Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Has God Given Up on You? | Advent | Matthew 1:6-11

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

Is there a sin too great for God's grace? Are you ever too far gone? In today's episode, Keith looks at a man listed in Matthew 1:6-11 as an example of God's grace covering great sin and evil. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter@TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Matthew 1:6-11 Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. I remember watching a commercial back in the 1990s. It was put out by the Canon Camera Company, and they had to launch this big advertising campaign, and their star, kind of the celebrity they had on it was the tennis legend, Andre Agassi. And the slogan that they were using for this big ad campaign was, image is everything. And that phrase captured the feeling of that time, but maybe it captured the feeling of all times, right?

Because I think people have always been and probably always will be consumed with their image. Today, we have more and more opportunities to work on our image, more and more tools at our disposal to help us present the kind of image that we want to put forward. We live in what you might call a self-editing world in which we can control what people know about us. and therefore what they think about us. My wife is a big country music fan, and Brad Paisley, who's one of the country music stars, had a song with a line in it, I'm so much cooler online.

And isn't it true that online we edit our image, like think of dating apps or really any place that we can present ourselves, we come across better online than we do in person? Or another way that people kind of self-edit is in their resume. Let's say somebody went to a college and flunker. out and then went to a different college and graduated. Well, that college they flunked out of, that's probably never going to show up on their resume. And of course, we know that there are people who have been found cheating on their resume, like coaches or political candidates that they've

lied on their resume and made themselves look more accomplished than they really are. But this urge to self-edit. It's not entirely new. In the ancient times, your genealogy was kind of like your resume. What often mattered was what family you were from, what clan, what's your pedigree. That's the way a person would recommend themselves to the world. So we airbrushed photos, but people back in the first century, they airbrushed their resume. So King Herod, he's the ruler in Jesus' day. He was consumed with his image. So he doctored his own genealogy. And what he did is he removed the names of people that didn't fit with a story that he was trying to tell about himself, a story of his own personal greatness. Now, you might say that Matthew, who wrote the gospel of Matthew, when he was putting together

the genealogy of Jesus, was guilty of the same thing. What I mean is that when we read the genealogy that Matthew presents, we're not reading every name of every person in the ancestry of Jesus, dating all the way back to Abraham. We're reading the names of the people that Matthew thought were important to include. We're reading those names that Matthew thought revealed something important about who Jesus is and what his mission is. So Herod self-edited his own genealogy to emphasize how great he was. Matthew edited Jesus' genealogy to show how gracious he is.

Greatness versus graciousness. From the very beginning of the story, in the very first chapter, Matthew wants us to see that Jesus is a friend of sinners. So in the genealogy, in the list of names, he's driving home the point of Matthew 121. She will give birth to a son and you are to give him the name Jesus because he will save his people from their sins.

In order to catch the grace communicated in this genealogy, I just want to pick one person from the section that we have today that demonstrates this truth that Jesus is gracious. So the person in Jesus' genealogy we're going to look at today is Manassah. He's the son of Hezekiah, and Manassah was the king of Judah for 55 years. As we study Manassah, there's a wrinkle in a story that's hard to reconcile. He's considered to be one of the most evil kings of all, and yet toward the end of his life, he gives us heart to God.

The story of Manassah is a story of radical redemption. So Manasse is this very evil king who's in Jesus' family tree. He finds forgiveness in God late in his life, but the damage he caused by his sin was so profound that his legacy is still that of evilness. Let's look a little bit more at him. His story is told in the book of kings and chronicles. That's where all the stories of the kings of Judah and Israel are told. So Manassah comes to the throne and becomes king at 12 years of age when his father, Hezekiah, dies. Manasa made it his. His name. He's a child. He's his mission to undo all the reforms that his father had put in place. So his father, Hezekiah,

had destroyed the shrines of pagan worship, but Manasseh rebuilt them. And he also added shrines to even more gods. Manassah desecrated the temple by putting altars for idol worship in there. He sacrificed, think about this. He sacrificed his own sons, burning them to death in the worship of the idol Molek. Manasseh murdered so many people that in Second Kings it says, Manasseh also shed so much innocent blood that he filled Jerusalem from end to end. I mean, Manasseh was a tyrant. In the Jewish Talmud, it claimed that Manasa murdered the great prophet Isaiah by sawing him in half. It would be easier if that was the only story that we had about Manassas.

Then we could just conclude he was evil and he faced God's judgment. But redemption is often messy. Grace is often scandalous because grace forgives people that we aren't sure should be forgiven. Second Chronicles 33 says, but Manasseh led Judah and the people of Jerusalem astray so that they did more evil than the nations the Lord had destroyed before the Israelites. I mean, this guy's evil. Can't we just curse the man and move on? No. God can redeem the most hardened heart.

The consequences of sin may remain, but the grace of God is beyond. anything anybody deserves. So we read this in Second Chronicles 33. The Lord spoke to Manassah and his people, but they paid no attention. So the Lord brought against them the army commanders of the king of Assyria, who took Manassah prisoner, put a hook at his nose, bound him with bronze shackles, and took him to Babylon. In his distress, he sought the favor of the Lord is God and humbled himself greatly before the God of his ancestors. And when he prayed to him, the Lord was moved by his entreaty and listened to his plea. So he brought him back to Jerusalem and to his kingdom. Then Manasseh knew that the Lord is God. So did you hear that? Manassah repented and he got right with God.

And God ended up restoring his kingdom to him. And so what you see is that Manassah begins to institute religious reforms. He begins to undo some of the evil things that he had done in the first place. He tore down all the shrines to false gods. He took out the altars to the false gods that he had put in the temple. So his conversion seems real. I mean, it's having a real change, a real impact in his life. But even though Manasseh had a personal conversion, he was never able to lead Judah totally out of the sin that he had previously led them into.

Because all the people, they didn't follow him in his reforms. They continued their idolatry. and when Manassah dies, his son does evil in the eyes of the Lord. So Manassah is kind of this tragic figure in Scripture. Although he repented of his sin, he was unable to undo all the damage that had been done. And yet, he is someone who shows that no matter how much sin we've committed, no matter how evil we are, God still can change us, that God can still forgive us, that there's no sin so great that God's grace won't forget. give it. And this just reminds us, don't give up on anyone. Maybe there's somebody in your family or

maybe this is even describing you or somebody at work or whatever who just seems so hardened toward God and so uninterested in the things of God and they've done such incredibly evil things. Maybe you just have written them off like God wouldn't really have anything to do with them. God could never save them. God could never change them. God wouldn't want to forgive them. That's just not true. God loves to forgive. sinners. There's no one who's committed some sin so great that God's grace cannot forgive it. And that's why Manasseh is in Jesus' family tree. It's why he's in this genealogy of Matthew 1 because it's a reminder to us what Jesus is about. Jesus is on a mission to forgive sinners. That means that Jesus can

forgive my sin. It means that I shouldn't give up on anyone because Jesus can forgive their sin. You see, this genealogy is full of sinners. And that means it's full of. of hope for people like you and me. Hey, thanks for listening. If you want to go deeper, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talk newsletter. You'll get a short email once a week. It'll challenge you to grow in your faith,

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