You know what you never hear? A Christmas sermon based on Matthew 1. And that's too bad. It's an important chapter.
I mean, it's not like most exciting chapter to read or to talk about, and certainly not to listen to. It's a genealogy, so it probably gets skipped over a lot. It's hard to read and harder to preach on. But it tells us something important about Jesus.
No one just waved a magic wand and said “"Abracadabra!” and made Jesus appear. He didn't just come from nowhere. He was expected, and he was foretold, and this chapter tells us exactly where he came from.
Long ago, I had decided to preach through the books of the Bible. I thought this would give me plenty of flexibility while still providing some structure and teaching the church I was pastoring a little about what was in their Bible. While I still think it's a good idea — and you can have it for free if you want — it also left me with a problem: the Sunday before Christmas, I would be preaching from Nahum.
If you haven't read Nahum recently, and there's a good chance you haven't, it's not a book that's generally associated with the Christmas season. It's an oracle against Assyria, and a pretty vicious one. It's strange to think of ink on paper screaming, but if a book could scream, Nahum would. It would scream for vengeance.
Yet Jesus is in Nahum, too. The destruction of the Assyrians would be the work of the Messiah, who would come and defeat Israel's enemies and make it a great nation again. At least that was the popular understanding.
I'm not here to say who was right or wrong. I just want to point out that there was a popular understanding. The Messiah didn't just pop up. The Jews had been waiting for him for over a thousand years,
I'm not sure why there are two different genealogies given for Jesus in the Gospels. To the best of my knowledge, the one in Matthew is a legal one, establishing his right to the throne through Joseph, while the one in Luke traces his ancestry through Mary, showing his ancestral descent directly from David.
Both genealogies show that Jesus Christ didn't just appear from nowhere. His birth, death, and resurrection were foretold, sometimes thousands of years in advance. Since time began the Messiah had been promised, and Jesus was the fulfillment of that promise. That's all “Christ” means; it's just a Greek translation of the Hebrew word “Messiah”. It's a job description, not a last name.
That's why he can never be replaced by anyone else. No one else could fulfill the hopes of his people the way he did. Replacing Jesus Christ wouldn't just mean plugging someone else into his spot. It would require changing thousands of years of prophecy.
No one pulled Jesus out of a hat. No one made him suddenly appear. He came as a response to hundreds of prophecies, and he will fulfill even more at his second coming. His coming was expected and foretold; nobody just waved a magic wand and made it happen.
[LC Bloom is pretty sure no one waved a magic wand and made him appear either, but he really doesn't remember and figures nothing that was going on at the time is his business anyway. He's from Birmingham, Alabama, and can be reached at lechrroom@icloud.com. He also writes for Built for Glory and has written for COBRASAURUS‼‼!]
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