Matthew 1:1-17

Chapter 1

Every Name Historical Christ Always Coming Christ Comes Through All Sorts of People

Matthew 1:1-17 .

1. The book of the generation (a Hebrew form) of Jesus Christ (Jesus was a common name, but not Christ ), the Son of David (the most popular of his names), the son of Abraham.

2. Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judas and his brethren;

3. And Judas begat Phares and Zara of Thamar (quite exceptional to find the name of a woman in a Jewish genealogy); and Phares begat Esrom; and Esrom begat Aram;

4. And Aram begat Aminadab; and Amiriadab begat Naasaon (the brother-in-law of Aaron); and Naasson begat Salmon (probably one of the two spies saved by Rahab);

5. And Salmon begat Booz of Rachab (the harlot of Jericho); and Booz begat Obed of Ruth (a heathen Moabitess); and Obed begat Jesse;

6. And Jesse begat David the king; and David the king begat Solomon of her that had been the wife of Urias (the last woman's name in the genealogy);

7. And Solomon begat Roboam; and Roboam begat Abia; and Abia begat Asa;

8. And Asa begat Josaphat; and Josaphat begat Joram; and Joram begat Ozias (the Uzziah of the Old Testament);

9. And Ozias begat Joatham; and Joatham begat Achaz; and Achaz begat Ezekias;

10. And Ezekias begat Manasses; and Manasses begat Amon; and Amon begat Josias;

11. And Josias begat Jechonias and his brethren, about the time they were carried away to Babylon:

12. And after they were brought to Babylon, Jechonias begat Salathiel; and Sala thiel begat Zorobabel;

13. And Zorobabel begat Abiud; and Abiud begat Eliakim; and Eliakim begat Azor;

14. And Azor begat Sadoc; and Sadoc begat Achim; and Achim begat Eliud;

15. And Eliud begat Eleazar; and Eleazar begat Matthan; and Matthan begat Jacob;

16. And Jacob begat Joseph (descended from David through Rehoboam and Solomon) the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.

17. So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David until the carrying away into Babylon are fourteen generations; and from the carrying away into Babylon unto Christ are fourteen generations. (So divided merely to help the memory. The division is arbitrary.)

This is a genealogical tree. One sometimes wonders why such lists of names are in a book which is specifically known as a revelation of the will and love of God. Who cares to read a genealogical table? Most of the names are unknown, many of them are difficult to pronounce, and once read, who can remember a solitary verse of the whole catalogue? Yet the names are here, and if here, there must be some purpose in the record. God is a severe economist of space as of everything else: he does not throw anything away, though there may be wastefulness here and there, according to our present incomplete notions of things. Fasten your attention upon this genealogical tree for the purpose of studying it with a view of finding out whether the matter ends within this formal tree, or whether it does not become a tree that fills the whole earth and heaven, yea, and spreads itself over all the spaces and liberties of the universe.

The great mistake which you have to overcome in your Christian studies is, that Jesus Christ lived within a few days only, and then ceased to live upon the earth. In only a very narrow sense is that true. I am interested for the time being in learning the peculiar circumstances under which my Lord's ministry was conducted. I am not unwilling to listen to pictorial descriptions of the scenery through which he passed: it gives me but momentary delight to know whether he spoke in the sunrise or in the sunset, yet I like to hear the rhetoricians' beautiful way of setting forth the surrounding circumstances of his ministry. But Jesus Christ was not a figure on a landscape: he was and is the life of all living things. Paint the landscape when you are going to give some hint of mighty discoverers or warriors or men of local and perishable renown; the landscape may be more important than such men themselves were within the immediate lines of their earthly history; but in the case of Jesus Christ I want nothing but Christ: I want the landscape to fade away into an invisible fleck, and nothing to be seen but the CHRIST, filling all things and making all things look small under his infinite presence.

We speak of Jesus Christ as a historical character. In no such sense can I be constrained to speak of him except for momentary convenience. Jesus Christ is the contemporary of all ages. He is living as certainly upon the earth as he ever lived in Nazareth. He is the Man of to-day, and there is no man beside. All good things flow from him, all beauty takes the hue of its tenderest colour from his countenance, and all strength is but a flash and throb of his almightiness. It is in this way that I study Christ, and it is so that we come to live upon most intimate terms, so that every day he baptizes me with his blood, and I besprinkle him with my tears. Do not go to the grave to find Christ: you will only find an angel there who says, "He is not here, he is risen." That is the daily speech which may be made about Christ: he is risen, so as to claim a still higher place in the attention and confidence of men, so as to fill a wider place, so as to claim a higher, stronger throne alway rising. The resurrection is not a miracle, measurable within five seconds, or within the twinkling of an eye it is the perpetual miracle of truth and purity and divine life.

Realize the nearness of Christ. Do not vex your souls by thinking that he lived centuries since. The centuries have nothing to do with his life except to continue it, and to open up some new unfoldment of its infinite compass and resource. I will say to my soul Thy Saviour is looking upon thee: he is watching all thy growth, he is sending his daily blessings upon thee, he is alway dying, alway rising, alway interceding a contradiction it may be in literal words, but the soul that has passed through the mystery of that agony which is birth, will understand that amid all this contradiction of letters there is a solid and melodious reconciliation and unity of meaning.

Every name is more or less historical. Even your obscure name has around it a little circle of associations peculiarly and incommunicably its own. What we call obscurity is only a relative term. God knows all the insects that are in the air: all the ephemera that are born in the sunbeam and that die in the moment of their birth, he registers in his great record. Do not say it does not matter what you, so little, obscure, unknown and socially contemptible, do. Every atom has its own shadow, every life has its own charge, and because you are obscure and uninfluential now, it does not follow that you need be so in the lapse of time. Besides that, consider your son. Sometimes a great figure stands upon a common and rough pedestal: who can tell the name of the father and mother of Moses? Yet Moses stands up in the gallery of history the most towering and indestructible figure. Do not let us therefore look at our own personal standing alone: we cannot tell what lives we may be, under God, creating, guiding, stimulating, blessing. We may bless others by sympathy, we may help the great by prayer: many an obscure suppliant gladdened the great heart of Paul by nothing but simple, loving intercession for him, that he might set his feet upon the neck of his enemies and be crowned with the glory of Christ's honour.

Some of these names were in the direct line of the royal succession, and some come into the genealogical table, as it were indirectly, so that commentators have to pause in their annotations and wonder how such and such names came into the genealogical table at all. We are soon puzzled by divine providences things do not always fall into easy straight lines; life is a complication, a problem, a difficulty. Now and again we catch a clue, and think we can unwind the whole, and presently we come to a knot which we cannot disentangle, and which it would be impious to attempt to cut. You know not what your incidental and indirect relations to the great lines of history are. You may be startled some day to find how much you have been and how much you have done. And when you ask how it is that this sudden renown has brought upon you the flame of immortality, the answer may be this: "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye did it unto me." Do not say that you are not upon the great lines of history, that you are not tributaries to the great river that seems to fray for itself an infinite channel through the earth, and pours its noble waters into a great sea. All rills trickle into the rivers. There is a royalty of mind as well as a royalty of blood. There is a royalty of behaviour as well as a royalty of descent. The question for each of us to consider is, whether we are acting up to the measure of our endowment and responsibility, and having answered that question in the affirmative, all the rest will be settled by the Supreme Power.

These words are spoken that I may break the spell of delusion and self-despair under which some men may be suffering. Do we not all suffer from that unhappy spell sometimes? Now and again we say. "Let the gourd wither, and let me cease to live, for all my efforts are but beatings of the air, and I seem to have no relation to the great currents and swift deep movements of Divine Providence and why I am here at all I cannot tell: would God the sleeping hour would come, when I might fall off into an everlasting self-oblivion! "It is foolish talk. The very least of us has a mission to fulfil, a function to discharge, a reward to secure. Let me then, as an apostle of Christ, call upon myself, upon every other soul, to seize the privilege and magnify the office to which we are called by the All-wise and All-good Creator.

All generations travail in birth with one greater than themselves. The great man is not yet come, he is always coming. The Son of Man has come? Yes, but not in his glory. Christ has come? Yes, but in his everyday clothes, to begin his work, to give the earnest of his blood but he is always coming. That was the explanation of apostolic fire and unquenchable enthusiasm, and it must be the explanation of the inspiring force under which our own life is stirred and whirled in its daily course. I am always looking for and hastening to the coming of Jesus Christ. He will never come as a man. He will come with a new coming, wider and more beautiful and satisfying than as a visible figure. Let those explain the meaning of such terms, who have felt what it is to have the heart move to apprehensions and seizures of realities for which there are no words. "Thy kingdom come." Do I thus pray for some great square figure to fall out of the blue heavens and establish itself upon wheels to roll round the earth? I pray, rather, for the infinite domination of ideas, purposes, and intentions of the most elevated and sacred kind. When Christianity comes, Christ will come: when the spirit of self-sacrifice has established itself upon the earth, then tell the heavens that the arrival has been completed, and that earth is just outside heaven, sunned with all its light, and made tuneful with all its music.

I find from these genealogical records that the most illustrious lines often dip into strange places and seem to become lost in great moral swamps, so much so that it appears to be impossible they can ever be found again and reunited. There is many a bad man in this list. There are men here who have broken all the commandments of God. There are women here who have done the same. And yet the grand purpose moves on: it is not in the power of men's hands to break the threads of the divine purpose and scheme. The Saviour comes, notwithstanding at times the whole history seems to be depraved and utterly lost. I remark upon this fact the more pathetically because it is even so in the individual life. Sometimes we find ourselves where it seems to be impossible that God can ever find us more. Yet the life is redeemed with great cost to God, for he pays blood for blood, but his redeemed ones are not given over to the power of the destroyer. Cast down, but not destroyed; smitten on the cheekbone, but not forsaken; cursing, swearing, denying Christ with oaths and blasphemy, flat, black and then saying, "Lord, thou knowest all things, thou knowest that I love thee." As the predicted man came through all the troubled lines, now illustrious with moral purity, now shamed with infinite disgrace, so through my life and thine, with all their slips and falls, their mighty prayers and horrible blasphemies, our better self shall come, the saint that is in us shall be delivered and nourished and perfected, and through our ungainly life, most depraved and occasionally most loathsome, there shall come that glorious body, that shining self, which is like Christ.

As I read this genealogy, I feel how true it is that grace is not hereditary. The good man, so good as to be almost an angel, has a son that shames the very genius of decency and insults with violence the very spirit of righteousness. This is a great mystery, that a mother, whose voice the angels might well mistake for a voice of their own, gives birth to a son that breaks her heart with his great wickedness. And a more astounding wonder still that a man whose name is a disgrace to humanity shall have a daughter beautiful as an angel, a son both philosopher and saint. Despise no man, blame no man, for circumstances over which he had no control, and praise no man for advantages which were thrust upon him without any spontaneity on his own part. Remember what your children may be; though oftentimes your minds become shocked and confounded because it seems as if the divine purpose were broken off, know that God is at the head, and through all the process of the suns, his grand purpose is developing and widening itself. Judge not by the accident; do not come to broad generalizations upon the circumstance of the passing moment; remember that all history, all time, all influences are under divine moulding and direction, and when God says "It is finished," he and the universe may hold quiet and solemn Sabbath together.

In reading further these genealogical records, I find that Jesus Christ came through all sorts of people. If I were minded to challenge him, I could upbraid him with some names that are here, and with cruel taunting I could add bitterness to his cup. He tells me that he came through all sorts to all sorts. It must be so with your life, if you are to be a great minister of God. You must not belong to any one class. You must have been depraved in your ancestors, however holy you are in yourself. O thou Son of Man, I have found thee, ancestrally, in the very pit of shame. What a history lay behind him: how he brought it all up into one focus and lived it over again in his tender sympathy, his universal understanding of human want, and his infinite beneficence whilst ministering to all classes of human kind. O thou art my preacher who comest up to every mood of my soul, so that when I am less than beast, thou knowest how to speak to me, and nearly angel, thou canst accost me in the better tongue.

This is the Christ that we preach, the Christ who came through all sorts of people, that he might teach and bless all sorts of people, so that you, wise sage, can go to him and find that your ingenuity is a blunder and your profundity the shallowest of surfaces so that you, poor sinner, can go to him, and find him girded with a towel, ready to wash with water or with blood the stain that no other but himself can ever reach. And you too, little child, dear sweet little girl or boy, you can go to him, for he himself was the Child Jesus, and he knows everything that swells the child's breast and makes the child's eyes glisten and the child's soul laugh with glee. Behold, this is no class-man, no local deity, no special missionary, no man who can speak in one language only. His tabernacle is in the sun, and his speech as impartial and universal as the wind.

In looking still further into this genealogical table, I find that Jesus Christ did not always come through the eldest sons. Some of these names are the names of the eldest sons of their families and some are younger sons. God will not be bounded in his movements by our little laws of primogeniture and precedency. To-day he says, "I will go through the eldest son;" next time he says, "Younger son, come, I will elect thee." And thus he moves, not by our ceremonial arrangements, but by a grandeur and a sweep of movement which takes in all elements and all arrangements of human life, and gives a tender sanctity to the things that we often foolishly despise.

The question has arisen again and again as I have been perusing this genealogical table, Why did not Jesus Christ come earlier? Thus I come upon a mystery in Divine Providence. Jesus Christ came before he came in the flesh. I want you, therefore, to recall the very first lesson of the morning, that as he comes now, since his flesh was buried, so he came before his incarnation in Bethlehem. Said he, "Abraham rejoiced to see my day." As a Guest, a nameless Presence, a wrestling Angel, a Cloud by day, a Fire by night, an Eye in the wheels of the chariots of Israel, in a thousand ways he came to the olden church, in a thousand ways he comes to the baptized church of to-day. Have all your doors and windows open, for you cannot tell by what means he will find access to your individual life or to your organized existence as churches. Be ready for him. What I say unto one I say unto all, Watch.

Let me say that there is a record in which even our names may all be found. Rejoice not that the spirits are subject unto you, but rather rejoice because your names are written in heaven. Let every soul remember that his name may be written in the Lamb's book of Life. When the Saviour was told that his mother and other relatives stood without, desiring to see him, he said, "Who is my mother and who are my brethren? Whosoever doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my mother, and sister, and brother." So we may all be in the genealogical tree of which he is the root: we may all be in the great sky, as little stars indeed, of which he is the central and inextinguishable glory.