The Covenant Savior-King

How Matthew’s Lineage For Christ Spells Out the Roots of Salvation

Everyone hates genealogies in the Bible. They’re just lists of name after name after name after name. It gets boring, daunting, and absurd.

But that’s because most haven’t learned how to read them.

Ancient Israel never recorded lineages haphazardly. They’re all intimately connected to the narrative of the Bible and of history. When taken seriously, they flesh out the theological importance of the stories told.

No genealogy makes that as clear as the Christmas lineage of Christ Jesus’s birth in Matthew 1.

It artfully recounts the history of humanity and Israel to show you how God would work through the life of Christ to secure eternal victory over darkness, sin, and death. And what role you play in that ongoing movement.

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A Promise Made

Matthew begins by tracing from covenant to kingdom, knowing full well his Jewish readers would understand the plot line.

The first three names in Jesus’s lineage are the original forefathers of Israel. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (who was renamed Israel). As the receivers of Yahweh’s original covenant, they represent the promise that God would make Abraham’s offspring into an uncountable mob as numerous as the stars in heaven.

Modern readers often mistake that promise as merely physical. Until they read Romans and Hebrews and learn how those faithful to Christ are interconnected with Abraham because of his faithful obedience to God.

But Abraham’s children were always more than Israel. And the promise always had a spiritual component.

Stars in the ancient world were never just shiny objects in the sky. They were where the heavenly host came from. Where the gods (the sons of God in the Old Testament) lived. And the gods were often envisioned as stars. They would appear as light.

When Yahweh promised Abraham’s offspring would outnumber the stars, he was telling Abraham his children would join and surpass in quantity the heavenly assembly. They would become higher than the angels. And the evils committed upon humanity by the sons of God in Genesis 1-11 would be reversed.

Sin and death would be conquered

The hoards of demons would be defeated

Our relationship with the divine would be restored

What Adam and Eve did in the garden, the curse they unleashed upon the cosmos, would be countered through Abraham’s offspring. They were more than people; they were conquerors.

The other names in the first 14 generations each tie into stories that are types of the covenant promise’s fulfillment in Christ. Especially the 3 women.

• Tamar confronted Judah’s dishonesty and corruption (as Yahweh would later do through the prophets)

• Rahab gave up everything to save her family and the Israelite strangers she had just met (as Christ would do for estranged Judah)

• Ruth showed loyalty to God and his people in the face of uncertainty (and bore the line of Israel’s greatest king)

All of them were also Gentile women. God elevated and worked through the weaker sex among non-Israelites to spell out how the plan of salvation through the Messiah would unfold.

Israel was just the beginning.

The people of the world were to be rescued from certain damnation and creation restored through the King of an eternal kingdom rebuilt from the one that fell…