matthew is writing to prove Jesus is the Davidic Messiah-King Israel has been waiting for. He, therefore, chooses a select genealogy to prove that Jesus comes from David’s line.
The way Matthew does this is through a pretty neat trick in this genealogy, called gematria. Gematria is the system of assigning numerical values to the letters and characters in an alphabet. It is often used to associate words and phrases with specific numeric meanings. When you add up the values of David’s name, you get the number 14. So what Matthew does is not only to write a western-thinker’s list of ancestors. He is using a gematria to link Jesus to David. If you are playing along at home, you will also notice that there are a “David” amount of people in each of the three lists, and actually David himself is the 14th person in the list.
So Matthew opens his Gospel by saying in effect: Do you want to know who Jesus is? David, David, David. He was clearly linking Jesus to David in a way only an accountant could appreciate! Nonetheless, there it is: The New Testament is the story of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
The Blood of the King
We should also pay attention to who makes the cut into Matthew’s list, who did he choose to include, who made the cut?
We have the obvious people: Abraham - Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham that the whole world would be blessed through him and his offspring. Isaac is there - the baby born by a miracle to a barren woman in her later years. Jesus too would be born by a miracle. Jacob - the first Israelite. Jesus is the true Israelite, the only one who truly lived as God intended. Judah is there - the tribe of Israel who stayed true to the worship of God when the rest of Israel abandoned God. Jesus is the true one who never worships idols. Boaz is there, the kinsman redeemer, who looked after the widow Ruth and became the ancestor of David. Jesus too would one day become a redeemer of everyone, and he would look after the widows, the orphans, and the abandoned people of this world. Of course, we have the kings, David and Solomon, the greatest king and the wisest king. Jesus would be greater and wiser than both put together.
However, that is really about it in terms of good stuff. There are a good deal of hopeless bad people in the list too. Rehoboam - instrumental in the civil war that split Israel apart. Ahaz, who, according to my Bible dictionary, “has the dubious distinction of being one of the worst apostate kings in Jewish history.” He set up pagan shrines all over Jerusalem and offered sacrifices to the pagan gods of Syria. He also led Israel into political, moral, and religious chaos. After him comes Manasseh - probably the worst of Israel’s kings. He heavily promoted the idol worship of the Assyrians, but he also instituted human sacrifices, necromancy, consulting dead spirits, magic, and divination. He did more evil than the nations who inhabited Israel’s land before him. And in fact, his reign is summed up in 2 Kings 21:16 as follows:
2 Kings 21:16 CSB
16 Manasseh also shed so much innocent blood that he filled Jerusalem with it from one end to another. This was in addition to his sin that he caused Judah to commit, so that they did what was evil in the Lord’s sight.
All throughout the Bible, God often describes idol worship as adultery, as sexual promiscuity on behalf of his people, so it is not surprising that the women listed in Jesus' genealogy remind us of this too. The first is Tamar - a woman who had an incestuous relationship with Judah, her father-in-law, and bore the twins Perez (also found here in the genealogy) and Zerah. There is Rahab, the prostitute. We have Ruth, the Moabitess. Moabites were known by Israelites as people of sexual immorality, and she did spend a “rather shady night at Boaz’s feet" which many interpret as a euphemism for something else entirely. Then there is Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, included in this genealogy because of David’s adultery.
So what should we learn from this?
The list we end up with here is very different from similar lists of superheroes in mythological accounts. Unlike a character that secretly has the undiluted pure blood of royals flowing through his veins, Jesus’s bloodline leaves much to be desired. So why did God sovereignly include them in the list? Why did they make the cut?
Because Jesus came to redeem these kinds of people.
Sinful, immoral outcasts like Tamar and Rahab and David and Manasseh. People like you and like me. Jesus’ heritage makes him someone who can actually be a blessing to all nations. His heritage makes him one of all of us. He has human heritage. He has divine heritage. He has Jewish heritage. He has gentile heritage. He has royal heritage. He has common heritage. He has a perfect heavenly father, and he has an imperfect human father. He has mortal heritage. He has immortal heritage. He owns the cattle on a thousand hills, and he was born poor in a stable. He is someone to whom every person on earth can relate, and yet he came to save those who realize that he is both their Lord and friend.
So that is who Jesus is. How is he going to save the world? How is he going to be the blessing to all the nations? That is a story for next time…