Matthew 1:6–7

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."

Though Solomon is in the official genealogy of Christ (Matt. 1:6-7), Christ actually descended through Nathan, the son of David. So God's promise to Israel stands, but apart from Solomon's line. The one exception is that officially Christ is Messiah through Joseph, who was not His father by birth. The wisdom of God shows clearly and beautifully when we compare the two lists. Matthew's begins with Abraham and ends with Christ as the official son of Joseph. Luke's goes backward from Joseph to Adam.

David alone has the title, the king (verse 6). Solomon's name is there, but there is no kingship attached to it. The unbelieving Jew, as he tries to reject prophecies about the Messiah, has always made a strong point of this, that the promises given to David about a son were all fulfilled in Solomon. According to them Solomon is the king, and higher than David in his rule and dominion. How striking, then, that the Holy Spirit gives the name simply Solomon, without adding "the king" to it. David is the king and no other can have the title, until his son comes.

The second begins at once with one in whom departure from God showed itself. His heart went after other gods than the One Only God, who had shown him special favour. After this there is a general history of decline. Three descendants of the apostate murderess Athaliah are blotted out of the list altogether. The Babylonian captivity ends the story in this part, and that captivity was the giving up of the nation as the openly acknowledged people of God.

Deuteronomy 21:15-17 had warned against such an arrangement. A man "must not bestow firstborn status on the son of the loved wife in preference to the son of the unloved, the true firstborn." Perhaps Rehoboam did not know this scripture, but he ought to have. A king in Israel was responsible to get himself a copy of the law and read it all the days of his life. Still, the grace of God rose above the failure of Rehoboam, for Abijah is confirmed in the genealogy of the Lord Jesus in Matthew 1:7.

How very sad that such an excellent reign should be spoiled towards the close. When Baasha, the king of Israel, interfered with him, he relied on the king of Syria. He did not seek the help of the Lord, as he had done when the Ethiopians came against him. The Lord sent Hanani the seer to reprove him for what he had done. Instead of humbling himself and confessing his failure, "Asa was angry with the seer, and put him in the stocks in prison." Within a very short time a disease struck his feet. The physical weakness expressed the moral weakness, "yet even in his disease he did not seek the LORD, but sought help from physicians."

For this future Son to be "the offspring of David," David's line had to continue until He appeared. This is why God had promised David a lamp for him and for his sons always. How was this lamp to keep shining in the royal house? How was it to pass through man's poisoned air and moral darkness without being put out? If it went out, David's true Heir could never appear. Satan understood this. If he could succeed in putting out the lamp, all of God's counsels about the just Ruler over men would come to nothing.