Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Image Isn't Everything | New Testament | Matthew 1

Episode Date: January 2, 2023

Join the TMBT community in reading the entire New Testament in 2023. Get your FREE reading plan here. Are you consumed with your own image? Who do you want others to think you are? Are you enough for God's kingdom? Keith kicks off our series through the New Testament in a year with Jesus's genealogy in Matthew 1. Listen to find out if you have what it takes to be a part of God's kingdom. 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. 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

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. Welcome to the new year with 10 Minute Bible Talks. We're glad to go through the New Testament this year with you. Grab a friend and let's do this together. Let's see what God wants to do in our life this year. You open your Bible in Matthew 1 and the first thing you are confronted with is a genealogy,

a list of hard-to-pronounce names. You might be tempted to skip the names or maybe even decide that reading through the New Testament wasn't such a great idea after all. Look, don't panic, at least not yet. Matthew wants to introduce us to Jesus and he's going to use a genealogy to do it. Why is he doing this? What does this genealogy have to say to us? Well, we live in a self-editing world where we can to a large extent determine what people know and think about us. Just think about how people use social media to present a certain image.

The urge to self-edit isn't entirely new. In ancient times, your genealogy was like a resume. What mattered was your family. Your genealogy announced who you were. Today, people might airbrush a resume, but in the ancient world, people would airbrush the genealogy. We know that King Herod, who was the ruler in Jesus' day, was consumed with his image, so he doctored his own genealogy. He removed the names of people who didn't make him look good.

He removed the names of people who didn't fit with a story that he was telling about himself, a story of his own personal greatness. You might say that Matthew was guilty of the same kind of thing. When he put together Jesus' genealogy, he didn't include every name of every person in the ancestry of Jesus dating all the way back to Abraham. We are reading those names that, Matthew thought were important to include. We're reading those that Matthew thought revealed something important about who Jesus is and what his mission is. Herod self-edited his own genealogy to emphasize

how great he was. Matthew edited Jesus' genealogy to show how gracious he is. From the very beginning of the story, Matthew wants us to see that Jesus is a friend of sinners. In this list of names, he is driving home the point of verse 21. It says this, 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 went to pick a few people out of the list of names that will help us see who Jesus is and what kind of mission he's on.

Today, let's focus on the women that are mentioned. Ancient genealogies didn't include women, so when, When Matthew included four women, he's saying that the kingdom of God is radically different than what we might expect. The first woman in this genealogy is Tamar. We find her story recorded in Genesis chapter 38. It's a twisted story. The short version is that Tamar's father-in-law, Judah, shirks his responsibilities to her after her husband died. Tamar is desperate, so she tricks Judah into sleeping with her.

When you're sleeping with your father-in-law, it's safe to say. that the family is dysfunctional. Remember now, this is Jesus' ancestry. So I hope you see what's happening. Jesus uses this sinful union between Judah and Tamar to bring about the birth of Jesus. God is redeeming the brokenness. Next is Rehab, who's referred to as a prostitute.

She lives in Jericho, which is designated for destruction, but God intervenes and rescues her. Ruth follows Rehab, and she's also an outsider. Ruth is a Moabite, which was one of the nations that were constantly at odd with the Israelites. By including her in the genealogy, Matthew is saying that God loves the outsider. The fourth woman is Bathsheba, but you don't actually find her name in the list. Here's verse 6. David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah's wife.

David infamously took advantage of his power to have an adulterous relationship with Bathsheba, who later became his wife. Matthew could have skipped over those names. He didn't have to include any women and didn't have to include these women. That he chose to do so tells us something about Jesus. He's come to rescue the outsider. He's come to rescue the vulnerable. He's come to rescue the sinner.

God wants to teach us that his kingdom is built on grace, not morality and not merit. When we look at the people in Jesus' lineage, what we find is a bunch of sinners. men and women, none of whom deserve to be included in the family of God. After reading that genealogy and knowing the story of everyone included, the wrong question to ask is, how did they get in? And the right question to ask is, how does anyone get in?

See, no one qualifies for God's kingdom. Google has a unique approach to finding new employees. One way Google weeds out the best from the rest is by publishing a 21-question aptitude test in a number of magazines. The questions alone are enough to confuse those who are not technologically and intellectually elite. For example, here's one of the questions. How many different ways can you color an Echisagiron

with one of three colors on each face? Here's another one. On an infinite two-dimensional rectangular lattice of one-oam resistors, what is the resistance between two nodes that are in nights move away? I'm not even sure I have pronounced saw those words right? The test also includes more subjective tongue-in-cheek requests like

write a haiku prescribing possible methods for predicting search traffic seasonality. And what is the most beautiful math equation ever derived? Google once tried a different approach. It placed billboards with math problems on them. Anyone who was able to solve the problem was taken to a website and confronted with another thorny math problem. Those smart enough to decipher that were taken to an internal Google page that praised, quote, your big, magnificent brain. And then they invited you to apply for a job. Aren't you glad that God requires nothing like this for entrance into his kingdom? God's acceptance is not predicated upon great intellect, savvy, or skill. It's not based on anything you do. That's good news, because God's test is a lot more difficult than Google's. His standards,

believe it or not, are much higher. It's absolute moral perfection. The only person who ever passed God's test is Jesus. Jesus doesn't wink at sin. He doesn't let it slide. He dies for sinners. You could never be good enough, smart enough, or measure up. You only have to do the thing that is the easiest and at the same time the hardest. That is to turn from your sin and believe in Jesus.

It's hard for us to live the message of grace because we live our life in the kingdom of Google. our world functions like one big Google interview. In our world, rewards go to the smart, the beautiful, the savvy, the hardworking, the talented. Rewards are given to those who are cut above the rest. And if we're not careful, we think that God's kingdom operates like ours. We think that God's kingdom operates like Google's kingdom. We think that God honors the good, the moral, and the religious. And we stop coming to God as a desperate sinner looking for God's undeserving grace.

The genealogy of Jesus teaches us that God's kingdom is built on grace, not morality or merit. No one earns their way in. No one deserves to be there. You either get in by grace or you don't get in at all. Thanks for listening. We've created a plan to help you read through the New Testament this year. This reading plan is the same one we're going to be using on TMBT, so you can read a chapter and then listen to an episode on the chapter that you just read.

The link to the PDF is in the show notes.