SOME VAST ETERNAL PLAN

[Matthew 1:1-17]

Prayer for Illumination – This is not an unusual text, Lord – we find similar texts throughout the Scriptures – but it is unusual for us to look at it as closely as we intend to look today, to consider it as closely as we intend to consider it; so we ask that your Spirit would be at work in this place. My words will certainly be inadequate, but I pray that your Spirit will give them life. Our thoughts too, and our understanding, is inadequate, but our prayer is that you would give life to these insights and truths that they might take root in our minds, and, more deeply still, in our spirits, that we might recognize our place in the story that is being told here and that we might be shaped for the particular place you have designed for each of us. We pray this in Jesus’ name, AMEN.

Message

          Mostly I remember how desolate and colorless it was. Spring had come to many places further to the south, but here, near the Canadian border the low hills were still covered with the brown remains of winter grass. The light, also, was dull, barely penetrating the leaden clouds which reached all the way to the horizon in all directions. Between the earth and sky I could barely see the mottled blue and white face of the Continental Divide – perhaps, I wasn’t sure, a glimpse of Going to the Sun Mountain. A friend of my father’s was driving us along a featureless country road outside Browning, Montana, to his favorite spot for fly-fishing, across that barren-looking prairie.

          Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, the road dropped down into a hidden valley, through which flowed a broad, rushing stream, lined with bushes and scrub oak and a few hardy evergreens, sculpted into exotic shapes by the harsh climate of northern Montana. It was a magical place in that bleak landscape, carrying some sort of mysterious promise of life and adventure. For after all, that stream had originated somewhere, presumably in those glaciated mountains to the west, and was hurrying through these barren fields on its way to . . . someplace else – someplace distant, alien, and unknown. The narrow riparian environment which clung to its banks harbored populous colonies of birds and other wildlife, uncomprehending, it seemed to me, of the larger universe of which they were a part. They were content to make their home here, drawing sustenance from it’s waters for each succeeding generation, but I – I found my imagination gently tugged by the current to explore the greater story of that little stream’s life.

          Suppose I had been prepared that day to board a canoe and paddle out into the swift current, and travel maybe 50 or even 100 miles along that fluid highway. I would soon have found myself in the Cut Bank River as Montana’s “Big Sky country” opened up to me, and some distance downstream I would have been joined by the Dupúyer and Medicine Rivers as they made their way eastward toward the Tiber Reservoir. No doubt I would have had opportunity to view exotic scenes along the way, perhaps drifting noiselessly past a few grizzlies, intent (I should have hoped) on catching a few fish for their supper.

          But life on the river is demanding, and suppose after 75 miles or so I pulled my canoe out of the water and passed it along to another intrepid explorer who, after a similar run, would pass it along to another, then again to another, and so on until this episodic adventure had continued into the Missouri River, and across the border into North Dakota, through the 150 mile long Lake Sakakawea where it turned sharply south and proceeded another 500 miles through the rolling grasslands of South Dakota cutting a wide swath across the Great Plains. Some 2000 miles from where I had begun, our travelers would have found themselves in the mighty currents of the Mississippi River passing the great arching Gateway to the West at St. Louis and continuing ever southward past places with names like Cairo, and New Madrid, and Vicksburg, and Natchez where great lawns swept up to antebellum homes, and moss clung to gnarled trees. And all this would have been so thoroughly unlike anything I had imagined as that same water rippled over glacial till in northwest Montana, so unlike it that not even the most creative story-teller could have connected the two.

          And yet it would have been a single story of uninterrupted and unanticipated adventure! Had anyone along the way begun to dream bigger dreams, he or she would have loved to hear all the stories that had preceded them, and such stories would most certainly have whetted their appetite for what was yet to come in this grand adventure. For by learning something of the epic journey of which they were a part, their own relatively brief excursion on the water would have taken on far greater significance. They would have understood that they were making a significant contribution to this far greater enterprise. What a grand thing it would have been to learn that a journal had been kept of the entire saga! And that they could add their chapter and pass it along to the next traveler!

          Such is the excitement of a genealogy such as we just read from the gospel of Matthew – and you thought genealogies were boring! Such is the excitement of a genealogy if you know something of the individual stories along the way! And as I read through those names a few minutes ago, you did know some of those stories and began to think about them.

          It is a compendium, you understand, of the greatest story ever told – the history of the human race! Matthew takes it all the way back to Abraham, but Luke, in his gospel, takes his story all the way back beyond Abraham through countless generations of sons and fathers to Adam who, he states cryptically, was the son of God. A genealogy provides us with a telescope on history, through which we may step back from our very provincial vantage point and see the hand of God at work throughout the vast reaches of recorded time, and even get some sense of history before recorded time. God is, after all, working His purpose out, as the hymn says, generation after generation – taking us step-by-step toward the climax of history. But limited as we are to a single lifetime, like each of our brief travelers along the river, each of us sees so little of what is really taking place. Canon Leon Morris, Principal of Ridley College, Melbourne, commenting on the genealogy which concluded the lovely little book of Ruth in the Old Testament, says, “A genealogy is a striking way of bringing before us the continuity of God’s purpose through the ages. The process of history is not haphazard. There is a purpose in it all. And the purpose is the purpose of God.”

          That, certainly, is what we see in the sweet little pastoral book of Ruth about which he was commenting – God’s hand at work in the lives of ordinary people in an out-of-the-way place – but accomplishing His grand purposes, in the case of Ruth the establishment of the line of Israel’s greatest king, David. And now in our text, Matthew takes us further on down the river to a milestone we could not have imagined through the dark and turbulent days which followed David’s reign. For now, after seemingly endless twists and turns, after eventually capsizing and losing many of our companions in a dreadful collision with an enemy vessel (Babylon) steaming upriver, after struggling desperately to right our craft and scramble aboard once again (the time of the return from exile with Ezra and Nehemiah), we have rounded a bend and there before us is the one of whom the prophets had spoken with breathless anticipation, the one who is called Messiah, and who is offering to accompany us on the remainder of our journey: “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age,” he tells his disciples – I am with you all the way to the climax of history, from this point forward. What a delightful turn of events for our adventure!

          As Matthew begins his gospel with this fascinating genealogy, he wants to encourage us for the homestretch, for the last days, of which you and I are a part. This final leg of our adventure has indeed begun with the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. There will be more dark and threatening days ahead of us, some worse, perhaps, than anything which has come before, but now, Matthew assures us, we have a pilot on board, a pilot on whom we can depend utterly for the remainder of this journey! So Matthew is saying: Welcome aboard! You may be in for the ride of your life, but the outcome is secure, and our destination is glorious beyond imagination! “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man what God has prepared for those who love Him!” [1 Corinthians 2:9]

          As Matthew telescopes history for us, we see a reflection of the three fundamental stages of history. Indeed, the whole of Biblical history can be summarized in three words, as we’ve mentioned before: 1) Creation, 2) Fall, 3) Redemption. The world as God intended it, first of all, in creation. The world as we deformed it, secondly, in the fall. And, finally, the world as God redeems and remakes it. Much has been made, throughout history, of the Rise and Fall of great cultures like Greece and Rome. But the end of the story has not yet been written. The three stages of human history include the rise and the fall all right, but then the rising again of humankind made in the image of God!

          It is these three stages in the life of God’s people which Matthew reflects in the three segments of his genealogy. Verse 1, Matthew 1, outlines for us where he is going in the simplest terms, the overview: Jesus Christ, / the son of David, / the son of Abraham. Then he fills out this outline in verses 2-16, giving us the connecting links from Abraham to David, and from David to Jesus. And finally he summarizes in verse 17: “Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Christ.” We see three stages here, don’t we?

          Just exactly why the number fourteen has such significance for Matthew, we don’t know. It is the Hebrew numeric equivalent of David’s name, which lies at the center of this genealogy, so he may have done it on purpose for that reason. It is also a multiple of seven, which has always been the number of perfection in Biblical history since the seven-stage account of God’s perfect creation. In any case it is not the actual number of generations between each of these persons.

          Hebrew genealogies are never entirely complete. They are always designed to make a point. Nearly always they leave out less significant names, as has happened here. If you compare the equivalent genealogies in the book of Chronicles, for example, you find many more names there, and certainly several generations have been left out between Rahab (in verse 5) who lived during the time of Joshua when the Israelites entered the Promised Land, and Boaz who is listed here as her son, but who lived late in the time of the Judges, some 200-300 years later. All that Matthew wants to establish is that Boaz is a descendant of Salmon and Rahab. But the nice symmetry of 14s has the additional effect of making the account easier to memorize in a day when most people’s access to history was through the spoken word. Incidentally, when Luke gives his genealogy, he includes 21 generations between David and the exile – another multiple of seven, so that seems a significant reason for this genealogy being constructed as it is.

          What Matthew primarily wants you to notice, however, is that in the first segment of the history he is accounting for us here, the history of God’s people from Abraham to David, we find an account of the rise of the people of God to what really was the zenith of their history – the Golden Age with David as king. In the second segment of history from David to the exile, we find the reversal of their fortune, that familiar theme in history of the rise and fall, the fall now to the nadir (the low point) of their history. He has tracked the rise and the fall of God’s people. But then he tracks the beginning of their phoenix-like rise from the ashes of exile to the birth of Jesus, who is called the Christ (which is simply Greek for the Messiah). History, Matthew is telling us in this simple way, is going someplace. We are not bobbing randomly on some ocean of chance, awaiting our fate. We are traveling a predetermined course, under the hand of God, toward our eternal destiny. Whatever adversity we may encounter along the way, we can rest assured that God has not lost control.

          But if Matthew has had the freedom to choose the fourteen individual stories between the primary characters in his genealogy as he carries us through the epic narrative of our human race, what astonishing and perhaps peculiar judgment he has exercised here in tracing the heritage of our Lord Jesus Christ! In a culture where men thanked God every morning that they had not been made a Gentile, a slave, or a woman, Matthew gives a prominent place to Ruth, who was not only a Gentile, but a Moabite – from a race begun in incest. Her poverty had reduced her to following the slave girls as they gleaned the leftover stalks in the grain field. And of course most obviously, she was a woman! Matthew is, if you will, unapologetically challenging the prevailing culture! – So you are quite proud of the fact that you are not a Gentile, a slave, or a woman, are you? Well, David, your great hero, as well as our Lord Jesus Christ were both descended from Ruth who was all three, a Gentile, a slave, and a woman!

          Indeed, if you would care to look closely at this narrative, you’ll see some other surprises. You’ll see great prominence given to other women as well; women who, as we might say today, carry a lot of baggage: Tamar, for example, who was an adulteress; Rahab who was a notorious prostitute; Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba, who gave birth to David’s illegitimate son, complicit it seems in this affair, and who later became the Queen mother of Solomon. Tamar was a Canaanite (that despised race); Rahab was also a Canaanite, a Gentile from Jericho; Ruth a Moabitess as we said. . . . And if you think the foreign women in this list were a notorious lot, take a look at the Jewish men listed there, men like Ahaz and Manasseh. Look up Manasseh’s life sometime in the book of Chronicles. You’ll find there an extraordinary sinner. Yet when God chose to enter the human race, it was into this climate of sin and alienation that He chose to step!

          That is the magnificent part of the story, isn’t it? And this was no accident. He chose to enter the story precisely here at this point, and in this way. History, you understand, was in a free-fall. But He had come to reverse that action, to begin the third stage. It was not only that we were alienated from each other like Jew and Gentile, or that we had come to disrespect and to dominate one another like male and female; but it was that we had all become slaves, without exception! We had become slaves to our own sinful desires. “We were in slavery under the basic principles of the world,” Paul tells the Galatians.

But when the time had fully come [the precise moment in history], God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons.

He wants us to be part of the story.

          You see, Matthew wanted to make it clear in this alien climate that he was introducing the story of redemption in his great gospel. He was introducing the third and final phase of history. The human race, and then subsequently God’s own people, had risen and then fallen. But they were about to rise again, and history would see the reversal of all those old estrangements. “You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus,” the apostle Paul would say, “for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. [And listen to this!] There is neither Jew nor [Gentile], slave nor free, male nor female [all those old distinctions], for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

          If there is one supremely encouraging message in the genealogy of our Lord Jesus Christ, it is that no one has ever fallen so low or become so insignificant or so despised that God cannot redeem and include them, even prominently, in His story of grace and achievement. Never forget that, whoever you are, however you may feel you have failed, however insignificant you may think you are, No one is beneath the grace of Christ. There is no one who cannot ascend to a place of glory along with Him, no one who cannot become a part of the story.

          So we have come to our own section of the river today. The story is continuing to be written even as we speak. You and I are characters who figure significantly in the story. Our chapter is a vital part of the narrative that has begun with Adam and continues to our day and beyond. As I said earlier, for 1400 years this year, the Christian church has celebrated All Saints Day, just as we are doing today. It is an appropriate remembrance that every believer who has ever been a part of this epic adventure is significant. Now, our names too appear on the list. None of us has fallen so low, or become so insignificant that God cannot invest us with His glory and use us in the accomplishment of His glorious purposes.

          So where is history finally going? We are going to be exploring that further in the weeks to come; the trip is not yet complete. In the Bible, genealogies always look back, but only, (as in our continuing story), to set the stage for the future. Genealogies look back with the anticipation of looking ahead. The generations of Adam in Genesis 5 set the stage for the story of Noah. The generations of Noah in Genesis 10 set the stage for the introduction of the people of God. The genealogies in Chronicles set the stage for re-establishing God’s people in Israel after the exile. Now Matthew’s genealogy sets the stage for the future of a whole new race, finally fit for God’s kingdom. His genealogy takes us to the “continental divide,” as it were, to the watershed of history, in the birth of Jesus Christ. For what we find at its climax (this is fascinating) is both a continuity and a discontinuity with the past. We will be exploring this further.

          Yes, we may trace our story back into history, and there is a continuity there. We share the blood of Adam, believe it or not. But did you notice the fault line in verse 16? Look at it once again, a little shift in this story he has been telling that turns out to be a major shift: “. . . and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.” So we are in the rhythm there reading those names: Eleazar is the father of Matthan; Matthan the father of Jacob; Jacob the father of Joseph; but Joseph is not listed as the father of Jesus – rather as the husband of Mary, “of whom was born Jesus.” And he will continue in verse 18 with the story of the virgin birth, for a crucial discontinuity has been introduced here as well. The human race to this point has exhibited a fatal disease – the disease of Sin, which leads inevitably to Death. If we are ever to know a true resurrection in this third and final stage of history, we must disassociate ourselves with the line of Death (“For as in Adam all die, . . “), and become linked instead with the line of Life (“so also in Christ shall all be made alive” [1 Corinthians 15:22]). That life flows, of course, only from our Creator, so we know where we need to connect.

          Perhaps it would be more clear if we departed from our analogy of the river and introduced the not-altogether-dissimilar analogy of a vine and branches (which, by the way, resemble most rivers when you view their tributaries from a distance), an analogy which figures prominently in scripture. The problem is that the particular branch of the human family tree along which we have been traveling is diseased, and it is destined for death. As a result, if you and I are ever to be saved, we will have to be removed from that fateful tree or mortal humanity, as Paul says in Romans 11, and be grafted into a healthy one.

          “I am the vine; you are the branches,” Jesus explained in John 15. “If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” What is happening here is that Matthew is introducing us to an entirely new race of men – a new generation which is born, as Jesus says, “of water and the Spirit.” (He told Nicodemus this in John 3.) It is not a matter of flesh and blood anymore. As the apostle Paul concludes the passage we were reading earlier from Galatians 4 about what took place “when the time had fully come” and God introduced himself into the stream of humanity, Paul says: “Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, ‘Abba, Father.’ [We have a new connection now.] So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir [an heir of his glorious plan].” You see, in Christ we are made a new creation; old things are passed away; behold, all things become new. If you are a believer, if you have trusted in Him, God has made you a heir of all His precious promises.

          That was, you might remember in our studies a few months back, the climax of the story in Romans 8: “Now if we are children, then we are heirs – heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.” And then Paul goes on to say,

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For . . . the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

That is the watershed of history, is it not? Creation set free from its bondage to decay, and all those who trust Him set free to enjoy that glorious freedom. That, he concludes, is what we anticipate – the glorious climax of all history, awaiting those who come to follow Jesus as Lord.

          In the wonderful musical about exiled Russian Jews, Fiddler On the Roof – in a memorable dialogue with God – Tevye, the milkman, dreams of a life freed from the burdens of poverty and oppression. At the climax of the song, as he looks skyward toward his lifelong comrade and nemesis, he sings, “Lord, who made the lion and the lamb, You decreed I should be what I am; Would it spoil some vast, eternal plan . . . If I were a wealthy man?”

          Tevye can’t imagine that the incidentals of his life in an obscure corner of the world could have much of an effect upon God’s “vast, eternal plan.” But of course he is wrong! God’s vast, eternal plan includes the incidentals of all of our lives. We are part of an epic journey from the origin of all things to the climax of all history. Our particular chapter is being written right now, this very day, and you and I are characters in the story. It will continue to be written in the choices which may seem incidental to you, may seem obscure to you, may seem to be choices you think no one will even notice, choices you will make this week and in this coming year. God intends that, no matter who you are, your actions will make a significant contribution to His vast, eternal plan for the whole of creation and for the entirety of history. To date, we would have to admit, many of our actions have made rather a negative contribution. But God is in the business of redeeming history – of redeeming our personal history. The day we truly surrender to Him – this is not lip service; it is a choice to submit, to follow Him as Lord in our lives – we become heirs of that kingdom anticipating the grand climax of history! The adventure continues, but our destiny is assured!

Closing prayer – Father, this is a grand story, and it is so exciting. We have only glimpsed pieces of it along the way but enough to begin to piece together that – as you said through the prophet Isaiah – when you set out to do something you do it! Your word does not, your word can not fail. Your word has that kind of power; it brings about what you say. From the moment you said, “Let there be light,” as the Scripture tells us, “there was light.” Likewise from the moment you say, “Welcome, good and faithful servant,” we are assured of our place with you. Father, I pray that you would help us to see our place in this vast eternal plan, that we would find excitement in our segment of the river adventure, and that we would increasingly experience your presence with us as guide, as guard, and as savior and Lord. We pray this in Jesus’ name, AMEN.