Matthew 1:1-17
This morning we begin a journey through the Gospel of Matthew. Over the coming weeks, we’re going to walk alongside tax collectors and fishermen. We’ll watch Jesus calm storms, heal the sick, challenge religious leaders, and teach crowds gathered on hillsides. We’ll hear some of the most familiar stories in all of Scripture. Yet before Matthew tells us any of those stories, before the angels appear, before the shepherds arrive, before a star shines over Bethlehem, Matthew begins with something that most of us would probably skip right over.
A genealogy.
If you’ve ever tried reading through the Bible in a year, you’ve probably encountered one of these lists of names and found yourself tempted to move ahead a little more quickly than usual. I know I have. For many years, when I camåçe to Matthew chapter one, I treated it like the opening credits of a movie. I knew it was supposed to be there. I assumed it mattered somehow. But if I’m being honest, I was really just waiting for the story to begin.
Then one day I realized something that completely changed how I read this chapter.
Matthew thought the story had already begun.
In fact, Matthew had one opportunity to write the opening words of the New Testament. Think about that for a moment. Four hundred years had passed since the last prophetic voice had spoken in Israel. Generation after generation had waited for God’s promised Messiah. The entire Old Testament had been building toward this moment. If you had been given the responsibility of writing the first chapter of the first book of the New Testament, where would you start?
Most of us would probably start with the dramatic parts. We would begin with Gabriel appearing to Mary. We would begin with Joseph’s dream. We would begin with the manger, the angels, the shepherds, or the wise men.
Matthew begins with forty two generations of names.
The more I thought about that, the more curious I became. Why would Matthew choose this? What did he see in these names that I wasn’t seeing? Why did he think a genealogy was the perfect doorway into the story of Jesus Christ?
As I spent more time with this passage, I began to realize that Matthew’s first readers would never have experienced this chapter the way we often do. When they heard these names, they didn’t hear a list. They heard stories.
Think about our own nation’s history. If I began reading a list of American presidents, certain names would immediately bring entire chapters of history to mind. George Washington would remind us of the founding of the nation and the Revolutionary War. Abraham Lincoln would bring to mind the Civil War and the preservation of the Union. John F. Kennedy would remind us of the space race, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a pivotal moment in American history. The names themselves are important, but what really matters are the stories connected to them.
The same thing was true for Matthew’s audience. When they heard Abraham, they remembered God’s covenant and promise. When they heard Jacob, they remembered the night he wrestled with God beside the river. When they heard David, they remembered the shepherd boy who became king. These names were not simply names. They were reminders of God’s work through generations of ordinary and extraordinary people alike.
So this morning I want to take you on a journey through what many people consider one of the most boring passages in the Bible. My hope is that by the time we reach the end, you’ll never look at a biblical genealogy the same way again. Because hidden inside this list of names is a remarkable testimony to God’s faithfulness. What appears at first glance to be a collection of difficult names is actually the story of God working across centuries, through victories and failures, through seasons of promise and seasons of waiting, all while moving history toward the arrival of Jesus Christ.
And once you begin to see that, these names come alive.
Every Name Has a Story
One of the easiest mistakes we can make when reading a genealogy is forgetting that every name belongs to a real person. When we look at a list like Matthew chapter one, our eyes naturally move from one name to the next, and before long the people themselves begin to disappear. Abraham becomes a name. Isaac becomes a name. Jacob becomes a name. David becomes a name. The genealogy can start to feel like a historical record rather than a collection of lives.
Yet Matthew’s first readers would have understood something that we often miss. Behind every name stood a story.
When Matthew wrote “Abraham fathered Isaac,” his readers didn’t simply think of a man named Abraham. They remembered the elderly man whom God called to leave everything familiar behind and journey toward a land he had never seen. They remembered God’s promise that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky. They remembered the long years of waiting, the moments of doubt, the miraculous birth of Isaac, and the day Abraham trusted God enough to place even that promised son on the altar.
When they heard the name Jacob, they remembered a man who spent much of his life trying to get ahead through his own strength and cleverness. They remembered deception, family conflict, and years of struggle before God finally transformed him into Israel, the father of a nation.
When they heard David, they didn’t simply think of a king. They remembered a shepherd standing before a giant with nothing but a sling and faith in God. They remembered the songs he wrote, the victories he won, the mistakes he made, and the mercy God showed him along the way.
The names were not the story.
The names pointed to the story.
That is why genealogies mattered so much in the ancient world. They were not simply records of ancestry. They were reminders of identity. They reminded people where they came from, who had gone before them, and how God had been at work throughout their history.
The more I thought about that, the more I began to wonder what future generations might say if they looked at our own family trees. Most of us know at least a few stories that have been passed down through our families. Perhaps there is a grandparent who survived difficult times and taught everyone around them what perseverance looked like. Maybe there is a parent who sacrificed quietly so their children could have opportunities they never had. Perhaps there is someone whose faith became the foundation upon which an entire family was built.
Those stories matter because people matter.
And that’s exactly what Matthew is reminding us of here.
The Gospel does not begin with ideas. It begins with people.
Real people.
People who laughed and cried, succeeded and failed, trusted and doubted. People who experienced seasons of faithfulness and seasons of struggle. People who probably never imagined that their names would be read aloud in churches two thousand years later.
As we read through the genealogy, it becomes clear that God was not working only through the famous names. We naturally recognize Abraham and David because their stories occupy large portions of Scripture. But what about some of the others? What about Hezron, Ram, Azor, Eliud, Achim, or Matthan? Most of us know very little about them. In fact, if we’re being honest, many of us could not tell their stories at all.
Yet Matthew includes them.
Every one of them.
That tells us something important about the way God works.
We tend to measure significance by visibility. We celebrate the people whose names appear in history books, whose accomplishments are remembered, and whose influence is obvious. God often sees things differently. Throughout Scripture, He repeatedly works through ordinary people whose names are known only to Him.
The story of redemption was not built solely through kings and prophets. It was carried forward by mothers and fathers, farmers and craftsmen, people who raised children, worshiped faithfully, and played their part in God’s unfolding plan without ever seeing the final outcome.
I suspect many of them died believing their lives had been fairly ordinary.
Yet centuries later, Matthew places their names in the opening chapter of the Gospel because their lives mattered.
Their faithfulness mattered.
Their place in God’s story mattered.
That should be deeply encouraging to every one of us because most of us live ordinary lives. Most of us will never have books written about us. Most of us will never become famous. We will spend our lives loving our families, serving our communities, praying for those we care about, and trying to follow Christ as faithfully as we can.
The world may never notice those things.
But God does.
Matthew’s genealogy reminds us that God’s kingdom has always been built through ordinary people who faithfully played the role God gave them. Every name in this chapter represents someone whose life became part of a story much larger than themselves. Some understood it. Many probably did not. Yet God used them all.
And that may be the first great lesson hidden within this genealogy. Before Matthew tells us about the birth of Jesus, he reminds us that God has always worked through people. Not perfect people. Not famous people. Simply people willing to be part of what God was doing.
Behind every name is a story.
And behind every story is a God who was faithfully at work.
God Was Writing a Story Nobody Could Fully See
As we continue through Matthew’s genealogy, something else begins to emerge. What initially appears to be a simple list of names is actually spanning nearly two thousand years of history. Matthew isn’t just telling us who descended from whom. He is tracing the movement of God’s faithfulness across generation after generation.
One of the challenges we face when reading Scripture is that we often experience centuries in a matter of minutes. We can read from Abraham to David in a few moments and move from David to the Babylonian exile just as quickly. But for the people who lived those stories, this wasn’t a few lines on a page. This was their entire lives.
Abraham received a promise from God that all the nations of the earth would be blessed through his descendants. It was an extraordinary promise. Yet Abraham never saw its ultimate fulfillment. He trusted God, he followed God, and he died still looking forward to what God would one day accomplish.
Generations came and went.
Isaac lived his life.
Jacob raised his family.
Judah had children and grandchildren.
Years became decades, and decades became centuries.
Eventually David arrived, and for a moment it seemed as though everything was falling into place. Israel was united. The kingdom was strong. God’s chosen king sat upon the throne. Surely this must be the moment when all the promises would come together.
But it wasn’t.
After David came Solomon, and after Solomon the kingdom began to fracture. Kings rose and kings fell. Some honored God while others led the nation away from Him. The story that once appeared to be moving steadily upward suddenly became much more complicated.
Then came the exile.
The temple was destroyed.
Jerusalem fell.
The people were carried away into Babylon.
Everything that seemed secure was gone.
If you had been living in those days, you might have wondered whether God’s promises had failed altogether.
Yet Matthew keeps writing.
Name after name.
Generation after generation.
Because while the people could not always see it, God was still working.
I think that’s one of the reasons this genealogy speaks so powerfully to us today. Most of us live our lives looking forward, but we understand them looking backward. We rarely know what God is doing while we are in the middle of the story.
When Abraham left his homeland, he couldn’t see David.
When David sat on the throne, he couldn’t see the exile.
When the exiles returned home, they couldn’t see Bethlehem.
And yet God could see all of it.
To the people living those stories, life probably felt disconnected. One generation experienced victories while another experienced heartbreak. One generation saw blessings while another endured waiting. They likely struggled with many of the same questions we ask today.
Is God still working?
Has He forgotten His promises?
Does He see what is happening?
Will this difficult season ever end?
Matthew’s genealogy reminds us that God’s activity is not always obvious in the moment. Sometimes His work unfolds slowly across years, decades, and even generations. What appears to us as a collection of disconnected events may actually be part of a larger story that only God can fully see.
Perhaps you’ve experienced that in your own life.
Maybe you’ve looked back and realized that what felt like a closed door was actually God redirecting your path. Perhaps you’ve seen how a difficult season prepared you for something that came years later. Maybe you’ve watched God answer a prayer in a way you never would have expected, but only after a long period of waiting.
Life often makes more sense in the rearview mirror than it does through the windshield.
Matthew’s genealogy invites us to look into the rearview mirror of God’s people and see something remarkable. Through triumphs and tragedies, through faithfulness and failure, through prosperity and exile, God never abandoned His purpose. Generation after generation, He continued moving history toward the arrival of Jesus Christ.
The people whose names fill this chapter did not always understand the role they were playing. Most never saw the finished picture. They simply lived the chapter God had given them.
Yet when Matthew looks back across the centuries, he sees what they could not. He sees a faithful God weaving together countless lives into one beautiful story of redemption.
And perhaps that is one of the most comforting truths we can carry with us. We may not fully understand what God is doing in our own chapter right now. We may not be able to see how today’s struggles, prayers, disappointments, and victories fit together. But Matthew’s genealogy reminds us that the God who was faithfully working through Abraham, David, and generations of ordinary people is still faithfully working today.
The story was moving somewhere all along.
And so are ours.
Matthew Shows Us the Shape of the Story
As fascinating as the individual names are, and as encouraging as it is to discover God’s faithfulness woven through generation after generation, Matthew isn’t quite finished teaching us how to read this genealogy. In fact, after carrying us through forty two generations of history, he pauses in verse 17 and does something that many readers overlook. He steps back from the individual stories and invites us to look at the larger picture.
Matthew writes, “So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations; and from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah, fourteen generations.”
At first glance, it sounds like Matthew is simply organizing his notes. It almost feels like the kind of summary we might skip over on our way to chapter two. But Matthew is doing far more than counting names. He is helping us see the shape of the story he has just told.
What is remarkable is that Matthew doesn’t divide Israel’s history according to centuries, wars, or political events. Instead, he divides it around three defining moments. The first section stretches from Abraham to David. The second moves from David to the exile in Babylon. The third carries the story from the exile all the way to Christ.
The more you look at those three movements, the more they begin to feel familiar.
The journey from Abraham to David is the story of promise becoming reality. It begins with God calling a man who had no nation, no kingdom, and no idea how God would accomplish what had been promised. Abraham simply trusted and followed. Over the generations, God multiplied his descendants, established His people, brought them into the Promised Land, and eventually raised up David as king. By the time we arrive at David, the story seems to be reaching its peak. The kingdom is established. God’s people are flourishing. The promises made centuries earlier appear to be unfolding exactly as everyone hoped.
If the genealogy ended with David, it would read like a success story.
But life rarely moves in a straight line, and neither does Scripture.
The next section of the genealogy carries us from David to the exile, and suddenly the story takes a very different turn. The kingdom that once seemed secure begins to fracture. One generation after another drifts from God. Some kings lead faithfully, but many do not. The warnings of the prophets are ignored, and eventually the unthinkable happens. Jerusalem falls. The temple is destroyed. God’s people are carried away into exile.
What had once looked like a story of triumph now feels like a story of loss.
And isn’t that often how life feels?
Most of us have experienced seasons when everything seemed to be moving in the right direction. Plans were coming together. Prayers were being answered. The future appeared clear. Then suddenly a chapter arrives that we never would have written ourselves. A door closes. A relationship changes. A diagnosis comes. A dream unravels. The story that once felt so certain begins to feel much more complicated.
I suspect the people living through the exile wondered many of the same things we wonder in our difficult seasons. Has God forgotten us? Have His promises failed? Is He still at work even now?
If we stopped reading at the exile, those questions would remain unanswered.
But Matthew doesn’t stop there.
The final section of the genealogy carries us from the exile to Christ, and what makes this section so powerful is that it is largely a story of waiting. The people return from Babylon, but the kingdom is never fully restored. The glory days of David seem distant. Foreign powers continue to dominate the land. The prophetic voices grow silent. Years pass into decades and decades into centuries. Entire generations live and die still waiting for God to fulfill what He promised.
From a human perspective, it must have looked as though very little was happening.
Yet Matthew reminds us that God was still moving the story forward.
Every name in that final section represents another generation carrying the promise. Another family preserving hope. Another chapter in a story whose ending they could not yet see. Most of those people never witnessed the fulfillment of God’s plan, yet their lives were still part of it. They were helping carry the story forward even when they couldn’t see where it was leading.
Then Matthew arrives at the name toward which every previous name has been pointing.
Jesus.
- Suddenly Abraham makes sense.
- David makes sense.
- The exile makes sense.
- Even the waiting begins to make sense.
What looked like disconnected chapters were never disconnected at all. God had been weaving them together from the very beginning.
The more I reflect on those three movements, the more they seem to describe not only Israel’s story but our own. Most of us have lived through seasons of promise, when God’s blessings seemed clear and the future felt full of possibility. Most of us have also lived through seasons that felt more like exile, when life became difficult and the path ahead was uncertain. And nearly all of us know what it means to wait, to pray for something that has not yet arrived, to trust God when the answers seem delayed.
Matthew’s genealogy reminds us that God’s faithfulness cannot be measured by a single chapter. Abraham could not see what God would accomplish through David. David could not see the exile. The exiles could not see Bethlehem. Yet God could see the entire story from beginning to end.
That is why Matthew begins his Gospel here. Before he tells us about angels, shepherds, wise men, miracles, or sermons, he wants us to understand something about the God behind the story. He is a God who remains faithful through every chapter. Faithful in seasons of promise. Faithful in seasons of failure. Faithful in seasons of waiting. And faithful in the fulfillment of every promise He has made.
In many ways, Matthew has already preached the Gospel before he has even reached the Christmas story. The genealogy is his first sermon, and its message is simple: through every generation and every season, God remained faithful.
Conclusion
At the beginning of this message, I told you that I hoped you would leave seeing Matthew’s genealogy differently than when you arrived. My hope was that we might discover there is far more happening in this chapter than a list of difficult names and ancient history.
What Matthew gives us in these opening verses is not simply a family tree. He gives us a testimony. He gives us a witness to the faithfulness of God.
As we look back across these generations, we see people who lived through seasons of promise and seasons of disappointment. We see people who experienced triumph and people who endured heartbreak. Some lived during times when God’s blessings seemed obvious. Others lived through years of uncertainty, struggle, and waiting. Yet when Matthew looks back across the centuries, what stands out is not the greatness of the people. It is the faithfulness of God.
- Abraham could not see how the story would end.
- David could not see how the story would end.
- The exiles could not see how the story would end.
Yet God was faithfully moving history toward Jesus Christ.
That may be one of the greatest comforts for us today. We often want to know how our own stories will unfold. We want to know how God will answer our prayers, how He will work through our struggles, and how He will redeem the difficult chapters we are living right now. Yet most of the people in Matthew’s genealogy never saw the finished picture. They simply lived faithfully in the chapter God had given them, trusting that the Author of the story knew what He was doing.
Perhaps that is why this genealogy matters so much. It reminds us that our lives are part of something larger than ourselves. We may never fully understand how the choices we make, the prayers we offer, the kindness we show, or the faith we pass on to others will shape future generations. But the God who was at work through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, and countless others is still at work today.
And if there is one place where we see that faithfulness most clearly, it is not in a genealogy. It is at a table.
Because every name in Matthew chapter one was pointing toward Jesus. Every generation was moving toward the moment when God Himself would step into human history. The promises made to Abraham, the hopes carried through David, and the long years of waiting after the exile all find their fulfillment in Christ.
Today, as we gather around the Lord’s Table, we come as people who have been welcomed into that same story.
- The bread reminds us that God kept His promise.
- The cup reminds us that God kept His promise.
- The cross reminds us that God kept His promise.
Generation after generation waited for the Messiah, and God was faithful. Generation after generation carried the story forward, and God was faithful. Generation after generation hoped for redemption, and God was faithful.
And the good news for us today is that He remains faithful still.
A few moments from now, we will come forward to receive these simple gifts of bread and cup. Some of us will come carrying gratitude. Others will come carrying burdens. Some will come from seasons that feel more like promise, while others may feel as though they are still living in a season of waiting.
But we all come to the same table.
- We come to the table of a faithful Savior.
- We come to the table of the One toward whom every name in Matthew’s genealogy was pointing.
- We come to the table of Jesus Christ.
And this table reminds us that the God who was faithful in every chapter of Scripture will be faithful in every chapter of our lives as well. This table, like that genealogy, is where we remember the story. More importantly, it is where we remember the One who stands at the center of it.
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