Digging Deeper – Names and Numbers

An often-neglected portion of Scripture is the names and numbers contained within. There are tallies of persons and tribes, inventories, and measurements. But let us consider the details, lest we mistake the divine for drudgery. For the Gospel itself begins with such a list! The apostle Matthew starts:

“The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob…”

God, in His wisdom, saw fit to begin the Gospel with a retelling of the people through whom the Savior would come. And, in touching on this, He bids us to revisit history. These are figures and events—stories of actual people who encountered God—whose experiences are told in the pages of the Old Testament. This would have been especially important to the Jewish audience of Matthew’s writing, who were keenly aware of their ancestry.

But Matthew’s list does more than represent the Jewish heritage of Jesus; it recapitulates all of history in the person of Jesus. For Matthew, to begin the story of Jesus is to start with Abraham and lead up to the “fullness of time,” as the apostle Paul puts it. In that sense, this genealogy can be heard saying something like, “Jesus not only entered history, but all of history worked toward His entrance.” His incarnation is so pivotal that it split time and became the standard by which we measure the calendar year in B.C. and A.D. (Anno Domini).

This is especially important today, as we celebrate the birth of our Savior. Let us rejoice with a reading of the genealogy in Matthew 1:1–16, thanking Him that the Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14).