Matthew 1:5–6

And who and what was she? A Gentile, and once a prostitute! But Rahab is taken out of everything that was hers by nature. And here she is, in this gospel of Jesus written for the Jew. These are the very people who despised and hated Him because He would look on a Gentile. God visited her. By His mighty grace He delivered her outwardly and inwardly, and brought her into Israel on earth and made her a part of it — yes, by sovereign grace part of the royal line out of which the Messiah must come.

And who can doubt it was Rahab's faith that brought her into the genealogy, as sin had brought Tamar? Without faith, she had died with those shut up in Jericho, a cursed woman of a cursed race. Faith removed that curse from her; faith brought her in among the people of God.

Against this Ruth, with all her loveliness and with all her goodness, there lay a ban. It did not lie in the same way against the others. She was a woman of Moab, and the law had aimed an express statute against Moab: "No Ammonite or Moabite may enter the assembly of the LORD. Even to the tenth generation, none of them may enter the assembly of the LORD forever" (Deut. 23:3)... It is striking that the law applied to this devoted, this lovely woman — not to Rahab nor even to Tamar. In this way God has shown the law's real character. He did not bring it in to condemn the sinner and the prostitute, where human judgment would have condemned. He brought it in as the thing that would have shut out a Ruth, even with all her devotion to God. This taught plainly that man as man was shut out from God — not only in his sins, but in his righteousness.

Even the Edomite or the Egyptian was hated less, and their children might enter in the third generation (Deut. 23:3-8). So this gave a still deeper testimony that grace would go out and bless the very worst of the Gentiles.

Boaz, who is the instrument of blessing, the kinsman-redeemer, is a type of the risen Christ. The name means "In him is strength"; and it was he, when the nearest relative failed, who had the power of redemption. It was not possible for the nearer relative, who represents the law, to redeem the inheritance. The apostle wrote that an inheritance by law is no longer by promise, so Ruth had to receive everything as a gift of pure grace. Boaz, therefore, on whom there was no claim, though a relative, stepped in. Acting from his own heart of love and grace, he bought the land and married Ruth.

What, then, does the name of Ruth emphasise in this series? Can it be anything but this — that the law is therefore not the way of blessing? The law does not provide the redeemer; grace alone does. For Ruth the Moabitess is debtor to the grace of Boaz!

Who, setting out to prepare a family tree to prove a title, would have brought in the story of Rahab the prostitute, or Bathsheba, or Ruth, or Tamar? Ah, none but God. You see, God wrote this Book and not man... When He is about to tell the family history of His Son, become a man to bless man, God brings them in.

The genealogy that would satisfy a Jew asking questions had to be descent from Solomon. That came through Joseph alone. If our Lord had not inherited His title legally, He could not have been David's Son in the direct royal line. This was given to Matthew, and he proves Him beyond doubt to be the Heir through Solomon, whose succession the Lord confirmed with an oath.

The genealogy itself is that of Joseph, not of Mary… There were two lines that came down unbroken to those days — the house of Solomon and the house of Nathan. Mary was the representative of Nathan's family, as Joseph was of Solomon's. If Mary had been mentioned without her connection with her husband, there would not have been a legal right to the throne of David.

Bathsheba is not mentioned by name. Instead she is linked with all the horror of the crimes that her name alone, you would think, is enough to bring to mind — "her who had been the wife of Uriah."

Who, deliberately preparing a family tree to prove a title, would have brought in the story of Rahab the prostitute, or Bathsheba, or Ruth, or Tamar? None but God. You see, God wrote this Book, and not man… So in these four women you have the most beautiful illustration of how the grace of God can rise above the sin of man. He even allowed what came out of man's weakness and sin to be the very occasion for bringing His own blessed Son into this scene.

Only a few generations apart, we have these three women. The same spirit that rejected Jesus and the grace of God would have despised and excluded them all, for one reason or another, moral or ceremonial. So this was no new thought — God's mercy reaching out to gather in the outcast of the Gentiles, looking on the vile to deliver them and make them holy. It was God's way of old. They could not read the account He gives of their own Messiah's stock without seeing that it was so. And that this was the divinely prescribed channel no Jew could deny.

"Whatever one sows, that will he also reap," and no wonder, then, if adultery and murder sprang up again and again in David's path. No wonder the sword never departs from his house… But in the middle of all this growth of thorn and thistle, the sure fruit of sin, one small flower springs up from that cursed ground. It witnesses that where sin had abounded, grace overabounds. From this David and this Bathsheba, whom sin has joined together, a child springs whose name stands next in the line of the Lord's ancestors. As if to confirm it, he receives a special name, "Jedidiah," "beloved of the Lord."