Five Women

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Sunday, 12 December 2010 08:12

December 12, 2010

“FIVE WOMEN”

Matthew 1:1-16

by Pastor Ole Lillestolen

Two of the most frequently skipped sections of the Bible are our text for today and its counterpart in Luke. Unless you are into genealogies they tend to be boring, right? We can, however, miss a lot of fascinating details when we skip texts like this. No matter where you look in the Bible there is something to stop to take notice of. I’ll have to admit, however, that it took Myrna to get me to take a look at this text for today. She noticed that besides Jesus’ mother Mary, this genealogy includes four women, or “bad girls” as she calls them, as it spells out Jesus’ lineage. Why them?

There are other things to notice about these genealogies, like why they list different ancestors; probably because they are tracing both Mary’s and her husband Joseph’s lineages. Another little tidbit is that Jesus would not then have been born to King David’s kingly blood line through his mother Mary. He was then born through the line of another son of David, fulfilling both the requirement that the Messiah be born in David’s line and that he not be a descendent of the last sitting king of Judah, Jeconiah, whom God cursed for his evil ways, saying: “No man of his descendants will prosper sitting on the throne of David or ruling again in Judah.” (22:30)

But back to these women. The list begins: “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” The next says that “to Abraham was born Isaac; and to Isaac, Jacob; and to Jacob, Judah and his brothers.” But, the third verse breaks the pattern and tells us that, “to Judah were born Perez and Zerah by Tamar; and to Perez was born Hezron; and to Hezron . . . ” So, we ask: “What is a woman doing in this list, especially Tamar?” Why not Sarah, Abraham’s wife; or Rebekah, Isaac’s wife; or Rachel, Jacob’s wife?

You see, Tamar’s story is one strange stories in the Bible. She wasn’t a Jew by birth because the Jewish line was just getting started. She married one of Jacob’s sons who had died soon after. Wives were pretty much property in those days and widows actually belonged to the husband’s family, and if they had no children the custom was that a brother would take her as wife and their first son would be counted as the son of the first husband. Tamar’s second husband didn’t like this idea but then he died too, making Tamar look ‘dangerous to husbands’. Jacob was afraid to let his younger son marry Tamar, so even though he promised him to her, he never let them get married.

Tamar got frustrated and, after Jacob’s wife died, she dressed up like a temple prostitute with a veil over her face and parked herself where he would see her. He connected with her and she ended up pregnant with the twins, Perez and Zerah. Jacob didn’t know who he had hooked up and was ready to have her killed according to the law when he found out she was pregnant, but she was able to prove that he was the father of the boys and Jacob forgave her and accepted the boys. Why is she mentioned in the genealogy? Jacob actually called her more righteous than he, and I have to believe that though her method was wrong, Tamar committed herself to following the Lord and raising her boys to do so too.

Tamar was not, however, the only “strange” woman to make this list. Verse four lists Ram, Amminadab; Nahshon; Salmon; and Boaz as the next men in Jesus’ line. But, when it lists Boaz it says that he was born to Salmon “by Rahab,” and Rahab was a prostitute in Jericho back when Joshua was preparing his first attack in the promised land.
It turns out, however, that Rahab became a believer in God when she heard about the Israelis coming their way. The news of God performing miracles to provide for them and to protect them had reached Jericho and everyone was scared of the Israelites when they set up camp nearby. Yet the people of Jericho did not send out a delegation to sue for peace with the Israelites. They chose to stay put and fight, hoping that they could withstand the coming siege. Rahab believed that this was futile and that nothing was going to stop these people who had “The God of Heaven” on their side.

So, when she learned that the Israelites had sent spies into Jericho, she most likely sought and invited them into her house on the city wall. As a prostitute this was not unusual, yet it could have been noticed by people who would tell the king. Yet, her purpose was not prostitution. It was to protect and seek protection from these men. When the king’s men came looking, she hid the spies on her roof and then she let them down the outside of the city wall on the condition that when they attacked, they would save her, her parents, and her siblings.

It is probably wrong to paint her as a wanton woman. Prostitution in the ancient world was a normal, open business. Poor parents often sold their girls to brothels. Slaves were often forced into prostitution. And temples were filled with high class prostitutes who plied their trade as part of the pagan religion of the area. It is not hard to imagine that Rahab was so desperate for income to support her impoverished family that she turned to prostitution.

There weren’t many other options for unmarried women! Life was both different and difficult for women. In Greece, husbands typically even locked their wives in their homes to make sure that their children were theirs. Rahab was most likely not a prostitute by choice and when she saw God as a hope of rescue from her miserable life, she grabbed on to Him with both hands! Because she did, she was rescued and even became part of Jesus’ ancestry.

Interestingly, her son Boaz married a foreign Moabitess at that, and this daughter-in-law, Ruth, also made the genealogy! “To Boaz was born Obed by Ruth; and to Obed, Jesse,” who became King David’s father. Ruth was David’s grandmother.

Ruth herself was a prize. She had married a Jew who had moved with his family to Moab during a drought. But, he died there, as did both his father and other brother. That left a family of three women, Naomi the mother and Ruth and her sister-in-law Orpah. When Naomi ultimately decided to move back to Israel and released her daughters-in-law to go back to their familial homes, Ruth, in one of the most beautiful verses in the Bible said that she was going with. In Ruth 1:16 Ruth told Naomi, “Where you go, I will go, and where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God.” But, the problem with Ruth was that she was a Moabitess.

In Deuteronomy 23:3,4 we read that God had proclaimed to the Israelites that, “No Ammonite or Moabite shall enter the assembly of the LORD; none of their descendants, even to the tenth generation, shall ever enter the assembly of the LORD, because they did not meet you with food and water on the way when you came out of Egypt, and because they hired against you Balaam the son of Beor from Pethor of Mesopotamia, to curse you.” No Moabite could become a citizen of Israel and a member of the assembly that could go to the temple to seek God’s grace.

It turns out that this prohibition would not have applied to women because citizenship was always a male thing. Women didn’t count that way, even in Jesus’ day. Remember the feeding of the five thousand. We discover that that number only included the men and that there were women and children besides! For that matter, wives were often the spoils of war, women of the enemy! Nevertheless, it is fascinating to see a Moabitess in this list knowing that Moabite men were on the “do not admit” list.

Finally, to top this list off, King David had a son and heir to his throne by Bathsheba, with whom he had committed adultery while she was the wife of a Hittite soldier named Uriah. The genealogy says: “And to David was born Solomon by her who had been the wife of Uriah.” There’s quite a story there! But after Uriah was killed, she married David and became part of Israel’s history and I have to assume that she was even a spiritual support to David the author of the major part of the Psalms.

Why were these women listed along with the men of the genealogy? They were all tainted in one way or another. The message to me is that God welcomes and uses everyone who opens their heart to Him, even those who have messed up or come from the wrong side of the tracks.

Of course the genealogical list ends by naming Mary as the mother of Jesus, and she also was an unlikely woman in this list. When the wise men came to see Jesus after He was born they expected him to be born in Jerusalem. Mary was from Nazareth. People chuckled at Nazareth and asked, “What good thing could ever come from Nazareth?”

Here’s the thing. None of these women knew what they would become and that their names would be remembered along with those of kings and generals. Mary knew of course that she was going to become the mother of the Messiah, but like the rest she did not know what that would really mean, except that it looked like it wasn’t going to be all fun! Yet each of these women lived lives that counted and got on this list, as far as I can tell, because they chose to put their trust in God and go where He led them.

Let me remind you of the Apostle Paul’s testimony. In 1 Corinthians 2:9 he wrote, “eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and which have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love Him." Christianity isn’t just about getting into heaven! It’s also about getting on a list, some list that says “My life counted!” The thing is, we don’t just go and pen our names onto that kind of list. Our names might not appear there even during our lifetimes! But, the way to get our names on one of these kinds of lists is to chose to make God our heart’s focus and look to Him for His leading in our everyday lives.

I believe that these women became part of something great by opening their hearts and their everyday lives to the Lord! For four of them this amounted to a total change what they believed and who they trusted for time and eternity. For one this amounted to simply accepting the calling God had for her, maybe even just one day at a time. Jesus is here with us today and calls us as He did His disciples, “Follow Me and I will make you . . .” Where is Christ leading you today?