48. Hope Fulfilled: A Christmas Story

G' day and welcome to Stories of a Faithful God.

I'm Dave Whittingham.

Hope is such a wonderful thing, isn't it?

It's a great feeling of joy at what's coming in the future.

Moving to a new town for a fresh start, the graduation.

Thinking about all the doors that could open up now.

The man on bended knee asking his love to marry him.

Dreaming of their life together.

And the children they'll hold in their arms.

As wonderful as hope is, it can also feel so fragile.

The pain of shattered hope can be worse than no hope at all when you try to make a fresh start.

And yet all the old problems resurface when you can't get a job, or the job you get turns out to be dull and lifeless, or even painful, or when the marriage ends up lonely and certainly not what you'd imagined on your wedding day.

In our last series, we looked at the creation of the world.

How it was launched with astounding joy and hope.

Everything was good.

Relationships between God and humans and animals and the world were perfect.

And yet it was all shattered because people said, we want to do it all without God.

That sin that attempted break from God led to all the pain and suffering and injustice in the world.

A pain of striving for, hoping for independent rule over our own lives.

A hope that can never give the joy that it seems to promise.

In the midst of all that, though, a new hope emerged.

A hope that wasn't a dream or desire or longing that may or may not come true, but a guaranteed hope.

A hope backed up by the faithfulness of the one who promised it.

God himself said he would save his people, he would bless the world.

He would overcome this sin that wreaks so much havoc in today's episode.

As we begin a series in Matthew's Gospel, we're going to see the power of God's faithfulness, His commitment to all those promises he made.

We'll see how the hope he gives is a hope that'll never perish, spoil or fade.

And so, without further ado, I present to you our next episode of Stories of a Faithful God.

In Genesis, we saw a whole bunch of families as they played their various parts in God's big plan.

In chapter 12, it focused in on one family, the family of Abraham, to whom God gave some startling promises, promises that would lead to the whole world being blessed.

The New Testament begins by reminding us of the history of that family, how all their hope, all their waiting for the fulfilment of God's promises It's all been fulfilled in one man, Jesus Christ.

Christ means anointed one.

It indicates the chosen one, a person set aside for a special task.

And you can work out what this Jesus was chosen for by looking at his family tree.

So Matthew begins this historical account of the life of Jesus with these words in chapter one, verse one, an account of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

Those names, David and Abraham, should immediately make us think of the promises of God, of the hope he gave through them to Abraham.

He promised a people and land and nation.

He promised that the whole world would be blessed through him.

It's no accident then, that Matthew's gospel that begins with this mention of Abraham will end with the Great Commission where Jesus sends his disciples to the whole world to invite the world to become disciples of Jesus.

Because it's in Jesus that the blessing of God comes to the world.

To King David, living roughly halfway between Abraham and the arrival of Jesus, God promised a forever kingdom.

In 2 Samuel, chapter 7, God promised to bring a king from David's family who will be king forever.

His kingdom will never end.

This forever king will be anointed, which means he'll be the Christ.

And again, you can jump to the end of Matthew's gospel to see how this promise of a forever king is fulfilled.

When Jesus is raised to life, never to die again, he truly can be the forever king.

And that's exactly who God's made him.

In Matthew 28:18, Jesus tells his disciples, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth.

Go therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you.

And remember, I am with you always to the end of the age.

In Jesus, all the hopes of the Old Testament, all the promises of God, the true hope for the world, has been fulfilled.

And Matthew wants to tell us about this Jesus.

He begins with a genealogy showing Jesus family history from Abraham through David to Jesus birth.

It's not a complete family tree.

Matthew's not trying to show us every generation here.

Rather, he's showing us connections, true connections.

He's telling us the story of how God got us to this point.

It's a fuller version of the genealogy of verse one.

When Matthew said an account of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham, it's not that David was his actual dad and Abraham was his actual grandfather.

Rather, it's a way to show the important points along the family tree.

Matthew structures his genealogy in verse 2 to 16 into three sets of 14 generations.

The first set takes us from Abraham to King David.

And although it's a list of men of fathers and sons, Matthew very cleverly inserts a few women along the way to make a point.

So verse two says, Abraham fathered Isaac, Isaac fathered Jacob, Jacob fathered Judah, and his brothers Judah fathered Perez and Zerah by Tamar.

The story of the woman Tamar is one of tragedy.

She married Judah's first son, but his first son was so sinful, God put him to death.

Judah then gave her to his second son, who was also so sinful, God put him to death.

Then Judah promised to give her to his third son when he had grown up, but he never did.

In frustration, Tamar dressed up as a prostitute with her face covered.

Judah thought, oooh, a prostitute slept with her and got her pregnant, still not knowing who she was.

He was then told that Tamar was pregnant.

And in a moment of astounding hypocrisy, he prepared to have her burnt alive for fooling around.

Thankfully, she managed to prove that he was the father.

You can read the whole story in Genesis 38.

I think Matthew's including it here to remind us Abraham's family isn't so great.

It was actually filled with evil and sin, just like the rest of the world.

To be very clear, it's not because Matthew's anti Semitic.

Matthew himself is a Jewish, but it's part of him.

Showing that the hope for the world promised to Abraham isn't in all of Abraham's family.

It's in Jesus, the only one of the family who's never been sinful.

Matthew tells us a few more generations and then mentions another woman, Rahab.

Verse 5 says, Salmon fathered Boaz by Rahab.

Now, Rahab didn't just pretend to be a prostitute.

She actually was a prostitute.

It was her day job or night job.

She also wasn't a descendant of Abraham.

She was one of the Canaanites.

God sent the Israelites to punish and expel from Canaan.

And yet she actually proved to be a woman who put her trust in the God of Abraham.

She'd heard the stories of what God had done to Egypt.

She realized that true hope is found in this God.

And rejecting this God is disastrous.

Which is exactly the message Matthew will be showing us throughout his Gospel.

It doesn't matter if you're not from the family line of Abraham.

Come to Jesus and you'll be blessed.

You can read Rahab's story in Joshua chapters two and six.

It's a similar message for the next lady, Ruth, who married Boaz.

You can obviously read her story in the Book of Ruth.

Also, you can go back and listen to episodes 29 and 30 of Stories of a Faithful God, where I covered those events.

Like Rahab, Ruth was an outsider from Moab.

But like Rahab, she too found shelter under God's wing.

The second grouping of 14 begins with King David, the great king.

The king who all other kings were compared to.

Did they follow God like David or did they reject God?

And yet even this great, mighty, godly king was really evil at times.

Matthew reminds us of that.

In verse six, he says David fathered Solomon by Uriah's wife.

It isn't that Matthew doesn't know the woman's name, Bathsheba.

Rather, he's focusing our attention on the most important thing about her for this story.

She wasn't David's wife.

She was Uriah's wife.

Again, Uriah wasn't a descendant of Abraham.

He was a Hittite.

And yet he was an incredibly loyal soldier of David.

And yet, while Uriah is off at war, David's back at home getting Uriah's wife pregnant.

When Uriah's faithfulness makes it impossible for David to cover up his crime, he has Uriah murdered and takes Bathsheba as his own wife.

You can read that story in 2 Samuel 11:12.

It isn't what you'd expect from this great godly king.

Matthew's teaching us the hope that God promised wasn't to be found in David.

It was going to be in one of his descendants.

And so the genealogy goes on in search of a fulfilment of this hope.

Matthew gives us a list of some of the kings in David's family line.

Some of them were pretty good, some were terrible, worshipping false gods and treating God's people horribly.

And that's why the second set of 14 ends with the disaster of the exile of God's people to Babylon.

After that point, although there are people who trace their lineage back to David and Abraham, although the family continues, they don't have any more kings, the nation of Judah becomes a political football that gets passed from one superpower to another.

They did have one short period where they broke free and became independent with their own king.

But Matthew's making it really clear that brief interlude was absolutely not the fulfillment of God's promises.

His third set of 14 shows the family line becoming more and more obscure until we get to verse 16, which says, and Jacob fathered Joseph, the husband of Mary, who gave birth to Jesus, who is called the Messiah.

Actually, Matthew says Christ, not Messiah.

Christ is the Greek form of the word.

Messiah is the Hebrew word.

There seems to have been a trend in the last 15 years or so to translate Christ as Messiah.

And I don't really know why, especially when the translators are inconsistent.

The CSB translators used Christ in verse one and Messiah in verse 15.

But anyway, I climb down from that hobby horse now.

Our English translations are generally excellent and trustworthy.

That just seems to be a weird quirk that's crept in.

But you see where Matthew's led us, or rather, where God's led us.

God's been shaping history, crafting it and molding it just so he can lead us to this exact moment, all the way from Abraham through David to Jesus.

And this Jesus is the one he really wants us to focus on, because this Jesus is the anointed one, the Christ, the one in whom the true hope of the world is fulfilled.

So how did Jesus life here on earth begin?

It begins in a miraculous way.

This has been a theme throughout the Old Testament, that when a child has a miraculous birth, you need to watch this space.

It happened for Abraham's son Isaac, and for Moses and Samson and Samuel.

It's always happened, though, by God working through natural means.

In the birth of Jesus, though, God takes it a step further.

In verse 18, Matthew tells us the birth of Jesus Christ came about this way after his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph.

It was discovered before they came together that she was pregnant from the Holy Spirit.

I'm sure around Christmas time you've heard all the jokes about Mary trying to convince people she hasn't been sleeping around God's Holy Spirit put the baby in her.

In real life, though, this is no joke.

Even though Joseph and Mary are not officially married yet, they are legally bound together in a way that modern Western engagements don't do.

So imagine Joseph's heartbreak when he's told Mary's pregnant.

There's actually no way for him to verify her story of how she became pregnant.

Luke tells us in his Gospel that an angel appeared to Mary and told her what was about to happen.

But for Joseph, what's he meant to do?

Most people would not accept Mary's story.

Sometimes arrogant modern people will say things like, they were just more gullible back then.

This story shows that that simply isn't true.

Joseph is much quicker to believe that there's been adultery than he is to believe That a miracle's taken place.

But even though he believes there's been adultery, he doesn't want to do any harm to Mary.

Matthew tells us he's a righteous man.

Instead of taking her to court, where she'd most likely be condemned to death, he decides to divorce her quietly.

He is a man who's not gullible, but kind of, even in the midst of deep pain.

Then God restores Joseph's hope.

He sends an angel, a messenger, to him.

In verse 20, the messenger says, joseph, son of David, don't be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because what's been conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.

She'll give birth to a son and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.

The name Jesus means God saves.

And here, God signalling an astounding fulfillment of hope.

Salvation from sin.

This selfish desire in all humans to discard God and put his crown on our own heads.

The sin that we think frees us, but actually enslaves us to sadness and suffering and pain and death and ultimately the judgment of God, the rightful king.

Salvation from the curse that none of us have been able to escape since the fall of Adam and Eve.

The evil that was present in Abraham's family just as much as it's present in our family.

Jesus is coming to save his people from that.

This is what God's been planning for a very long time.

The perfect salvation by the perfect Savior.

In fact, God told his people about it throughout the Old Testament.

He gave hope of a future rescue.

Matthew draws us to the words God spoke through the prophet isaiah in the 8th century BC.

In verse 23, Matthew quotes these.

See, the virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son.

And they will name him Immanuel, which is translated, God is with us.

God with us can simply mean God is for us.

He's helping us.

He's on our side.

And so the name could simply mean he's helping us through this child.

Which is certainly true, as we'll come to see, though in Jesus, it actually means more than that.

In Jesus, God the Son is actually physically with us.

He's taken on a human body so that he can physically be present for humanity in order to save us from our sins.

God made that promise hundreds of years before and he's been shaping history to bring it to this point.

It's remarkable that he's doing it through this man, Joseph.

Joseph's not some king or great ruler or figure of importance.

Sure, he's got a great lineage Descended from King David himself in the family of Abraham, but he isn't a world changer or influencer.

That's okay, though, because God's not telling Joseph that Joseph's about to do something amazing.

He's saying that he is about to do something amazing.

He's about to solve the core and fundamental problem of the entire world through the birth of this person, Jesus, which means God saves the one, also known as Emmanuel.

God with us.

Jesus is born exactly where you'd expect the Christ to be born, in the town of Bethlehem.

Bethlehem was King David's home city and sits about nine kilometres south of Jerusalem.

He's born under the reign of King Herod.

There are at least three Herods in the Bible, but this is the big one who made the name cool.

He's known to history as Herod the Great.

He has no ancestral link to the line of kings.

From David, he came to power in a fairly slimy way.

Very basically, in 63 BC, the Romans conquered Jerusalem.

They allowed puppet rulers to continue on the throne so that they didn't have to administer the area directly.

Later on, there was a Jewish revolt and Herod, who was the son of an important official, went to Rome.

He said, give me some help and I'll fix this revolt for you.

They did help.

He did fix it.

He became king and ruled quite a large area.

As he got towards the end of his life, he became absolutely paranoid about people taking the throne from him.

His rage and suspicion fell on a number of his children and wider family who he had murdered.

And it's around this time, right near the end of Herod's life, that Jesus is born.

One day, some foreigners from the east arrive in Jerusalem.

Matthew tells us that they're magi.

Magi are astrologers whose job it was to read the stars and advise rulers.

It's particularly strange that God would inject these guys into the story, because astrology is really evil.

And yet, once again, this is God highlighting that he'll be using Jesus to save people from all over the world.

These men are not Jews.

In the events that follow, it's these foreign astrologers who treat Jesus appropriately, not the Judeans.

They arrive in Jerusalem, a city which presumably they have never visited before, and they start asking a perfectly innocent question.

In chapter two, verse two, they ask, where is he who has been born king of the Jews?

For we saw his star at its rising and have come to worship him.

Gods actually worked through the stars to bring these men here.

Now, in Jerusalem, every man and his dog knows that King Herod has not just had a baby.

In fact, the number of offspring he has is shrinking, not growing, as he murders them.

So who on earth could they be talking about?

Well, word about these strangers spreads and finally it reaches the ears of Herod.

Matthew tells us he's disturbed and all Jerusalem with him.

If someone's talking about a king of the Jews and it's not Herod, then that could only mean the Christ, the promised king, the one who could legitimately claim the throne of David.

Unlike Herod, who was an interloper, Herod gets all the chief priests and scribes together and asks where the Christ is meant to be born.

He can ask that because God said where it would happen.

God isn't making this up as he goes along.

It's all part of his really careful salvation plan.

So they tell Herod in verse 5 in Bethlehem of Judea, because this is what was written by the prophet.

And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah, because out of you will come a ruler who will shepherd my people, Israel.

That's partly a quote from Micah5.2, but also it alludes to other parts of the Old Testament.

Most of Judah's kings would have been born in Jerusalem in the majesty of the palace, but King David wasn't born there.

He had no royal lineage and was born in the backwater town of Bethlehem, somewhere you'd never expect a king to be born.

And yet, through David, God created a shadow that pointed forward to when the forever king would be born.

In that same backwater town, Herod summons the magi and asks them exactly when the star they saw first appeared.

We're not told their answer yet, but it's going to be significant.

Later on.

In verse 8, he sends them to Bethlehem and says to them, go and search carefully for the child.

When you find him, report back to me so that I too can go and worship him.

If you've been listening carefully to what I've been saying about Herod, you'll realise it's probably not worth trusting those words very much.

The magi seem blissfully unaware of just how deadly he is, though, and they set off for Bethlehem.

On the way, they see the star.

It's the same star that had prompted their journey in the first place.

But my reading of it is that it's now behaving in a new way.

It doesn't seem like the star led them anywhere before, other than to Judea in general, otherwise they wouldn't have had to ask where the new king is now, though the star gets very specific.

In verse nine, we're told it led them until it came and stopped above the place where the child was.

When they saw the star, they were overwhelmed with joy.

This is God using the star to bring them to exactly the right place.

They go into the house and they see the baby with his mum Mary, and they fall down and worship him.

It's not the sort of worship you give to God.

I don't think there's any indication that these guys think Jesus is God.

Rather, it's the sort of honor you give to a king.

This is, after all, the one born king of the Jews.

Of course, for us it has that same sort of double meaning that Immanuel had God with us.

Saying they worshipped him doesn't actually mean that they thought he's God.

But the language also works if he is God.

The Magi open up their bags.

They have bought presents fit for a king.

Gold, frankincense and myrrh.

The last two are different resins taken from exotic trees coming from as far away as southern Arabia.

They were used to make perfumes which were used on all sorts of occasions.

Way back when the Queen of Sheba came to visit King Solomon, the son of David, she brought gold and spices and precious stones.

That moment was the high point of the Old Testament, the time of greatest blessing, when the descendants of Abraham really seemed to be a blessing to the world, as God promised Abraham before their sin messed it all up.

Now, in Jesus Day, people from afar are visiting a new son of David, and they too bring gifts fit for a king.

And unlike Solomon, this king won't mess things up through his sin.

Rather, he's come to save his people from their sin.

After they've given the gifts.

Thankfully, God warns them in a dream not to go back to Herod, and they head home by another route.

For people with no Jewish heritage, no access to the scriptures, no history of the promises of God, they've treated Jesus incredibly well.

In fact, they've treated him exactly how you'd hope that Christ would be treated when he arrives.

Unfortunately, Herod is not quite so wise.

In another dream, God sends an angel to Joseph.

He gives Joseph the sort of message you can't really sit on for a few weeks.

It's urgent and terrible.

In verse 13, the angel says, get up.

Take the child and his mother, flee to Egypt and stay there until I tell you.

For Herod is about to search for the child to kill him.

It's the sort of message where you wake up immediately.

Shake Mary say, grab what you can, we're leaving in 10 minutes.

They leave that night and escape to Egypt, where they stay until Herod's death.

You might be tempted to think this is a disaster.

God's lost control.

How can the Christ possibly be in danger?

Actually, though, this is all a part of God's plan, it fits perfectly with what God's been setting up for the last couple of thousand years.

Verse 15 says he, Joseph and the family stayed there until Herod's death, so that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet might be fulfilled.

Out of Egypt I called my son.

That's a quote from Hosea 11.

One again, written in the 8th century BC.

Originally, of course, it's talking about the nation of Israel, how God saved them out of slavery in Egypt and brought them to the promised land.

But again, that's a shadow pointing towards the reality in Jesus the Christ.

Sadly, there's another link to events in Egypt.

When Herod discovers that the Magi have fled the scene, he's furious.

He's terrified of having a rival for the throne.

And so he does something that's logical but utterly horrific.

In verse 16, we're told he gave orders to massacre all the boys in and around Bethlehem who were 2 years old and under, in keeping with the time he had learned from the wise men.

What a brutal calculation.

Some historians like to say this never happened, simply because there's no evidence for it outside the Bible.

But that ignores two very important facts.

One, the Bible has consistently been shown to be a very reliable historical witness.

And two, the evidence outside the Bible we do have about Herod shows that he's more than happy to kill his own sons because he saw them as a threat to his power.

If he's willing to do that to his own children, it makes perfect sense that he'd do it to a bunch of strangers, especially towards the end of his life when his paranoia was at its height.

The event that this recalls from Egypt, of course, is when Pharaoh saw the growing population of Israelites as a threat to his power.

To put the brakes on, he ordered all male Israelite infants thrown into the Nile.

Both that attempted genocide and this massacre under Herod are unspeakably cruel.

And yet even this evil is not outside the plan of God.

It's not that God's responsible for it.

It's more that even though it's a terrible example of human's declaration of autonomy from God, God uses their evil for his good purposes.

The depth of the evil can be heard in the outcry of the grieving, the prophet Jeremiah, writing around 600 BC, was given a prophecy about this event.

Matthew quotes him with these words.

In verse 18, a voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning.

Rachel weeping for her children, and she refused to be consoled because they are no more.

You may wonder, what good can God possibly bring from this?

What hope can he bring when it seems like hope's been destroyed?

Back in Egypt, in the book of Exodus, even as the baby boys were being massacred in the river, there was one baby boy who was placed carefully in the river to be kept safe.

The boy, Moses.

And so, through the tragedy that was happening in Egypt, God raised up the Savior who would lead his people out of Egypt.

The slaughter under Herod brings an even greater hope for God's people.

When Jeremiah described the horror and grief of this event, he also showed how it was a sign of great hope for Israel.

He told of how God will save his people, bring them home from exile and establish them in peace and safety.

And now, in Matthew's Gospel, out of this horrible slaughter, hope is about to come.

Not too long after these events, Herod dies.

Everything described so far has probably happened within two years of his death.

And just like God promised, he sends an angel to Joseph down in Egypt.

In verse 20, the angel says, get up.

Take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, because those who intended to kill the child are dead.

And so Joseph gets his little family and heads back to the land of Israel.

On his way, though, he hears some news that makes him pretty anxious.

He hears that one of Herod's surviving sons, Archelaus, is ruling over Judea in his father's place.

Judea is the southern section of the land, based around Jerusalem.

Bethlehem is in Judea.

God confirms in a dream for Joseph that it's best not to go there.

And so instead, Joseph keeps heading north up to the region around Lake Galilee.

He settles the family in a small town called Nazareth, which, again, is all a part of God's plan.

In verse 23, Matthew says then he went and settled in a town called Nazareth to fulfil what was spoken through the prophets that he would be called Nazarene.

There's just one small difficulty with that, though.

There's actually no specific prophecy that mentions the Messiah coming from Nazareth.

This is mostly because the town of Nazareth wasn't actually settled until after the Old Testament was completely written.

So what on earth is Matthew talking about?

Well, he's actually picking up on a really important Old Testament theme about the Christ.

That is the idea in the prophets that the Christ will be unknown, unrecognised, despised, rejected.

Even though he's the king, he'll be treated like a criminal.

Even though he's the chosen one of God, he'll be rejected by God and his people.

By the time you get to the New Testament, one of the last places you'd expect the Christ to come from is Nazareth.

You see it in John's gospel when Philip goes to tell Nathanael that he's found the Christ.

He says in John 1:45, we've found the one Moses wrote about in the Law.

And so did the prophets.

Jesus, the son of Joseph from Nazareth.

Nathanael's totally on board with looking for the Christ.

He's on board with the Law and the prophets.

What really jars, though, is the mention of Nazareth.

Listen to his response.

He says, can anything good come out of Nazareth?

It's the last place he expects the Christ to come from.

If you put together everything God said about the coming Christ, you see that he's both predictable and unpredictable.

Yes, he'll be from David's royal line.

He'll be born in David's hometown of Bethlehem.

He'll carry the lineage of the royal throne, but he'll also be unrecognisable.

And from a place you don't know, he'll arrive to bring hope at a time of great weeping and suffering.

He'll be a human child, but he'll be Emmanuel, God with us.

He'll come to save his people from their sins, even though he's born out of a family steeped in sin.

And all these things, all these apparent contradictions are fulfilled in Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

All through the Old Testament, God's been laying the groundwork.

A bit of information here, a little piece there, but all of it pointing to one great hope.

A hope that'll never perish, spoil or fade.

A hope that can't be destroyed by the murderous intentions of an evil despot.

A hope that's both for Israelites and for Gentiles, a hope for the whole world.

This hope carries the stamp of an eternal guarantee of the faithful God.

You can see how committed to it he is because he wrote all of history so it would come to this exact moment.

Matthew's stumbling over himself to get all the Old Testament references out.

He wants you to know, God wants us to know that this hope that Jesus brings is real and nothing can tear it down.

When you look at your life for the world around you.

When things don't seem to have gone according to plan, when the things you hoped for seem lost, remember the hope that only God can give.

The only hope that will never disappoint.

The hope that Jesus brings as he fulfills all the good promises of God.

What we've looked at today, though, is only the beginning of the story.

Matthew's about to tell us about the start of Jesus ministry, how he'll suddenly burst out into people's lives, saving them from sin and giving them eternal hope.

But that's a story for next.

Thanks everyone for listening.

If you've got kids, don't forget to head over to Stories of a Faithful God for Kids, where we do the same stories but in shorter bite sized chunks and in an appropriate way for kids.

Also, if you want to think about neurodivergence and you want to help friends or family with neurodivergent kids, then head over to Neurodivergence, Family and Faith, another podcast that I do with my friend Kate Morris.

You can find both those podcasts on any listening app and also@faithfulgod.net Keep trusting Jesus.

Bye for now.