Marvel at God’s Great Masterpiece

Posted on Oct 25, 2018 Topic : Inspirational/Devotional

When reading the book of Matthew or Luke, it’s tempting to skip over the long lists of names found in the early chapters. After reading three or four names into one of these lists, you may feel your eyes start to glaze over.

Get to the good part, you may be thinking! These long family trees may not seem as interesting as the familiar stories about the shepherds and the wise men, but every word of the Bible is from God, so if he thought it was important for us to know who was in Jesus’s family tree, we need to pay attention.

To understand why the genealogies listed in Matthew and Luke are important, think of the story of Jesus as you would a huge painting or mosaic—a masterpiece by a master artist, like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City.

Michelangelo took four years to complete the huge work, and only when viewed from a distance, from the floor of the chapel, can the scale and scope of the full work be appreciated. In the same way, when we look at the big picture of Christmas, we can appreciate the thousands of years and millions of tiny brushstrokes God used to complete the masterpiece of the birth of Christ.

Matthew presents Jesus as the Messiah, a figure the Jews had been told would be a king. Unlike a president, a king does not come to rule by ballot, but by birth. A king has to prove his right to the throne by proving he is descended from the royal family.

God had revealed that the Messiah’s “right to rule” would be proven by three things: He would come from the family of Abraham (Genesis 22:18), he would come from the tribe of Judah (Genesis 49:10), and he would come from the house of David (2 Samuel 7:12-13). Now you see why God thought it was important for us to see these names in Jesus’s family tree—they demonstrate his legal right to the throne.

But the genealogies reveal even more than that. Jesus’s legal right to rule came through Joseph, but the Bible makes clear that the Messiah would be a descendent of David. As Joseph’s adopted son, Jesus was a legal descendent but not a descendent of David by birth. Just so there would be no doubt at all about Jesus’s claim to the throne, God told Luke to include the other side of his genealogy—his mother’s side—which can also be traced back to David through one of his other sons. Jesus was physically born of Mary, so her genealogy shows us that he was a literal descendent of David as well as a legal descendent.

God didn’t leave one square inch of his canvas unfinished. He didn’t use one brushstroke too many or too few, but just the right strokes and just the right colors to create the masterpiece of the birth of Christ.

Dear Father, thank you for being the master artist who arranges our lives the same way you arranged Jesus’s claim to his throne. Help us to trust that you are always working to place us exactly where you want us in the masterpiece you’re creating.