Does Your Messy Family Disqualify You? (Luke 3:23-38) | Daily Devotional & Bible Study

I know what a lot of you are thinking. The genealogy. Are we really going there?

We are, and there's a reason. If God had wanted a clean family tree for His Son, He had the power to arrange one. Instead He built this one, out of the overlooked and the outsider and the people who were wronged.

Today we're finishing Luke 3 by walking through the lineage of Jesus and the women hidden inside a list that never names them.

Links

We visit Luke's house in Rome on our Bible Study Live trip.

Bible Study Live is a small-group Bible study trip with Rachael Groll. Study Scripture where it happened in Rome, or slow down for a contemplative Bible study retreat in Maui. Dates and details at BibleStudyLive.org

Listen ad-free, plus the full library of past series, on Patreon: patreon.com/HearingJesus

Questions or prayer requests? Leave me a voicemail: SpeakPipe

Why does Luke put the genealogy here?

Matthew opens his gospel with a genealogy. Luke buries his at the end of chapter three, right after the baptism and right before the temptation. Luke is a details guy, so the placement is intentional.

Look at what comes immediately before. The heavens open, the Spirit descends like a dove, and a voice says you are my beloved Son. Then Luke runs the family line all the way back to Adam, who he calls the son of God.

And look at what comes right after. Next week we study the temptation, where the enemy says if you are the Son of God.

So Luke sandwiches this family tree between heaven declaring the sonship of Jesus and the devil attacking it. In the ancient world, genealogies were identity documents.

Why does it say Jesus was about thirty?

Thirty was a meaningful number. The Levites entered temple service at thirty. David became king at thirty. Joseph entered Pharaoh's service at thirty. Ezekiel's visions began at thirty. It was the age a man was considered ready to carry the responsibility of ministry.

Luke says about thirty because he's a careful historian. The point is that this is not a kid. He's ready.

Why is Luke's genealogy different from Matthew's?

Matthew starts with Abraham and walks down through David to Jesus. He's making a Jewish case, laying out the royal credentials.

Luke flips it. He starts with Jesus and walks backward through David, past Abraham, all the way to Adam, and then one step further to God.

That difference is intentional. Matthew stops at Abraham because his point is the covenant with Israel. Luke pushes past Abraham because his point is the entire human race. He's a Gentile writing to Gentiles, saying this is for everybody.

Remember what Luke quoted from Isaiah a few verses earlier. All flesh will see the salvation of God. Matthew and Mark stop that quotation short. Luke carries it all the way through, and then he builds a family tree that backs it up.

And think about the timing. John just told the crowd that having Abraham as their father wasn't enough. Then Luke shows that the family line of Jesus goes back further than Abraham anyway.

Why do the two lists split after David?

From Abraham to David, Matthew and Luke match. After David they diverge almost completely. Matthew traces the line through Solomon, the royal line. Luke traces it through Nathan, a different son of David.

They also give different fathers for Joseph. Matthew says Jacob. Luke says Heli. Scholarship is divided. One explanation is that Luke is giving Mary's line, with Heli as her father and Joseph listed as son-in-law, since Jewish lists didn't name women. Another is that Matthew gives legal rights to the throne while Luke gives physical descent. They run through different members of the same families, so they aren't in conflict.

Why does any of this matter?

Here's what struck me. Most of these names appear nowhere else in Scripture. We know nothing about them. No recorded words. And they're in the line of Jesus.

Dozens of people who lived and raised children and died without making a mark on history, except that they were part of the lineage of the Messiah. God was working through generations who never knew what they were part of. They died without ever seeing it.

For a Jewish person, your genealogy was your identity. Wrapped up in it were land rights, your tribe, and sometimes your job. A priest had to prove descent from a priest in order to serve.

And it was verifiable. Genealogies were part of the public archives, and Josephus talks about consulting them for his own work. When Luke published this list, people could go check it. Those records were destroyed when Rome leveled Jerusalem around AD 70. At the time Luke wrote, you could still look it up.

Why does it end with Adam, the son of God?

Luke is the only gospel writer who takes it all the way back.

Paul later calls Jesus the last Adam in 1 Corinthians, and Luke is making that same connection here, using a list instead of an argument.

The first Adam was tested in a garden where he had everything, and he failed. The very next thing we read in Luke is Jesus going into the wilderness, hungry for forty days, tested. And He doesn't fail.

Where are the women in this list?

There aren't any named. Matthew includes four. Luke includes none, because he's writing the way historians of that era wrote.

But here's what I can't get past. Every name in this list required a woman. And if Luke is in fact tracing Mary's family, then this entire list is her family tree, recorded under the men's names.

So let me point out a few of them.

Eve, the wife of Adam. The very first promise of a rescuer in Scripture was given to her, not to Adam. God tells the serpent that her offspring will crush his head. This whole line Luke just traced is the working out of a promise spoken to a woman about her children. Adam named her Eve because she was the mother of all the living, and Luke traces Jesus back through all the living.

Noah's wife. We don't know her name. We know she boarded the ark, survived the flood, and raised the sons the whole human race descends from, including Shem, who is in Luke's list. Everything after Genesis 8 runs through a woman nobody ever named.

Sarah, attached to the son of Isaac. Twenty-five years waiting on a promise, into her nineties, past any reasonable hope. She laughed when she heard it. Gabriel later tells Mary that nothing is impossible with God, echoing Sarah's story to a young girl who knew it well.

Leah, attached to the son of Judah. Jacob loved Rachel. Leah was the wife he didn't choose, and Genesis says plainly she wasn't loved. She names her first sons in a way that reflects that ache. Then the fourth son she names Judah, which means praise, saying this time I will praise the Lord. She stopped naming her children after the love she couldn't get and named one after the God who saw her. And Judah is the son the Messiah came through. The unloved wife is the great-grandmother of the royal line.

Tamar, attached to the son of Perez. Widowed twice in Judah's family and left in limbo. Under the law she had a right to a husband from that family, and Judah withheld it. A woman with no power, denied what she was owed, who did the only thing available to keep her family line alive.

Rahab, the mother of Boaz. A Canaanite living in Jericho under judgment, with a shameful job. She hid the Israelite spies because she had heard what their God had done and she believed it. Hebrews 11 lists her among the faithful. Her great-grandson was King David.

Ruth, the mother of Obed. A Moabite, and Deuteronomy 23 restricted Moabites from the assembly of Israel. A widow with no children, which meant no security of any kind. She followed Naomi and Naomi's God, and gleaned leftover grain at the edges of fields, the provision the law made for the poor. Two generations in a row, the royal line runs through foreign women.

Bathsheba, attached to the son of Nathan. According to 1 Chronicles 3, Nathan and Solomon had the same mother. Her story was not a clean one, and it was not one she chose.

What do we do with that?

Most of these women are invisible to us. Hundreds of years of women whose names we don't have, who carried babies and delivered them and fed them and taught them and buried them and kept going. All of them part of the story.

And it wasn't only the respectable ones. There's a woman nobody wanted. A widow who had to fight for her place. A Canaanite with a shameful job. A foreigner from an excluded nation. A woman a king took advantage of.

If God had wanted a clean family tree, He could have arranged one. He built this one instead.

So if you feel unseen, or unchosen, or like your story is too messy to be useful, this list is for you. You're in good company, and the company is the family line of Jesus. My own family line is messy too. Praise God that He takes the mess and redeems it.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Finishing Luke 3, and why we go slowly
• 01:28 Reading the genealogy
• 03:25 Prayer
• 04:25 Why we study genealogy at all
• 05:01 What comes right before and right after
• 06:52 Why thirty mattered
• 08:53 How Matthew and Luke differ
• 09:49 Why Luke pushes past Abraham
• 12:40 Two fathers for Joseph
• 15:57 The names we know nothing about
• 17:54 Verifiable in the public archives
• 19:19 The son of Adam, the son of God
• 19:49 The first Adam and the last Adam
• 21:07 Why there are no women in the list
• 22:42 Eve and the first promise
• 23:27 Noah's wife
• 23:55 Sarah and the impossible
• 25:49 Leah and the son named praise
• 26:54 Tamar
• 28:15 Rahab
• 30:24 Ruth
• 31:49 Bathsheba
• 33:37 The women we never see
• 34:45 If God had wanted a clean family tree

Frequently asked questions

Why do Matthew and Luke give different genealogies?
Matthew traces the line through Solomon and Luke through Nathan, another son of David. Explanations include Luke tracing Mary's line, or Matthew giving legal throne rights while Luke gives physical descent.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices