Grains of Sand

Pixabay A few years ago I joined Ancestry.ca in order to track down and document my family's genealogical history. My mother's side wasn't hard, but Dad's was another story. My great-grandfather had worn out three wives on the farm and no one seemed to know what their names were, or anything about the children of the first two. Records were obscure—immigration authorities seemed to have a hard time with spelling many of the names of those coming from Europe back in the day. But in the course of searching out more recent family history I discovered some cousins that I had had never known, and about whom no one had ever spoken—two young boys in one family who had died young. Genealogies are interesting, revealing, and sometimes even important. So they were in the time of Christ. Matthew begins his gospel, a message particularly directed to the Jews, by reciting the genealogy of Christ in order to prove a direct line back to Abraham, the father of the nation (Matth...

Google Images In the genealogy given to us in Matthew 1, there are four women mentioned. That Matthew includes references to these is probably unexpected. Jesus’ blood lines are being traced through Joseph as Matthew’s way of proving that Jesus was the promised Messiah, descended from David and the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham to bless the nations through his seed. Mind you, Matthew might have saved the ink in his pen since Jesus did not have one drop of his earthly father’s blood in His veins. He was the true Son of God and only the adopted son of Joseph, conceived in Mary by the Holy Spirit. And Matthew might have saved the ink in his pen by not referring to three of the four women mentioned in his list—at least under normal circumstances. But then again, the birth of the Messiah was anything but normal! The name of the first woman mentioned comes in Matthew 1:3 where we read: “ Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar. ” If we look back at Genesis 38 ...

Google Images I went to seminary with D. A. Carson. That’s the only name I can “drop” that might have any significance to the broader world beyond my own little one. Matthew, as he begins his gospel, immediately drops some very impressive names. He does it quite deliberately because he wants to impress his Jewish audience, not with WHO he knows, but with the significance of WHAT he knows. “ A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham ” (Matthew 1:1) is how the book begins. You see, Matthew had discovered that Jesus Christ was the promised Messiah, the Redeemer sent from God to restore His people to Himself. Now his task is to try to convince his Jewish kinsman of that truth. To the knowledgeable Jew, the promised Messiah would come from the kingly line of David. Just as importantly, religious Jews knew that the Messiah was the fulfillment of a promise made to the patriarch of all Jews, Abraham. In Genesis 12, God had told Abraham this: “I will ma...