Introduction: I remember as a boy when I tried to read the Bible and struggled to remain interested when I got to the genealogies. The “begat passages,” as I used to call them, kind of lulled me to disinterest. I thought to myself, “Let’s get to the good stuff, the action, the story. What’s the point of all the passages about family lineage and all the begats?”

It’s Different Now: I was a child then and I thought as a child. Now I’m on the older side of the scale and have been through the Bible many times. I won’t say that the “begat passages” are by any means my favorite but I do think I have begun to understand a bit of what God is revealing to his body, the church, by way of the genealogies.

Today in Matthew: This morning I was reading in Matthew 1. It is, of course, one of the genealogies in the Bible. But Matthew 1 is the genealogy of the God-man, Jesus Christ. And here is something I hope encourages believers and challenges the skeptics out there: genealogies matter because they reveal how God keeps his promises.

Matthew 1’s first words are “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1 ESV). For people who don’t have a proper hermeneutic (principle of interpretation), they might immediately put them off because they don’t understand what Matthew is laboring in chapter 1 to demonstrate.

The whole point of Matthew’s gospel is that Jesus (the Christ) is the promised Messiah. His human incarnation is demonstrated via the Holy Spirit and Mary. But Jesus did not have a divine origin because he is eternal. Jesus in his human incarnation has a birthday, if you will, but Jesus as God almighty does not have a divine birthday, because the triune God of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is eternal. There never was a time when Jesus was not, in other words.

Names Matter: Jesus’ name matters because his office matters. That is, Matthew tells us “they shall call his name Immanuel” (Matthew 1:23b ESV) because of its meaning: God with us. See it? God has come. God has revealed himself by way of the incarnation. He has come to dwell among us in order that may behold via eyewitness accounts over the course of years, how Jesus/Immanuel/God with us, was and is God in the flesh. The Son took on flesh and fulfilled the promises of the Old Testament. The whole Bible and the whole storyline of the Bible was leading up to the God-man, Jesus the Anointed One, the true King, Immanuel.

Matthew stresses why this is so important: “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet” (Matthew 1:22 ESV). See it? To fulfill.

Encouragement: To state the obvious, we live in a fallen world where promises made are seldom kept. But there is One who cannot lie because he is holy. He is holy, holy, holy (cf. Isaiah 6). Christ is the fulfillment of the promises of God (Luke 24). Look to him, because he is utterly and supremely trustworthy. He is the fulfillment of the true, the good, and the beautiful.