Faithbase

Hello and welcome to thinking about the Bible and today we're not gonna spend a lot of time in the reading of the scripture because what I want to talk about is the entire genealogy of Matthew and in Luke and as you probably know there's a marked difference between the two and there's been a lot of speculation as to why and that's what we're going to talk about today is why is it that Matthew's genealogy and Mark's genealogy or excuse me Luke's genealogy diverge why is there a difference and one of the common suggestions is that Luke is tracing the genealogy of Jesus through his mother Mary and Matthew is tracing his genealogy through his adopted father his foster father guess you could say Joseph and the truth is both of them say that they are tracing their genealogy of Jesus from Joseph on back but part of the reason there's a difference is because of Luke's intention and Matthew's intention Matthew is concerned as we said before with the kingly and the covenantal and he wants to establish Jesus as the legitimate heir of Abraham and legitimate heir of David's throne the kingly heir Luke is more interested in in tying Jesus to humanity as a whole I'm for that's one reason he goes all the way back to the son of so-and-so the son of Adam the Son of God and so in other words he Jesus is the son of man and in Matthew he is the son of David that's something that Matthew's gospel refers to more than anyone else so the differences are I guess you could say intentional and and to us we might think well wait a minute if you're gonna have a genealogy isn't supposed to be a hundred percent accurate isn't supposed to be everything that you have available to you placed in the list there and the answer is not necessarily it depends and in our culture we think differently than they did obviously 2,000 years ago in the Jewish culture and Matthew's intention and here's the the key is to convince his countrymen that Jesus as I said is the kingly and covenantal heir to all that Israel had been promised and so that all that Israel had been promised finds its fulfillment in this Jesus the Christ who is the son of Abraham and the son of David and Luke as you probably know is writing to a broader audience and so he wants to connect Jesus to that broad audience humanity now neither one of them of course are exclusive to the other they don't somehow cancel out each other that's not the point the point is there's a difference for theological and covenantal reasons and the writers were fully aware of what they were doing it's not as if they said well gee I don't know what we've got going on here let's just make something up both writers Matthew and Luke were aware of what they were writing they had a purpose in writing it a particular way and they did provide accurate information it's just that they provided it in a format you might say as did Matthew that was driving the narrative the direction that the Spirit of God had and inspired them to go so even with that explanation we don't know for sure we don't have Matthew and Luke sitting here telling us exactly why there's this difference we'll have to wait for eternity for that when we have a chance to sit down with the two of them and say hey explain exactly why this difference was there and in the meantime let's not be too concerned about that because the point is both writers were writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and both writers had the intention of providing for the people of God information that God thought was important for the building up and the continuation of the church God bless you I'll see you next time as we are thinking about the Bible