The Sylvr Pen

Another odd thing about Christ’s genealogy in Matthew: the women in it.

In the first place, women’s names don’t appear often in the Hebrew genealogies. Second, take a look at the particular women Matthew mentions:

Tamar, who tricked her father-in-law Judah into getting her pregnant by posing as a prostitute.

Rehab, who really was a prostitute, and of a pagan city God was about to destroy for its pagan-ness.

Ruth, a Moabite who married an  expatriate Israelite in her own country (and historically Moabite women had been a terrible snare to Israel by seducing its men into vile idolatry).

Bathsheba, an adulteress, only named as “her of Uriah,” labeling her as rightfully bound to that noble man who was out fighting David’s battles while she was creeping into the palace to bed with the king.

And finally, Mary, brave and virtuous woman indeed, but one who certainly didn’t look that way to the people around her, pregnant out of wedlock before Joseph took her into his household.

The obvious question their presence in the “begats” evokes is “Why?” Why were these women singled out, while other women, some probably a lot higher on the virtue rating scale, remain unmentioned?

All I know is how clearly this speaks to me of God’s grace and His welcoming arms for any woman who would wholeheartedly come into them and willingly live as His daughter, Christ’s sister (Mt 12:50). How needy I am of that grace! I’m not what I once was, and what I was when He drew me in I want never to be again–but what I am now still falls way short of what I long to be: in holiness and all the good things listed as fruit of the Spirit. I was an outsider like Rehab or Ruth, doing life my own way instead of seeking His way. Yet He drew me in to be His own, just the same, out of His big love.

Another scandalous woman adopted into the family of Christ. I do so love and give thanks for that picture I get from the genealogy in Matthew.

A friend of mine once expressed her main difficulty in reading through the Bible: As soon as she got going, she’d come up against a whole string of “begats.” Daunting –and boring!

I replied that maybe even the begats were interesting, if you took time to scrutinize them. We were studying Genesis in a group then; so I suggested we slow down on Chapter Five’s “begats” and see what would result. Indeed, doing the numbers within them revealed fascinating things!

But we’re talking here about Jesus, so far called “Son of God” in these posts. In becoming “flesh,” He also took on human lineage, with its long listing of fathers and sons and a few mothers thrown in.  And His genealogical record gets interesting, too.

One thing that makes it interesting is the problem with it: Matthew 1:1-16 and Luke 3:23-38 list very different genealogies! What do we do about that?

Me? I ask the hard questions. In my Bible’s margin next to Luke’s genealogy for Jesus, I long ago wrote a big question mark (it’s still there) and filed the difficulty with my “UAQ’s” (UnAnswered Questions) that I store in notebooks or brain till I get my answers.

Usually that takes a while. This one about Christ’s lineage did, although once I had the answer, I wondered why I hadn’t figured it out long before!

What clued me in was R. A. Torrey’s Difficulties in the Bible. As it turns out, the seeming contradiction in lineage actually helps verify the fulfillment of several Bible prophecies.

If you line up Matthew’s and Luke’s genealogies, side by side, and move forward in time from Abraham on, you see that everything matches up until after David. Matthew’s account names Solomon next, then his descendants—all in the “royal” line. Luke names a different son of David: Nathan, and then lists Nathan’s offspring—not in the royal line.

This is important, because the Old Testament contains two kinds of prophecy about “the coming King” that also seem to contradict each other. One says He will be a Son of David. The other declares that no descendant in David’s royal line after King Jeconiah (a.k.a. Coniah) will ever sit on the throne of David (Jer 22:28-30). When you really study Christ’s two genealogies, you discover that, as far as fleshly lineage was concerned, He was a descendant of David, but not of Jeconiah.

Matthew (written with the Jewish people in mind) gives Joseph’s lineage. But the genealogy Luke gives isn’t Joseph’s. It’s Mary’s. Mary descended from King David, too, but not in the royal line–in other words, not through Jeconiah. And when you look carefully at the Greek of Luke’s passage, or a literal translation of it, you see that it  says Jesus was “as it was supposed, [the] son of Joseph.” (Because Mary was a virgin, Jesus was not Joseph’s natural son.) Immediately after that it says, “of Heli, of Matthat, of Levi…” etc., going back through Mary’s line to David and beyond, all the way to Adam.

Mary’s line is highly significant, because it shows Jesus was truly a fleshly descendant of David, but not of Jeconiah.

Isn’t it wonderful, how the very things that seem to be “problems,” “difficulties,” “contradictions” in these Bible passages actually turn out to be greater verification of Jesus being indeed the prophesied Messiah (Christ) who will one day return to rule as King over all? Something else to rejoice in while celebrating the birth of the Savior!

Where is scripture’s first mention of Christ’s incarnation? In Gabriel’s announcement to Mary in Luke? In Isaiah’s prophesy of six hundred plus years earlier?

No, to find it we must travel back, back to the beginning of Earth, the beginning of mankind, the beginning of sin: back to Genesis 3. There, right in the middle of the great Curse hides the promise of the Great Blessing. There, in Genesis 3:13-15, the LORD tells of a coming One who would someday crush Satan, someone He identifies as “the Seed of the woman.” Not the seed of Adam her husband, nor of mankind in general, but specifically as “her Seed.” Therefore this passage also alludes to that extraordinary form of conception and delivery, the virgin birth.

This prophecy harkens back to the dawn of time! God had this plan in place since at least the time of Eden. And someone recorded it no later than Moses’ era. Is it not reason for awed rejoicing?

According to John 1:14, “The Word [who was with God and was God] became flesh and dwelt among us.” How? By what means?

In Israel’s antiquity Isaiah 7:14 prophesied that a virgin would conceive and bear a Son  and call His name Immanuel [literally  God-with-us]. Then, several hundred years later, the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary of Nazareth to tell her that she would bear a child who would be called the Son of the Most High, whose kingdom would never end (Luke 1:31-33), and Mary asked how that could be, “since I am a virgin?”

That prophesy and its fulfillment tell us the means—but without much explanation of the how.

Do you believe in this virgin birth? I didn’t for the longest time. It just isn’t the way conception and birth happen. But then, if I had read the Isaiah verse with intelligent consideration, I’d have had to admit that the way anything normally happens couldn’t be a sign. If the text said, “The Lord will give you a sign: A woman will have sexual relations with a man and conceive and bear a son,” I’d have thought, “What! How could that be a sign? That kind of birth happens everyday all over the earth!”

So…a special virgin birth was prophesied in antiquity—as a sign, and in due course even the virgin involved questioned how this could be. Then the angel answered—but barely, vaguely: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.”

Do any of us imagine we can understand this—or even get the faintest idea how immense and overwhelming a personal “overshadowing” by the  Master and Creator of our fearsome Universe might be? Whatever it was, it was powerful and spiritual, for the verse specifies the “Holy Spirit” as the agent at work. The explanation Gabriel gave Mary probably went as far as any human could comprehend, and perhaps as even any angel could tell, for this is the kind of thing Peter said “even angels long to look into” (1 Peter 1:12 NIV).

Let us bask in the wonder of the incomprehensible, of God’s thoughts and workings, so far beyond our capabilities, and realize, at the same time, how any miracle prophesied and fulfilled is by definition inexplicable. As Charles Wesley wrote about a later part of the Incarnated One’s earthly mission, “’Tis mystery all!” Let us revel in the mystery of Christmas!

Christmas: what’s it all about, really? If the message of Christmas were reduced to one short paragraph, what would it say?

How about this: “In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God…And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us”(John 1:1 and 14)? Simple.

And yet so incomprehensible. How could it be?

No wonder the unregenerate heart (not yet “born again”) cannot believe it. This passage says the Master and Creator of the Universe lowered Himself into our dust-speck-sized world to take the form of one of its dust-speck inhabitants, so that He could connect with us and reveal Himself to us, and that whoever received Him and believed on His name would be able to experience a new and different birth and become one of the children of God (John 1:12-13).

To ponder this throughout the coming month is to give Christmas its true significance. May I, may you, focus our hearts in this direction as that special holiday approaches.