And please turn in your Bibles to the prophecy of Haggai. You know it’s back there somewhere. Haggai chapter 2. And our Old Testament reading will be verses 1 through 9. Haggai chapter 2, 1 through 9. Listen to this. This is the very word of God.
In the seventh month, on the 21st day of the month, the word of the Lord came by the hand of Haggai the prophet. Speak now to Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah. And to Joshua, the son of Jehozadak, the high priest, and to all the remnant of the people, and say, who is left among you who saw this house in its former glory? How do you see it now? Is it not as nothing in your eyes? Yet now be strong, O Zerubbabel, declares the Lord. Be strong, O Joshua, son of Jehoshadak, the high priest. Be strong, all you people of the land, declares the Lord. Work, for I am with you, declares the Lord of hosts. According to the covenant that I made with you, when you came out of Egypt, my spirit remains in your midst. Fear not.
For thus says the Lord of hosts, Yet once more, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land. And I will shake all nations, so that all the treasures of all nations shall come in. And I will fill this house with glory, says the Lord of hosts. The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, declares the Lord of hosts. The latter glory of this house shall be greater than the former. says the Lord of Hosts, and in this place I will give peace, declares the Lord of Hosts.
And for our New Testament reading, turn to Luke’s Gospel, Chapter 3. Part of the reason for selecting that passage from Haggai is because in Luke chapter 3 we have the genealogy of the Lord Jesus Christ and those two names that we read in Haggai, Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel and Joshua the son of Jehozadak are in that line, they are in that genealogy. So I wanted you to see how these these texts, these passages intersect, so to speak. So our New Testament reading and the text for this morning’s sermon is Luke 3, 23-38.
Jesus, when he began his ministry, was about 30 years of age, being the son, as was supposed, of Joseph, the son of Haley, son of Mathot, the son of Levi, the son of Melchi, the son of Janai, the son of Joseph, the son of Matathias, the son of Amos, the son of Nahum, the son of Esli, the son of Nagai, the son of Maath, the son of Matathias, the son of Semin, the son of Yosek, the son of Jodah, the son of Joannan, the son of Rasa, the son of Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel, the son of Neri, the son of Melchi, the son of Adi, the son of Kosam, the son of Elmadam, the son of Ur, the son of Joshua, the son of Eleazar, the son of Jorim, the son of Mathat, the son of Levi, the son of Simeon, the son of Judah, the son of Joseph, the son of Jonam, the son of Eliakim, the son of Meleah, the son of Menah, the son of Matathah, the son of Nathan, the son of David, the son of Jesse, the son of Obed, the son of Boaz, the son of Salah, the son of Nashon, the son of Aminadab, the son of Admin, the son of Arni, the son of Hezron, the son of Perez, the son of Judah, the son of Jacob, the son of Isaac, the son of Abraham, the son of Terah, the son of Nahor, the son of Zerug, the son of Rehu, the son of Peleg, the son of Eber, the son of Shelah, the son of Kynan, the son of Arphaxad, the son of Shem, the son of Noah, the son of Lamech, the son of Methuselah, the son of Enoch, the son of Jared, the son of Mahalaleel, the son of Kynan, the son of Enos, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.
That, that is the reading of God’s word.
Please pray with me.
Father in heaven, we thank you for this passage of your word. We ask you to bless it to us, build us up in our faith. Even through this passage, we pray this confidently and we pray it in Jesus name. Amen.
just a word of apology. You know pronunciation of some of these Biblical names is tricky, not just because they are unfamiliar, but because we’re inconsistent. For instance the Hebrew name Shaul appears numerous times in the Old Testament. Well there’s a Shaul that we know very well, we call him Saul. And so even in our English versions it’s spelled out S-A-U-L, But elsewhere where the same name in Hebrew occurs, it’s Shaul. And there’s things like that. And names in our English Bibles that begin with a J, they really should be pronounced with a sort of a yuh sound probably instead of a juh sound. And we’re inconsistent because the ones that I’m inconsistent anyway, maybe you’re not. But I’m inconsistent because the familiar names like Joseph and Jeremiah will say with that typical J sound, whereas others we would maybe do a little bit differently. But anyway, I just wanted to mention that as an introduction.
But I want to bring to your minds the expression that we sometimes use when someone says something that really comes across powerfully or has some profound insight. We might respond by saying, that’ll preach. heard that expression? We use it especially in Christian circles. Sometimes we come across something in God’s Word that really moves us, has an impact on us, or has potential we think to really speak to the hearts of others and we’ll say, that will preach.
But I can’t say personally that I’ve ever heard somebody say, that will preach after reading instructions in Leviticus for how to offer a sin offering. Or I was talking with somebody in the congregation not long ago about Bible reading and we were talking about Ezekiel. There’s a lot of really perplexing and difficult things in Ezekiel, but once you get to chapter 40, it’s this extended multi-chapter vision that Ezekiel has of this glorious new temple. I mean, right down to the dimensions and the descriptions of different parts of it. And when you come away from reading that, I don’t recall anybody reading that part of Ezekiel and saying, that’ll preach.
And certainly genealogies are the same. Matthew’s gospel begins with a genealogy, and there’s tons of them in the Old Testament, of course. And they’re not the kind of passages from God’s Word that necessarily immediately grip us and stir us and seem potential of great edification.
But in the Reformed tradition, we have this practice of what’s referred to as Lectio Continua. Lectio Continua, which means continuous reading. Meaning that in the Reformed tradition, the Reformers particularly revived the practice of preaching through books of God’s word, not cherry picking topics to preach on. but taking a passage of God’s Word or a book from God’s Word and preaching all the way through it. Because we want to be faithful to God’s Word and we want to preach the full counsel of God.
And so we don’t just preach hit and miss on whatever happens to be the bee under our bonnet at any given time. We preach God’s Word and we preach all the way through it and we preach everything in the book that we’re preaching, even the hard passages. even the passages that don’t seem to have any direct relevance to us? Because when it comes to the book of Leviticus, or when it comes to Ezekiel’s description of this temple that he saw, or when it comes to a genealogy, 2 Timothy 3.16 still applies.
All Scripture is breathed out by God and it’s profitable for us. And that’s why we’re considering it together this morning, this genealogy, all these names of people that we don’t even know about. Many of them, we have no information on them, but we come to this passage and in obedience to God, we consider it together.
The challenge of this text, though, is not merely that it’s a genealogy. That makes it interesting and difficult enough to deal with in itself. But it also presents a conundrum for us as Bible-believing Christians because As one commentator put it, there are clear and glaring differences in this genealogy of the Lord Jesus as compared to the genealogy given us by Matthew in chapter 1 of his gospel. Very significant and clear, indisputable differences. So how do we deal with those things?
Well, critics, all the way back to ancient times, it’s not just a modern text criticism thing. Scholars from centuries ago have been dealing with this issue and studying it and trying to reconcile these two genealogies. And critics and skeptics in all the ages have attacked the reliability of the Bible because of this very thing. because Matthew presents one genealogy of Jesus saying he was descended from these people and Luke has a different genealogy. And so people attack the very reliability of God’s word on the basis of that.
Well, it presents us several problems. One, it’s probably the lesser of the two that I’m gonna address today is that Luke’s list is much longer than Matthew’s, and the solution I think that we can introduce for that is that ancient genealogies, ancient Jewish genealogies included, did at times skip people. They weren’t comprehensive always, and they weren’t even necessarily intended to be comprehensive. They would sometimes skip people. And so, for example, Matthew, as a Jew, writing primarily to Jews, he clearly omitted at least three kings that we know about and we read about in the Old Testament history books, but they’re not in that genealogy in the places where we would expect to see them. So it happens. So the issue of Luke’s genealogy being so much longer really isn’t that much of an issue.
The bigger problem is this. Luke’s list has an entirely different set of names from David through Jesus. You recognize a lot of those names, I’m sure. Once we got closer and closer to Adam, familiar names start to appear, people you’ve read about in your Bibles. But between David and the Savior, all those names don’t overlap. Most of them don’t. And so that’s the issue I want to address. It would be irresponsible of me not to at least address this. As I say, scholars have been dealing with this for a long time, so I think of a faithful Puritan minister, Matthew Poole. Maybe some of you have his commentary, but he, dealing with one particular issue in this genealogy, wrote, it is a difficulty which hath exercised very many learned men, and I doubt whether ever any yet satisfied himself in the resolution of it. So he’s saying, yeah, it’s an issue. It’s a conundrum. I don’t have the answer. And I doubt anybody else has come up with one that’s really satisfying. So that goes all the way back at least to Matthew Poole.
But there are several hypotheses. None of them are without difficulties. And so that’s why the church as a whole hasn’t settled on, OK, this is the explanation. Because there are a couple of different ways of addressing it. a couple of possible explanations, but again, each of them has problems.
One solution or idea is that Matthew in his genealogy is giving the descendants of David’s royal line. In other words, the people he traces from David through to Jesus are the people who at any given time would have been the rightful heir to the throne. Whereas in contrast, Luke gives Joseph’s actual biological line, his particular line.
Another scholar said, admitting that we do not know how the two genealogies fit together does not mean that one or both of them is mistaken. To admit this is simply to acknowledge that our knowledge is partial, and that it is not the purpose of the Gospels to resolve this matter, and that a number of different scenarios could explain the differences.
That idea that Matthew was giving the royal line whereas Luke is giving Joseph’s actual line, that I read somewhere that was adhered to and defended by Machen. That’s apparently the position Machen held too.
Here’s my conclusion after wrestling with this. My conclusion is that Matthew follows the line of Joseph and Luke traces Mary’s line. Many have held that over the years. In fact, it was a very popular view amongst the older commentators.
Well, why did I arrive at that conclusion? Well, we have historical records, extra-biblical records, particularly in the Talmud. If you’ve never heard of the Talmud, the Talmud is this gigantic, voluminous set of rabbinical Jewish teachings from throughout the ages. And in the Talmud, it refers to Mary as the daughter of Haley. That’s the first name in this genealogy we have here, Mary, the daughter of Haley.
Luke also strongly implies in several of the passages that we’ve seen already that Mary too, not just Joseph, but Mary was descended from David. She was a daughter of David’s line. And frankly, it’s only if Mary was descended from David that Jesus could have the Davidic bloodline in him. If he’s only David’s descendant by adoption or legally, then he’s He’s not truly offspring of David.
So this is a solution that many of the older commentators favored, Poole, Henry, and some of the earlier commentators that we have. There are a lot of modern scholars that dispute that view, but There’s nobody, they’ll say it’s improbable or that it has difficulties, but no one can disprove it. That’s the one I’ve landed on.
So as we look at the genealogy in Luke, what we’re actually looking at is Mary’s line of descent from David and that line by which blood, the DNA of King David is actually in our Savior.
But all that really, I’m sorry to take so long on that, but that’s not really the point. The point is that Jesus Christ is truly and fully man, descended from our first father, Adam. That’s the point of this passage.
Jesus Christ is truly and fully man, descended from our first father, Adam. So first of all, let’s consider that Jesus, the divine son, is truly and fully man. Luke has already established for us in passages we’ve considered previously, he’s established the divinity of Jesus. Jesus is God. He’s God in the flesh. You recall the prophecies that were spoken regarding John, when the angel appeared to John’s father, Zachariah, he spoke of John’s future ministry, and he said, your son is going to be great before the Lord, and he’s going to go before the Lord, your God.
John was the forerunner of Jesus, and the angel said he’s going to go before the Lord God of Israel. When the angel appeared to Mary, the angel said, he, your son, will be son of the Most High. And he’s going to rule over the house of Jacob forever. No ordinary human king can do that. Only Jesus, the Son of God, the Divine Son, can do that.
And then when the angels appeared to the shepherds, what did they say? They said, a savior is born who is Christ the Lord. So we lose a little bit of the force of this coming into the Greek because we don’t use the word, the Greek doesn’t use the word, the memorial name of God. But that’s what the angel was saying. A savior is born to you this day who is Christ, Yahweh.
So Luke’s made it clear that Jesus is divine. There’s no argument there, there’s no dispute. But by providing the genealogy, he’s asserting and proving that Jesus is also human as well. He’s fully human. He places Jesus in the family tree, reaching back to the patriarchs, reaching all the way back to Adam. Jesus became true man in space-time history. That’s what the purpose of this genealogy is, to show us that Jesus was a man and he lived among us as one of us.
You might tend to want to skip over those genealogies when you come to them in the Bible and different passages you read. They’re boring, names you don’t recognize, names that are hard to pronounce. But one of my favorite stories about The genealogy is told by R.C. Sproul, and he’s speaking of this Bible-translating missionary who went to a remote tribe. And this is one of those missionary projects, this long-term, like a lifelong thing, because this missionary went and lived among a tribal people who did not even have a written language, learned their language, created a written version of it, taught them to read, and then began to translate the Bible into their language for them. so that they could have the word of God.
Well, in haste, the missionary decided because there’s this eagerness to get this first portion of God’s word published and into the hands of this tribe. And so they skipped the genealogy and just went right to the meat of the story, so to speak. And nothing happened. Sometime later, there was a second edition of Matthew’s Gospel published. This is all about Matthew’s Gospel. Second edition of Matthew’s Gospel published, and in that one, the genealogy at the beginning was included, and the chief of the tribe came and said, wait just a second here. You mean to tell me that this Jesus you’ve been telling us about all these years was a real person? And the missionary said, well, yes, of course. And he said, I thought all this time you were just telling us a myth or a fable. And before long, the chief of the tribe was converted. And before long after that, the whole rest of the tribe was converted. All because of a genealogy.
It’s completely different than saying Ares was the son of Zeus. No, these were people. This is a family tree that you can trace back through the whole history of the human race. Jesus wasn’t part man, part God. He is entirely human. Biologically, he was human. He had a beating heart in his chest, and he had had a beating heart within him since the time he was conceived in his mother’s womb. Have you seen ultrasounds of little babies, like maybe at 10 weeks? And in the ultrasound, they barely look like anything more than a little glob, but you can see a beating heart right in the center of that. Jesus had one of those. Jesus had lungs that draw air, and they drew air day after day, right up until the time He expired on the cross. He hungered. He thirsted, just as we do. He was physically a human. He was also spiritually a human. He had all the components of a human nature that you and I have, including a soul, a human soul. Not just a body animated by the presence of God, but a man, a human being in every way that you yourself are a human being.
Throughout the ages, heretics have denied Christ’s humanity. It’s much more popular these days to deny his divinity. But there was a very serious heresy threatening the early church. And it continues to resurface throughout through the centuries. That said, that taught basically, no, Jesus wasn’t a man, he couldn’t possibly been a man, we believe he was God, but he wasn’t truly man, he just seemed to be was heresy. And if Jesus didn’t have a body, then we don’t have a Savior.
Our creeds and confessions clearly teach the doctrine of the person of Christ. He’s the eternal son of God. He’s begotten, not created. He was very God of very God. But the eternal son of God was made man. He was born. He suffered. He died. He was buried and he rose again. And he still has and always will have a body. He still is and always will be man. He’ll always be the God-man.
Jesus is God, Jesus is man, and His lineage as it’s presented to us by Luke shows that He’s qualified to be our Redeemer, to be the Redeemer of God’s elect. That’s our second point.
Number two, Jesus is the son of David and the seed of Abraham. Both genealogies we’ve been talking about this morning, Matthew’s and Luke’s, both show that Jesus was descended from Abraham. God’s gracious covenantal promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring, to his seed, to his descendants, but particularly to his offspring, singular, as Paul labors to prove in Galatians 3. But the Jews prided themselves on being offspring of Abraham. And when they came to Jesus and bickered with him, He’d challenged them about their sin and their need to get right with God. They would respond by saying, we’re offspring of Abraham. That meant a lot to them. And they could make that claim. Any Jew who had access, sufficient access to the genealogical records would be able to trace themselves all the way back, all the way back to Jacob, all the way back to one of the 12 tribes. So they knew they were offspring of Abraham. But Jesus, more than anyone, could make that claim. That’s what Paul was talking about in Galatians 3. Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, and to offsprings, referring to many, but referring to one, and to your offspring, who is Christ. So Jesus’ descent from Abraham is very important. that he can be the seed of Abraham in whom the promises were fulfilled. And those promises are fulfilled. Those promises are mediated through Christ.
But another thing that both Luke’s genealogy and Matthew’s show us is that Jesus is descended from David. Therefore, he’s of that royal line of Israel. Therefore, he’s eligible to be their king. He’s David’s son. And so the promises that were given to David about his son can be fulfilled in Jesus. And the blessings promised to David are fulfilled in Jesus. So as we study scriptures and trace God’s grace and his mercy through the scriptures. The Abrahamic covenant and the Davidic covenant are stages in progression in the covenant of grace which began back in Genesis 3. The covenant of grace, grace began long before David ever reigned. began long before Moses brought the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt and received the law. The covenant of grace even began before God made any promises to Abraham. The covenant of grace goes back all the way to the very day our first parents sinned and fell. Because God promised to deliver on that very day. Our parents disobeyed him, brought curse upon the earth, curse upon us, and God came rushing in with words of grace. That day he proclaimed that Eve’s offspring would crush the serpent’s head. And Luke makes that connection too, because he traces Jesus’ lineage all the way back to Adam, all the way back to Eve. He is the seed of the woman. came to crush the serpent’s head.
And that brings us to our third and final point. Jesus is the second Adam. That’s number three. Jesus is the second Adam. Paul gives extensive discourses on the parallels and the contrasts between Adam and Christ. There are two very significant similarities between Adam and Christ. First of all, neither Adam nor Jesus had a human father. Neither Adam nor Jesus had a human father. God formed Adam out of the dust and breathed life into him. That’s why in this passage, Adam, to some extent, is referred to as the son of God. He’s the very product, the immediate product of God’s creative power. He formed him. We see that in verse 38. Jesus was born of Mary, so he did have a human mother. But he didn’t have a human father because he was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit. And so the end of Luke chapter three refers to Adam as the son of God. But at the end of the passage, we looked at just last week. God, the father spoke from heaven and said of Jesus, you are my beloved son. Jesus is the Son of God, but he didn’t have a human father, neither did Adam.
Secondly, both Adam and Christ are federal representatives of a people in covenant with God. Both Adam and Christ are federal representatives of a people in covenant with God. Adam, under the covenant of works, represents the entire human race. If you are a human being living and breathing on earth today, you are in covenant with Adam because he is the federal head of the entire race, the entire human race. Jesus, under the covenant of grace, represents all of God’s elect. He is our covenant head in the covenant of grace. So those are similarities. Both Adam and Christ are federal representatives. Neither one of them had a human father. They were each in his own way a son of God.
But there are also, as you know, very significant differences between Adam and Christ and their representation of those with whom they’re in covenant. Paul speaks of it in Romans 5, where he says, for if because of one man’s trespass, death reigns to that one man. Much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through that one man, Jesus Christ. Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. Whereas by the one man’s disobedience, the many were made sinners. So by the one man’s obedience, the many will be made righteous. Paul makes a similar point, correlating point, in 1 Corinthians 15. Thus it is written, the first man, Adam, became a living being. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the natural, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust. The second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust. And as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.
Christ came to succeed where Adam failed. Christ came to conquer where Adam suffered defeat. And Luke, as we continue on through his gospel is going to tell us the story of Christ’s victory.
It was a lifelong work. The beginning of our text mentions the fact that when Jesus began his ministry, he was about 30 years old. And even though he lived in obscurity and wasn’t out preaching and teaching during those 30 years, he was doing very important work for you and for me every single day. Because every single day, he lived a sinless life, so that he would be eligible to be the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
Day after day for 30 years, Jesus lived and he never sinned. I got one of those little calendars for Christmas where you can tear off a sheet each day. And I thought, what if I, every day I tear one of those off. And what if, as a spiritual exercise, on the blank side, the back, I just confessed my sins to the Lord in writing, made a record of how I’d sinned against God and sinned against man that day. I’d need a lot more space than was on that little thing, for one thing, but I’d have something every day to write down. Jesus wouldn’t. He could tear the sheet off the calendar and wouldn’t have any sin to write down. Day after day after day for 30 years.
None of us goes even a day. None of us goes even an hour. Without sin, but for three decades, Christ lived a complete and spotless life of moral integrity in absolute obedience to all the will of his father and to all of his commandments.
There’s going to be a particular key victory that Jesus wins in the chapter we look at next, because a particular assault is going to be directed against the Lord Jesus by Satan, by the serpent. God permitted Satan to come and tempt our first parents in the garden. They sinned, they failed. Satan attacked the second Adam, tempted him to sin, Christ prevailed.
So tracing Christ’s line back to Adam stresses the universality of his mission. He didn’t just come for David and his line. He didn’t just come for the Jewish nation. He didn’t just come for Abraham. His salvation is for all people. Jesus Christ is a member of the human race along with us. and his gospel is for the whole human race, for all people everywhere.
Jesus was descended from Adam, and he came to redeem his father, Adam, and his father, Abraham. He came as David’s greater son to redeem David, his father, He came to redeem his supposed father, Joseph, and his mother, Mary, and all of his elect. You and I needed a second Adam, and God provided one.
Let’s pray. Lord, what consolation it is, how profound and how but joyful to think that Christ our Savior is one of us, that he took on flesh and blood, that he was made man. We thank you for him. We thank you for his daily obedience throughout all his life so that he could then lay down his life for us, which he did willingly. And that’s what we’re coming to remember in the Lord’s Supper. Let us reflect on Christ our Savior, and his offering up of himself for us, for our sins. We commit this observance of the sacrament to you now in Jesus name. Amen.