Today’s Passage: Matthew 1
Open the New Testament and the very first thing you meet is a list of names, and many a reader has stalled right there. Do not stall. Matthew is doing something deliberate. He begins his Gospel the way the Old Testament begins its great turning points, with a family record, because his whole book is the claim that the story Israel had been telling for two thousand years has finally arrived at its Man. In seventeen verses he walks from Abraham down to Joseph, and he arranges the walk in three sets of fourteen generations, hinged on David the king and on the exile to Babylon: the rise, the ruin, and the long quiet afterward. Into that list he writes four women, where an ancient genealogy would ordinarily have named none, and every one of them carries a story of scandal, foreignness, or grief. He leaves the wicked kings in alongside the good ones and does not tidy the family up. And then, at the end of the line, the pattern he has repeated forty times breaks. He does not write that Joseph was the father of Jesus. He writes that Joseph was the husband of Mary, “of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ,” and the rest of the chapter tells you why the pattern had to break. Mary is found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. Joseph, a righteous man unwilling to shame her, resolves to end the marriage quietly. An angel meets him in a dream, tells him not to be afraid, gives him the child’s name and the reason for it, and Matthew tells us that all of it fulfills a word spoken through Isaiah seven hundred years before. By the time you reach verse twenty-five you have been told who this King is, whose story He completes, what He came to do, and who He is.
As you read, hold this: The King’s own family line runs straight through scandal, exile, and failure, because He came to save His people from their sins, and His name is God with us.
Context The world of Matthew 1
To a first-century Jew, a genealogy was not filler. It was a title deed. Families kept their records with care, priests had to prove their descent from Aaron before they could serve, and the historian Josephus, writing in that same generation, thought it worth boasting that he could produce his own line from the public registers. Such records were kept in the temple archives in Jerusalem until the Romans burned the place in AD 70, which means Matthew is publishing a claim that could still, in his lifetime, be checked. And the claim is enormous. To sit on the throne of David you had to belong to David. Herod the Great, who ruled Judea when this child was born, was an Idumean by blood and a king by Roman appointment, and the old reports say he had genealogies destroyed because his own would not bear inspection. So Matthew’s first move is a legal one: here are the papers. Notice also the shape he gives them. Three sets of fourteen is a memory aid for people who learned by ear, and it may be more than that, since in Hebrew the letters of David’s name add up to fourteen. Matthew is also selective, and honestly so. In Hebrew reckoning “the father of” can mean ancestor as easily as it means son, and Matthew skips several kings between Joram and Uzziah. That was a normal way to write a line, not a mistake. He is not padding a register. He is preaching one.
Then there is the matter of Mary and Joseph, which the chapter simply assumes its readers understand. Jewish marriage came in two stages. The first, the betrothal, was not an engagement in our sense at all: it was a binding covenant, witnessed and legally sealed, after which the couple were husband and wife in law though they did not yet live together, and the only way out was a writ of divorce. Roughly a year later the husband would come and bring his bride home, and the marriage proper began. Mary and Joseph stood in that first stage. A pregnancy in that gap could mean only one thing to the neighbors, and in a Galilean village of a few hundred souls there were no secrets. The Law of Moses treated such a case with the utmost seriousness, and though Rome had by then taken capital sentences largely out of Jewish hands, the shame would have followed Mary and her child for life. Joseph therefore had two roads open to him. He could accuse her publicly, name the cause before the elders, keep his own reputation spotless and destroy hers. Or he could hand her a quiet writ before two witnesses without stating why. Hold that in mind as you read verse nineteen, because Matthew is about to tell you which road a righteous man took, and it is not the one his neighbors would have called righteous.
Matthew 1:1–6 (BSB)
¹ This is the record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham: ² Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers. ³ Judah was the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Ram. ⁴ Ram was the father of Amminadab, Amminadab the father of Nahshon, and Nahshon the father of Salmon. ⁵ Salmon was the father of Boaz by Rahab, Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse, ⁶ and Jesse the father of David the king. Next: David was the father of Solomon by Uriah’s wife,
Matthew’s first sentence is his whole Gospel in miniature: this is Jesus, “the son of David, the son of Abraham.” Two names, two promises, and everything that follows hangs on them. Son of Abraham means the man to whom God swore that through his offspring all the nations of the earth would be blessed, so this King is not a private possession of one people. Son of David means the shepherd boy God set on a throne and promised a kingdom that would not end, so this One is not merely a teacher but an heir, and the word Matthew uses for Him, Christos, pronounced khris-TOS. Strong's G5547, the Anointed One, Christ, Messiah. Christos is not a surname. It is a job, and a crown. The word means “anointed one,” and it is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Mashiach, from which we get Messiah. In Israel a man was anointed with oil when God set him apart for an office he could not take for himself: priests were anointed, and prophets on occasion, and above all kings. Samuel poured the horn of oil over David’s head in front of his brothers, and from that moment the boy was the LORD’s anointed even though Saul still held the palace and David still had years in caves ahead of him. So when Matthew calls this child Christos in his opening line, he is not decorating the name Jesus. He is saying that the office is filled. Centuries of prophets had spoken of an Anointed One who would come from David’s house, rule in righteousness, and never be removed, and Israel had waited through exile, through Persian governors, through Greek kings and Roman procurators, praying for Him. Matthew’s answer, laid out in a list of names, is that the wait is over. And here is the sweetness of it for you: the Anointed One holds His three offices on your behalf. He is the Prophet who speaks God’s word to you, the Priest who offers the sacrifice for you, and the King who reigns over you and for you. Blessed be His name. , says exactly that. Then the record walks down from Abraham, and you must not skim it as a page of hard names, because Matthew has done something to it that no careful reader of his day could have missed. Ancient genealogies traced fathers. Matthew stops four times and writes a woman into the line. Tamar, who was cheated of her rights by Judah and got her sons by sitting veiled at the roadside where he would take her for a prostitute. Rahab, a Canaanite of Jericho who kept a house of ill repute and hid the spies under the flax on her roof. Ruth, a Moabitess out of a people the Law had long held at arm’s length, who came home with Naomi and gleaned in Boaz’s field. And then the fourth, and see how Matthew writes it: not Bathsheba, but “Uriah’s wife,” so that a stolen woman and a murdered husband stand there in the King’s family papers with the wound still open. Any other court in the world would have quietly edited that page. God did not. Sit with that for a moment. The line of the Messiah runs straight through scandal, foreignness, and grief, and it runs through them on purpose, because the King coming at the end of it is coming for exactly such people.
Matthew 1:7–17 (BSB)
⁷ Solomon the father of Rehoboam, Rehoboam the father of Abijah, and Abijah the father of Asa. ⁸ Asa was the father of Jehoshaphat, Jehoshaphat the father of Joram, and Joram the father of Uzziah. ⁹ Uzziah was the father of Jotham, Jotham the father of Ahaz, and Ahaz the father of Hezekiah. ¹⁰ Hezekiah was the father of Manasseh, Manasseh the father of Amon, Amon the father of Josiah, ¹¹ and Josiah the father of Jeconiah and his brothers at the time of the exile to Babylon. ¹² After the exile to Babylon: Jeconiah was the father of Shealtiel, Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel, ¹³ Zerubbabel the father of Abiud, Abiud the father of Eliakim, and Eliakim the father of Azor. ¹⁴ Azor was the father of Zadok, Zadok the father of Achim, and Achim the father of Eliud. ¹⁵ Eliud was the father of Eleazar, Eleazar the father of Matthan, Matthan the father of Jacob, ¹⁶ and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ. ¹⁷ In all, then, there were fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Christ.
Now the list goes through the kings, and it does not flatter them. Here is Asa, who tore down the idols, and Jehoshaphat, who sent teachers through the land with the Book. Here is Hezekiah, who spread the enemy’s letter out before the LORD, and Josiah, who wept when the Law was read to him. But here also is Rehoboam, who split the kingdom because he preferred the advice of young men; Ahaz, who shut the temple doors and burned his own son in the fire; and Manasseh, who filled Jerusalem with innocent blood and reigned longer than any of them. God kept every one of them in the record. He did not trim the family tree of His Son down to the respectable branches. And He had bound Himself to that house by an oath He would not take back:
"He will build a house for My Name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever." 2 Samuel 7:13 (BSB)
Then comes the hinge of the whole list, and Matthew names it twice so you cannot miss it: “the exile to Babylon.” That was the day the promise appeared to die. The city burned, the temple was leveled, the last king of David’s line had his eyes put out after watching his sons killed, and the survivors were marched a thousand miles east. And what happens to the genealogy afterward? Look at it. Shealtiel, Zerubbabel, and then Abiud, Eliakim, Azor, Zadok, Achim, Eliud, Eleazar, Matthan, names you have never heard preached and never will. The royal line goes underground and becomes a family of nobodies in a backwater province, and it stays that way for roughly six hundred years. But it does not stop. That is the point of the three fourteens: rise, ruin, and then the long patient stretch where nothing seems to be happening and God is keeping His word every single generation of it. And when Matthew reaches the end of the third fourteen, the drumbeat of “was the father of” that has sounded forty times suddenly falls silent. He does not say Joseph was the father of Jesus. He says Joseph was “the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.” A careful reader stops dead at that line, which is precisely what Matthew wants, because he is about to explain it.
Matthew 1:18–19 (BSB)
¹⁸ This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about: His mother Mary was pledged in marriage to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. ¹⁹ Because Joseph her husband was a righteous man and was unwilling to disgrace her publicly, he resolved to divorce her quietly.
Matthew tells us the truth in the first breath, and it is worth noticing that he tells it to us and not to Joseph. We are told at once that the child was conceived through the Holy Spirit. Joseph was not. All he knew was that the woman he was covenanted to marry, whom he had not yet brought home, was carrying a child, and that on the plainest reading of the facts she had betrayed him. Try to feel the weight of that before you move on. Then Matthew gives him a single adjective and builds the whole scene on it: Joseph was a dikaios, pronounced DIH-kai-os. Strong's G1342, righteous, just, upright. Dikaios is one of the great load-bearing words of the Bible. In ordinary Greek it meant a man who gave everyone their due, who kept the rules and could not be faulted; in the Greek Old Testament it became the word for the man who is right with God and lives accordingly, the word for Noah, for Abel, for the man of Psalm 1. It is the root of the whole family of words Paul will later use for justification, being declared right in the court of heaven. So when Matthew hands the word to Joseph, he is not saying Joseph was a nice man. He is saying Joseph belonged to that long line of quiet believers who feared God and kept His word. And then watch what such righteousness actually looks like when it is put under pressure. It does not become harsh. It does not go looking for the loophole either. It holds the Law with one hand and mercy with the other and takes the loss itself. That is a small early picture of something the rest of this Gospel will make blazingly clear, for the child in Mary’s womb is the one truly dikaios man, and He will keep the Law perfectly and then take the loss Himself so that the guilty go free. Righteousness, in the end, is not a hard thing. It has God’s own mercy running through the middle of it. man, and because he was righteous he was unwilling to disgrace her publicly, and resolved to divorce her quietly. Read that sentence slowly, because it does something to our idea of righteousness. The neighbors would have said the righteous course was to expose her, to make it publicly clear that he had not sinned and would not shelter sin. Matthew says the opposite. Here is a man who intends to obey the Law he loves, and who at the same time will not use the Law as a weapon against a woman he believes has wronged him. He looks for the road that costs him and spares her. That is a rare and beautiful thing in any century, and God chose that man to raise His Son.
Matthew 1:20–21 (BSB)
²⁰ But after he had pondered these things, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to embrace Mary as your wife, for the One conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. ²¹ She will give birth to a Son, and you are to give Him the name Jesus, because He will save His people from their sins.”
He had not acted yet. He had “pondered these things,” turned them over through what one suspects were some very long nights, and while he lay there God came to him. Notice how the angel addresses him: “Joseph, son of David.” The man is a village craftsman with a ruined marriage on his hands, and heaven calls him by his royal name, because the office he is about to fill is precisely that of the son of David who will give this child a legal father and a legal throne. And then the word he needed, “do not be afraid to embrace Mary as your wife, for the One conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” Everything Joseph feared was untrue. There had been no betrayal, no sin, nothing to cover. What was happening in that house was the most holy thing that had ever happened in the world, and he had been standing at the edge of it in the dark, doing his honest best.
Then comes the naming, and with it the sentence that sets the course of the entire Gospel. “She will give birth to a Son, and you are to give Him the name Iēsous, pronounced ee-ay-SOOS. Strong's G2424, Jesus, "the LORD saves". Iēsous is simply the Greek for a common Hebrew name, Yeshua, which we usually spell Joshua. It is a sentence rather than a label, and the sentence is “the LORD saves.” There had been a Joshua who led Israel into the land after Moses died, and a Joshua the high priest who stood in filthy garments before the angel and was clothed in clean ones. It was an ordinary name, and part of the wonder of the incarnation is that the Son of God took an ordinary name off the village street. But the angel will not let it stay ordinary. He gives the reason for it in the same breath: “because He will save His people from their sins.” The name is the mission. Every time that name was called across a courtyard in Nazareth, a promise was being spoken over the boy who answered to it. And every time you speak it now, you are saying out loud what God has done: the LORD saves. He does not merely offer help, or point out the way, or improve those who are already doing well. He saves, and what He saves us from is named plainly, and it is us. Say the name slowly sometime and let it be a prayer. , because He will save His people from their sins.” Do not pass over that lightly. Heaven itself explains the name, and the explanation is not that He will save His people from Rome, or from poverty, or from their circumstances, or from their enemies, though every one of those was on the wish list of the nation that was waiting for Him. He will save His people from their sins. That is the deepest trouble any of us has, the one no revolution and no reform and no amount of trying harder has ever touched, and the King is coming for it directly. Everything else in Matthew, the sermon on the mountain, the healings, the hard words to the proud, the road to Jerusalem, the cross and the empty tomb, is this one sentence being carried out.
That promise was not new, either. Israel had sung it in the dark for centuries, in a psalm of the pilgrims going up to Jerusalem, and the singers cannot have guessed how literally God intended to keep it:
"And He will redeem Israel from all iniquity." Psalm 130:8 (BSB)
Matthew 1:22–23 (BSB)
²² All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: ²³ “Behold, the virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call Him Immanuel” (which means, “God with us”).
Matthew now steps out of the story to say something he will say ten more times before his book is done: this happened “to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet.” He wants you to see that God has been at work on this for a very long time. The word he reaches for came through Isaiah to a frightened king named Ahaz, with two armies marching on Jerusalem and the house of David shaking like trees in the wind. God offered Ahaz a sign; Ahaz, with false piety, refused to ask for one; and God gave him a sign anyway, of a virgin who would conceive and bear a son called Emmanouēl, pronounced em-man-oo-ALE. Strong's G1694, Immanuel, God with us. Emmanouēl comes over into Greek straight from the Hebrew Immanu-El, three small pieces meaning “with us God.” Isaiah uses it three times in two chapters, and there it is spoken over a land about to be overrun, which tells you something important: the name is not a warm sentiment for an easy day. It is what God says when the armies are on the road. And in Matthew it is no longer a promise about a sign given to a doubting king but a description of a person lying in a manger. Hold the two halves of that name apart for a moment and look at them. El, God: the maker of heaven and earth, holy, unapproachable, whom no one may see and live. Immanu, with us: in a poor family, in an occupied province, in flesh that got hungry and tired and finally bled. The Church has confessed ever since, because Scripture says it, that this child is fully God and fully man, one Person, conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of a virgin, and that if He were one shred less than God He could not save us and one shred less than man He could not stand in our place. And notice where Matthew puts this name. Here at the front door of his Gospel, and then again at the very end, in the last words of the risen King to His own: I am with you always. The book opens and closes on the same promise. . Matthew, writing under the Spirit who gave the prophecy in the first place, tells us where that word was always going. And he adds the translation for us, because the name is the whole point: “God with us.”
Do not hurry past the manner of it, either. Matthew says plainly what Luke says plainly and what the Church has confessed in every century since: this child had no human father. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of a virgin, truly born, truly one of us, and truly God the Son. It is not a detail we may set aside as decoration on the story, because the whole gospel rests on it. Another apostle put the same wonder in one line:
"The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth." John 1:14 (BSB)
Matthew 1:24–25 (BSB)
²⁴ When Joseph woke up, he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and embraced Mary as his wife. ²⁵ But he had no union with her until she gave birth to a Son. And he gave Him the name Jesus.
And that is the end of the chapter: a man wakes up and obeys. There is no argument, no request for a second sign, no delay while he thinks it over. Joseph simply “did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him.” Consider what obedience cost him. He took home a wife the village would count as disgraced, and he wore the raised eyebrows for the rest of his life, and there is not one recorded word of complaint from him in all of Scripture. He waited, he cared for her, and when the child was born he did the last thing the angel had told him to do: “he gave Him the name Jesus.” That act mattered more than it looks. In Israel it was the father who named the child, and by naming Him, Joseph publicly received Him as his own son and handed Him the family papers we just read, the legal descent from David through the kings. Mary gave Him His humanity. Joseph gave Him His throne. Neither of them gave Him His life, because that came from the Holy Spirit. So the King arrives quietly, in an ordinary house, to a young woman and a carpenter who both said yes to God when it cost them everything they had.
Study notes Going deeper
Look back over the chapter as one piece. It begins with a promise made to Abraham, runs it through a royal house that could not keep its own commandments, carries it into exile where it looked finished, keeps it alive through six hundred years of obscure men whose names nobody remembers, and then sets it down in a village in Galilee in the person of a child conceived by the Holy Spirit. There is no accident anywhere in it. The women with their broken stories are not a blemish on the line; they are a preview of who this King came for. The wicked kings are not an embarrassment God overlooked; they are proof that the promise never depended on the quality of the men who carried it. And the long silence after Babylon is not God losing interest; it is God being patient on a scale we can hardly imagine. Paul saw the same thing and put it in a single sentence:
"But when the time had fully come, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive our adoption as sons." Galatians 4:4–5 (BSB)
When the time had fully come. Not a moment early and not a moment late, and every one of those forty generations was God bringing the clock around to the hour He had fixed before the world began. So if you are in a season where the promises of God seem to have gone underground in your own life, read this list again. Nothing was happening in the years between Zerubbabel and Joseph, so far as anyone could see, and God was doing the most important thing in the history of the world the whole time. He keeps His word. He keeps it through scandal and through failure and through exile and through silence, and He kept it by sending a Son whose name means the LORD saves and whose other name means God with us. Learn the Word, trust the God who is never late, and give thanks.