Matthew 1:1-6

Sunday message · The Book of Matthew series

Phillip Santillan  ·  Matthew 1:1-6

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Message Summary

In this message from the series on the Gospel of Matthew, Pastor Phillip Santillan starts at the beginning, Matthew 1:1–6. The word gospel translates the Greek euangelion, meaning good news, and Matthew, writing mainly to a Jewish audience, set out to show that Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies about the Messiah. So why begin with a family tree, and why this one? Phil’s answer is that it reveals the heart of Jesus.

We still describe people by who their parents are, Phil notes, and for Matthew’s first readers, where you came from said a great deal. Since God had promised David that the Messiah would come from his line, Matthew needed to show that Jesus did. But unlike the genealogies young Jews learned, his list names four women, three of them not Jewish, and seems to highlight people you would leave out of the Son of God’s family tree.

Judah fathered Perez and Zerah by Tamar, whose story in Genesis 38 some churches will not read aloud. Salmon fathered Boaz by Rahab, the prostitute who helped Joshua’s spies. Boaz fathered Obed by Ruth, a Moabite from a people who were enemies of the Jews. Then David fathered Solomon “by Uriah’s wife.” Matthew does not even name Bathsheba, calling to mind David’s affair with another man’s wife and his arranging Uriah’s death to cover it up. Phil believes Matthew did this on purpose, so readers would stop and ask what is going on.

Phil suggests that Matthew, having spent three years with Jesus and watched him invite unlikely people, himself included, knew that telling the good news required showing the heart of Jesus with absolute clarity. Looking ahead to Matthew 9, he explains that tax collectors were seen as traitors working for Rome, the lowest of the low. Yet Jesus looked Matthew in the eye and said, “Follow me.” Matthew followed and invited Jesus to dinner with other tax collectors and sinners. When the Pharisees objected, Jesus answered that the sick, not the healthy, need a doctor, and sent them to learn what “I desire mercy and not sacrifice” means, for he came to call not the righteous but sinners. Matthew records no one being offended, Phil observes, because people disconnected from God know it.

The genealogy is not a digression but the point, because the Christmas story is about God drawing near to those who had drawn away. Phil sees in it where God is leading Clarity Church: to have a heart like Jesus for the lost, for those who do not fit in or, like David, knew better and went off the deep end. For anyone thinking instead of their own guilt and shame, he repeats a saying he has shared for years: nothing you do can make God love you more, and nothing you have done can make him love you less. He closes with a twofold challenge, to accept that God is sending us to people who desperately need him, or to submit to Jesus as one he loves and stop keeping him at arm’s length.