NIV Application Bible Podcast: Episode 18 (Matthew 1)

• Perfection is no longer a prerequisite. God loves you. God loves you. God loves you. He weaves messy mistake prone people into his family. [Music] Welcome back to the NIV Application Bible podcast. Man, we’ve had fun, haven’t we? And we’ve already finished the whole Old Testament canon. And here we are at the beginning of the New Testament.
• The gospel according to Matthew. Uh the word gospel comes from the re Greek word yuan gelon. It means the good news. And to really get why this is good news, you got to get a little bit of the context of Matthew’s audience. You know, Matthew was one of the 12 disciples. Um, you may not know that his audience as he began to preach and teach was primarily a Jewish audience.
• So before I read this very beginning of Matthew’s good news story, I want you to imagine a bunch of men and women and maybe some kids sit in a semiircle listen to Matt preach and they’re Jewish, which means they’ve been taught that they have to perfectly follow 613 rules in Tra. They’ve been taught you have to be perfect in order to be accepted into a relationship with Yahweh, the only true God.
• Matthew’s trying to explain because of Jesus, perfection is no longer a prerequisite to be reconciled into relationship with God. Faith in Jesus is what you need. And he starts the story this way. So just imagine they’re sitting there thinking, “We’ve got to be perfect.” You know, surely the women are wearing some ancient version of Spanx.
• And the men are wearing their dress pants. And Matthew begins the sermon like this. This is the genealogy of Jesus, the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham was the father of Isaac. Isaac was the father of Jacob. Jacob was the father of Judah and his brothers. Judah, the father of Perez, and Zarah, whose mother was Tamar.
• Perez, the father of Hezron. Hezron the father of Ram. Ram was the father of Aminadab. Aminadab the father of Nan. Nan the father of Salmon. Salmon was the father of Boaz whose mother was Rahab. Boaz the father of Oed whose mother was Ruth. Oed the father of Jesse and Jesse the father of King David.
• David was the father of Solomon whose mother had been Uriah’s wife. I’m going to stop right there because I know you’re not encouraged yet. Let me tell you that first century Jewish audience was because by beginning the family tree of Jesus like this, he has just succeeded in shocking them because he’s woven women into the genealogy of God’s son.
• First of all, in this era, women are never included in genealogies. I mean, even though they had their babies without epidurals or ice chips, women are not mentioned in genealogies. Matthew includes five five women. And these aren’t like good girls either. He weaves women into the family tree of Jesus who were who were wild girls.
• He starts with uh Tamar. So here’s the gist of Tamar’s story. Um she has married Judah’s eldest son. Judah is a big deal. He’s one of the the patriarchs of Israel, one of the 12 tribes. So Tamar marries into this, you know, pretty impressive family and she marries the oldest son of Judah. Well, the oldest son goes cray cray and so God kills him for his behavior.
• And so based on their culture, she is woven into what we would now call Levite marriage. She marries Judah’s second eldest son, and he’s a nutter, too. And so he gets killed in the story. Well, then she’s promised to marry Judah’s third son, boy named Shayla. This is all in Genesis, uh, if you want to follow along and know that I’m telling the truth of this genealogy.
• And so, while she’s promised to marry Judah’s third boy, Judah says, “Why don’t you go on back home because he hasn’t gone through puberty yet, but when he goes through puberty, I’ll text you and you can come marry him.” Taking the smallest bit of liberty with the with the Hebrew there. But that’s the story in the Old Testament.
• And so she starts thinking, you know, this doesn’t bode well for me. Two of Judah’s sons have already died while married to me. I bet you he he changes his mind and doesn’t let me marry Shayla. So she takes matters into her own hands. That’s a common theme in the Old Testament. She disguises herself as a prostitute and she engages in intimacy with her father-in-law with Judah and then she gets pregnant.