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A Misfit among Misfits

jesus_genealogy

Truth Minute: A Misfit among Misfits

God promised he would provide a Messiah through Abraham’s bloodline, and he did.
But when you read through Jesus’s lineage (Matt 1:1-16), it’s not a roll call of the rich and famous, but rather -mostly like a police lineup. Even more, it included Women (women! women! women!…)- which is rare because ancients traced lineage through males. So, this sets the tone for justice and equality that is reinforced throughout Christ’s ministry.
Now, the woman the author included weren’t princesses or social royalty, they were pretty much downright scandalous.
Tamar came up with a scheme disguising herself as a prostitute and waited for her father-in-law, Judah, by the road… Judah seen a
32-26-38 and fell for her deception. Out of this came twin sons. The first born, Perez, became an ancestor of Jesus.
Rahab was a “lady of the night” or what some called “the Madame of Jericho”. She was also a Canaanite who worshiped a false god.
But later risked her life to protect God’s people and abandoned the false god for the true God. She ended up becoming the great-great-grandmother of David and ancestor of Jesus.
Tamar, Rahab, and Bathsheba committed the ‘serious’ kinds of sexual sins (incest, fornication, adultery), yet God, in his grace,
included them in the family tree of Jesus and used them to produce our Savior.
You would expect Jesus’s family tree to be a Hall of Fame filled with heroes and sages. But instead filled with Gentiles, fornicators, adulteresses, prostitutes, liars, wicked kings, and other scandalous folk – parts of it feel like the Hall of Shame. It’s actually fitting that God would use this group of misfits to give us a Savior because Jesus himself was one. No, he didn’t sin, but shattered the preconceptions again and again. He refused to fit the mold people had fashioned for the Messiah.
Through this family tree, God puts his awesome Grace on display.
He’s reminding us that he can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves – pick up broken pieces and put them back together – take broken lives and make them whole – gather broken hopes and make them reality. That’s the message of Jesus’s family tree.
Thank God no one is beyond his super-natural grace and that he chooses to work through imperfect human vessels.
(Ref: Matt 1:1-6, Gen 38:1-30, Joshua 2:1-24, 2 Sam 11:1-27, Eph 2:1-10)
-Elder AL Winsley

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