5/3/2025
I have always been captivated by studying the lineage of Jesus Christ. There's a saying "You can't choose your parents, but you can choose your family." Whereas I understand why the statement is thought to be valid, because "family" can include people who are not related to one, but they have shared interests and a strong sense of unity and kinship, but scripture suggests something else. In Psalm 139:13-16 it is clear that God knew us, chose us, formed us uniquely:
For You formed my inward parts;
You covered me in my mother’s womb.
14 I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Marvelous are Your works,
And that my soul knows very well.
15 My frame was not hidden from You,
When I was made in secret,
And skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
16 Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed.
And in Your book they all were written,
The days fashioned for me,
When as yet there were none of them.
Ephesians 1:3-6 puts it nicely:
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, 4 just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, 5 having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, 6 to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.
I find it beyond fascinating that God knew us before the world was created by Him (but of course He would), He knew our parents' abilities and characters, just as He knew Mary would be the perfect choice to carry His Son, and He knew Joseph would stand beside her and make an excellent choice of earthly Abba for Jesus, training Him in His Heavenly Father's laws. God chose! God chose us! He knew who would serve Him, and He knew who would betray Him. I am so grateful that He chose me to be His child. Now, I am determined to spend the remainder of my earthly sojourn praising and honoring His Name and fulfilling what He placed me here to do in the book that has my name on it. A most humbling thought, as I find it very hard to get the one thing done that I know He asked me to do. I feel so inadequate, and the one cheerleader He gave me is with Him now. So, I'm alone trying to do my best to bring honor to Him. After all, He does transform coal into diamonds.
Looking at the ancestry of Jesus, I want to point out some of the interesting personalities. Matthew, Chapter 1 begins with the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the son of Abraham. He is referred to the Son of David, because it was prophesied that the Messiah would come from the line of David, the tribe of Judah, and He came in the flesh as God's Son. In Judaism the oldest son, the first born, received the inheritance, but Abraham's son, Judah, was fourth in line. You may recall the reason being Reuben disrespected his father, and Simeon and Levi (from the tribe of Levi came the priests) brought shame to the family by wiping out the village of the one who raped their sister, so shaming Judah. So, Judah is now the first son, but actually, that is the way it was supposed to be from the beginning.
Judah has a son, Perez, through Tamar, but she is not his wife. Whoa! Actually, Tamar was married to Judah's older son, but God killed him, because he was not a righteous man; so according to Judaism, the next son must marry his brother's widow, so his brother's line can be carried on by birth of a son. But this didn't happen, because Judah's second son did not want to honor this arrangement, so God killed him. That left the only son who was much younger, not of marrying age. Judah promised Tamar she could marry his younger son, when he grew up. So she went home to her family to wait, and time passed, and Judah, not wanting to chance God's wrath and the loss of his only son, just ignored the situation. So, Tamar, finally understood Judah's betrayal and took matters into her own hands by pretending to be a prostitute. I'm not going into the story further, but her plan worked as you can read in Genesis 38, and she gave birth to twins (another interesting aside), and the lineage continues with Perez.
Skipping down to verse 5, we see that "Salmon begot Boaz by Rahab, Boaz begot Obed by Ruth, Obed begot Jesse, and Jesse begot David." Now Rahab one may recall was the prostitute in the book of Joshua who protected the spies. Ruth is the Moabite woman, a pagan, who had been married to Naomi's son who died. In fact bother of sons were married to Moabite women, and both sons died of sickness, leaving Naomi alone, because her husband had also died. They had moved from the Israel to Moab during a famine. Again I leave it to the reader to consider the story in its entirety, found in the book of Ruth. Her story is beautiful, so if the reader is not familiar with it, and the cost she paid by going with Naomi to Israel rather than returning to her family, please make the time to read it. The fact that she married Boaz and was the great-grandmother of King David is quite a love story, and a picture of Boaz as the kinsman redeemer, a type and shadow of Jesus our Messiah, our Redeemer.
David's story of becoming King of Israel is not without a great bit of drama and intrigue, but the story takes on a finer edge once he is firmly established as King. David was the youngest of Jesse's sons, and it has been suggested that David's mother was not Jesse's wife. While that is an interesting aside, whatever the case, David's life as a shepherd proved instrumental in his becoming the man God affectionately called "the apple of His eye." Besides being a shepherd, he was a skilled musician and singer, a brave protector of his sheep, and a great writer. He became a great friend of the son of his enemy, a young teenager who took off the head of a giant, and ultimately a great warrior and beloved King, who ruled his kingdom well.
Everyone is familiar with the story of David and Bathsheba, and that God chose Bathsheba to give birth to Solomon who became the King of Israel after David, and whom God gifted with great wisdom. The story is quite tragic, and Solomon, in spite of his great success, turned away from God due to his lust for pagan women. His son and successor, Rehoboam, ended up dividing the Kingdom of Israel into the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and that ushered in evil leaders and the ultimate demise of the land of Israel when both kingdoms were conquered by pagan kings, the temple destroyed, and the people carted off to different countries. But not before the birth of another interesting man who becomes king of Judah.
Verse 10 introduces us to King Hezekiah and his son, Manasseh. Amid a series of good and bad kings from Rehoboam's reign until Hezekiah's, Hezekiah was a good king who loved and honored God and brought restoration to the kingdom of Judah. In 2 Kings 18, the story of Hezekiah begins. As mentioned, he led a godly life and followed in the example of King David. 2 Kings 20 tells the story of his illness, and God sends Isaiah the prophet to advise Hezekiah to get his affairs in order, as he is going to die from his sickness. Hezekiah pleaded with God, so God extended his life by 15 years, resulting in the birth of Manasseh, who did more evil than even Jeroboam, one of the evil kings of Israel. In fact, after the kingdom was divided, Israel never had a good king. Manasseh was 12 years old when he became King after his father's death. I find it very interesting that had Hezekiah not begged God for more years, the country would have been spared of 55 years of his evil rule in Jerusalem. Again, however, God had knew this would happen.
This ends my partial look at the lineage of Jesus, as I just wanted to point out the fact that God takes people and situations, and He turns them into something entirely different. We never know how things are going to turn out in families and friendships. I encourage all to take the time to study the Old Testament, and the lineage of Christ, and then compare it to the New Testament. These true stories bring great hope to people like me who make mistakes, but whom God can use in mighty ways to effect a Kingdom. Who knows what God has written in each one's book, the plans He has to give us a future and a hope (Jeremiah 29:11).
Selah.
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