of Aminadab, of Aram, of Esrom, of Phares, of Juda,
Six names fill this line of Luke's list, and most readers pass over all of them. Yet God chose these men as the ancestors of His Son. The order Luke gives them, and the stories behind them, show how God works.
Matthew's list runs downward, from Abraham toward Christ. Luke's runs the other way, from Jesus back to Adam. One writer explains why the direction matters:
Luke's theme joins with the truth of Christ's full manhood, and his genealogy shows it. He takes it out of the leading place it has in Matthew, and he reads it backward. This is not a title derived from man; it is blessing flowing back to men. So it links the Lord, not with David only, nor even with Abraham, but with Adam himself.
The verse ends with the name of Judah. His record holds a promise of the throne and a history of sin:
The fourth son of Jacob and Leah, and the head of the tribe bearing his name, which means "praise." It was Judah who advised selling Joseph rather than taking his life; so his descendants, the Jews, handed the Lord over to the Gentiles. He sinned in the matter of Tamar, his daughter-in-law. He was ready enough to have her punished, until the truth came out that he was guilty too. So we trace the terribly corrupt history of the family from whom, according to election, Christ was to be born. … When Jacob blessed his sons, his predictions put the royal line in Judah. The sceptre would not depart from Judah, nor the ruler's staff from between his feet, until Shiloh came. From Judah sprang David and a long line of kings.
The promise did not run on through Judah himself. It ran through Perez, the son born from the worst chapter of his life:
Is it not remarkable that this record should begin with Perez? That the elders and the people should take the house of Perez as a pattern of blessing for the house of Boaz? "May your house be like the house of Perez." Who was Perez? Let Genesis 38 answer. Why not begin with his father, Judah? His was the greatest of the tribes of Israel. But it was through Perez, son of Tamar, that the promised blessing had to come. God led His line of promise through base things of the world, and took up those that man would spurn. This was to magnify His grace and exalt His name. … And so it comes about that, if the beginning is Perez, the end is David.
The names between Perez and Amminadab are easy to trip over. One man in this stretch of the list carries more than one name in Scripture:
Aram: son of Esrom, and father of Aminadab (Matthew 1:3-4; Luke 3:33). He is called RAM in Ruth 4:19 and 1 Chronicles 2:9-10.
Chronicles records Hezron's other sons too. One writer asks why God keeps even the side branches of this family on record:
Having brought the line down to David, the Holy Spirit pauses and notes the sons of Hezron other than Ram. … The honoured line passed through Ram, but his natural connections have a place in the archives of Judah. … Scripture even names Segub, though he was only half-brother to Ram. Is it not because of his connection with the ancestry of David? That line was always so precious to God, and even the smallest link with it entitles a man to a place in these genealogies.
Matthew and Luke give different lists after David. One writer explains why the two lines are not the same:
Matthew gives the Messianic genealogy proper, from Solomon through our Lord as the legal heir of Joseph. Without it the promise would have failed, and He would have lacked the legal title. Luke gives His real line through Mary, as Son of Man and Son of God here below. It does not run down from Abraham and David, but up to Adam and God.
- Direction. Luke reads the family backwards. He is not tracing a title claimed from men, but blessing flowing back to men.
- Judah. His name means "praise," and God promised him the royal sceptre. Yet his own record is one of betrayal and sin.
- Perez. The promise ran through the son born of Judah's worst act; God led His line through base things to magnify His grace.
- Every name. God recorded even the distant relatives of this line, because nearness to David's ancestry was precious to Him.
- The point. The list ends at Adam, not Abraham. It shows the full manhood of the One who brings the blessing back.
of Jacob, of Isaac, of Abraham, of Terah, of Nachor,
Luke 3:34 sits inside the long list of names that Luke runs backward from Jesus, and it holds five weighty names: Jacob, Isaac, Abraham, Terah and Nahor. God gave His promises to the first three; the last two belong to the family God called Abraham out of — so why does the line not stop at Abraham?
Matthew opens his Gospel with a family tree. Luke holds his back. One commentator finds the reason in both the placement and the direction the names travel.
It should strike any thoughtful mind that the Spirit of God must have had good reason for bringing it in here, when Jesus is baptised. It comes in not mainly to prove He was truly the Messiah according to the flesh. It brings out the Person of Jesus on the human side, as the Father had just owned Him on the divine side. So the genealogy is very unusual in this — that it traces Him up to Adam and to God. Why? Clearly this has nothing to do with His being the Messiah. It is meant to show One whose heart went out to the whole human race. It is the genealogy of grace, as Matthew's is of law. It does not run down from the two great fountains of blessing for Israel — Abraham and David, the source of promise and the royal line.
These three names are not simply grandfather, father, son. God's word about worldwide blessing was spoken to each of them in turn, and the New Testament identifies who that word was really about.
When the ram God provided took Isaac's place as his substitute, God gave Abraham the wonderful promise, "in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed" (Gen. 22:18; Gal. 3:16). That offspring, says the apostle, is Christ. The promise was so important that God repeated it to both Isaac and Jacob (Gen. 26:4; Gen. 28:14).
So these three names mark the line through which the promised One had to come.
Luke does not stop at Abraham. He also names Terah, Abraham's father, and Terah's own father Nahor. The Old Testament tells us what these fathers worshipped.
In Joshua 24, Joshua says to all the people, "Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, Long ago your fathers lived beyond the Euphrates, Terah, the father of Abraham and of Nahor; and they served other gods." This is the first mention of idolatry the Bible gives us. And it comes not when idolatry began, but when it had already corrupted Abraham's own father.
Abraham's place in the line, then, was never his own achievement.
Even Terah was an idolater. Abraham was set apart to the one true God by the promises which sovereign grace entrusted to him and to his descendants in the line of Isaac.
Since Luke has already said Jesus was only supposed to be Joseph's son, readers ask how this list relates to the one in Matthew. Commentators differ over the details, but several argue that the wording marks off Joseph in a parenthesis, so that the line itself begins with Mary's father.
Joseph was the son of Jacob, in Solomon's line, while Mary was the daughter of Heli, in Nathan's line. Our Lord needed to be born this way to be, beyond question, the heir of David and true man... Had He really been Joseph's son — which He was not — the whole truth of His person would have been denied. Had He been only Mary's son — which He was not — He would have been true man but not true Messiah. He must therefore be Joseph's son legally, Mary's son truly, and God's Son supremely.
The names in verse 34 are steps in a list that keeps going back to the first man. Where the list ends shapes how we read it.
The stream is flowing back; and the blessed One who has come to serve among men is not building on the names of those who went before Him, but showing them as people His grace serves, and to whom He is bringing back the blessings they lost. So when you come to Adam himself, who closes the genealogy instead of opening it, what do you find? "Adam, the son of God." Christ's work has reinstated him, as if the fall had never happened — that, and more.
- Backward, not forward. Matthew traces the line down from Abraham and David. Luke traces it up — a genealogy of grace, not of law.
- Back through promise. God gave Jacob, Isaac and Abraham the same promise of blessing for all nations, and the apostle says that promised offspring is Christ.
- Back past promise into idolatry. Abraham's fathers "served other gods" — Scripture's first mention of idolatry names the family he came from.
- Back by grace alone. Sovereign grace entrusted the promises to Abraham and set him apart to the true God. Better ancestry had nothing to do with it.
- Back to Adam, and to God. The list ends where humanity began, so that the One who serves men brings back to them the blessing they lost.