The King Has Come Pt. IV | Matthew 1:1-17

August 17th, 2025

This week we continue our look at the riches of the genealogy found in Matthew chapter one, and Pastor Ben considers how Jacob’s place there brings with it the glories of Yahweh’s mercy.

Last week this genealogy was likened to the composition of a Symphony, with all of the instruments uniquely blending into one masterpiece. It could likewise be compared to the creation of a piece of artwork: If you were to walk into an art studio during the creation of a painting, it wouldn't look like what you will see at the end of the process. The shading might be off, the strokes might be different, and it might seem odd and out of place. Each name, each brush stroke, has different color variations, different shadings, and the picture that it's bringing to light as Matthew walks through all of these different brush strokes of life is ultimately the picture of Jesus Christ as the promised seed. The genealogy paints this beautiful picture.

Whether or not you think of brush strokes on a canvas, or notes on a page, the truth is the same: There's nothing so breathtaking as to look at a genealogy and think about the lives that God has brought together, bringing forth His promises, revealing His faithfulness, and unveiling His character. In every symphony there are movements, and every movement carries a different idea, different sections, with tempos and mood and things of that nature. As the movements develop these themes, they work together towards its final conclusion. With each name we enter into a different movement, and as we move from Isaac to Jacob, that movement is the melody of mercy. We're in that melody of mercy, and now we're going to learn it through a different lens, the lens of Jacob. Last week, we saw what makes mercy so extraordinary: It allows us to experience the heart of God, just like sensing the movements in the symphony, not just knowing about Him, but we experience Him in His character in a very dynamic way.

As we move from Isaac to Jacob in the genealogy, we're exposed to another aspect of God's divine mercy. We already talked about mercy being complex, mainly because it's experienced. We experience mercy, and as we experience mercy, it sets itself apart in a very dynamic and complex way. As we built the framework of mercy last week, we began by just observing it. That's what you do with anything. We stopped, and we just took a brief moment to observe it in the life of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. We understood that mercy is a movement of God towards sinners, and he does this in a very restorative fashion. With that observation, we understand that mercy is first relational, and that's why we experience it. In taking a closer look at the Hebrew words that formed the vocabulary of mercy we came up with two themes: emotion and action.

With emotion, we looked at the Hebrew word hemla from Genesis 19:16, where Moses talks about the compassion of Yahweh, the same compassion that was applied to Lot and his wife as He rescued them.  With that understanding, we began to look at that word specifically. There is a group of Hebrew words that talk about how mercy is highly emotional. Not only that, the emotion that is felt is the tender love of a mother towards an infant within her belly, a kind of sensational love. When we talk about the feeling of this love and talk about the fact that we experience God's love in this way, we must be careful: When we talk about the emotions of God, we're talking about these anthropomorphic ideas, or the expression of His internal attribute. We experience it in emotion and feelings and things like that, but it's who God is. God has designed us in such a way as to have these feelings and emotions in order to understand who He is. His emotions do not change in the same way that that ours change. There's this emotional tenderness that forms with the theme of mercy.

The next idea, action, that appears in the Hebrew is hesed, as found in Genesis 24:12: “And he said, “O Yahweh, the God of my master Abraham, please cause this to happen before me today, and show lovingkindness to my master Abraham.” This “lovingkindness” is a loyal love. It's a covenantal love, a love that God has determined to give us. And as He's determined to give us, it's interestingly enough, a mutual love. We talked about how that's God's own mutual love with Himself. God makes a covenant with Himself to love Abraham. God makes the covenant with Himself to love us, as believers, before the foundation of the world. This is a loyal love that cannot be broken, because God is the giver of mercy. And that mercy, then, is that act to redeem believers.

When we come to the New Testament, we saw a word from the New Testament, oiktirmos. Oiktirmos brings in these themes and wraps them up beautifully in just one word. With oiktirmos, there is this emotion that you feel…this mournful lament that comes out, and so it's wrapped up in this word, and that mournful lament, that compassion, makes you desire to act. It compels you then to act. That is the way we see this word whenever it's used in the New Testament, and so we understand that that this oiktirmos is the idea of this deep, inward groaning of lament that arises from intense compassion, compelling someone to act, but specifically in a restorative manner, e.g. as in reconciliation. Why oiktirmos is important specifically is because, when you look at the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament done by Jewish scholars), those Jewish scholars, having looked at all the words used for mercy in the Old Testament, use oiktirmos, and they use it more frequently than any other. So, then, we begin to understand the reality of what oiktirmos is, and that shows us what mercy is. One word combines all the different shades and dynamics of what mercy truly is, into one word.

Given that, mercy is not something that you rush into to dissect, and distill it down to a just a doctrinal point. Mercy is something that you stand back, you take in, and you allow its rich complexity to reveal its beauty, as something that you've experienced. Having experienced it, you begin to put a framework around it. You understand that it's relational. As you understand the relational aspect of it, you realize that it's known only within the context of it being used or delivered to you. Ephesians 2:4 reminds us that we were dead in our trespasses and sins, “… But God, being rich in mercy because of His great love with which He loved us…made us alive together with Christ.”  In 1 John chapter 3, John asks what kind of love is this, that He would send His Son to die on our behalf? Mercy, then, is just a movement of God towards an unbeliever, a sinner. It's an intentional movement. Mercy is this rich soil in which He brings forth in this genealogy through Isaac using a barren womb. Mercy is reconciliation, mercy is restoration. As we come to the next name, Jacob, we will see that mercy is not only restorative, but it's also elective. Mercy is this experience that flows from God's sovereign choice. And this has vast divine and personal implications for us in our life today.

-Jacob

Mercy and election are inseparable in Scripture. We see this clearly in Romans 9:10-16: And not only this, but there was Rebekah also, when she had conceived twins by one man, our father Isaac; for though the twins were not yet born and had not done anything good or bad, so that the purpose of God according to His choice would stand, not because of works but because of Him who calls, it was said to her, “THE OLDER SHALL SERVE THE YOUNGER.” Just as it is written, “JACOB I LOVED, BUT ESAU I HATED.” What shall we say then? Is there any unrighteousness with God? May it never be! ¹⁵ For He says to Moses, “I WILL HAVE MERCY ON WHOM I HAVE MERCY, AND I WILL HAVE COMPASSION ON WHOM I HAVE COMPASSION.” ¹⁶ So then it does not depend on the one who wills or the one who runs, but on God who has mercy.”  We recognize that in this rhetorical statement Paul is emphatically stating that, of course, here's no injustice in God.

We see, then, that mercy flows from God's sovereign will alone. It's His to give, and when He gives it, He gives it perfectly. When you think of electing love, when we begin to understand it and the reality of mercy, you also understand that His sovereign choice is not cold determinism. It is, instead, a magnificent, majestic, unfathomable mystery of God in the way in which He loves us.

One of the ways we misunderstand election stems from seeing God through the lens of humanity, and the anthropomorphic ideas that Scripture conveys in our misunderstanding. We begin to assume God's decisions are shaped in the same way that our decisions are shaped. Unlike ours, God's choices are not impulsive, they're not reactionary, they're not inconsistent. They are, instead, rooted in His will. For instance, when we read Ephesians 1:5, we see that He predestined us for adoption to Himself as sons through Jesus Christ
“…according to the good pleasure of his will.” And we see that phrase “good pleasure” we tend to have this anthropomorphic view of God where He acts like we would depending on our mood or other trivial reasons.  That's a mistake in our picture of God, that God looks at the mass of humanity and randomly applies mercy to whoever arbitrarily based on his His mood, selecting some for salvation, or rejecting others on a whim, or maybe a response to what happens in their own life maybe, or something like that. That's a humanistic way to think about God. We take His divine perfection, and we imagine His decisions to be like ours, projecting our finite understanding of reality and the character of God onto God and His infinite, perfect attributes.

In reality, however, God's pleasure is never arbitrary. Even the word that He uses for good pleasure, evvdokia, is just a compound word relaying a deliberate, joyful purpose in what He does. His pleasure, then, is an expression of His unchanging wisdom, justice, love, and purpose. It's a reflection of His faithfulness that He's had since before the foundation of the world. God's good pleasure is the movement of mercy, but it's a sovereign action in perfect harmony with His divine character of perfection, which is bound up in love. What God is actually doing in sovereign election is taking the natural and the supernatural, and bringing forth a line of redeemed people.

We understand that Adam and Eve sinned, and because of Adam's role in humanity, that sin and corruption is imputed to all of his descendants. Romans 5:18-19: “So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men. For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were appointed sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many will be appointed righteous.” Because of Adam’s sin, we're all headed for destruction, everybody, every single person that's born. With the fall of humanity we find ourselves in condemnation before God, and what does God do?  He talks about the coming seed, He talks about the promise that's coming forth, and He presents that promise all the way through the Old Testament (which is why we started in Matthew looking at the genealogies). He shows the promise as coming through a second Adam, the Messiah, the first fruits of those who will be raised from the dead. 1 Corinthians 15:45-47 states it this way: “So also it is written, ‘The first MAN, Adam, BECAME A LIVING SOUL.’ The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural; then the spiritual. The first man is from the earth, earthy; the second man is from heaven.”

The mystery, then, in all of this is that God, being rich in mercy, weaves together the natural and the supernatural, and He brings about His redemptive plan so He doesn't discard humanity in its fallen state. He enters into humanity. He interjects Himself. He has compassion towards them, and He sees it through all the way to the end. He created divine life in Mary’s virgin womb…Mary… who was herself a sinner in need of grace.

There's glory in this miracle that He begins to produce: Since sin is transmitted from the seed of man, God bypassed the natural process of life, and, by the power of the Spirit, He created life in the womb, not merely a man, but the God-man. Then He clothed Himself in humanity, in human flesh, redeeming humanity from within. This is the union, again, of the natural and the supernatural, the physical and the divine. This is likewise the miracle of the incarnation of Philippians 2:6-8 (“…who, although existing in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, by taking the form of a slave, by being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”) God is doing something new with the old.

Isaac was the son of promise. God made the barren womb fertile to bring forth his chosen nation. The mercy of God in this. Even before Isaac and Ishmael were formed in the womb He intentionally chose Isaac to come into being as the son of promise. Paul reflects this idea of intentionally creating a people of mercy when he wrote In Romans 9:22, “ And what if God, wanting to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath having been prepared for destruction, and in order that He might make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory— even us, whom He also called, not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles?”.

After Isaac, Matthew lists Jacob. Even though Esau is assumed in the context, in the background is God's divine will, which he prophesied beforehand. No child is arbitrarily born. Romans 9:29 states, “And just as Isaiah foretold, “UNLESS THE LORD OF SABAOTH HAD LEFT TO US A SEED, WE WOULD HAVE BECOME LIKE SODOM, AND WOULD HAVE RESEMBLED GOMORRAH.” It's God's offspring bringing forth his people. That preserves the people for a specific purpose, and not just the nation, but then a remnant from that nation (this is why the Bible uses foreknew, and that He predestined us in love to become like Christ. Martin Lloyd- Jones says we must always think of God's way of salvation, not the human way. As we look at salvation, we try to interpret it based on our lens, so we flip the paradigm based on our own experience (we go backwards). Instead, we must always think of salvation as a positive process producing a new people, a spiritual people, by a spiritual birth.

So, God determines by His good pleasure who would father his nation, who could continue in that nation, and the remnant of that nation, and His mercy is not based on human goodness or compelled by anything on the human side. There's nothing that's driving Him. He's acting on compassion. He is acting within mercy. There is no human background that affects God's election. These two brothers and their mother had had nothing to do with God's electing mercy.  Paul even affirms this about himself in Galatians 1:15: “But when God, who had set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me through His grace, was pleased to reveal His Son in me so that I might proclaim Him as good news among the Gentiles…”  There's no works, there's nothing that they've done.

Some people think that works could be a part of it (“the middle mind theory”), where God has an electing mercy, but He looks down through the corridor of time, He sees the good decisions you're going to make, and then He reacts to that and says, “Yes, this is my chosen elected child.”  What would He see if he looked down Jacob's life? He would see schemer, thief, liar, nothing else. That's who he was, yet God chose to grant mercy to him. Jacob's work could not have merit to God's mercy.  Mercy is not transactional. Mercy is just a one way street. So, then, our salvation is a mercy of God, and it's not based on works. As Titus 3:5 states, “He saved us, not by works which we did in righteousness, but according to His mercy, through the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit…”. We operate in a culture where we work and you get a paycheck or you volunteer and sometimes you get a reward, and so we take this idea and we begin to apply it sometimes to theological concepts. In the context of salvation, it’s God’s favor instead. Works have nothing to do with God's mercy towards us. But that's the temptation of man. That's why Paul says in Romans 3:24 that, “…by works of the law, no human being will be justified in his sight”. This was the issue with the Jews. That's the issue with us today. We think we’re justified somehow by keeping the law, and the Jews took it further into 613 laws that they kind of orchestrated around this idea (e.g. keeping the Sabbath, circumcision, the foods they ate, etc).  Whenever they did this, they forgot the point of the law: to point to their need for mercy. They misunderstood their justification, and so the people thought I’m going to make the decision to follow the laws. The reality is they actually never followed it perfectly, but they still created this rubric in their own mind that this law keeping was going to build up the good in God's sight. It's the same idea we see today in “decisional regeneration”.

Modern day decisional regeneration is the idea that I have decided to follow Jesus. I’ve set my mind to it, and this is what I’m going to do. In this decisional theology, our new birth occurs when we hear the gospel, we're convicted of the truth of the gospel, we understand our need for salvation, and we choose to accept Christ rather than reject him. Then we pray a prayer, we walk down the aisle, or whatever it may be. Then we confirm our decision through baptism. And that's dangerous because in this theological framework, a person is saved because of something they did, or the law that they've created that they've followed.

A similar error is “baptismal regeneration”, where one believes a person must repent, confess, and be baptized in order to be saved.  This new life happens after full water submersion. They point to different passages to defend why they would say that, but in truth they are not seeing those verses in their correct context. In reality, they are seeing baptism as a work of righteousness and not just a work of obedience. The Bible is clear that salvation happens by grace through faith. Both are a movement of God towards the sinner (not sinner back to God). Salvation is just the mercy of God.

And that's Matthew's point as he's writing this this genealogy, going from Isaac to Jacob. So it's not based on their behavior. There's no good or evil. This is God's intended plan because mercy is a choice. If we see salvation or as anything other than a mercy of God, we strip the gospel of its glory, and we redefine what mercy is. We read our ideas into Scripture (eisegesis), and then redefine the terms to be more comfortable with what we decide. This is what makes Arminianism and free will such a biblical atrocity, because it makes:

• God's sovereign choice dependent upon man's choice,
• God's sovereign granting of mercy contingent on man's deserving action,
• God’s sovereign granting of mercy transactional rather than relational, and
• God’s sovereign action within man’s hands.

Mercy is a sovereign choice of God. Since mercy is the reflection of God's own heart towards the undeserving, only those who have received mercy can actually extend mercy. In the grand scheme of life, the only people that can actually exercise true biblical mercy are believers because they're the only ones who have experienced mercy. That's humbling to think about since with the proper understanding of mercy being a choice made by God and extended to us as believers, then it naturally follows that showing mercy is likewise a choice for us as well, at least in part. Moreso than being a choice, it's actually a matter of obedience, according to Scripture.

That's the beauty of mercy. Mercy is not just something that we receive from God. He commands us to extend mercy, and He empowers us by the Holy Spirit to be able to extend that mercy, not in a salvific sense, but in an experiential sense. Why would God require believers then to extend mercy (Luke 6:36: “Be merciful just as your Father is merciful”)?  As we extend mercy, we are connecting with God relationally first and foremost, since mercy is something that we experience, and we're experiencing the love that God has towards us as well. Given that, the only way for us to truly understand what that's like from God's perspective is if we begin to extend mercy in the same biblical way in which He extended mercy towards us. There's this relational connection with Him as we experience His love for us, then also we then are salt and light. We're likewise pointing the way to truth, because now we're reflecting God's character, and the only way someone can experience that character is that they also receive mercy. That's the message of Colossians 3:12, “So, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience…” Since you've been chosen by God, He tells us to put on a heart of compassion (the word used here for compassion is the same word translated mercy elsewhere). So, then, we have blessings for obedience.

Additionally, Matthew 5:7 tells us that being merciful comes with a blessing: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy”.  As we allow these streams of mercy, in receiving mercy and then allowing that mercy to flow through us towards other people in obedience to God, we also then receive this daily mercy from God. It becomes this constant filling and emptying that God has created for us. That's why you'll see many Christians attracted to mercy ministries, to missions towards feeding the poor, towards clothing people who might need all these different kinds of things. It's this attraction to the mercy of God. As we live out this mercy, God fills us up, we understand who God is, and our relationship with God grows.

What are some of the practical ways we live out mercy? Six ways:

I. We forgive quickly and experience God’s peace.

• Colossians 3:13: “…just as the Lord graciously forgave you, so also should you.”
• Forgiveness frees us from the bondage of bitterness and keeps our hearts open to God’s comfort.

II. We meet needs generously and see God’s provision.

• Proverbs 19:17: “He who is gracious to a poor man lends to Yahweh,
  And He will repay him for his bountiful deed.”
• God often meets our needs in surprising ways when we meet the needs of others.

III. We show patience and receive patience.

• 1 Thessalonians 5:14: “Be patient with everyone.”
• God deals gently with us, especially in our weaknesses, as we mirror that patience toward others.

IV. We restore the broken and experience God’s restoration.

• Galatians 5:1-2: “Restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness…bear one another’s burdens.”
• God often refreshes and strengthens us as we walk with others through their trials.

V. We pray for those who wrong us and enjoy deeper fellowship with God.

• Matthew 5:44-45: “Pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father.”
• Mercy expressed in prayer draws us closer to the Father’s own heart.

VI. We bear with immaturity slowness to change, as God endures our own stubbornness.

• Romans 15:1-2: “Now we who are strong ought to bear the weaknesses of those without strength and not just please ourselves. Each of us is to please his neighbor for his good, to his building up.”
• When we show mercy it builds up the weak.

The merciful, then, live in this constant exchange: What they freely receive, they freely give. Although it sounds transactional, it actually is not. What God is doing is He's designed our relationship to constantly replenish us as we pour out for Him. And as He does this we understand His love for us, and we experience it in new ways. Think about sharing the love of God through mercy with 50 different people. When you share that mercy from God with 50 different people, there's fifty different ways you're going to understand God's mercy towards you. That's why it's dynamic. That's why it's complex. That's why it's beautiful to understand God's mercy in this way, and this is how He wants to be made known to the world: By His people extending mercy to the lost and giving them the message of salvation.

Mercy is relational, it's restorative, and it's best understood in its context as we freely give mercy to those around us. This is why Jeremiah says in Lamentations 3:22-23 that His mercies are new every morning, mercies ongoing forever, and they never end. It doesn't expire after salvation. The manifold wisdom of God is being unfolded perpetually. The mercy of God is just going to be laid out daily before us, and we're going to understand His sustaining mercy, His forgiving mercy, and his empowering mercy.

We must also be aware of the negative aspect of mercy as well: Scripture is clear that there is cursing for disobedience, judgment first and foremost.  It was stated before that only believers can receive (and give) true mercy. If you're a person who does not extend mercy, the first question you ask yourself is, am I a child of God? Do I even know Him? James 2:13 provides one principle: “For judgment will be merciless to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.”  There's also a principle in 1 Corinthians 3:13 that talks about how God will discipline us and chastise us if we don't extend this mercy towards other people. Therefore, as a child of God, then, we invite discipline into our life if we don’t show mercy.

So, then, mercy is beautifully complex. And it is extensive in its application. Mercy is not a single note. It's this harmony of God's eternal choice by His good pleasure and His love moving towards sinners, with sustaining them and empowering them their whole life as they live out their life for God. It's the covering in Eden. It's the promised seed, which Matthew's point. It's a call that rescues. And for those of us who have received it, then mercy is the melody in which we live day in and day out. It's the rhythm of our life, freely giving what we've received from God until the day we have that final crescendo. And then mercy becomes the everlasting song for eternity and glory.

Selah

• How does this new understanding of mercy change your understanding of God and His sovereignty? How does it change your understanding of your own salvation?

• What, if any, changes do you need to make in your own walk with Christ in extending mercy to others?

• Review the six ways to demonstrate mercy mentioned in this message. Pray about how you live out these principles in a more effective way.