Anchor My Faith

Title: Abraham to Judah (Matthew 1:1-2)

There are many people today that keep a record of their families; who are their ancestors. People may go back to a particular starting point, which might be a person or a couple and then draw a tree showing how the family branched out over the generations. This is a practice that goes back to the beginning. Genesis 5 starts out with: “This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God” (Genesis 5:1 ESV). The chapter continues by telling us who fathered who. Here in Matthew we find the same type of recording.

Matthew begins his gospel with: “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1 ESV). Matthew tells us that Jesus is a descendant of David, but then continues to point back further to Abraham, which becomes his starting point for his genealogy.

This genealogy and the one given in Luke 3 have caused great difficulty among commentators in trying to reconcile various problems contained in the genealogies and also between them. We will skip over those problems and focus on some key points. We will begin with: “Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers” (Matthew 1:2 ESV).

I believed Isaac is mentioned because he was a miracle child; a child of old age. This is explained in Genesis 21:1 – 3 (ESV): “The Lord visited Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did to Sarah as he had promised. And Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age at the time of which God had spoken to him. Abraham called the name of his son who was born to him, whom Sarah bore him, Isaac.”

Like Sarah, Rebekah, the wife of Isaac, was barren for some time, but in due time God provided and she gave birth to twins who were named Jacob and Esau (Genesis 25:24 – 26). Jacob had five wives who provided him with twelve sons, but the son we are interested in here is Judah who was Leah’s fourth and last son. Since there is an interesting story connected with Judah, we will wait and pick up the story in the next lesson.

Prayer

Father, I confess I wasn’t very excited over writing lessons on the genealogies, but as I get into them they outline some interesting stories. They provide the names of some of the people who were used to lead up to the birth of Jesus. Some of those names identify people with some interesting stories to look at. Today, many people keep track of their ancestors and some of them have interesting stories. What kind of a story are we leaving for people to look back on? Father, thank you for guiding us through some of those stories.