Day 2

                              

It's like a clerical collar, ya see? David, we could be TWINS! (sorry Matt, he's my twin now). Is that weird?

I digress...

Here is Davids write up about that crazy geneology from Matt 1 (Warning: Nerding out on the Bible is about to happen, no Pinterest links below. If that's what you're here for...read on).

"The link above represents a quick look through scripture and using concordances (indexes to find words in the Bible) to locate words and names quickly. More research needs to be done with this passage, and I’m sure that an in-depth study of the lineage of Christ is out there and has already been done, and it looks a lot better than mine.

The genealogy included here is a bit more confusing than what we would consider “acceptable” for an ancestry.com pedigree. Reasons for that may include the presence Levirate marriages (which would force a widow to marry her deceased husband’s brother, possibly in the case of Shealtiel and Zerubbabel), curses on future generations (possibly in the case of Joram and Uzziah), and differences in names (translations, interchangeable usages for the same name, etc).

The genealogy in Matthew 1 goes through all of Israel’s recorded history, starting at Abraham, the father of the world’s three major religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam); continuing through the tribes of Israel (Judah); continuing through the story of Ruth, who is ancestor of Jesse and King David. It then continues through the Israelite monarchy (told in 1 and 2 Kings), which included some good kings (Hezekiah and Josiah, and to a lesser extent, Asa and Jehoshaphat) and some bad kings (Manasseh, Amon, others).

What does this tell us? First and foremost, it reminds us that Jesus descends from Abraham, and the line connecting them runs through the line of David. Along the way, Israel’s relationship with God is a rocky one: there are periods when Israel is faithfully obedient, and then there are periods when they’re anything but. The last several generations includes names not mentioned elsewhere in scripture – ordinary nobodies. 

While Christ’s family tree is full of unfaithful people and others we haven’t heard of, Christ himself becomes the epitome of what being faithful to God looks like. That God can work through such a history of lost, unfaithful, and ordinary people to work to the perfection in Christ tells me that God can work through “ordinary nobodies” like us as well".