Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Jesus Came From That Family? | The Gospels | Matthew 1:1–17

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

Why would Matthew begin the story of Jesus with a genealogy? What could a list of ancient names possibly have to say about your life today? And what does Jesus's family tree reveal about God's kingdom? In today's episode, Keith explores Matthew 1:1–17 and uncovers a surprising truth: nobody earns their way in; God's kingdom is built on grace. Read the Bible with us! This year, we’re exploring the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and it's never too late to join! Download your reading plan now. 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 so that 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. Passage: Matthew 1:1–17

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. It seems weird to us that when Matthew wants to introduce us to Jesus, he starts with a genealogy. We wouldn't do that. If we were introducing two friends to each other, we wouldn't start by telling each of them of the other's ancestral lineage. But when Matthew wants to introduce us to Jesus, that's exactly what he does. he starts his gospel with a genealogy. And when you read through it, you might wonder, what does this list of ancient names

have anything to tell us? How is it relevant to us? What does it actually tell us about Jesus? Nothing. It seems boring. But inside this genealogy is a message about Jesus that is more relevant to your life than anything else you'll hear today. If you let it, it will change how you think about God, about yourself, and about grace.

Now I'm not going to read all the verses of all the names. if you want, you can look through them, and there are going to be some that you recognize, names like Abraham, David, Solomon, and a lot of names you probably don't recognize. That's okay. Let me pray for us. Father, I pray that you would open your word, that we might see truth in it, and that you would open our heart, that the truth we see would transform us. It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen. In 1990, Canon, the camera company, it launched it as big. It's been. advertising campaign and it was built around Andre Agassi, who was a big tennis star at the time. The slogan was three words. Image is everything. It was a camera ad, but it kind of captured

something at that moment and maybe it's captured something that's been true about every moment in human history. People have always been consumed with their image and human beings probably always will be. The difference today is that we have more tools than ever to manage our image. I mean, we live in a self-editing world. We're in control of what people know. about us and therefore what they think about us. Like we doctor our photos or we curate our feeds. One country music song summed up social media perfectly. I'm so much cooler online, he's saying. We photoshop, not just our faces, but our lives, our reputations, our resumes. I mean, you know how this works. If someone starts at College A and then flunks out, but later graduates from College B,

College A is never going to show up on the resume. A few years back, a guy named George O'Lear. was hired as the head football coach at Notre Dame, but he had to resign five days later when it came out that he had claimed things on his resume that just weren't true. He had claimed degrees and athletic credentials he'd never earned. We all edit ourselves. We put our best foot forward, our best face forward, and then try to hide everything we don't want others to see. And this isn't new. In the ancient world, your genealogy was your resume. Your family, your clan, your pedigree, that's how you recommended yourself to the world. And people doctored their genealogy.

I mean, Herod, who remember he was the king in Jesus' day, he was so obsessed with his own image that he had his genealogy altered. He scrubbed it of the names that didn't fit the story that he wanted to tell a story about his own greatness. But here's where it gets interesting, because Matthew is doing the same thing. When we read Jesus' genealogy in Matthew chapter 1,

we're not reading every single name between Abraham and Jesus, Matthew is being selective. He's choosing, he's including the names he wants us to see, the ones that reveal something essential about who Jesus is. So both men edited a genealogy, but here's the big difference. Herod edited his genealogy to show how great he was. Matthew edited Jesus' genealogy to show how gracious he is. From the very first page of the New Testament, Matthew wants you to see one thing. Jesus is a friend of sinners. Matthew is telling us, In this list of names in the genealogy, what the angel will tell Joseph just a few verses later, 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.

To catch the grace packed in to this list of names, let me just pull out a few. So first there's Abraham. To understand Abraham, you have to understand the world he was pulled out of. Just a few chapters before God calls him, Genesis gives us this verdict. the Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. Into that moral chaos, God intervened. He reached into the life of one man, Abraham, and through Abraham blessed the whole world.

But don't romanticize Abraham. Before God grabbed hold of him, Abraham was a pagan. God opened his eyes. God gave him a new heart. God gave him the faith to believe the promises he'd made to him. Abraham did not go looking for God. God went looking for Abraham. God always moves first. Abraham didn't choose God. God chose Abraham. And that is exactly what Jesus says to his disciples. He says, you do not choose me, but I chose you. That's in John 15. We love him because he first loved us.

That's in 1 John 4. If God gave us 1,000 chances, if God gave us 10,000 chances to find him on our own, we'd never have found him. So the very first thing this genealogy teaches us is this. God is of God of grace, and his grace always comes first. Then there's King David. He was blessed by God in almost every way a person can be. He killed Goliath as a young boy. He was anointed king. He won battle after battle. God had been so good to him. And then David blew it. I mean, blew it badly. First, adultery or what some people say might be something closer to rape. And then to cover it all up, murder. murder. Here's what David's story teaches us. David turned his back on God, but God never turned his back on David. And when David is finally confronted with his sin, he doesn't manage his reputation. He isn't merely sorry he got caught. He doesn't blame shift. He genuinely repents. And that's the doorway to the promise that God made to every one of us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just. He will forgive us our sins and purify us from all in righteousness. So the second thing this genealogy teaches us is this. God is a God of grace whose grace triumphs over sin. Then we come to the women.

Matthew does something that the first century reader would have found pretty surprising. He includes women in this genealogy, and it was surprising because genealogies of that era didn't name women. And yet Matthew chooses to name four before he ever reaches Mary. The four he names are Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and the wife of Uriah. Just by including them, Matthew is announcing that the kingdom of God, it runs by a different logic than the kingdom of humans. And look who these women are. There's Tamar. Her story is in Genesis 38, and it is a disaster. And Judah is her father-in-law, and Judah shirks his obligations to Tamar. So she disguises herself, tricks him, sleeps with him. And from that union comes Perez, who's right here in the line of Jesus, right here in Matthew

chapter one in the genealogy. When your family tree includes a woman who conceived a child by her own father-in-law, it's fair to say that this family is dysfunctional. But do you see what God is doing? He's taking a sordid, tangled, sinful story, and he brings the Messiah out of it, God's showing us that he can redeem the messes in our life. Then there's the person that's known as the wife of Yariah. That's Bathsheba, the one David manipulated into sin. Yeraya was one of David's most loyal soldiers. While Yerai was off fighting David's wars, David took his wife. And when she became pregnant, David had Yariah killed to cover up his tracks. And notice, Matthew won't let David off the hook for this. That's why he doesn't write Beshiba. He writes Yeraya's wife, because he wanted to keep the crime

in full view right there and the family record of the Son of God. And then there's Rahab, the prostitute from Jericho. Jericho is a city that was marked out for destruction, but God rescued Rahab, not because of anything she'd done, but sheerly because of grace. And this former prostitute, who now is a child of God has chosen to stand in the direct bloodline of Jesus. See, here's the thing. This isn't just ancient history. This is a preview of Jesus' whole ministry. During his life, Jesus spent time with people like Rahab, with prostitutes and tax collectors and sinners. And it made the religious people furious because they didn't understand him. They didn't understand grace. they couldn't grasp that he had come to seek and save the lost. So they sneered, here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners. And Jesus went right back at them. He said, truly, I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you. Now, how could that be true? Well, C.S. Lewis, he wrestled with that question, and in the problem of pain, he wrote something worth thinking about. He said, prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they can

not turn to God. The proud, the greedy, the self-righteous are in that danger. So let me ask you, do you feel the weight of your sin? Or have you found your present life in this world so comfortable, so satisfactory, that you're actually in danger of missing Jesus altogether? Are you starting to see how important this genealogy is? How much is packed into this list of names? God arranged his son to be born into what, quite frankly, is the ultimate dysfunctional family. I mean, here's a pagan, an adulterer, a murder, a prostitute. And the list goes on. And why would God do that?

Because he wants to teach us that his kingdom is built on grace, not morality, not merit. When you look honestly at the people in Jesus' family tree, you find a crowd of sinners, not one of whom deserved to be there. Which means that after you read this genealogy and know the stories behind these people, the wrong question to ask is, how do they get in? And the right question to ask is, how does anyone get in? because the answer is the same for all, and that is grace, because no one is qualified. The reason grace is so hard for us to believe is because we live in a culture that rewards us based on our performance.

Grace is a gift to the undeserving, but in our world, the rewards go to those who do deserve it. They're like the smart, the beautiful, the talented, the hardworking. Whoever is a cut above the rest, that's the way school works or that's the way our careers work. It's the way a lot of parenting works. And if we're not careful, we assume that God's kingdom works the same way. We assume that God honors the good, the moral, and the religious. And we stop coming to God as desperate sinners begging for grace. Instead, we start coming to them as basically decent people who are doing pretty well, not perfectly, but pretty well. Here's the test to see which kingdom you're actually living in. When you don't get what you want from God, when you don't get the health outcome or the

grade or the kind of marriage you wanted. Do you get testy? Do you get a little angry? Do you think, how come God didn't give me this? I deserve this. The more we fix our eyes on what we deserve, the more disappointed we become. Deserving people are almost always the most disappointed people. Now, picture the opposite. A desperate sinner is someone who knows that what they truly deserve is God's judgment. When that person sees that God sent his own son for them, when they see that they are the recipient of God's grace that they do not deserve. They are astonished. And everything good in their life becomes this undeserved gift from a gracious God. See, that's the message hidden in this list of names. God's kingdom is built on grace, not morality and not merit. Nobody earns their way in. Nobody deserves

to be there. You either get in by grace or you don't get in at all. Father, I pray that you would open our eyes that we could see the grace that you offer us. us, that we would let go of our goodness and instead come to you as needy sinners depending on your grace. So in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.