“There is one page at the very front of the Ne=
w Testament that almost everyone skips. It looks like nothing. Forty-two ge=
nerations of names. So-and-so was the father of so-and-so. But hidden insid=
e that list is the most scandalous guest list in all of Scripture, and it c=
hanges everything about who God lets into His story.
I have taught the Bi=
ble for years, and of all the pages people skip, this is the one I most wis=
h they would stop and actually read. Here is what almost no one notices. In=
the ancient world, genealogies followed one strict rule. You traced the bl=
oodline through the men. Fathers and sons. Women were almost never named. A=
respectable Jewish genealogy of the Messiah would have been a clean, unbro=
ken chain of honored fathers.
 =
;
Matthew broke that rule. He included five w=
omen. And the five women he chose were not the ones you would expect. He di=
d not include Sarah, the honored mother of the nation. He did not include R=
ebekah or Leah, the great matriarchs. He chose five women whose stories wer=
e scandals.
The first is Tamar.
Her hu=
sband died. Then the brother who was supposed to care for her died too. Her=
father-in-law Judah refused to give her his third son as the law required,=
leaving her a childless widow with no future and no protection. So she dis=
guised herself as a prostitute, and Judah, not recognizing her, slept with =
her. She bore twins. One of them sits in the direct bloodline of Jesus.
T=
he second is Rahab.
She was a Canaanite =
prostitute living in the walls of Jericho. When the Israelite spies came to=
scout the city, she hid them and was spared when the walls fell. A foreign=
prostitute from a condemned city. She married into Israel and became the g=
reat-great-grandmother of King David.
The third is Ruth.
She was a Moabite. The Moabites were a despised people, =
an enemy nation, forbidden by law from entering the assembly of the Lord. R=
uth was a foreigner and a widow from exactly the kind of nation a respectab=
le Jew was taught to avoid. She became the great-grandmother of King David.=
The fourth is named in a strange way.
Matthew does not even write her name. He calls her "the wife of Uriah=
=2E" This is Bathsheba, the woman King David committed adultery with, =
before arranging to have her husband Uriah killed in battle to cover up the=
pregnancy. Matthew deliberately reminds the reader of the scandal by namin=
g the murdered husband. The son of David and Bathsheba was Solomon, in the =
direct line of Jesus.
The fifth is Mary.
And here the pattern breaks.
The firs=
t four carried real shame. Deception. Prostitution. A foreign and hated blo=
odline. Adultery. Mary carried only the appearance of it. An unwed teenage =
girl, pregnant before her marriage, in a culture where that could have ende=
d with her being stoned. To everyone in Nazareth she was just one more scan=
dal. But she had done nothing wrong. She was the one woman in the list who =
was innocent, and she was treated exactly like the ones who were not.
Tha=
t is the moment the genealogy turns. Because the child she carried was the =
reason all five names are there. He was born into a bloodline of the guilty=
and the shamed so that He could carry the guilt and shame of every name th=
at came before Him, and every name that would come after.
Five women. One=
who played the prostitute to survive. One who was a prostitute. A foreigne=
r from a hated nation. A woman remembered for adultery. And an innocent gir=
l who bore the shame of a scandal she never committed, so that the Savior c=
ould be born. That is the bloodline Matthew chose to open the New Testament=
with.
He could have hidden them. Genealogies hid women by default. He co=
uld have written a clean, honorable list of fathers. Instead, he deliberate=
ly wrote scandal, foreignness, prostitution, and adultery into the family t=
ree of the Messiah. Because that was the entire point. God did not merely f=
orgive these women. He wove them into the bloodline of His own Son. On purp=
ose. In the very first chapter of the New Testament, where He knew everyone=
would eventually read it.
The family tree of Jesus was deliberately buil=
t out of the exact kind of people the world would have said did not belong.=
If your past has ever made you feel like you could never really belong, th=
ose five names are in that genealogy for you.”
John Ross
~~
Dr Bob Griffin =
[email protected]=
www.grif.net
Continue steadfastly in prayer, being=
watchful in it with thanksgiving.
&nb=
sp;
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