Tonight.
I wanted to share a rabbit hole that I’ve
gone down recently.
~ the don’t worry, the whole thing’s the
rabbit hole.
So but I was kind of looking through
It’s unfortunate that my email has
auto-subscribed to a few of the things
that
it has. They include things like Reddit
and Quora and other like places where
people
go to question things. And a lot of
questions come
up around Christianity and the way things
don’t agree with one another in the Bible.
And one of the most glaring spaces where
the Bible appears to disagree with itself
is a very long passage in two different
books.
If you look at the genealogy as it’s set
forth in Matthew versus Luke,
Joseph was two completely different
people,
according to the way the genealogies are
laid out.
So to kind of get us started, I want to go
through the first part of it.
So this is where it matches up because
Abraham back is not included in one,
and ~ the genealogies generally match up
all the way down to Jesse.
After David, you start to see a difference
in the way the genealogies are laid out.
And there’s some reasoning behind that,
which I want to kind of explore tonight.
what are the reasons that the genealogies
are so different in Matthew and in Luke?
So if you look through the history of this
genealogy,
it tells a story. And it starts in the Old
Testament.
So it starts with Adam, who was the first
to deliver sin to the world.
He and his wife Eve brought sin and death
into the world.
And as they brought it,
they were given something in return.
They were given a promise. So they were
given a promise that is fulfilled
at the end of the cycle we’re going to
cover tonight.
So they were given a promise that through
Eve the entire world would be blessed.
So we continue down through that.
And we get to Seth. So the firstborn,
which traditionally has been where this
promise should pass through the
generations,
didn’t go to the firstborn, because the
firstborn murdered the secondborn.
So Seth had to come into being to be re a
replacement for that firstborn.
So that promise that was made to Adam was
passed to Seth.
And as we keep going.
There’s not much to note about the next j
several generations,
but when you get to Enoch, you find
somebody who’s pretty special.
You find somebody who was not only
so good that he followed God,
but he was so good that God took him with
him.
And you get to the next one,
Methuselah, Enoch’s son. And if you look
at the math.
that is tied into how long Methuselah
lived being the longest living man
recorded.
He died in the flood.
So his death coincides with the date of
the flood.
So more than likely Methuselah was not
good enough to survive what his
son was able to survive.
Or what his grandson was able to survive.
Eventually we get to Noah. And in 1 Peter,
1 Peter uses the flood as an example of
what baptism is.
So Noah becomes the example of the first
time baptism into the world where
it was washed clean by water. Then we get
to Shem,
and Shem, through some failure of his
father,
was the one who received the blessing.
From Noah. So that promise that was given
all the way back in the Garden
of Eden was passed through Shem’s line.
And Shem’s line is where we get a lot of
the nations that we’re going
to be interacting with throughout the rest
of the Bible.
So the Jews all come from the Semitic
line.
But so do the Canaanites, so do the
Philistines,
so do all of these people that we’re going
to be interacting with.
All of these people who quickly give up
serving God and turn to idols.
All of these people who worship things
like Molech,
where literally you are to offer your
children to the bronze god that they
set on fire so that your children burn to
provide protection for your people,
that you have human sacrifice even of
adults,
and you have a people who have turned so
far away from the will
of God that they’re almost unrecognizable.
You have Canaan, who’s significant only
that he is not mentioned in some
old Masoric text but was in the
Septuagint.
So when Luke is quoting this, he’s quoting
the passage from the Septuagint.
~ and then you get Peleg. So Paleg is
described
as during his lifetime the world was
divided.
This is when the Tower of Babel happens.
I want you to look at how many generations
are between Noah and Paleg.
It’s a small world still.
So it we’re talking maybe tens of
thousands of people,
not the billions of people we think of as
inhabiting the world today.
It is a very small group of human beings
that are on this earth.
And you see, pay during Peleg’s time the
world was divided because
the languages were separated. And that
caused a scattering of people.
So they take all of their religious
backgrounds.
If you recall, what do they say at Babel?
when they start building a tower.
What do they want to make?
Something to reach God? A name for
themselves.
That is language that is used over and
over and over in
the whole Old Testament to describe men
defying God.
They’re not taking on the image of God.
They’re not taking on the semblance of a
godly people.
They’re trying to make a name for
themselves.
They’re trying to take the power of God.
God is the one who gives people a name.
And you see that in the good examples.
You see humility. You see people not
lauding praises
on themselves when they’re given as good
examples,
but turning to God for salvation.
You see it all throughout the Psalms of
David,
that David over and over and over is
reminded that he should stop sinning
and listen to God, that he should stop
dwelling on his own problems.
And start meditating on the scriptures.
So we see this come back over and over in
the people that follow the
God are the humble, and the people that
follow themselves are evil.
As we keep going through this,
we finally get to Abraham. Abraham is
an interesting man that by the time we
read about him in the New Testament,
he’s called the what? The father of what?
Follower of what? He’s called that too.
He’s called the father of the faithful.
He’s the father of failures in the way his
story is recorded.
Over and over and over through his
journey,
you see Abraham failing to depend on God
and trying to take
it into his own power to save himself,
to save his family. You see it twice with
Sarah,
where he claims she’s his sister,
which she was his sister, but she was also
his wife.
So we see these failures accumulating
through Abraham over and over and over.
In fact, nine are recorded, and he’s
finally successful with the last one,
which frankly is the most horrific thing
that we see in his life,
and that he’s told to sacrifice his son
only for his son to once again
be saved by who? God.
He turned it over and let God take care of
the situation that
he was creating himself.
So we see Abraham taking his entire life
to learn these lessons.
And we see that mistakes pass through to
the son,
but one thing I want to note is in ancient
rabbinical text,
this guy we know of as Shem was still
alive when Abraham was alive.
He lived a hundred years past Abraham’s
death.
And a lot of these old rabbinical texts
mention that that was Melchizedek.
That was the priest and king that they see
one day,
that Abraham sees and offers sacrifice to.
It’s his oldest living ancestor,
is who he’s interacting with at this
point.
Now.
That’s not got that’s not the Bible,
but that’s old rabbinical text,
but it’s interesting to note that that is
what the ancient Hebrews thought,
in that it was Shem that is now known as
Melchizedek,
known by a priestly title. Then we get to
Isaac,
who once again we see loses the line of
secession.
It’s a little less hard and firm in this
one,
in that Ishmael was born through who?
Not his wife, right, born through Hagar.
But Isaac is the secondborn. By all
accounts,
according to the law at the time,
Ishmael should have been one to receive
the birthright,
and that blessing should have passed
through Ishmael.
But that blessing was instead passed down
to Isaac.
Then we see Jacob, who is a secondborn and
a liar and a thief.
All throughout his life we see him doing
the wrong thing over and over till
he finally comes back home. And he reaps
terrible consequences for a
lot of his actions. He ends up with two
wives and two concubines because of this.
He ends up with a multitude of children.
And when he finally comes back home.
He has to encounter God himself to start
to change his life.
He has to wrestle with God, a physical
wrestling to represent all
the wrestling he has been doing by living
in his own devices
and not turning it over to God.
This is a lesson that humanity has always
struggled to learn.
And that’s what we see in this collection
of people who eventually lead
us down to Jesus.
We see a people who are struggling to
accept God for who God is.
We get to Judah. Not only does Jesus not
pass it through the firstborn,
but he doubles down this time.
The firstborn doesn’t get it, the
secondborn doesn’t get it,
the thirdborn doesn’t get it. Their sin
drove the blessing away from them,
and it’s inherited by the fourth.
So in Judah, we see the fourthborn
receiving the blessing.
And Judah
was not a good person either. Judah
Slept with Tamar, who was his
daughter-in-law,
and the son who becomes the line that
David comes through was
a child of incest. It was a child that is
born of Judah and his daughter-in-law.
So we go a little further. we get to
somebody who may or may not belong in the
text.
It’s not in the Masoric text, but it’s in
the Septuagint.
And then we get down to ~
Selah and Rahab. Was Rahab Jewish?
No. Rahab bore Boaz.
Boaz married who? Also not a Jew.
So by the time you get to the person who’s
being set up to be king,
the blood of the Jewish nation has been
almost eliminated from his lineage.
So you have Obed and Jesse, who probably
married Jews,
I don’t know who they married,
but the line of
Of inheritance from Abraham has been
dwindled as part of the process.
So are you seeing a pattern in what we’re
doing here?
What God is doing with these gen with
genealogist generation?
He’s setting up the person who would
eventually be king.
That it’s not a Jew, that it’s not someone
who is from
a lineage of people who are pure and of
people who are honorable.
It’s from a people that he created to
love,
knowing their faults, knowing how many
times they would fail.
So now we get the David
And at David’s point in the text,
there’s two genealogies. They’re
completely different.
In Luke, we have a genealog make sure I’m
right here.
Luke, we have a genealogy through Nathan.
And in Matthew, we have a genealogy
through Solomon.
And we look at those two things,
that’s two completely different lines.
Which one of them was king?
So the inheritance should have passed down
through Solomon.
The blessing should be passing down
through Solomon.
People would connect this idea of the
blessing with a line of kings at this
point,
because they’re going to be descendants of
David.
But when we look at what we’re given,
it’s two completely different genealogies.
They match up in one place in the future.
When you get to Shieldil and Zerubabel,
who were Shield, who was who was
Zerubabel?
Do you remember? He’s not mentioned a lot
in the Bible.
Yep. Yep. Shitel was born in captivity and
remained a captive.
Zerubbabel was the only royal line that
came back.
The only member of the royal line that
came back.
So if they were going to set up a new
king,
it should have been sh through sh through
Zerubbabel,
right? It disappears. There’s no interest
in having a king anymore.
Likely ’cause they weren’t allowed to have
one.
But there doesn’t seem to be any talk or
any discussion around Zerubabel inheriting
the throne. It seems to be something
that’s gone away at this point.
So why do we have two completely different
lineages?
Have you ever ever heard an explanation
for this before?
So when you look at it, there are three
reasons that scholars give for it.
So one of them is that they are both
talking about Joseph’s ancestry.
And Joseph’s ancestry was recorded two
ways.
So he was adopted by the descendant
of Zerubbabel that is mentioned in
Matthew.
And so that’s where he gets his legal
lineage.
But his biological lineage is what’s
traced in Luke.
The other is ~ that there is a
Try to remember exactly what this one is.
Sorry, I said I’m backwards. So that’s the
physical,
that’s the problem of curr progressive
that I can never tell on the screen where
I am. the other one is that he was ~ that
it was a lineage of Mary that is traced in
Luke.
And that the reason Joseph’s name is used
is because legally it would have
to be Joseph to pass the inheritance
along.
But what it’s saying in Luke’s passage is
that Luke is.
Does a lot of effort to document that Mary
was a virgin.
So as part of this, to make sure the
lineage passed through,
it’s mentioned as j supposedly of Joseph,
implying that it’s actually of Mary when
it talks about it in the in the genealogy.
Whereas over in Matthew, it is actually
the the lineage of Joseph.
And the other one is that it was a
Levereite marriage,
so a lot a lot closer to what we see.
With the daughters being passed from son
to son up the up the chain
if somebody dies. Realistically,
of these three choices, there’s a fourth
choice I like a little better.
~ because it does it makes none of these
three matter.
And that choice ties back into what these
genealogies are trying to tell us.
So if you look
At what the purpose of the of the two
books are.
If you look at Matthew, Matthew’s written
to a Jewish community where
the royal lineage would matter.
So Matthew needs to tell the story of how
he ties back from king
to king to king all the way to David.
Whereas Luke is written to Gentiles,
and Gentiles are much more fascinated with
biological
means. They’re much more traded in actual
family,
how father passes the son. If you think
about the Roman Empire at this point,
who is Caesar?
Right, but which Caesar was it?
Sugustus Caesar. Was Augustus Caesar the
biological son of Julius Caesar?
He was adopted. You have a dynasty who
crowns
its descendants through adoption,
not through actual biological genetics.
So it’s something that’s different in the
world now.
It’s something if you look at the passing
of
the baton from ~ I can’t think of his
name,
Philip to Alexander, that was a father-son
relationship.
As soon as Alexander died, generals fought
over the Empire.
The Empire was split up into the
Ptolemaics and the San the I can’t think
of them all right now, but it’s split up
amongst the different generals.
So you’re living in a world where the
inheritance of your genetics don’t matter
the way they matter to the Jews.
Because power doesn’t flow through
manifest destiny,
which is something we bring back later in
the medieval era,
right?
It’s something that flows through strength
and through merit.
So it’s a much different audience that
Luke is trying to target.
He’s trying to target everybody,
not just the Jews. The direction it goes
forward.
It starts with Abraham and goes all the
way to Jesus.
Whereas in Luke, it works backwards.
So it starts with Jesus and goes all the
way,
not just to Abraham.
Not just to Adam, it goes all the way to
God.
So he in Luke is trying to show the
divinity of Jesus.
That this lineage goes all the way through
history till God put the spark
on the earth. If you look at the starting
point,
it’s Abraham, father of the Jews,
right? But it’s traced all the way back to
God in Luke.
If you look at the core theme,
Jesus is the foretold Messiah.
He is the Messiah of prophecy.
And if you look at Luke’s theme,
Jesus is the savior of all of humanity,
not just the Jews. So when you look at who
they’re traced through,
in Matthew, what the Jews would have been
concerned about is how do you
get back to Solomon, David’s son?
But in Luke, it’s traced back to Nathan,
Nathan’s other son, or David’s other son,
not the royal lineage, but
the the biological lineage.
So when we look at it, what I want to take
a look little bit of a closer look
at is why there’s two stories.
If we look back
Here, this one on the left side is the one
through Nathan and the one
on the right side is the one through
Solomon.
How many names during those time periods
do you recognize from Nathan’s line?
If you recognize any, it’s the two that
are highlighted in yellow.
The one that was that was the king in
exile and the one that was
the one that brought people back,
because they’re the only ones mentioned in
the Bible.
But on the other side, you have a line of
kings that held the throne
of David in Judah. So let’s look at a few
of these.
You’re going to see something similar when
we look at this breakdown.
Just like all the people on the first half
of the genealogy,
these were not good people.
Both Solomon and Nathan were sons of
Bathsheba.
How did David end up with Bathsheba?
Adultery and murder.
There’s probably no frame of a wedding
that was described in the Bible that
was more messed up than David’s marriage
to Bathsheba.
So we look at both Solomon and Nathan
descended through this terrible
act where David didn’t just steal his
friend’s wife,
he murdered somebody who was one of his
protectors.
He paid for it with that one, but he
doesn’t appear to have paid for it long
term.
~ you get to Rehboam.
Rehoboam spent his reign punishing
everyone else.
He listened to his friends when they said,
If Solomon taxed them with whips,
you tax them with scorpions. He oppressed
and tried to destroy the kingdom through
ill through.
Incompetence really. And he did destroy
most of it.
Ten of the tribes left during his reign.
You have Abijah, who was a polygamist,
married a bunch of women and kind of made
it his job to collect a harem
as large as he could. You have Asa,
who generally was a good king,
but when his health started failing,
refused to turn back to God, refused to
get rid of idols.
Refuse to do the things that the prophet
said,
if you do these things, God will take care
of you.
Then you have Jehosaphat, who started the
ties back with the Northern Kingdom.
Unfortunately, the king at the time was
everybody’s favorite collection
of stories in the Bible, King Ahab,
the evil.
Who was so a bon rule when you get to
first Kings chapter twenty one?
After this king not willing just to have
an entire kingdom
Listen to his wife when she dwelt on a
vineyard to the point where
he took the vineyard from someone,
and Elijah is spent sent to Saim,
so this is after idolatry, after the bell
worship,
after the murder of all of his priests,
after years of famine. This guy could not
learn.
And in verse nineteen, and thus you shall
speak to him,
saying, Thus saith the Lord, You have
murdered and also taken possession,
and you shall speak to him, saying,
Thus the Lord s thus says the Lord,
in the place where the dogs look up the
blood of Naboth,
and the dog shall look up blood,
even yours. And Ahab said to Elijah,
Have you found me, O my enemy?
And he answered, I have found you,
because you have sold yourself to do evil
in the sight of the Lord.
Behold I will bring in evil upon you and
will utterly sweep you away and
cut you off fr and cut off Ahab every a
cut off from Ahab every male
with bond and both bond and free in
Israel.
And I shall make your house like the house
of Jaboram,
the son of Nebat, and like the house of
Basha,
the son of Ahijah, because you have prov
because of the provocation which
you have provoked me to anger,
and because you have made Israel.
sin.
Ahab is told that his dynasty is going to
be cut off.
That every descendant of his will be
destroyed.
But in the meantime, Jehosaphat,
in his wisdom, had his son married to
Ahab’s daughter.
And Ahab’s daughter was a terrible person,
just like her father.
So she has Jerum commit murder after
murder for him for her,
and then her son Ahaziah makes idolatry
almost policy
in Israel and he lasts a year.
Jehoash killed the prophets,
and his reign was a little longer,
but eventually after Jehoash there’s a
woman on the throne.
The woman that was married to Joram,
she takes the throne,
she kills all of the potential heirs that
aren’t hers,
and takes the throne for herself while her
son is a regent.
Eventually Amaziah takes over the throne,
and he’s killed in battle, the last of the
line of Athaliah.
So at this point.
Ahab’s reign or Ahab’s descendants are
killed to the fourth generation,
the same way it is referred to in Exodus
and Deuteronomy,
when the curse that God’s deliver will be
delivered to the third
and fourth generations. The funny thing
about these three kings,
they’re mentioned in Chronicles.
They’re mentioned in first king in the
book of Kings.
They are not mentioned in Matthew’s
genealogy.
Because Matthew agrees that they’ve been
cut off from the line of secession.
So the line of secession goes back up and
goes to Uzziah.
Uzziah decided took it upon himself to
enter the Holy
of Holies and offer sacrifice himself.
Jotham allowed the idols continue,
had some religious reforms, but he allowed
idolatry to continue in the company,
in the in the country. ~ Ahaz sacrificed
his own children to Molech.
Hezekiah, kind of a religious reformer,
but his pride and vanity got the better of
him when he decided to make
a name for himself and go and fight Egypt.
Manasseh finally sealed Judah’s faith by
adding witchcraft to their sins.
So at his during his reign,
the nation of Judah is sealed that they’re
going to be taken away.
Ammon continued to worship idols.
Josiah was repentant, but he was still
prideful.
Jehoiakim was one of the last straws.
If you turn over to Jeremiah thirty six.
I will just not want to turn there.
thirty six and verse thirty. Thus,
therefore, thus says the Lord concerning
Jehoakim,
King of Judah, he shall have no one to sit
on the throne of David,
and his dead body shall be cast out to the
heat of the day and the frost
of the night.
He was not only removed from the throne,
but his lineage was removed from the
throne,
and he was cast out in a similar fashion,
using words to describe how the scapegoat
is cast out.
So then finally in Jechaniah’s day,
the kingdom’s ended. He’s the king that’s
finally taken captive.
We see Shiltail, who lives a life in
captivity,
and then you see Zerubbabel who actually
brings them back.
But other than that, there’s nothing to
note.
And that nothing to note requires
quotation marks under everybody else until
you get down to Jacob.
the husband of or to Joseph, the husband
of Mary.
As mentioned in the lineage of Luke,
that the other lineage could very well be
the lineage of Mary.
There’s lots of explanations for that.
But the important thing here is that it is
showing that
man was so bad at serving God,
that man was so
Defiant, insistent on making names for
themselves,
that that royal lineage was cut off and it
had to go all
the way back to David to be reestablished
through the line of Nathan.
And that’s the story. That’s why we have
these two different accounts.
Because one is an account of a royal
lineage that is corrupt and void.
And the other is an account of a royal
lineage who
did not make a name for themselves.
They did not try to laud praises,
to increase their wealth, to increase
their strength,
to make sure their names went down in
history.
It was a lineage of people who served God.
And that’s why we have those two lineages,
because it shows us what God is looking
for when He’s looking for someone
to deliver His Son.
So the line, the legal line of Joseph was
cut off.
But the legal line of Mary,
who was known to everybody to be a
descendant of David,
all the early scholars say Mary was was a
direct line descendant of David.
~ but it was showing that
God was providing a pure solution from
people who followed him.
So that’s overall the lineage of of Joseph
and Mary and eventually Jesus.
And in it we see God using this filter of
history.
The same way we see it that the nation of
Israel was being filtered
out and made improved. If you look back
from Abraham,
his entire life was learning to serve God.
If you look at the Israelites,
once the law of Moses was put in place.
What’s the first thing they did?
They built a golden calf and worshipped
it.
Man has always been flawed, but God has
always been trying to remove those flaws
and make us his people, till eventually he
set up
not just this perfect line that Jesus was
biologically going to come through,
but he set up this world through people
like Alexander the Great,
who was amazing at conquering the world,
who took
Hellenic culture all the way to India,
who primed the world to not just be able
to trade with one another,
but to speak the same language.
The law of Rome wasn’t written in Latin.
It was written in Greek so that everybody
could understand it,
because that was the common language.
Who used the nation of Rome when it was
still a republic to build roads
all over Europe.
And all over Africa and all over the
Middle East,
so that the word could be carried,
so that encounters like Philip and the
Ethiopian eunuch could happen on
the road on his way home. God set up all
of these things from the first man in the
garden.
And that’s what Matthew and Luke are
trying to show us:
is that even though there was a line of
People who fail your whose failure after
failure after failure led to Jesus.
God was always designer.
He was always making sure that that path
was there.
And I think that’s what having those two
genealogies show us is that
God has a design and He’s willing to let
us in on it.
But once again, most people just argue
about it because they don’t understand
God’s
design.
But that’s it. Take a break and get ready
for class or get ready for ~ songs.
