Perfect Aim
MATTHEW 1:1-17
RECENTLY I LISTENED to a fascinating talk by Marvin Rosenthal, a Jewish convert to Christianity. He shared how Matthew’s genealogy was one of the proofs that persuaded him that Jesus is the Messiah. To explain what he meant Rosenthal used a helpful analogy from his experience as a U.S. Marine many decades ago. At the rifle range, he and his fellow soldiers would practice their aim by shooting at a target from three distances—200, 300, and 500 yards. From that distance they couldn’t always tell by the naked eye if their bullets hit the target or not. So, in order to determine their accuracy, one of the soldiers would hide down in a nine-foot ravine behind the target until he heard ten shots. Then he would get up and check the sharpness of the shooter. He would add up the score and relay the results by slipping a colored disk onto the end of a pole and raising it up high. The color of the disk would communicate the shooter’s accuracy. If you missed the target completely, a big flag would be waved, a military way of saying, “You ought to be embarrassed!” Yet, for each bull’s-eye a red disk would be secured to the pole and the pole would go up and down. So if you were six out of ten, the pole would go up and down six times. Now, if you hit the bull’s-eye ten times out of ten, that same pole and red disk would simply be spun around once. Rosenthal goes on to say that, especially for a Jewish audience (who understands the significance and the necessity of genealogical records), Matthew’s genealogy hits the bull’s-eye ten times out of ten.
As we explore this genealogy, I’m going to utilize Rosenthal’s analogy with some slight modifications. I want you to think of this text like a target set before us. Let’s make it three targets. And I want you to think of God, not with a rifle in his hand (I’ll tame the imagery just a bit, in fact. I'll make it more Biblical) but as an archer with a bow and three arrows (e.g., Psalm 64:7). Now watch what he’ll do. With this genealogy he will take three shots at three targets, each time hitting them dead center. God can see that he has hit the bull’s-eyes, but he wants us to see it as well. He wants us, if you will, to insert the red disk, raise up the pole, and turn it once, showing we know and appreciate his perfect aim.
Right Line—Jesus Is from the Line of Abraham and David
We will call the first target “God hits the right line.” (Let’s say this one is 200 yards away.) Jesus is from the right bloodline, as Matthew will say from the start. Jesus is “the son of David, the son of Abraham” (v. 1). Abraham and David are two key names in this genealogy. If you miss seeing them (at the top and tail, in v. 1 and v. 17, and also in v. 2 and v. 6), you miss everything.
Now, what’s so important about these two men? Two promises! God gave each a specific promise. In Genesis 12:1-3 God says to Abraham: Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
Through Abraham and his offspring God will raise up a people (Israel) who will be a blessing to the entire world (the Gentiles). This is the beginning of the Abrahamic Covenant. Paul also called it, in a broad sense, “the gospel” (Galatians 3:8). This “gospel” is further specified by the Davidic Covenant, the promise made in 2 Samuel 7:12, 13 (cp. 1 Chronicles 17), where David is promised that one of his descendants would establish a forever kingdom: When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.
Throughout his Gospel, Matthew brings these promises together in the person of Christ, with what Jesus calls “the gospel of the kingdom” (4:23; 9:35; 24:14—this phrase is only used in Matthew). However, this is not the point of the genealogy. Here, the Evangelist is simply showing how God hits the lineage target—i.e., how Jesus is a descendant of both Abraham and David. Jesus comes from the right line. As Craig Blomberg summarizes, he has “the correct scriptural pedigree to be the Messiah.” The Messiah must be a Jew (a son of Abraham, v. 2), but he also must be from the tribe of Judah (vv. 2, 3; cp. Genesis 49:8-10), and from one specific member of that tribe (David, v. 6). Jesus has all of this going for him.
But Jesus wasn’t the only person in world history to have such a lineage. All those listed in verses 6-16 shared his lineage, as well as others who were his contemporaries, like his four brothers (13:55) or the famous rabbi Hillel. So in some ways it’s like the time my mother did our family genealogy in which she traced the O’Donnells back to a line of Irish kings. I come from nobility, which is no surprise to me. But it was a surprise when I learned that all of Ireland was once run by various nobles, thus indicating that anyone with Irish ancestry was descended from some Irish “king.” Well, you’ll be glad to know that Jewish genealogies aren’t the same as Irish ones. Only a select group of men in the history of the world came from Abraham and David. The select group, however, was larger than one man. Jesus wasn’t the only Jew who could claim lineage from this patriarch and that king. And that’s why two more targets are set in place.
Yet, before we move on to them, I want us here and now to stop and think about the obvious, which we so often fail to do. In Matthew 1:18-25, which we will look at in the next chapter, an angel appears to Joseph and tells him what is happening with Mary, his betrothed. He is told about this son who is to come, whom he is to name, “Jesus,” which means “Yahweh saves.” After he is told the details of the divine plan, we read in verses 22, 23: All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet [Isaiah]: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us).
Jesus is Immanuel. The man Jesus is “God with us.”. That’s so easy to forget, isn’t it?
We think it is such a wonderful thing when a queen from another country comes to visit and offers her greetings and love. We think it is such a wonderful thing when a rich businessman volunteers for a night to help at a homeless shelter, providing food and comfort to the poor. We think it is such a wonderful thing when a professional athlete gives of her time to conduct a free clinic for innercity kids. Such are wonderful things, all of which we recognize, appreciate, and applaud—the humility and condescension. But what marvelous, unfathomable humility and condescension it was when God provide the man Christs Jesus. When you read 1:1, “the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ” alongside 1:23, “and they shall call his name Immanuel,” it ought to be enough for us to stop and think, to pause and praise, and to join in the angelic chorus, singing.
Right Time—Jesus Came at the Right Time
Jesus is from the right line. That’s important and necessary. Without it we stop the target practice. We look for a Messiah elsewhere.
In addition, Jesus was born at the right time. That’s the second target we’ll take a look at, and we’ll see that God’s arrow here likewise goes straight into the middle. Look at verse 17. Matthew wants to make sure we see this. So he ends the genealogy like this: 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 is saying that there are three key periods thus far in salvation history. Frederick Dale Bruner helpfully suggests that we think of the history here like the capital letter N. The first fourteen generations head upward from Abraham to David, the second fourteen downward from Solomon to the Babylonian exile, and then the final fourteen “move upward again in hope and fulfillment from the exile to Christ.”
Scholars disagree as to why Matthew structures the genealogy this way. Some say the number fourteen is a literary device called a gemetria. In Hebrew each letter has numerical value. Aleph, the first letter, is worth one; dalet, the fourth letter, is worth four; vav, the sixth letter, is worth six, etc. The word “David” in Hebrew is comprised of three letters (dalet/vav/dalet—four /six/ four) which equal fourteen. So perhaps Matthew is telling us prosaically as well as poetically, “Jesus is the son of David” (underline David).
Others theorize that the three fourteens are just a structural way of aiding our weak memories. The argument is that Matthew limits all the names he could have had so we would remember the genealogy itself and the necessary and important names within it.
Beyond the numerical or mnemonic value, Matthew’s structure has theological value. He has intentionally selected names (real historical people who are really part of Joseph and Mary’s line) and arranged them to make the same theological point that Paul made in Galatians 4:4a: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son” (cp. Hebrews 9:26). In other words, God has designed history around the birth of Jesus.
On paper we agree. The birth of Christ is the center of history. But so often this head knowledge has yet to make it to our hearts. We might write BC (“Before Christ”) or AD (“Anno Domini - in the year of our Lord”), but we are often far removed theologically and emotionally from the importance of this reality.
Have you ever wondered why Jesus didn’t come in the modern age rather than in the first century? Why didn’t he come during the era of television, video, and the Internet, when nearly all that he said and did could be precisely documented? Can’t you just picture CNN reporters and paparazzi camped a few feet away from Jesus and the Twelve for three years straight? Can’t you imagine a streaming video of his each and every movement? Can’t you imagine the ten o’clock news starting every night with something from the life of Christ—“Today Jesus healed ten lepers. We interviewed nine of them. One refused an interview in order to return to Jesus for a word of thanks.” And can’t you imagine years from now, when some rebellious teen started to doubt the claims of Christ, how the teachers of the times would just pull out their computerized contraptions and say, “Now, son, look here, it’s all on video.” And then this teacher would proceed to show the clip, the most famous one played on YouTube—Jesus’ resurrection. Everyone has seen it. The reporter is outside the tomb, giving a play-by-play of Jesus’ life, and while he’s saying something about Christ’s claim to rise again, lo and behold, the stone is rolled away. There it is on film! They take a close-up and out comes the Son of God, just as he said he would. Who wouldn’t believe?
Sometimes we wish God’s timing were different. And sometimes we wish God took out the “faith” part of our faith. What I mean is, some of us think like Carl Sagan thought. Sagan, the brilliant scientist but foolish man, once said he’d believe there was a God if God had written the Ten Commandments on the moon. Well sure, everyone would believe if that were the case. But that would take the faith out of faith, which would as be as bad as taking the mystery out of romance, the curiosity out of the cat, or the oxygen out of the air.
When Scripture says that Jesus came at “the fullness of time,” it means it. God designed history—with the rise of this empire and the fall of that one, with this person born here and that person born there, with this event happening now and that one then—to prepare us for Jesus and to give room for faith. God values us too much to treat us like robots, and I’ll add (and maybe I’m bold to do so) that only unimaginative atheists want the Ten Commandments painted on the moon or Jesus captured on videotape.
The Bible tells us that while God’s ways are hidden to some extent (e.g., Deuteronomy 29:29; cp. 2 Corinthians 4:3-6), nevertheless “his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power” as Romans 1:20 puts it, are as obvious as the North Star on a clear night. When we die, we will find this reality to be as real as oxygen, which we cannot see or taste or touch, but we know it’s there, keeping us alive every second of the day.
God is real, and he is faithful, and we can see such attributes in creation and in Scripture. Yet God has not made himself so self-evident that no faith whatsoever is required. How boring that would be. How dull. How lifeless. How robotic. How so not like he who created this unbelievably complex, mysterious, beautiful universe. How so not like he who glories in bestowing the gift of faith to undeserving and rebellious sinners (see Matthew 16:17).
There is enough evidence for my children—whether it’s facial features, lanky limbs, or personality characteristics—to recognize me as their father. But if each one of them demanded a DNA test before they would acknowledge and appreciate me as such, then they would be very ungrateful and overly demanding children. God has given us creation—what Calvin called the theatre of his glory—and Scripture, what I’ll call the evidence of his faithfulness, and yet how many humans want a DNA test before they will call him, “Abba, Father." Thankless little brats, aren’t they?
Let’s not be thankless little brats. Let’s look at the arrow in the middle of this target. Let’s have faith, more than we had when we read the last page. Let’s recognize that Jesus came at the right time, which is one of the many marks that he’s the right one. He is the Messiah with whom we can trust our very lives.
Right Design—Jesus Came Even for Gentile Sinners
So here we are, sitting and waiting in the nine-foot ravine. We’ve come up once to see God hit that first target right in the middle—Jesus, the Son of David and Abraham. Then we’ve come up again to see God hit that second target dead-on—Jesus came at the right time (fourteen/fourteen/fourteen). Our faith in his faithfulness and in his sovereign rule of this world and its history is elevated. Finally we hear the third arrow strike. We jump up and see that, sure enough, God is three for three.
The first target is the right line, the second is the right time, and the third is (oh yes, I’ve made it rhyme with line and time) the right design. It is not simply that Jesus came as a Jew from a lineage of kings and at the perfect time in history, but it is also the design of it all—why he came and for whom he came. That’s what we'll explore last but not least. In fact, this last point likely is the least least. This is the 500-yard shot that strikes with such accuracy and force that it goes through the bull’s-eye and out the back of the target! It’s the shot we are to see, stand up, and applaud!
So, what’s the design? It is a strange design, but it’s a Scriptural one.
Matthew’s genealogy is unparalleled. While it appeals to a Jewish audience because it is a genealogy, it has at least three peculiarities that would have offended a Pharisaical Jew who, for example, valued racial, moral, and patriarchal purity.
The first peculiarity is that Matthew includes five women: Tamar (v. 3), Rahab (v. 5), Ruth (v. 5), the wife of Uriah, whom we know to be Bathsheba (v. 6), and Mary (v. 16), the mother of our Lord. This mention of women here is as strange as having “Mary Magdalene and the other Mary” as the first two official eyewitnesses of the resurrection, which Matthew records in 28:1-10. This is peculiar because a woman’s testimony was not valid in a court of law, and a woman's name in a Jewish genealogy was of little legal significance. (Note the word “father,” repeated thirty-nine times!) This is why in other Biblical genealogies, such as the first nine chapters of 1 Chronicles, very few women are mentioned, and the ones who are named are likely added to show “the purity of the line or enhance its dignity.” But here in Matthew, the great Hebrew matriarchs are missing. Where is Sarah, Rebekah, or Leah?
Matthew records five women in this genealogy. This is peculiar. But it’s a peculiarity with a purpose. It’s part of the plan. It’s in the divine design. With the coming of Jesus, women do not gain new status within God’s covenant people. However, they do take on key roles in the drama of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Matthew sees fit to note this at the beginning and end of his Gospel.
Now, if it’s not bad enough that there are so many women in this genealogy, it is even worse (to continue my sarcasm) that four out of five are not even Jewish. Besides Mary, who was likely herself from the kingly line of David, Jesus’ genealogy is full of a bunch of Gentile women! Tamar and Rahab were Canaanites (a race of people with which the Israelites were forbidden to intermarry). Ruth was a Moabite. The Moabites trace their lineage back to incestuous Lot. Remember the story of Genesis 19? It’s a true but terrible story. Moreover, we’re told in Deuteronomy 23:3-5 that the Moabites were excluded from Israel’s assembly because they refused to give them food and drink after they left Egypt. So, for Naomi’s son to marry Ruth in the first place would have been as scandalous as a Swedish-American in the 1920s marrying an African-American. “You want to marry a Moabite?” We can almost hear Naomi cringe. Then we have Bathsheba. She was the wife of Uriah before she was the wife of David. Uriah, we are told in 2 Samuel 11:3, was a Hiltite. He was a Gentile. While Bathsheba was likely an Israelite, as she was the daughter of Eliam, the son of Ahithophel the Gilonite (2 Samuel 11:3; 23:34), through marriage she legally become a Hittite.
So am I saying that King David’s great-grandmother was a Moabite and his wife, the mother of great King Solomon, a Hittite of sorts? I'm afraid so. The bloodline is impure. It’s as bad as Prince Charles marrying that woman of non-royal stock. Ah, but again, it’s all part of the plan, a plan that Paul explains most plainly in Galatians 3:27-29: “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise.” Even Canaanites, as we shall see in 15:21-28, can come into the kingdom; even Gentile dogs can eat the crumbs that fall from the King’s table.
The first peculiarity of this genealogy is the mention of five women. The second is that at least three are Gentiles. The third is that most of them were involved in (how shall I put this?) irregular sexual liaisons. Tamar dressed as a prostitute in order to get her father-in-law, Judah, to give her lawful offspring. This plan worked, for that’s how Perez and Zerah (the twins mentioned in v. 3) came into this world. Forget the soap opera tomorrow morning or Desperate Housewives reruns. Just give good old Genesis 38 a read. That’s Tamar. Then we have Rahab, who didn’t disguise herself as a prostitute but actually was a prostitute in Jericho, that wicked town where the walls came tumbling down. She became—as the books of Joshua (2), Hebrews (11) and James (2) point out—a woman of faith. However, the scandal of her past is what it is. Finally, we have Bathsheba, who was certainly taken advantage of by King David. But she was, in my estimation, not perfectly innocent. She was after all taking an indiscreet bath out in the open, in the king’s view, and she didn’t say no to his advances when the Law said that a woman should in such a situation. Either way, even if she was only 2 percent to blame, she was involved in an adulterous affair, one that cost the life of her first husband and her first son and one that certainly marred her reputation.
Yet even the sexual irregularities of these women are part of the design. For they prepare us for the most irregular sexual or non-sexual encounter of all time. They prepare us for the virgin conception and birth. For those who doubt that God would work through an unmarried, teenage girl to bring about the Messiah, Matthew is saying, “Well, take a look at Grandma Tamar and Bathsheba. Look at the line. Notice the design!” If David and Solomon could come from where they came from, then the King of kings could come, as Isaiah said he would, from a virgin, this pure girl of marred reputation named Mary.
Now as I said, that's one of the things that Matthew is up to. The other is this: Jesus comes from the right stock, but it is bad stock. As one commentator says, there is “no pattern of righteousness in the lineage of Jesus.” Jesus comes from a bunch of sinners. I don’t just mean Tamar and Rahab. Look at the list of wicked kings here—e.g., Rehoboam, Abijah, and Ahaz. Ahaz!
Moreover, look at the so-called “righteous" men of old—like Abraham (who lied) or Judah (whose idea it was to sell his brother Joseph into slavery and who was, after his own admission, worse than Tamar) or David (with his adultery and murder, two permanent marks on his background check) or Solomon (with his polygamy and idolatry) or even good Hezekiah (with his pride in being good). And you thought your family tree is a mess. It’s as if Matthew puts a criminal lineup before us.
But why? What’s the moral of this method? Why inform us that “Jesus did not belong to the nice clean world of middle-class respectability, but rather he ‘belonged to a family of murderers, cheats, cowards, adulterers and liars’”? The point is “almost too obvious to belabor.”’ Matthew wants to show us what Paul will teach us in 1 Timothy 1:15: “The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” Jesus came not for the righteous but the unrighteous (cp. 9:13), for sinners—like Matthew the tax collector and Rahab the prostitute. He came for sinners like you and like me.
Conclusion: The Genesis of Jesus
In the Greek the word “genealogy” can be rendered “genesis”—“The book of the ‘Genesis’ of Jesus Christ.” This is important to note, for with Jesus we have a “New Genesis,” a new beginning, one far greater than the first. For whereas God in the first Genesis fashioned the deepest oceans and the highest heavens, now in his Son he has poured into those places grace upon grace.
Grace, grace, God's grace,
Grace that will pardon and cleanse within;
Grace, grace, God's grace,
Grace that is greater than all our sin.
Grace—that’s not the poison but the potion on the tip of this last arrow, the one that has gone through the target but should now be stuck in your heart.
Jesus came from the right line at the right time. And it was indeed the right design—designed for sinners like you and me.
(R. Kent Hughes. and Douglas Sean O'Donnell., 2013)