Born of a woman, Luke 3: 23-38

Those of you that are regular attendees of the Beach Fellowship know that I preach in a style known as expositional, which means that we study the Word verse by verse, chapter by chapter.  And while I believe that the merits of this style of preaching usually far outweigh any negatives, today we come upon a passage which I would be tempted to skip over.  It’s been said that smart preachers should always avoid teaching on genealogies. 

So I guess I’m not very smart.  I wanted to skip over this passage, but it seemed that the Lord impressed on me that there are things here that are of great importance, and it would be to our benefit to study this section of scripture. 

Another thing that those of you who are regulars here will know, is that I do not normally use our time in the scriptures to pander to secular holidays.  So I had no intention of trying to preach a Mother’s Day message today.  Ironically, however, as I resolved to be faithful in preaching the next passage of scripture on the genealogy of Jesus  Christ, I found that there is a Mother’s Day message of sorts hidden in this text. 

Now you may find that hard to accept, looking at this long list of names.  There are 77 names in this list, and all of them are names of men.  So the logical question I’m sure you are asking is how can this be relevant to mothers if all the names are of men and no women are mentioned?

But before we answer that question, let’s answer another question.  Why does Luke include the genealogy of Jesus Christ here anyway?  Of what significance is this record?  And the answer is that Luke is presenting the credentials of the Messiah.  He has already given us the testimony of witnesses, like Mary, the shepherds, the angels, Simeon, Anna, and the prophecy of Zacharias and Elizabeth.  He gave us the witness of John the Baptist, and last week we looked at the testimony of the Holy Spirit and of God the Father at the baptism of Christ.  So Luke is presenting the credentials of the Messiah.  And the genealogy of the Messiah is yet another absolutely necessary credential. 

It was necessary because it was well known that the scriptures explicitly prophesied that the Messiah would come from the lineage of David. In 2 Samuel 7:16 the prophet Nathan speaks God’s words about David saying, "Your house and your kingdom shall endure before Me forever; your throne shall be established forever."'"  And this promise was reiterated over and over again throughout the OT. 

For example, in Isaiah 9:6 there is the familiar passage:            “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the increase of [his] government and peace [there shall be] no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will perform this.”  So it is necessary then to present the lineage of Jesus in order to establish that He was from the line of David, the royal line which gave Him the right to the throne of David, in fulfillment of prophecy. 

Now there are two genealogies given for Jesus, one here in Luke and another in Matthew chapter 1.  Matthew, if you will remember, was written primarily to the Jews, and comes at it from a Jewish perspective, starting from Abraham, the patriarch of the Jewish race, and then on to David, and from David to Solomon on down to Joseph, who was the legal father of Jesus, by adoption. 

Luke was a Gentile, and writes for a primarily Gentile audience, who starts at the other end, starting with Jesus and working backwards.  Luke wants to show how the Messiah links with all of humanity. He goes back through David, back through Abraham all the way to Adam and finally to God taking that universal approach connecting the Messiah to all humanity. But interestingly, Luke’s genealogy is different from Matthew’s in some names as well.  Luke’s genealogy from David to Joseph is completely different than that of Matthew’s.   And the reason comes from verse 23, “being, as was supposed, the son of Joseph…”  Literally, the original says, “as it was being thought.” 

So here is the nod to the mother’s today in Luke’s account See, in Luke, the genealogy is maternal, it follows his mother’s line.  Matthew’s genealogy is paternal, it follows his legal father’s line, even though Joseph was not his actual father, but his adoptive father.  And that is why Luke says, it was thought that Joseph was His father.  Jesus actual father was the Holy Spirit.  Mary was a virgin who conceived a child through the Holy Spirit.  So even though genealogical records of that day were traced through the males, Luke starts from Joseph, saying he was commonly thought to be the father of Jesus, and then skips over to Mary’s father, Eli, and then traces his line back to David.  When you read Matthew’s account, the line goes back to David through Solomon, David’s firstborn son.  But in Luke, the line goes back to David through Nathan, Solomon’s brother.  So we see that in both his mother and his legal father’s lineage, the line goes back to the throne of David, which is the main point that Luke is trying to make. 

However, I think it’s particularly interesting that Mary’s line doesn’t stop with David, or even Abraham as Matthew’s did, but goes all the way back to Adam, who it says was the son of God, literally of God.  Because Luke is not only interested in presenting Jesus as the rightful heir of David, but also as the Son of Man. That was our Lord's favorite title for himself, one he used more frequently than any other name. As you read the Gospel of Luke, the one you meet here is, of course, the same person you read about in Matthew and Mark. However, in Matthew the emphasis is upon his kingliness. Matthew presents Jesus as the King, and in Mark Jesus is presented as the suffering Servant. But in Luke, the emphasis is quite different. Here Jesus is presented as the Son of man---Jesus, the man. The perfect man.  His essential manhood is constantly being set forth throughout this Gospel.

It’s an important dynamic that needs to be understood, that Jesus had a heavenly Father, but He had an earthly mother.  And this is what Luke is pointing out.  To better understand this turn to Galatians 4:4 “But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law,  so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons.”

Now this is the mystery of godliness that Paul speaks of in 1Tim. 3:16            “By common confession, great is the mystery of godliness: He who was revealed in the flesh, Was vindicated in the Spirit, Seen by angels, Proclaimed among the nations, Believed on in the world, Taken up in glory.”  God becoming man is a great mystery, but a key to understanding it can be found by going back to the Garden of Eden when Eve, the mother of the human race was deceived by Satan and sinned against God. 

But though Eve sinned, and then tempted Adam to sin with her, the Bible doesn’t speak of sin being passed down from Eve, but it speaks of sin being passed down through Adam. Romans 5:12 says, “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.”

The sin nature is passed from man to the next generation.  We have inherited it from our forefathers.  Adam’s sin was in a way even greater than Eve’s sin in that he chose to obey man, rather than God.  Eve at least was deceived.  Adam sinned with both eyes wide open. 

But even so, the end result was a catastrophe for the human race.  God had created man in his own image, male and female.  And I believe that as it says in Genesis 1:26, “our image” and then it says “our likeness” did not mean that man physically looked just like God, but that man was made like God as a triune being; spirit, soul and body.  When God warned that man would die if he ate of the tree, he was not only speaking of eventual physical death, but immediate spiritual death.  When man sinned, the spirit of man died. 

Man was created to have spiritual communion with God.  We were created to have an intimate knowledge of God, but when sin entered into man, that capacity was shattered.  So then ever since, man has been aware of some great spiritual need, but unable to fill it.  Unable to achieve peace with God, because he cannot know God in his sinful condition. 

But God gave a wonderful promise back in the Garden, after Eve had sinned.  God said to Satan  in Genesis 3:15, “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, And between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, And you shall bruise him on the heel."  It was a promise of the Messiah, that one would come through the woman who would one day bruise Satan on the head.  Satan would bruise Jesus on the heel, so to speak, when he crucified Him, but Christ would bruise Satan on the head, a mortal wound, when He rose victorious from death and hell.

So then Luke presents his genealogy from Mary’s father all the way back to Adam, the son of God, because he wants to show that Jesus is the promised offspring of woman’s womb that would bring about defeat of death.

There is another passage of scripture that I think is tied to this, and it’s 1 Timothy 2:15, “But women shall be preserved through the bearing of children if they continue in faith and love and sanctity with self-restraint.”  In some versions, it may read saved through the bearing of children.  The Greek word is sozo, the common New Testament word for salvation. The word can also mean “to rescue,” “to preserve safe and unharmed,” “to heal,” “to set free,” or “to deliver from.”

This is not saying that a woman can go to heaven by virtue of the fact that she has given birth, but it means that the human race will be saved by the birth of the Messiah, coming through a woman. So a better way to approach this passage is based on the grammar in the original Greek language. In the original, it says she will be saved in the childbirth.  And it means that through a woman will come salvation for man.

Going back then to Galatians 4:4, Christ was born of a woman, born under the law. The law of God condemned man to eternal death.  We were powerless to do anything about it.  We could not reach up to heaven.  We could not bring God down to earth.  We could not attain to the righteous standard of God’s holiness.  Man was lost, condemned under the law.  The law wasn’t made to provide a stepladder to heaven, as if we could only climb up each rung and never make a mistake then reach heaven.  It is impossible, because of our sin nature inherited from Adam.  

Job realized this and said in Job 25:4, “"How then can a man be just with God? Or how can he be clean who is born of woman?”   And his cry was answered in the angel  Gabriel’s prophecy to Mary in Luke 1:37            "For nothing will be impossible with God."  Gabriel announced, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; and for that reason the holy Child shall be called the Son of God.”

Man could not come up to God, but God could come down to man. And while history is filled with men who would be God, only one God would be man.  And He did so by becoming born of a virgin, conceived by the heavenly Father. Luke who was a doctor, confirms this great mystery of godliness, God becoming man, and tells us that One entered the human race who was born of a virgin; because Mary had never known a man. Yet she had a son, and his name was called Jesus. The wonder of that mystery is given in this simply told genealogy that Luke presents to us.  He presents the grandeur of God’s great plan from the beginning to redeem man from sin through Mary’s lineage, by going from Eve all the way to Mary, to show God’s fulfillment of His promise that from one born of a woman would come One to bruise Satan’s head and save the human race from death.

Jesus himself attests to that purpose in what is the key verse of the whole book of Luke, chapter 19 verse 10 when He calls himself by that special name, which we now know has special significance, the Son of Man, saying, "The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which is lost."  He is not only talking about coming to save lost people; he has come to save that which is lost. Not only is it men who are lost, but also it is man’s purpose of his humanity. We no longer know how to be what we were intended to be. The whole dilemma of life is that we still have, deep within us, a kind of subconscious memory of what we ought to be and what we want to be, but we do not know how to accomplish it.

Our soul is searching for that other place, the lost Holy of Holies, which is behind the veil, impenetrable. We cannot enter there. We know there is something more, something deeper, just beyond the edge of our soul.  This is the place where God intended to dwell, and which is the intended center of human life. It is the spirit of man. But because the spirit is dead in fallen man, men rise only to the level of intelligent animals, beholden to their baser instincts. Yet there is something mysterious, reserved, lying deep in an area which they cannot enter, pricking their subconscious.

But in Luke’s genealogy, he traces the coming of One who at last penetrates into the secret place, who enters the spirit of man, the place of mystery, and rends the veil, opening it up so that man might be reborn in his spirit, knowing the mystery of the purpose of his being, and thus find fulfillment through Christ Jesus.

Consider for a moment what it meant for Christ Jesus to come to earth as a man to secure our salvation. The King of heaven left His throne and took a stable for a nursery. The very Son of God was hunted by a tyrant king and became an infant exiled in Egypt. The source of all wisdom and knowledge was born into poverty and lived without earthly wealth and luxury. Holy and without sin, the Messiah was assaulted by every temptation Satan could thrust on Him, yet He resisted each one. The King of creation willingly subjected Himself to all that it means to be human--pain, hunger, thirst, sorrow, physical exhaustion, the full range of human emotions--yet did so without sin.

In an unfathomable act of selfless, sacrificial love, He left heaven's glory to die on our behalf. He offered mercy to a people who deserved only His wrath. He stooped to accomplish that which we not only could not do, but also would not do. In love, the God of the universe stepped from eternity to do what was impossible with man, to come to the world and save those wholly unable to save themselves.

Look in closing at verse 38. Christ’s lineage comes full circle, it is traced all the way back to God. He is the Son of God. He goes all the way back to God with whom He existed before the world began. Adam also was a son of God by creation. And when Adam was created he fully bore the image of God. He was a son of God, a real child of God like God designed men to be, able to know God. He bore the image of God body, soul and spirit uncorrupted until he fell into sin.  But when Adam sinned, the original image of God was shattered, it was broken and no one has ever entered into the world a true son of God like Adam was, except Jesus. Man’s spirit died, his nature became sinful, and everyone of Adam's descendants has been stained with the sin of Adam ever since. But Jesus came into the world without that sin nature which was passed on by Adam by the fact that He was born of a virgin.  And not only was any sin nature found in Him, but He lived fully pleasing God, as God said in verse 22, "This is My beloved Son in whom I am well pleased." He was man the way Adam was designed to be, sinless, perfect man bearing absolutely perfectly the image of God. He was the true Son of God, the only true Son of God that had ever come into the world since Adam.

But He's not only Son of God, He is Son of Man. He is like us, tempted, troubled, suffering, persecuted, hated, reviled and killed. He is a Son of Man suffering the penalty of death completely for man all the way down to the pit of Hades, yet rising triumphant over death. He is fully man in every sense, yet fully  Son of God. God in His deity, Man in His humanity. He is Son of God, Son of Man, deity and humanity.

Then He is Son of Abraham as to His nationality. That is He is the promised seed. When God made a promise to Abraham it was to a seed, Galatians 3:16 says, and He is the promised seed who will bring all the blessings promised to Abraham. And He is also Son of David, royalty, the promised King who will usher in the glory of all the Kingdom of Heaven of which there will be no end, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever. 

So that is my Mother’s Day message, a message buried in the genealogy of the most favored mother of all mankind, who brought forth a Savior as was promised even as judgment was being cast upon the sin of the mother of all mankind.  God is a God of justice and mercy.  And in the end, “mercy triumphs over judgment.” (James 2:13)

I trust that you know the mercy of God, by accepting the substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus Christ on your behalf, confessing your sins, repenting and calling upon God for mercy.  David said that a broken and contrite heart God will not despise.  For those that humble themselves and confess Jesus as Lord of their life, He promises to save them.  That’s what Jesus suffered and died for, to redeem us from the penalty of sin.  But for those that reject Him as Savior, there remains for them nothing but the judgment.  The choice is yours.