Skip to main content

Jesus' Family Of Rogues

When a child is placed for adoption, a check is done into the prospective parents and their background, to try to make sure they can provide a good and safe family environment.

God, on the other hand, apparently chose more recklessly. We can see in Matthew chapter 1 that Jesus family tree included some very noble ancestors, but also some pretty shady ones. Cheats, bandits, thieves and murderers – almost every depth of human depravity is represented. Just look at some of the people whose blood ran in Joseph, his adoptive father's, veins:

‘Jacob the father of Judah’ (v1)
A cheat and a deceiver who swindled his own brother out of his inheritance (Genesis 27)

‘Judah the father of Perez
A promiscuous man who had a child by his own daughter (Genesis 38)

‘David the father of Solomon’
Lied to a man who trusted him, and lived as a bandit (1 Samuel 27). He had sex with another man’s wife, got her pregnant, and had her husband killed to try to cover it up. (2 Samuel 11)

‘Solomon the father of Rehoboam’
Slept with almost 1000 women. Deserted God and turned to idolatry (1 Kings 11)

‘Asa the father of Jehoshaphat’
Made an unholy alliance, cruelly imprisoned a prominent dissenter and ended his life as a brutal tyrant (2 Chronicles 16)

‘Manasseh the father of Amon’
An occult practitioner who burnt his own son as a human sacrifice.

All in all a pretty unpleasant catalogue of behaviour. Yet into this chaotic family was born the Rescuer who would bring light to a dark world.

What an amazing testimony to the grace of God and his astonishing ability to forgive and forget, and to bring good out of bad!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jealousy or Generosity - Which One Wins?

I was struck just recently by the contrast between two particular people who met Jesus, and his response to them. One was a prosperous official who had acquired many possessions. Jesus' advice to him was, "Sell everything you have and give to the poor" (see my post of 27th May for a take on what that might mean). This man could have done so much to help those less fortunate than himself, but when Jesus suggested doing so he went away sad. He was far too jealous of his own wealth to consider sharing it. I would like to think, after he had time to reconsider, he was at least motivated to do more than before. But we don't know. His contact with Jesus and the gospel sources seems to end there. The other person was a poor widow who literally put her last two pennies into the temple offering (Luke 21:1-4). Of her Jesus said, "She, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on". She had no way of knowing how her tiny offering would be used. It might
Post a Comment
Read more

The Birth of Jesus - a Smoking Gun From History?

Some say that Jesus of Nazareth is just a myth and a legend. Others, a historical figure who was born in Bethlehem, probably around 5 BC.  Wouldn't it be great if we could find his birth certificate and settle the matter once and for all?! Oddly enough, it's not such a daft idea. The Roman Empire was assidious about keeping records, and the birth of Jesus would certainly have been noted in its archives. Unfortunately, between the sackings of Rome and Constantinople almost all of them were lost. That wasn't always the case, though. Several times in the first three centuries AD the Empire made concerted efforts to erase the story of Jesus from history. For all this time the records were available - as the Christian apologist, Justin Martyr, was at pains to point out in an open ketter to the Emperor: "Now there is a village in the land of the Jews, thirty-five stadia from Jerusalem, in which Jesus Christ was born, as you can ascertain also from the registers of the taxing
Post a Comment
Read more

God the Omnipotent and Stupid?

One of the questions you will often hear raised about God goes along the lines, "If there is an omnipotent God why doesn't he do X?", where X may be anything from stopping wars or preventing earthquakes to curing cancer. Often there is a deeply personal reason behind the question, which makes a purely rational answer wholly unsatisfying. All the same, it's a rational question and some kind of rational answer is deserved. But two things make it a complex question to which no simple answer is possible. One is the extraordinary diversity of the things that 'X' may represent, all of them having different causes with different and completely unrelated solutions. The other is the sole focus on God's omnipotence. Because God, if he exists, must be so much more than just that. There is an old philosophical conundrum on the same subject, of the kind that philosphers love to pose and to ponder. If God is omnipotent, can he create an object so massive that he himself
Post a Comment
Read more