Winfield Free Will Baptist Church

Introduction:
There are several things about one’s hometown that go overlooked over time. Did you know that Winfield used to be called “Needmore”? Did you know that Winfield was recently named the number 1 town in Alabama where life is slow-paced and simple. Did you know that Winfield is home to one the most extensive genealogy archives in the south. If you knew that strange fact then you are probably one of millions of Americans who have spent time researching where you came from. One guy researched his family tree and came up with an interesting way to describe his family in one word: “fudge”. Fudge—“we are mostly sweet but every once in a while you find a nut.” Now I don’t know if this describes your family (let me suggest--if everyone in your family is sweet you might be the nut) but if we are all honest we are intrigued by our family history. That’s why Matthew 1:1-17 should never be skipped over.

At first glance we look at the list of names and we are tempted just to skip over it. “All I need to know is that Mary was Jesus’ mother and Joseph was his dad. Next chapter please.” But genealogies teach us something and if every word of Scripture is inspired and is profitable then we have a responsibility to examine this genealogy.

Bold Statement:
In this genealogy is everything you need to know about Christianity. All the essentials are in there. As I've studied this the past week I have learned so much diving into commentaries, listening to other pastors teach on this. I've realized that the amount of things that Matthew is trying to teach you through this simple list of names is remarkable. I'm going to limit myself to 3.

Individuals are important to God.
Life has a way of producing a sense of isolation and a feeling of being alone.
The Martian—In 2015, director Ridley Scott explored this sense of isolation and being alone is his movie about a man who was left alone on Mars. There is one iconic scene from the movie when the star, Matt Damon, is sitting on top of a Martian boulder just simply looking at the horizon. No one around. Not a single person on the entire planet.

Life has a way of telling us that we are not important.
Politicians strive for power to make a name for themselves. Athletes work endless hours honing their skill because they seek to leave their name in the record book. The rich become obsessed with making more, saving more, obtaining more because they want to their name to be great.
Psalm 41:3 For thou art my rock and my fortress; therefore for thy name's sake lead me, and guide me.
Each name has a story….each name is significant to God…each name had a purpose in the God story.
Notice where their significance is rooted.
17 verses and not one profession is mentioned.
You do not see….Abraham the explorer and rancher
Boaz is mentioned but you don’t see. Boaz the wealthy land owner.
Only David has his occupation mentioned (King David) simply because this list is given to us to trace back Joseph’s connection to the royal line of David. (Luke 2: “because he was of the house and lineage of David.”)

Significance is the realization that I am valuable and that my life is worthwhile. And the value of our lives and the expression of our significance is most brilliantly displayed when we realize that we are created in the image of God and then allow our worth to be calculated by God’s personal investment in us.
Listen to how the Lord tries to communicate this to us:

We thank God for the gospel in these names! Tim Keller says that all we need to know about Christianity can be found in this list of names. We see the gospel reality that our significance is not found in our careers, net worth, or even our spiritual performance, our value is found in our placement in the God story.
So the next time….
You don’t measure up to the Jones’, that’s not where my significance is found.
When you have a conversation with a math genius and he begins to explain how the theory of relativity, the Pythagorean theorem and the laws of thermodynamics work in coordination to give us the basis for space and time….nod, say “uh huh” and know that your worth is not in brain cells but in being made in the image of God.

Place Ephesians 2:11 over Matthew 1:
My life has eternal value and significance because I am created by God for good works that He has laid out for me before I was ever born.

So, Jeconiah and Shealtiel might only be mentioned once in Scripture but their value isn’t to be measured by their names in lights but their value is found because the “light of the world” came through them.

Even the worse events of life can serve to bring good.
One of the most fascinating parts of this whole genealogy is how God organized it for us. Look at how verse 17 tells us something remarkable. This list of names is categorized in three groups of 14. Bible scholars make it clear that the number are pointing us to something. I’ll give you these numbers and you can study them later. 3 groups of 14 equal 42 and 42 is six 7’s. What is the number of perfection in the Scripture’s? It’s seven.
In other words, Matthew chooses to organize this genealogy in 3 sections of 14 to show that God has superimposed his seal of perfection on history.

3Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar,

(Summarized from Gen. 38) Tamar was a wife of one of Judah's sons. But her husband died before they could have kids.
And in those days if a guy dies and left his wife without kids, it was the obligation of the deceased's brother to marry her and give her children.4 So the brother was named Onan and he begrudgingly takes her as his wife (evidently he didn't like her) but he doesn't want to have any kids with her, because, you know, kids are expensive, and he didn't even like Tamar, and so whenever they came together Onan made sure that Tamar didn’t get pregnant.

Well, God wasn't pleased with this either, so he killed Onan.

Now Judah is two sons down and he's only got 3.

Well, legally speaking, Tamar was supposed to be given to Judah's 3rd son, Shelah. But at this point Judah starts feeling like Tamar must be cursed and he doesn't want to lose his last son, so he stalls... for years.

Tamar figures out that Judah is never going to let her marry the third son, so she devises a plan. Turns out Judah, her father in law, has a weakness for prostitutes. So she dresses up like a prostitute and seduces him and gets pregnant with Perez and Zerah.

Well, 3 months after she gets pregnant she starts showing and Judah, who has no idea it's his babies, orders that she be stoned because obviously she's been sleeping around and so they drag her out and she says, ''I have here the belt of the man whose babies these are'' and it's Judah's belt; so now he's in an awkward situation.

This is some messy, chaotic stuff.?
Yet in all of this, God was working, bringing about a perfect plan. That's why the number 14 is used.?
He is working in your life, too, even when he seems absent.

Some of you have some messy dysfunction in your life, and I'm not saying God is not pleased with the pain that someone has wrought in your life…God is never pleased with sin nor the pain of it’s consequences. He is always heart broken by it.

But God has one over-riding purpose in your life, to accomplish Jesus' purposes in and through you, and he's working in all things, in the darkest parts of your personal genealogy to bring that to pass. He takes the chaotic mess of your life and stamps his perfect 14 on them.

Vs. 5: Rahab. She was a prostitute and a Gentile that God saved from Jericho.
Ruth. She's a Moabite.?
BTW, you see all these women? Women were not considered important in those days. Yet, they are included in Jesus' genealogy. And, btw, these are not even respectable women. Every woman listed in here was involved in some sexual scandal.

Vs. 6: David and ''the wife of Uriah.'' Why that phrase? Why didn't Matthew just write her name? He's making you remember the story. David betrayed one of his best friends and slept with his wife and then had him killed to cover it up.

Jesus' line is filled with moral outsiders; ethnic outsiders (Gentiles); gender outsiders (women).

So a genealogy is like a resume, and so kings like Herod would only list people in their genealogy who established their worth.

Yet look who Jesus included in his: Tamar, Rahab, “the story of Bathsheba.”

Jesus is the center of history.

Matthew takes what the world would have considered to be an insignificant family line and organizes all of human history around it.

Here's why that is important-at this point it certainly didn't seem like Jesus was the focal point of history. Israel was a small, backwater, Middle Eastern country that was under the rule of somebody else. Nobody in Rome was paying attention to this family line.

But God had made a promise to Abraham to bring salvation to the world through Jesus and to bring the whole world into subjection to Jesus.
And at this point in world history you've got these really powerful nations and people that seem like they are directing things, but what Matthew shows you in this genealogy is that God is the one guiding it all according to his plans for the Messiah!

The powers of the world are an illusion.

Let me give you one quick example of that: One of the details most people know about Christmas is that Mary and Joseph had to travel to Bethlehem because Rome was taxing everyone and you had to go to your home city to be registered.

But Luke explains to us that God's purpose in that was so that one of the prophecies about the Messiah would be fulfilled, the one that said he'd be born in Bethlehem. So God moves Rome to this tax so he can get Mary and Joseph back to Bethlehem. You ever wonder why God went to all that trouble? Why not just appear to Joseph in a dream and say, ''Joseph, go to Bethlehem?'' It is to demonstrate to you that God moves powerful nations around like chess pieces to bring to accomplish his purposes in Jesus. He taxed the whole world to move two people 90 miles.

Here's why that should be encouraging to you. It doesn't look now like Jesus is the center of history. CNN is not here this weekend paying attention to what we do. They are watching what they think are most important powers in the world-the markets; the White House; world politics; but these things are like an insignificant drop in the bucket-the center of history is what God is doing in the kingdom of Jesus-the accomplishing of his purpose to take salvation to every nation on earth and to bring the world into subjection of him. And he moves around the most powerful nations at will to accomplish his purposes.
There's an unseen story behind the story.

Many of the Israelites were, at this point, discouraged. They looked around and didn't see how God was fulfilling his promises. Rome was in charge.

Many of you look around and are discouraged; you see unbelief growing; secularism taking over, corrupting our institutions, destroying our nation.

But don't be deceived. It didn't look back then like God was accomplishing his purposes. But he was. He was doing his greatest work?