Over the last few years there has been a growing fascination with our genealogies. We love to look back at our family histories, create family trees, and search out information about what our ancestors were like. Last year people even took it to the next level, and one of the best selling Christmas presents was home DNA testing kits. Which can tell you where in the world your family comes from. This did cause some issues for some families when the results between family members were not what they should have been!
Matthew opens with:
‘the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ’ (v1)
which deliberately recalls Gen 5:1:
‘This is the book of the generations of Adam’
Matthew is telling us that the story of Jesus parallels in importance the story of the very first human. Basically, the coming of Jesus is cosmically as big as the creation of humankind!
‘Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Messiah’ (v17)
In the genealogy itself, Matthew is as good as shouting David, David, David. Matthew divides the genealogy up into three groups of 14, and in Hebrew David’s name = 14 (D = 4, v = 6, d = 4). Matthew is saying Jesus is the Davidic Messiah.
Matthew is telling us through the genealogy of Jesus that the coming of Jesus is a cosmic turning point, and that he (Matthew) sees Jesus as the royal Davidic messiah. For more on this see ‘We have found the Messiah’.
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