3 Days of Prayer and Fasting (2024/12)

1¹ The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

² Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, ³ and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, and Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Ram, ⁴ and Ram the father of Amminadab, and Amminadab the father of Nahshon, and Nahshon the father of Salmon, ⁵ and Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, ⁶ and Jesse the father of David the king.

And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah, ⁷ and Solomon the father of Rehoboam, and Rehoboam the father of Abijah, and Abijah the father of Asaph, ⁸ and Asaph the father of Jehoshaphat, and Jehoshaphat the father of Joram, and Joram the father of Uzziah, ⁹ and Uzziah the father of Jotham, and Jotham the father of Ahaz, and Ahaz the father of Hezekiah, ¹⁰ and Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, and Manasseh the father of Amos, and Amos the father of Josiah, ¹¹ and Josiah the father of Jechoniah and his brothers, at the time of the deportation to Babylon.

¹² And after the deportation to Babylon: Jechoniah was the father of Shealtiel, and Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel, ¹³ and Zerubbabel the father of Abiud, and Abiud the father of Eliakim, and Eliakim the father of Azor, ¹⁴ and Azor the father of Zadok, and Zadok the father of Achim, and Achim the father of Eliud, ¹⁵ and Eliud the father of Eleazar, and Eleazar the father of Matthan, and Matthan the father of Jacob, ¹⁶ and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ.

¹⁷ 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.

Matthew explicitly says in verse 17, “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” He had a clear organizational scheme in his genealogy, and his scheme may be related to gematria. Gematria is a method by which Jews assigned a numerical value to each Hebrew letter, so that someone’s name can be added up to a number. According to this method, the name “David” has the numerical value of fourteen, which is likely why Matthew lists three sets of fourteen names. Matthew is highlighting that Jesus is the promised Messianic King, the Son of David who was to come.

Because the Christ has already come, there is no need for another Savior or Messiah. Are you waiting for another Christ? A husband or a wife to fulfill you and make your life worthwhile? A charismatic politician to take charge and accomplish all your agenda? A great Christian leader to bring about the Third Great Awakening or another Reformation? There is no other Messiah. And we are not the Messiah either. The world does not need more of you or more of me, or more of anyone else. It needs more of Jesus. The Christ has already come.

Because God appointed men to be heads of their respective households, Biblical genealogies are patrilineal, traced through the father’s genealogical line, but unusually, Jesus’s genealogy includes names of women, and yet, there are four women who are specifically mentioned, in addition to Mary, the mother of Jesus: “Tamar” (v. 3), “Rahab” (v. 5), “Ruth” (v. 5), “the wife of Uriah, [Bathsheba]” (v. 6), and all four of them are foreigners, non-Jews. The inclusion of Gentiles in this genealogy of the Christ foreshadows the inclusion of Gentiles in the Kingdom of God through the Christ. This is profoundly moving in two ways. First, how is it that, after all these years, God still keeps the promises He made to Abraham and to the nation of Israel? Israelites have sinned and broken their covenant with God a hundred times over, and yet, God still keeps every last promise He made, and the Son of God, the Savior of the world, is born a Jew, so that “salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22).

Second, how is it that, after all these years, God grafts Gentiles into His promise of the Kingdom? These Gentiles that have hated, persecuted, warred against, and killed the people of God? I love the story of the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15. She begs Jesus to cure her daughter who is “severely oppressed by a demon,” and Jesus says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” which is true, before Jesus’s death and resurrection. But the woman replies, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” And Jesus answers, “O woman, great is your faith!” and heals her daughter, so that even this Canaanite woman, like Bathsheba, Ruth, Rahab, and Tamar before her, is included in the Kingdom of God. Most of us are uncircumcised Gentiles who were once “separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:11). And yet, it says in Ephesians 2, the “dividing wall of hostility” between Jews and Gentiles have been “broken down,” so that there is now “one new man” in Jesus Christ, “in place of the two,” so that “[we] are no longer strangers and aliens, but … fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God,” so that while “salvation is from the Jews,” it is no longer only for the Jews, but for all nations (Matt. 28:18-20).

Verse 7 tells us that one of Jesus’s ancestors was “Rehoboam,” the son of Solomon. Rehoboam’s folly and unnecessary cruelty split Israel in half (1 Kings 12). And under Rehoboam’s reign, Judah was led into all kinds of idolatry, cult prostitution, and abominations (1 Kings 14). Ahaz “even burned his son as an offering, according to the despicable practices of the nations whom the LORD drove out before the people of Israel. And he sacrificed and made offerings on the high places and on the hills and under every green tree” (2 Kings 16:3-4). Manasseh was even worse. Even though his father, Hezekiah, sought to reform Israel and get rid of the idols, Manasseh “rebuilt“ them and even desecrated the temple of God by building pagan altars and idols inside it. In fact, it says in 2 Kings 21:9 that “Manasseh led [Judah] astray to do more evil than the [pagan] nations had done whom the LORD destroyed before the people of Israel.” And, of course, the infamous Jechoniah continued to do “evil in the sight of the LORD,” and during his reign Judah was conquered by Nebuchadnezzar and sent into exile in Babylon (2 Chron. 36:9-10).

In Genesis 38, Judah sleeps with a woman that he think is a prostitute, only to discover that she was Tamar, his daughter-in-law, who had disguised herself in order to get impregnated by him, since Judah had been unjustly withholding his son from her, whom he owed her in accordance with the principles of Levirate marriage. And Perez, Jesus’s ancestor, was conceived by this illicit, incestuous union according to verse 3. Similarly, verse 5 tells us that King David’s great great grandfather Salmon “father[ed] Boaz by Rahab,”whom Joshua 2:1 tells us explicitly was a Canaanite prostitute. And verse 6 is the kicker of them all. It says, “David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah.” Bathsheba is not even named here. Instead, to make his point abundantly clear, Matthew describes her as “the wife of Uriah.” David committed adultery with Bathsheba and impregnated her, then tried to cover it up by attempting to make Uriah sleep with her so that his illegitimate child can be hidden. When that didn’t work, David arranged to have Uriah killed in battle, so he could steal Bathsheba to be his own wife. Matthew calls Bathsheba “the wife of Uriah,” to rub in the point that David had sinned. And yet it is through this illicit union that Solomon, one of Jesus’s royal predecessors is born. Jesus’s checkered genealogy shows how Jesus embraced our humanity and bore our sins on the cross in order to save us.