Disclaimer: Please forgive any typographical, grammatical, and/or content errors in the following notes. They are not meant to be an exact transcription, but rather a helpful guide for those who appreciate the written word along with the spoken word. If you have any questions on what was taught, feel free to reach out on our ‘Contact Us’ page.
How many of you have ever done the ancestry.com thing? On my dad’s side, we Millens used to be McMillen from Ireland, formerly MacMillen from Scotland. Apparently the Irish don’t like the Scots, and the Americans don’t like the Irish, so now we’re just Millen – just cut out the Mac and Mc altogether. Prior to that we were ??? I don’t know. It’s fun to know where your family line comes from and where you can trace back and in the ancient world, the family tree or lineage was very, very important. People would be very diligent about tracing those things and they kept very precise records because your family tree and heritage was really the only legal standing you had in the ancient world to establish your identity and pedigree. It was used to determine things from the title that you carried to the assets that you owned. All that stuff could be forged pretty easily back then, including the documents for a family tree, but they kept those documents meticulously and they kept them on hand for the purpose of knowing who someone was and where they came from. In Jewish culture, they were no less important and they established not only which tribe you were from, but also established what your role within the people and within the culture of Israel was. If you were a Levite you were going to be attending to the temple perhaps maybe even being a priest.
As we are studying through the book of Joshua, each tribe was allotted a different portion of land for example and so that’s where they would live, that’s where they had land ownership according to their tribe which could all be determined and shown through their family tree.
So the gospel of Matthew…who knows the audience that Matthew is writing to in his gospel? It is a Jewish audience and so naturally Matthew begins that gospel with a genealogy of Christ establishing his pedigree and identity. And because it’s a Jewish audience we can see right here in the beginning he references perhaps the two most famous Jews right away. Matthew 1:1 says, “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” Any Jew upon hearing that this individual was a descendant of David and Abraham would immediately not just recognize the pedigree of the person, but would recognize that this guy could be a fulfillment of the promise of God. It is critical that we recognize that within this genealogy that Matthew is immediately drawing attention to the fact that Jesus Christ is a possible Messiah. Of course, we know that throughout the rest of the book that Matthew goes through great lengths in pointing out all of the different ways that Jesus fulfilled those prophecies and is in fact the Messiah, the savior of the world, and died an atoning death for the sins of the world that all who put their faith in him may have life. Amen?
The genealogy is where it starts. We’re not going to read through the whole thing today, but I’d encourage you to do that on your own time and memorize it 🙂 I’d be really impressed if you could memorize all those names. But, we’re going to break this down over the next three weeks so we’ll have time to look at some more of the intricacies and nuances of this genealogy, but for today and the next couple of weeks we’re going to pick a couple of people to look at in this genealogy because how many of you know that in a lot of ways we as people are deeply shaped by our family. We are the most deeply shaped by our parents, but they were shaped by their parents who were shaped by their parents and so on and so forth and scripture says that there are generational blessings and generational curses. So to get a full picture of Jesus Christ we can read about his ministry in the gospels, but we can also understand a little bit about the forces that shaped him in terms of his human family by studying his genealogy and the people therein. So today we’re going to study the first three guys—Abrahan, Issac, and Jacob—good to start at the beginning, is it not? And we know a lot about these men so I’m not going to belabor them. But perhaps if you haven’t recently go back into the book of Genesis and read again the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and read with an eye towards what they ultimately teach us and tell us and point to with Jesus Christ.
We’re going to examine the lives of Abrham, Isaac, and Jacob in story fashion. These guys were collectively known and are known as the patriarchs of Israel—the fathers of Israel. Why are they called the patriarchs? The most clear reason why those three are called the patriarchs is because Yahweh, God, to each one of them repeats the three promises of blessing: that they would be made a great nation, that they would receive the Promised land, and that the Lord would bless all of the families and nations on the earth through them. He repeated that to each one of them at different points in their life. Genesis 12 & 15 to Abram/Abraham, Genesis 21 & 26 to Isaac and Genesis 28 to Jacob/Israel. That’s a really big deal. The Lord didn’t continually repeat His promises after that. He did not repeat those promises to Judah, for example, as far as we can tell, though Judah is, of course, the son of Israel who carried on that promise. We know that Jesus is called the lion of the tribe of Judah. Judah is very important, but he’s not a patriarch because the promises were not given to him. So if we were to read the story of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob we would see that each of these men were very, very different which is interesting because throughout scripture at many different places and times. In fact, about a dozen times we hear God either referring to Himself or even Jesus referring to Him as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, it’s almost a title or a name. Why would God refer to Himself in that way? Have you ever thought about that? Why would He denote aspects of His character based off of these three guys who He has made a promise to. Well, let’s study the guys to figure that out.
Abraham wasn’t a Jew as we think of him. He was from Ur of the Chaldeans, which is present day Iraq. So the Jews are basically just Arabs from Iraq who got transplanted into Canaan, that’s if you go all the way, all the way back that’s where they are from, what is now present day Iraq, moved to what became known as Israel. The Lord came to Abram and said you should go over here to this place. This is all in Genesis 11-12, 12 specifically. And Abrah said, alright, let’s go. He responds in faith and the text is very, very clear to point that out multiple times. Abram at 75 years old packed up all of his belongings, his wife, his household, though he had no children and he traveled the months-long journey to the place where the Lord would show him. Abram settled down between two hills by a big oak tree (remember that from last week’s sermon?) Mt. Gerizim on one side and Mt. Ebal on the other with the oak right in the middle. He settled and made a covenant with God in Genesis 15. Abram didn’t actually participate in the covenant. God did all aspects of the covenant which theologically is very important but we’re not going to break that down today. He received those promises for the first time. That the Lord would make him the father of a great nation, that the Lord will bless all the nations of the world through him, and that the Lord would give his descendants the land in which he settled, which was all around Shechem, which was the city that was there. Abram was a man of great faith. In fact, the Lord changed his name from Abram which means “Exalted Father” to Abraham which means “Father of Nations” and yet he didn’t have any kids and therein we find the first major flaw in Abram. He was a man of great faith but he also was a man who liked to take matters into his own hands. So we see him having a son, Ishmael, through his wife’s servant, Hagar. We see multiple times that Abram would get ahead of the Lord, perhaps forging on and doing his own things. Now the law had not been given at this point, that’s not going to be for hundreds of years until we get to Moses. Abraham didn’t have the advantage of having the law to direct him clearly as to what he should do and how he should live. But he did have Yahweh speaking to him directly which is a pretty cool thing. So Abrah did the best he could but the Lord made very clear that he was not going to have offspring through any efforts of his own. It would be entirely the supernatural work of God and 25 years after the promise when Abraham was 100 years old the Lord blessed him with his son, Isaac.
Isaac is the second patriarch and we can read his story which overlaps with Abraham in Genesis 17-28 and then he dies in chapter 35. Isaac is an interesting individual in that after the Lord blessed Abraham with Isaac the Lord then turns around and tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. To kill him which is kind of scary, kind of crazy. If you study ancient near eastern peoples, however, it wasn’t out of the ordinary. Child sacrifice was tragically a very common practice with many of the occultic, pagan gods, i.e. fallen angels, however you want to classify them, they demanded child sacrifice. Now, Hebrews 11 tells us that Anraham in listening to the Lord expected that the Lord would raise Isaac back from the dead because how else would the Lord keep His promise through him. Which again shows great faith. But the fun thing about this story besides all the allusions to Jesus Christ is the fact that when Abram went to do this, we might have this image in our mind of a small baby boy, but if you break down the Hebrew, Isaac is referred to as a young man, so think of Isaac as a teenage kid and he knows full well what his dad has been told to do. In fact, Isaac himself is the one who carries up the load of stocks for the burnt offering that would be made. With Abraham we see a tremendous amount of faith exercised and so when Isaac is fully aware of what’s going on, here we see a tremendous amount of obedience and submission exercised, even to the point of his own death. Of course the Lord doesn’t have Abraham sacrifice Isaac, he provides an offering instead and they worship the Lord together and reaffirms His promise to Abraham once more and Isaac grows up.
Isaac, scripture says, was a good kid. He pretty much did everything his dad told him to do including the sacrifice part. Scripture kind of alludes to the fact that Isaac was a bit of a mama’s boy. In fact, he didn’t get married until he was 40 years old and his dad was like, “Son, I’m gonna go find a wife for you alright?” And he did. Isaac married her sight unseen. He loved his wife very much but he was kind of a pushover. Any time Isaac encounters conflict he runs from it. He doesn’t stand up. It wasn’t necessarily that he was a wuss, but he had tremendous faith in the Lord to provide for him no matter what. The Lord didn’t tell him to engage in conflict and so he didn’t. And the Lord provided. Isaac loved a good pot of stew. In fact, when he had his sons, Jacob and Esau, he really preferred Esau, in fact Scripture says that he loved Esau (not that he didn’t love Jacob) but it says that his wife loved Jacob and he loved Esau. Why? Because Esau was a manly man. He had hair growing out of every orifice. He was a hunter and he would bring his dad some of his fresh kill and cook it up for him. I kind of imagine Esau walking around all the time kind of grunting.
Jacob the third patriarch is described as a quiet man loved by his mother. Another mama’s boy. And Jacob just helped his mom around the tent. Silently plotting how to take over the throne (I’m embellishing that part) but his name means “usurper” and he was Esau’s twin. When they were born, Jacob was born holding on to Esau’s heel (who was entitled to the birthright.) Which they took as a symbol and scripture writes it that way and it’s what happened. Esau sold his birthright to Jacob for some stew. Jacob legally speaking didn’t steal the birthright. He simply outsmarted or rather bought it from him through the weakness of his stomach. Then when Isaac was very old. Isaac, when he is about to die, tells Esau he is going to give the blessing. Mom hears this and who does mom love? She dresses Jacob up just like Esau, makes the stew just like Isaac likes it, and sends Jacob in and Isaac can’t really see and so Jacob gets the birthright and the blessing. Of course Esau isn’t going to be happy about this and so Jacob flies the coop, runs away, and goes to Uncle Laban on mom’s side and there he falls in love. He falls in love with Rachel and pledges to work for Laban for 7 years to marry her. The seven years go by and Jacob experiences some of his own medicine and Laban pulls the ol’ switcheroo. Here’s my older daughter Leah instead of Rachel. Jacob works seven more years for Rachel and as is most likely the case immediately married Rachel but worked for Laban as well in payment. But Rachel can’t have kids and Leah can. Then the servants Zilpah and Bilhah, they also get in on the action and they’re just having babies.
Jacob begins to have a very full household. The Lord begins to bless him over and above Laban and the wealth and prosperity of Jacob’s household grows and grows and grows while Laban’s decreases. Laban and his sons become very jealous of Jacob, so much so that Jacob recognizes that he’s gotta get out of dodge. So Jacob starts running again and the Lord intervenes and says, hey, I have a place for you to go, it’s this nice spot with these two mountains and in between there’s this oak tree, I want you to go there so He directs him back to the promised land which he had left. He returns to Shechem between Mt. Gerizim and Mt. Ebal. He buys some land there and he builds an altar to the Lord. It doesn’t go too well for the Shechemites because they all die at the hands of two of Jacob’s sons after a particularly vile deed done to Jacob’s daughter, Dinah. Jacob doesn’t like that too much and curses some of his sons, Simeon and Levi, which we talked a little bit about last week. Before he died he blessed the rest of his sons including Judah who he says that the throne of rulership would not depart from that house, hence Jesus being from the line of the tribe of Judah.
As we read last week, praise God, the Lord delights in taking us from curse to blessing and at the covenant renewal ceremony in the book of Joshua after the conquest of Jericho and Ai, they went back to Shechem between Gerizim and Ebal, the blessings and the curses were read. The Levites who had been cursed were reading the curses and the blessings to the people and Simeon, one of the tribes who was cursed, was standing on Mt. Gerizim, the mount of blessing. So the Lord worked all of that out for those guys and scripture is amazon when you see how it all connects and interacts. God does nothing by accident or happenstance. It is all intentional in what he does and the family line continues from there from Judah and so on and so forth down the line.
Now why is it important that we know who these guys are? Well, I hope you have seen that each one is very different. So points of application for us as we prepare for Jesus, who all these people point to, right. As we’ve been saying, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacon are unique in their personalities. There are of course overlaps and similarities, but there are differences. But God is the God of all three of them. He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob mentioned throughout scripture. One of the things that I have seen many times, especially when we’re going to baptize someone or when I sit down and talk to someone about their story is almost a sort of embarrassment that I don’t have too great of a testimony. My life has been pretty plain. Tell that to Jacon and Isaac. Isaac in particular. He was a good kid who was raised in a good home who had a tremendous amount of prosperity and blessing in his life. Didn’t really make too many dumb decisions and mistakes and really wasn’t until the end of his life that he couldn’t see anymore that his wife and son kind of pulled one over on him. But even that worked itself out and Isaac didn’t begrudge Jacob that. You can see that later on in the story when Isaac dies and Jacob and Esau are both there together at the death of their father. Even that is worked out. So Isaac was a good kid. Had a pretty plain testimony.
Some of you might relate more with Abraham who didn’t have anything spiritual previous to God’s promise to him. He had faith, he trusted, yet he still was pretty self-sufficient. He was a guy who liked to take things into his own hands, he was a man of action, he wouldn’t just let things go by the wayside. He went to rescue his nephew when he was kidnapped. He won in that skirmish because the Lord was with him. He met Melchizedek, the prince of Salem, and gave him 10% of all he had. Abram was a man of action.He wasn’t afraid to step out in faith in his pursuit of the Lord and sometimes he was wrong. Sometimes he messed up and got ahead of God, but he had a humble heart that was willing to repent and return to the Lord. Some of us might relate more to that type of a story.
Some of us are Jacobs. Some of us are tricksy. Some of us think we got it figured out and kind of just take and we see what the repercussions are and we want to run away and then we have things happen to us. We bear the consequences of those decisions. Jacob put in a different name is kind of your classic prodigal son type of scenario. Doesn’t always make the greatest decisions. But praise God that he is faithful, Amen? And He continues always to draw us and draw us and draw us and by God’s grace Jacob responded and he exercised the same faith as Isaac, the same faith as Abraham and walked in those promises even as he had to wrestle with God, quite literally wrestle with that angel. Jacob was stubborn, he wanted to be blessed and he wouldn’t let go and the Lord touched his hip and Jacob walked with a limp the rest of his life as a reminder that you can’t just do it your way and outsmart people, sometimes you need to wrestle with the Lord and do it His way and submit to His timing, but he got the blessing. Jacob learned that and went from being called Jacob, the usurper, to Israel, the one who strives with God because he strove with God and wrestled with Him on the way back to see Esau, because he didn’t want to go there into Laban’s land. Esau welcomes him with open arms. Praise God! Some of us are Jacobs and we need to have our hips knocked out of place and experience those low places so that we turn to the Lord in humble repentance and worship.
Here’s the cool thing. God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Regardless of who you may identify with, your story is a good one. Your story is a story of faith and trust, perhaps some pride and failure, but ultimately it is a story of redemption because that is what our God does, amen? And so scripture reminds us all the time that our God is a God of the Abrahams, the Isaacs, and the Jacobs, no one is better than the other. They all are what they are and He loves you equally no matter which of the three you identify with. And chances are you identify with aspects of all three of them. You are you. You have a unique story that is not Abraham’s story, that is not Isaac’s story, that is not Jacob’s story. It is your story, but it is one ultimately, praise God, of redemption because that’s what our God does because He loves you and that is a powerful truth as we look to Christ as the author and perfecter of our faith. He is the one through whom we have redemption.
In studying the patriarchs, see God’s love and faithfulness to all types of people. No matter where you come from He is extending His hand of blessing to you that by grace through faith you may receive it and have life.
Secondly, and lastly, each of these men, each of these patriarchs represent an aspect of how we are to respond to God’s promises or how we might respond to God’s promises and are ultimately called to work through them. Abraham as it has been mentioned immediately exercised great faith in the promise, he trusted God. Praise the Lord when we can have our Abraham moments, when we can hear the Word of the Lord whether it’s through His Word clearly or through some strong conviction that we have and we can trust it and simply act upon it. That is an Abraham moment. Praise God for those moments. Now we have to be careful that we don’t take matters into our own hands of course, but trust is what Abraham embodies.
Then we have Isaac and when the Lord calls us to do something, when He calls us to climb up on the altar of sacrifice, not only are we to trust like Abraham, but ultimately we are called to submit to our King. And so Isaac represents the critical humble heart of submission that we are all called to have for our King. Do you want to see God’s promises unfold in your life? Then walk with a heart of submission, humble submission.
Thirdly, Jacob is a man of honesty. Interesting because he’s a deceiver. But when it comes to God he honestly wrestles with God and wasn’t afraid to say I don’t want to go there. That guy’s going to kill me. I’m afraid, Lord, and he honestly wrestled with God working out his own salvation with fear and trembling as Philippians 2:12-13 say. It was God working in him to will and work out his good pleasure. That’s okay, in fact, clearly the Lord was perfectly fine with it. Now you might come away from it with a limp, so as long as you’re okay with a little defect in your physical person, your spiritual person will be better for it. It’s okay to wrestle with God and His promises so long as we work our way back up to Isaac in humble submission and Abraham with a trusting faith. The Lord can handle it and he invites you into that wrestling match so long as you have a heart that seeks His will as Jesus did. Not my will, but your will be done. And when we approach God’s promises and blessing and presence in our life through that lens we will experience God’s power and great fruit in our lives personally and through the work of our hands because it’s the Lord’s work in us and through us. Of course we know that God kept His promise to these three men. He made Israel a great nation, He gave them the promised land (keeping the promised land was conditional, which they broke those conditions and therefore were deported, we’ll talk about that at a different time) but most importantly He did bless all of the nations of the world through Jesus Christ.
As we prepare for the celebration and birth of our King (he wasn’t born on December 25th but that’s when we celebrate it) it is critical that as we study this genealogy, this family tree, we remember one of the most enduring qualities of our God is that He is faithful. That is what this family tree establishes, why he referenced Abraham right away. That our God is faithful and He kept His promises through the person and work of Jesus Christ and scripture tells us over and over again that our God is faithful. I’m just going to read some of the verses because they’re so good. 2 Thessalonians 3:3 says, “But the Lord is faithful. He will establish you and guard you against the evil one.” Amen! 1 John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Amen! Deuteronomy 7:9 says, “Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations,” Amen! Hebrews 10:23 says, “Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.” Amen! 1 Thessalonians 5:24 says, “He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.” Amen! Lamentations 3:22-23 says, “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” Amen? Amen!