Luke 3:23b-38 – Jesus: The One We Can Trust

Introduction

Before I begin, I just want you to know that in addition to doing my own study on the genealogies of both Matthew and Luke, I also listened to sermons from R.C. Sproul and Ligon Duncan. Some of the ideas and one of the stories come from these sermons as well as my own thinking. And so, I want to give attribution where needed and give them some credit.

Let me tell you where we are going to be going today before we start, so you can get some hope that this won’t simply be an intellectual exercise. From this simple genealogy, we are going to see that because Jesus was historical, fulfilled the OT promises and prophesies, and is the Son of God; we can put all our trust in him instead of ourselves.

Before I get to this, let me point out the elephant in the room. I am preaching today on Luke 3:23b-38. There are two things that might be going through your mind. First, the genealogies of Matthew and Luke are quite different. This may have caused some problems for you in the past, like maybe a college professor, a skeptical friend, or a co-worker who tried to use this to “prove” to you that the Bible is untrustworthy. Before I move to the second thing, let me talk about this.

Have you ever wondered how Christians since the time of the Gospel of Matthew and Luke could read or hear these genealogies and not be bothered by the differences? Well, in general, there are four different responses:

1. Distrust – “I won’t trust the Bible completely unless I have absolute proof with no doubts left in my mind and all my questions are settled. I will pick out what I think is true.”
2. Blind faith – “I don’t care, I just believe and check my brain at the door. I just won’t think about it”
3. A rooted but bigger fish to fry faith – “God has always been reliable and trustworthy; I have the Spirit of Christ and his love in my heart; I will trust his Word because of the confidence of the Spirit’s inward testimony to me. There must be something I don’t understand or something I am missing. And anyway, seems like a waste of time for me to dig into it. Someone has the right answer.”
4. Informed faith – “I will study all the options and pick one that sounds the most reasonable to me and that I believe aligns with the presupposition that God’s word is trustworthy.”

At any rate, let me try to give four plausible explanations for the apparent discrepancy in the genealogies.

The most common one today is that Matthew gives Joseph’s genealogy and Luke gives Mary’s. Perhaps verse 23b clues us into this. “Jesus…being the son (as was supposed) of Joseph, the son of Heli…” In other words, maybe Luke is hinting that Joseph was the supposed father of Jesus, but Joseph isn’t the father of Jesus and instead, what follows, beginning with Heli, is Jesus’ actual line through Mary.

The other one has been around for almost 1,800 years and was proposed by Africanus in the 3^rd century AD. It is suggested that Joseph’s family had a Levirate marriage (a man’s brother dies, and he takes up the mantle for his brother by marrying his sister-in-law, and the children are counted as his dead brother’s offspring) and that Matthew is giving us Joseph’s line through Jacob, who was his actual father, and Luke gives his line through Heli who was his legal father.

Another more recent one argues that Matthew gives the legal, royal descendants of David, the people who would have been king had David’s line continued, but Luke gives the actual descendants of David that end with Joseph, but these two lines converged because Jacob, the father of Joseph didn’t have a child, so the succession was passed through Heli’s line.

The last one is that Luke’s genealogy is Joseph’s, and Matthew’s is Mary’s. It is based upon Clement of Alexandria (2^nd century) who said that Matthew’s genealogy “continued down to Mary the mother of the Lord,” and Victorinus of Pettau’s (3^rd century) who said, “Matthew strives to declare to us the genealogy of Mary.” Justin Martyr also makes reference to Mary as a virgin of the family of David. Of course, this theory has its own issues…like manuscript support.

Honestly, these are all plausible options, but in this time and space, there isn’t consensus. Personally (after studying), I personally believe that one of the genealogies is of Mary. I want to say two things. First, just because there isn’t consensus now, doesn’t mean there won’t ever be. Second, we live in a broken world, so we should expect that things don’t always end up being tied up with a nice, tidy bow. This is one of those questions that we get answered in heaven.

But, I want to assure you that you don’t need to question the truth and historicity of God’s word because of this. In fact, it should give you more certainty. Why? If Christians were trying to hide something, they would have simply cut one of them from one Gospels or simply harmonized it. You don’t need to be unsettled by questions that can be raised from these genealogies. There are answers, but right now, on this side of heaven, we must trust God and take him at his word. Christians from the 1^st century onward felt that God’s word can be trusted, so can we.

Second, it is a genealogy, and you might be thinking, “Come on, pastor, these things are so boring. Can’t we look at something practical?” To answer this, let me tell you that I personally was encouraged this week, so hang in there.

Background

We are continuing in our story of Jesus at the dawn of his ministry. He has just been baptized, symbolizing the start of his ministry, identifying with his people, and being approved and anointed by God with the Holy Spirit for his work.

Exposition 

Now, let’s look at this genealogy from three headings. First, Jesus is historical. Second, Jesus fulfills all the OT promises and prophesies. Third, Jesus is the Son of God.

First, Jesus is historical. This is why this genealogy should not bore us. 

In New Guinea, a Wycliff translator was doing his work of beginning to have the Bible translated into that language. He got some men to help him with the translation. He decided to start with Matthew, and when he saw the genealogy in the first chapter, he decided not to get bogged down in that, so he went right to chapter two. He translated the whole book of Matthew from 2-28 and was surprised that by the end of that translation time, those who were helping him translate still did not believe the Gospel that he had been explaining repeatedly as they translated chapter by chapter.

Finally, after translating the whole book, he decided to go back and translate chapter one.  When he started translating chapter 1 with the men, by the time they got to the 3rd, 4th, 5th begat, he started seeing them get excited. Their faces lit up, their eyes were wide, their voices were excited, and they began to interrupt him. They said, "You mean Adam was a real person? Abraham? David? We thought these were just stories that you foreigners made up, not stories of real people." The translator said, "Yes, I've been telling you that all along." They responded, "We believe you now. We understand this. We can tell you all about our ancestors 50 generations back by name. We now know that everything you have been telling us is true about this man Jesus. And that he had real ancestors who were real people. And God really did these things."

You see, by seeing the names of Heli, Matthat, Joseph, Joda, Melchi, and so on down to Adam, this shows us that Jesus is historical he had a real mother, a real (adopted) father, grandparents on both sides, great grandparents.

Genealogies are not boring, they are powerful, when we read “X the son of Y”, “Y of Z”, and so on, what we are saying is that these were real people who really lived. They had houses, wore clothes, ate food, got married, and did things like we do.

And if all these were real, then so was Jesus. Jesus is not some figment of our imagination, some story that we hold to be true to make us feel better. No, Jesus really lived. And because of this, he understands what it is like to walk in our shoes. This is why we know that he knows our frame, he knows that we are made of dust. This is why we know that he has compassion for us and cares for us.

Second, Jesus fulfills all the OT promises and prophesies. This is why the genealogy should excite us.

Notice in verse 27, Jesus is the son of Zerubbabel. When the Israelites were in Babylonian captivity (Jesus, the Savior of the world’s ancestors) longing for a Savior, they were hoping and listening for the promises of the coming Messiah and King that the prophets were declaring would one day come. Jesus is the fulfillment of these promises and prophesies for he is the son of Zerubbabel.

Notice in verse 31 that Jesus is the son of David. He is the offspring of David who, after God had given Israel the Promised Land and established David as king would make covenant promises to. God promised David that a forever king would come from his offspring, who would reign and rule over all his people. Jesus is the fulfillment of this covenant with David as he is his son.

Notice in verse 34 that Jesus is the son of Abraham. He is the offspring that God had covenanted with Abraham that he would have that would be a blessing to the entire world. Jesus is the fulfillment of this covenant with Abraham as he is his son and truly is the Savior of the world.

Notice in verse 38 that Jesus is the son of Adam. Jesus is the second Adam who obeyed God in everything and would allow all of us to eat of the trees of life that grow by the river in heaven. Notice how this genealogy is mashed between Jesus’ baptism, coming out of the water, the Spirit resting upon him, and then the temptation in the wilderness. This is intentional. Jesus is the second Adam who fulfilled all of God’s commands. Instead of being tempted in a lush garden, Jesus was tempted in the wilderness. Instead of being tempted once by a serpent, Jesus was tempted three times by Satan himself. Jesus is the second Adam who didn’t plunge humanity into death and ruin but instead raised humanity out of their ruin and gave us life abundantly. Jesus is the fulfillment of the promise to Adam and Eve that Jesus would come from their offspring and crush the serpent, which Luke shows us as Jesus defeats Satan in his temptation and then throughout his ministry and then ultimately in his death.

Third, Jesus is the Son of God. The genealogy ends with the declaration that Jesus is the son of Adam, the Son of God. Essentially, Jesus has been declared all throughout these three chapters of Luke that Jesus is truly the Son of God. Remember that Mary, Elizabeth, Jesus himself, and God the Father, and the confirmation by the Spirit, have all declared him to be the Son of God. He is declared at his birth, in his childhood, and at his baptism by the Father, in this genealogy, and then in the next story, by Satan himself in the temptation that Jesus is the Son of God.

Luke is showing us that not only is Jesus historical (he really lived), he is also the fulfillment of all of the OT promises and prophesies (God is faithful), but also that he is the Son of God (the only one capable of rescuing us from the world, the flesh, and the Devil).

Application

How can we apply this passage? There are two major ways.

First, we can see through Adam, Noah, Abraham, and David that we as God’s people should live in faith, trusting God that he will fulfill all his promises. 

Adam wasn’t given a reason why the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was forbidden. He was simply to trust God without an explanation or understanding of why. What does this sound like? Faith!

Noah was given a reason to build the ark, but had no proof that anything that was going to happen, like rain from above could ever happen, since the ground was watered from the earth. He and his family were simply to trust God without understanding how this could happen. What does this sound like? Faith!

Abraham was given a promise that through his offspring, the whole world would be blessed, but his wife was barren. He was to trust in God’s promises even when he couldn’t see how it could ever happen. Also, he was then given a son whom the promise could be fulfilled and then asked to take him to a mountain and sacrifice him, even though it would have seemed that this would end God’s promises. He was to simply trust God without hearing from God how it would happen…a resurrection maybe? What does this sound like? Faith!

David was anointed as a young man as king of Israel, and then spent many, many years wandering in the wilderness and mountains, hiding from the current king, and fleeing for his life. He had no absolute knowledge of this while this time was passing. After he saw God’s promise for him to be king, and God fulfilled it, he was given a promise that he would have a son who would be an eternal king. He might have thought it could be Solomon, but he would not have known for sure. What does this sound like? Faith!

You see, the world wants to put God under a microscope, dissecting him and every word he has spoken. They walk by sight and not by faith, seeing this world and everything in it as what is true and real. Empirical evidence, proof that can be touched, seen, and handled, is what is required. No doubt is allowed into their world and no mystery either. Mystery is heretical to them because then there would be something outside of themselves that could judge them, as opposed to them judging everything.

The world still lives in Adam and Eve’s shadow. They must know for themselves, or better said, decide for themselves what is right and wrong, good and evil. But God speaks and tells us that he alone had this power, this authority. It is we who are required to be judged by him and live according to his judgments.

Hebrews 11:6 says that “…without faith it is impossible to please him (God), for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.“

Could the questions these genealogies raise be God’s way of testing us to see if we will please him by trusting in him? Could this be for us, in some sense, another tree of the knowledge of good and evil? What will we do? Will we stand over God and judge him? Or will we look at our own lives, understanding that we did not bring ourselves into this world, we can’t keep ourselves alive in this world, and we are simply a finite, limited, dependent, and helpless being that needs to live by every word that comes from the mouth of God?

But these men were also all sinners. Adam rebelled against God and ate the fruit. Noah got drunk and brought shame upon himself. Abraham was a liar and coward. David was an adulterer and murderer. What does this show us? These men needed this faith. They needed a Savior who would save the world and fulfill the promises that God made to them that they couldn’t. They needed grace. And grace comes through Christ.

Second, we can see through Christ the grace of God to us. Jesus identifies with us both in his baptism and in the reality that he was a real person. Jesus is not a story or myth. He truly lived and died. He was flesh and blood with a real father and grandfather. He took on our flesh and lived a life that God requires in this broken world. 

Jesus is the Messiah, the anointed one who is the promised heir of David. He is the king of Psalm 2, Psalm 110, Isaiah 32. He will reign forever on his father David’s throne.

Jesus is the heir of Abraham. All of God’s promises to Abraham to bless the whole world through him are yes and amen in Christ Jesus. No matter whether you are an adult, a child, a man, a woman, from Africa, Asia, America, Australia, Europe, or an island somewhere, Jesus blesses us and makes us an inheritor with him through his life, death, burial, and resurrection. Through Jesus, we have the promises of Abraham.

Jesus is the son of Adam. He is the second Adam who did not fall. He defeated Satan when tempted and then reversed the curse that Adam brought upon us. Through one man’s disobedience came sin and death, through one man’s obedience came life and righteousness.

Finally, Jesus is the Son of God. He is not just some great guy. Some good moral teacher. A great leader. Jesus is the very Son of God himself.

You see, we all are tempted to trust in ourselves or trust others. This will never suffice. We are sinners, people are sinners, and everyone will let you down. But Jesus, if you put your faith in him, God has put everything that you and I need in him.

He identified with us so that he could bear our sins. He is fully human so he can understand our weaknesses as a human. He is the Messiah and David’s heir, so he can reign over all and over our hearts. He is the heir of Abraham, so all of God’s promises can be yes and amen in him. He is the second Adam who reverses Adam’s curse so we can find the blessings of God in him. He is the Son of God, so we can be united to him and become the very children of God, our heavenly Father.

Everything that you will ever need is in Christ Jesus. You can either trust in yourself or trust people, and you will sin, fail, and die. Or you can trust in Christ alone, put all your hope in him, and live.