Join us for our new series on the Gospel according to Matthew. Matthew begins by explaining how we can know that Jesus is the one God promised would come and save his people from their sins.
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Transcript
Dan:
Hi, everyone. And welcome to training for life redeemed. I’m your host, Dan, and as always, I’m joined by my father, David Jackson. Today, we are beginning our actual diving into the chapter by chapter aspect of looking at the gospel of Matthew. We’ve already done a bit of an introduction to Matthew through some of , the talks that he gave at his church, which is MBM in Rooty hill, in New South Wales, Australia, and Dad. Today, we’re gonna jump into Matthew chapter one, and I think most people are gonna wanna know why does Matthew start off So boringly going through a genealogy. Is this actually the way to start a book . And if so, why?
David:
I think it’s beautiful. certainly sorts out who can read the Bible for public Bible readings when you got all these names . It’s just that first word. This is the record of the beginning or genealogy of Jesus, the Messiah. that’s almost the same wording that you have right at the beginning of Genesis. It’s the same word. So we had the beginning , in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and now we’ve got the beginning of Jesus because he is this offspring of the woman, offspring of Abraham, David, of this whole line , of God promises that is going to come and save us from what blew apart in Genesis three. So we’ve got that lined up, but the question for , Matthew’s writing for Jewish people, he’s writing, I think probably within a decade of Jesus’ death and resurrection. and the question on the mind of any first century Jew would be, how do you know this is the right one? Because there’d been plenty of other guys pop up and claim to be messiahs and saviours. And everybody just got dead as a result.
Dan:
That as we look through the genealogy Dad, one thing that strikes me as I look at this is that your inheritance is passed on through the men normally, right as it goes down. And so if Jesus is meant to be the son of David and the son of Abraham and with this genealogy yet , we also say, he’s the son of God. How does that work? How can he be the son of David and Abraham and also the son of God? How , how does that actually work for us?
David:
Yeah. Son of God is another title for whoever rules. So Adam was son of God. D avid’s offspring are sons of God, I srael i s my son. S o t his i s a t itle t hat p roperly belonged to any human being who w as in a right relationship with God. So Adam h ad dominion over the earth, and he was the first man. So he’s son of God, you come along to Jesus and in Jesus, you have a new man, a new humanity. And if you’re in Jesus, you a re part of that n ew humanity and y ou a re back being a son of God, rather than a son of t he usurper, Satan..
Dan:
Yeah . But is , is Jesus like a particular, I dunno how to say this, but he’s not the same as Adam in terms of being a son of God.
David:
Yes . Or is he, yeah, he is . He is . So son of God is not a title for God. Yeah . In that sense, I mean, he is God, but like, you know , he became Jesus when he was born. That’s when he got the name, he inherits David’s throne in Mary’s womb, he is the heir of David’s. Yeah. The heir of David’s throne.
Dan:
Isn’t that through Joseph, through
David:
Joseph. Yeah. Adopted married Mary and therefore all that legal stuff is happening. That’s a point in history. But when we talk , it’s a bit confusing, we would say, you know, or Luke’s Jude says, Jesus led the people out of Egypt. you know, Paul. Y eah. So we can talk o ut what Jesus was doing before he became a man, but he didn’t get the name Jesus t ill he was t hat, t hat sounds very confusing. I t’s just the way we talk. Y eah. You know, he i s, h e i s God, second person of the Trinity. Y eah. And he became son of God and h e, when he became a man inherited that title. O kay. Y eah. And then he passes that title o n his people. A ll r ight,
Dan:
Cool. All right . That’s not too bad for me. I can do that. So Jesus, son of God is a title that humans get, who are in a right relationship with God. And obviously he’s a new human doesn’t inherit the sin of his, his , father, because he , his father is , the father.
David:
He’s not his biological father.
Dan:
That’s right. so yeah, so he doesn’t inherit the sin, but he has. So he gets the name, he’s in the right relationship. So he is the son of God. In that sense, he is also Jesus. And it’s just the name. And we used , or a title we used to refer to him now, as we look at the genealogy as well, there seemed to be a few female names that come up as, you know , this one was the daughter of this one, a nd then it just keeps going. Or, o r i t s ays a m arried, this guy married this woman, sorry, I ‘ve g iven too much credit there to how things are written, but why are those women mentioned throughout this genealogy? W hat l ike, i s, is there a significance to them or is it just because they are mentioned maybe in the Old Testament,
David:
I , there there’s a huge significance to them. And I think this, this comes as a bit of a , a warning to men in the way that we read the old Testament or the way we read the Bible. So until probably 20, 30 years ago, you would hear preachers t alk a bout these women as the bad girls. U h, and t hey’d, they’d, they’d go on about the fact that Rahab was a prostitute that, you know, sorry, s ay, what d id I say about Ruth? W ell, she’s a Moabite, so we’d have to f ind something wrong with h er. She’s a Moabite. It’d have to f ind, y ou k now, k now, Tamar seduced h er father-in-law, i t’s, y ou’d focus on what these girls did, u m, that made them bad girls. And then you’d, you’d create a sermon that said, isn’t it wonderful that God forgives bad people. U m, but if you actually, if you read the text of what these women did, they redeemed the line of promise. So the men screwed it up big time. And these are the women who stepped in and saved that line of promise. So you , I mean, you look at , who would you start with? Rahab you’ve got a , a Canaanite girl and had she not repented and put her faith in Yahweh coming out of Jericho, we wouldn’t have king David. So she becomes, you know, his , one of his ancestors. Um, you go down a couple of generations and Ruth by transferring her loyalty to Yahweh comes into the picture and her husband’s family line, would’ve just ceased to exist, but she steps in commits to Yahweh. And as a result, the Redeemer kinsman marries her. If you go back to Judah and Tamar Judah had three sons, he wasn’t about to produce an air through any of them. And along comes Tamar and rescues the whole family line. So one after the other, and if you come down to Bath Sheba , she’s amazing. First she’s raped. Then she marries the king and then she intervenes to make sure that Solomon gets the throne and not somebody else. So without these women at each of these points, the family line would’ve dropped out. So these are the women who are the means of redeeming the Redeemer. and that, that just gives you this idea of redemption or all the way through what’s going on. Yeah .
Dan:
And I imagine if you were looking to preach a sermon on anyone’s name in there, that was a bad person. I’m sure there’s plenty of worse ones.
David:
The men aren’t the , the real good list of good guys. Are they?
Dan:
No, no. I don’t look at them and go, oh , wow . Yeah , Manasseh what a great bloke .
David:
And yet, without him and without his repentance, nobody gets saved. It’s just , it’s an amazing grace upon grace, upon grace.
Dan:
Okay . And now from the genealogy, we then move off into the story of the promise of Jesus. When the angels come, they talk to Mary and they tell her what’s happening. They appear in a dream to Joseph. This is a slightly shorter version of the story than you get in Luke, for example. Yeah. so , why has Matthew focused in on this part of the story
David:
Matthew’s burden is to help a Jewish person who is, I mean, the Jews of his day have been listening to the scriptures being read week in, week out. They’ve , they’ve got it. They , every Sabbath they’d read through the law, the histories, the wisdom, the prophets, they know their Bible. And so we are waiting for the Messiah. We’ve memorized the genealogy. So we know where he is coming from. Everybody knows he’s gonna be born in Bethlehem. Cause that’s, David’s , inherited property. and you know, there’s your prophecy and Micah that says that’s gonna happen. So we’re all sort of, if you were an alert and you were waiting for the Messiah, you sort of checking your account , your newspaper every day to see who born in Bethlehem so all that stuff in Luke is written for Romans who don’t know any of that stuff here, the focus is how many babies are born in, how do you know this is the one? And so we’ve gone down the line till we get to this fellow, Joseph Joseph, if , if the Romans weren’t around, would’ve been king of Judea, he , he has the birthright to that title. So how do you get from him to Jesus without Jesus inheriting sin? So you’ve gotta explain to Jewish people Mary’s role in that and that this conception, I mean, I love this don’t you love the sequence. Now God makes a man and out of the rib of the man, he makes a woman, which is pretty cool. and then God gets all excited about that and says, you know, it’s all very beautiful. I like that line . And then you come over here and the , the woman will , is the first to get to , to sin. And then the man sins, and then the whole of humanity’s gone. So God comes along to the woman and says, you are gonna produce the saviour. And out of the woman, he creates a new man. And that new man is Jesus. But to get Jesus, to be the rightful, heir of David throne, Joseph has got to acknowledge him as his adopted son. So, you know, God adopted us, Joseph adopted him, the patterns are all in there.
Dan:
That’s cool . I like that adopted pattern coming through that’s yeah. Ultimately what happens for us? And it’s great to see you that a man’s done that for Jesus to put, to give him his, you know , his rights to the being in the fire , but also
David:
It’s , I think it’s interesting too, how insignificant Joseph is otherwise. Yeah . I mean, he, he comes along outta nowhere. He finds out that his wife cuz he’s actually signed the contracts and everything is pregnant and it wasn’t him. So he’s in panic mode, but being a nice bloke and he , he cares for the woman. He doesn’t want a publicly humiliate and somebody’s gotta drop in a messenger from God and say, don’t worry about it, mate. God did this. She hasn’t been unfaithful. And he simply says, okay, Mary move in. and publicly he looks at the whole public and the world is saying, oh , you got her pregnant before you are supposed to. And he just doesn’t care about that. He takes the woman in and they have the baby and they do what God says. Um, and he virtually disappears after that. Yeah. Yep . He’s done his bit.
Dan:
So , so all that he is important for, well , Dad brings us to the end of this episode. If you would like to grab the study note to go along with this episode, please head over to trainingforliferedeemed .com/ 59. You can grab the study notes there, please. Also, if you enjoyed this, leave us overview. We’d love to hear from you and see what you’re thinking of the podcast and make sure that you subscribe and come back to join us for our next episode, when we’ll be looking at Matthew chapter two.
